2022-01-13 FYI

[martianant]

What if berth-a-porting and teleport invitations were nerfed?

I'm not sure how I feel about teleport, it certainly makes life easier but also does remove the need to travel places. I wouldn't mind too terribly if it were removed though, or severely limited? How were you thinking of nerfing it?

Berth-a-porting I have some stronger opinions on. I've found it's incredibly helpful for "debugging" why a ship has not done what you asked it to do. The AI is.. sometimes not the best, and a ship that should've arrived at City X two days ago still seems to be "stuck" or something. The only way to figure out what is up is often to go to to the ship and check it out. I've had to berth-a-port to ships a bunch to solve issues like this, only to find the ship got itself stuck somewhere or decided to spin in place forever. Often just changing the orders wasn't enough and it only got fixed if you visited it. No idea why. I know the AI won't enter unexplored systems without a player, but I've had issues even when the route was through 100% explored / owned space so it was never that. Sometimes it just.. stops working until a player visits it or something? Just my experience.

I think a decent compromise might be limited the acceptable of a berth to only ships belonging to your empire. That way you can't just accept a passenger berth on some friends ship on the other side of the galaxy and teleport there, but you can still find and fix when your empire's ships break.

Is that what you had in mind by nerfed? Would love to hear your thoughts on how you might nerf these options