So in general building factories on planets are pretty lame seeing as you mostly need more than one item to craft up stuff like CPU's, Industrial Motherboards, Components, Lasers, etc.
What if a system is implemented whereby you can connect your planets, much like the labs can be connected, but of course only the planets you personally own. Doing so you would then be able to tell one planet to produce Industrial Motherboards for example, by connecting it to a planet that produces 30nm circuits, another planet that produces 20nm circuits, and a third planet that produces gold bars. Once there are enough components on each of those other planets it is transferred to the planet that will then use it to produce an Industrial Motherboard.
This is excellent stuff. We don't want planet management to be fully automatic (ever), for obvious reasons. But we tossed around a few ideas of how to make something like this happen. Whichever direction we pick, it will HAVE to involve player activity. Maybe you would be able to hire newbies to haul materials for you. No promises here, but that's something we'd love to see.
(In the meantime, my advice would be to utilize social element and maybe make some deals to that effect).
Well, if it helps any, twice now I waited for a long time >5mins and the log shows that the pirate I shot down exploded at the very same instant as me in the log. Seems linked somehow. Also, doesn't really seem like a rare thing. On average pirates have been exploding 3-4 minutes after landing the last shot...
The "events happening at exactly the same moment" is not really a problem, that's how the game operates. You might have seen the "Last turn" printout on the main page.
But for the bug itself, yeah :( I've already bumped the priority on that one, but it's a tricky beast.
Thank you for balancing the energy usage for crafting a bit more. It really helps a lot. Hopefully we'll see an announcement of this next time ;)
As much as I would LOVE to take credit for that, I'm afraid it happened on it's own somehow. Must be that dynamic economy thing in play.
@onlinedigger, got your explanations and suggestions, thanks. Very interesting stuff.