It's not an extra step if you would be manufacturing them anyway and your prod does it for you.

At first I thought he might be referring to how you need to plonk down factories on the prod, which is an extra step if you're stupid enough to leave the factories behind each reset, but considering people offload a bunch of factories anyways when a prod is built, there is no extra step.

Unless you consider equipping a bunch of factories to be an extra step, to which I say bugger off because you've been doing that for yearsss with Ada Module Production.

Instead of a build taking metals, i now have to turn my metals into a IC before i can build this item. Thats most definitely a extra step.

Its by no means a huge a deal. It just seems like a meaningless change to a straightforward build.

OK, but why aren't you already turning some of your metals into ICs, in order to sell them to AI bases for profit?

Ic comodities will never be accepted well by everyone, becouse if you make them not worth selling to ai bases, pple are going to be unhappy with them, and in that case it just feels like its there to add pseudo content to the game

ICs in builds are fucking stupid. ICs were introduced as a revenue item to compensate for Ext Y removal. However the dev team has somehow gotten it into their heads that something more comparable to colony building content wise, should be an active barrier to building.

Do I really have to explain how fucking stupid it is to have to convert my metals or nuclear waste to use them? Let's say I have 100 million metals on a base, and I need 50 million for a build, however I only produce ICs to sell so I have 1k at a time. I keep metals on hand because the vast majority of bps in the game want them. ICs are there because of supplemental income. However because you guys want to make stupid meaningless changes, those 100 million metals are now fucking useless because I have an arbitrary wait time for my base to convert it all. To which you say; convert all your metals beforehand. To which I say; are you fucking daft? I still need those metals for the other bps in the game that use them.

You are trying to make 2 commods for every t0 commod and then have them do separate jobs, there is literally no fucking point. That's just needless complication. That would be like giving someone two great swords in Skyrim and telling them that one sword only kills enemies starting with A-L and the other one kills enemies with M-Z names. Nothing is accomplished gameplay wise. You are just forcing people into tedious bullshit. In the example all it would mean is equipping a new weapon every 30 seconds interrupting meaningful gameplay, in SS is the same fucking thing but with more tedium. For large builds I now need to shift to either raw production or extraction, I need to potentially remove commodities from trade bay so I am not accidentally selling the commodities (THAT WERE FUCKING IMPLEMENTED TO BE SOLD).

It's like having a blueprint that requires I have a colony pop of 2b before I can equip it to the base. ICs were put in to liquidate excess raw materials, not to further bog down already tedious fucking building with more tedium.

This push for ICs is equally absurd as if you started requiring Ext Ys for builds a few Unis ago. If your only argument is that ICs are just condensed commodities, then how come we were never building SSes with 100k Ext Ys? Because that same argument is equally true for Ext Y.

Factories are a fucking nightmare, and you guys refuse to overhaul the base UI to make a factory specific interface. Until you do that, you need to stay the hell away from expanding the role of factories in this game. It's like walking up to a painting in a museum, and proceeding to smear your shit all over it because you think it makes it look better.

IC is good for its initial purpose of being sold to ai bases, but to try and convert a system into another is counter intuitive, and makes it feel not well thought.

Hober shared your factory concept with the dev team yesterday. It looked interesting so we will be reviewing it soon.

So that just leaves the question of what is the point of having 2 commodities for every t0? There is no cost to convert, so there is very little argument to say that it's for balance reasons. You can't make all bps take ICs, because then t0s are worthless and we might as well be directly extracting ICs since the lack of a cost to convert to IC means there is no argument that directly extracting ICs is unbalanced.

IC expansion is simply illogical. There is one argument I could see for it, and that is allowing for larger mass builds (since it's actually pretty easy to organize a mass build so large it exceeds the base cap), however to do that you need to make ICs fully interchangeable with t0s. And since no one is suggesting that I'm gonna guess it's impossible. That's really the only way ICs make sense as a building material. That allows for condensing of commods, but then ensures those commods can still go to any blueprint.

Arbitrarily having bps take different materials that are actually the same thing though is just needless complication. Others have already commented on cost and movement for newer players to get large enough sets of the factories for meaningful production so I will leave that alone.

Given all of these reasons it's hard for me to understand why any of this is being pushed. There is precisely one good argument for it (mass building), but that sort of functionality isn't even on the table.

We could make ICs into commod crates that can be converted back into their raw components.

That undermines the only good argument though; mass builds. If it's a crate I still can't break open more than 2.1b on the base. If ICs are crates, then it's still pointless to have them used in builds. It's just an unrelated factory you're now requiring people to have to build.

I would like to go back to my colony point; ICs were implemented to turn t0s into money. They are basically actively managed colonies. We don't require people to have a colony to build a prod, so why are we requiring them to get into ICs to have a functioning prod?

And don't get me wrong, it's not just XYZ gear that pisses me off in this respect. I'm an equal opportunity hater, the admixium change also turned what was a fantastically simple, though still slightly tedious build into a living nightmare. ICs need to stay far far away from blueprints.

Caveat; unless bases can be made to treat them interchangeably when running builds.

I want to do the thing that Masterful suggested. IC is the next step for endgame prods. Eventually, if you keep increasing build requirements, you get initial builds of over 2b material, which obviously can't be done because the server will shoot you.

But Steel Girders are 1000 Metals each, meaning you can have a build that requires an equivalent 2b Metals but only take up 2m space. Allowing prods to prioritize IC over T0s IF YOU HAVE THEM would be grand.

I think the admix bps were changed back recently.