Hi ,
I was just thinking that a new ability could be a Narrow band planet scanner - this would be an ability that costs some ( maybe 500 ) energy and would have a cooldown of a day or maybe longer . What it would do would be : you pick a basic planet type ( barren , ice , volcanic , gas , terra , toxic , metallic , desert and ocean ) you would go on a scan run and the type of planet you selected would be the only type you scan - ofc your chances of finding said planets would be affected as well , so in effect you would find perhaps double of said type than you would normally find , but all other scans would be fails . This would help in legion mission tasks which need specific planet types scanned .

I was also thinking there would be a last category for the rarer planet types , this would include exotic , sentient , dyson , cthonic , vorigar and taltherian planets - this would not guarantee awesome planets as there are plenty of rubbish exotics out there . I'm thinking the basic planet types would also include their up graded versions as well e.g. if you picked toxic , then you would be able to scan irradiateds as well . I'm not sure if ocens should have their own selection or not as they could also be scanned from barren upgrades and melted icy planets , if anyone has any ideas ?

Thoughts ?

This could lead to some very very VERY nice planets being found significantly easier.

If you narrowed the possibility down to dyson's, they would all be found in the game just like that. Not all dyson's have significant cloak on them (ive seen legion held dyson with not alot of cloak).


I cant see this happening, its a bit too OP.

Hmm maybe I wasn't clear in that dysons could not be selected on their own , but would be lumped in with exotics etc. And I will try again to say how it would work - you select the "rare" type - this includes dysons and the rest - now you have say double the chance you normally have of scanning a rare planet ( subject to scan / cloak on enemy planets ) - you would have 1 hour , and in that hour you would scan only a few planets , the rest would be fails . The planets you did manage to scan would have a chance of being a dyson , or perhaps a tiny sparse exotic . This would not result in people finding dysons en masse . I dont know what ratios would be best , only wanting to give folks a boost on certain planet types - this does not guarantee the stats of planets either . Hope this clears it up a bit .

Still a bit over powered, though, because at higher levels energy isn't a concern as much as how many star chart purgers you have and how many available planets you can scan. If you are at that point, I'd imagine that filtering out planets you are less likely to want is worth the extra 10x cost in energy per planet scanned (or however much it costs per scan on average) only to be able to keep going without worrying.

Even at a lower level as I am, I'd still be inclined to use it.

Right let me show a rough example : my last scan run was about 800 planets , in that scan run i found about 8 terras and 2 gaias , so if i had used the ability and selected terras type my scan run would roughly get me 16 terras and 4 gaias and i would not have got the ( mostly rubbish ) other 780-790 planets . Does this make sense ?

Now on my last scan run I found 2 exotics 1 and 1 sentient , so if i had selected the rare type setting then I would have found roughly 4 exotics and 2 sentients , now there would be a higher chance that possibly I could get a dyson , but it would still be pretty slim . Hopefully this illustrates that yes you would have a slighly better chance of finding a dyson - if you select the rare type , but you would miss out on many hundreds of planets ( which mostly are rubbish )

I would prob use it on the terra setting and have a better chance of scanning terras and gaias , or use it depending on legion mission tasks for the type they need . But others could just select rare type constantly and it may pay off , or not .

I'd like to think everyone understood the premise, and that their concerns were actually factual unfortunately.

I'll break it down into 3 issues;

The first major issue here is; What's the penalty for using this feature?

Energy isn't an issue for the people that would use this feature & is a drop in the water compared to the really awful penalty of having 1000 trash planets in your databases and having to wait a week, a month or even months to scan again.

If you bring a feature in that cuts out the side effect of trash planets, then nobody will ever use the old scanning method again.

May as well remove 6.5 million planets from the database and replace them with planets vl mr or better.


As someone with a 150k energy bar, i'd set it to Rare planets only and use it as often as i could. Same with probably the majority of players too, as it would save us having to get 1000 purgers to scan again.... or even better, I could spend 3/4 of my energy on this new scanning feature and then if it fails(or even if it succeeds) i could then do a regular scan as well.

Issue #2: Dyson or just Rare planets in general.

The second issue is increase in locating all the best planets in the galaxy would occur much quicker than it does now, purely because the right people could scan more often, the right people being those with huge energy tanks and the ability to utilize those tanks.

The reason why Rare planets, including Dysons would become more easily attainable is because people would be able to scan more often than they can now. If a player set it to rare planets, sure they get 6-8 planet types, but they're the rarest for a reason. A player who right now scans 1000 planets, might get just 50 under the rare planets option, but the negative is they can't scan again for weeks or months.... for most it's months between scans.

Under this feature, they'd only have to purge down 100 planets or so every time they finished a scan run(as the idea was 2x the planet type, only way to do that right now would be to double the odds of locating such a planet). So they can be out there scanning 5x more often than they could before, as they only need to purge 100 planets now and not the 1000 from before.

Sure just because you scan more often doesn't automatically equate to finding more dysons, but it definitely increases your chances.

The way to think of it is, you just doubled our chances from 0.000001 > 0.000002(made up numbers as idk the true dyson scan rate) but you've also increased how often we can roll on those odds by decreasing the negative of the time it takes to purge down to scan again.

Issue #3

Now this one is huge in a sense, when you factor in that already we've kinda determined that we can scan 5x more often now than before and with double the odds of locating the Rare planets.

The one thing that prevents people scanning faster and locating many more planets(also known as scanning to grey) is the lag generated when every planet revealed causes a refresh of their database. Well if that refresh now occurs less often, then people can scan faster now & that means they would scan more (insert type here) planets than previously under the regular scanning method.

So take the above example from Issue 2. We located those 50/1000 planets but it took us 60 minutes to scan 1000 planets due to all that lag. That's 1 Rare planet every 72 seconds.

If we eliminate the lag caused by those additional 900 planets(as we now scan 100 Rare), which occurs every 3.6 seconds(60 mins/1k planets) then we could end up locating twice the amount of Rare planets we would expect even with the new scanner.

So instead of 10 terra/2 gaia in a 1000 planet run, we could feasibly locate as many as 30-40 terra/6-8 gaia's in the same timespan, as we've eliminated so many general causes of lag in the game that previously slowed down our abilities to scan.



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As to the point for legion missions, i'll just put that to one side. The reason being; None of the legion missions are difficult to do. 2 require an average of 300, the rest under 200, some less than 100 and for 3 years we've been telling people don't choose a legion mission you know you cannot complete. I don't see why we should alter that pov and pander to them by making it easier to scan a certain type of planet.


Anyway those are just my thoughts on the idea.

I'd love the idea personally, purely because i think it is OP and i would benefit massively from it being implemented.

The other problem is their are two planet types that simple put no one wants, NO one wants baron/volcanic and in many cases gas planets, NO one would EVER use it to scan for these types of planets in truth these plants while SOME buildings/artys interact with them they simply just can not compete with VL MRx3 terras or Toxics (which might as well come out of the can as x15/16's) No one needs research when you got scientists from AP, scientests from npc drop and data optmisers. They are just not good planets, if something like this would be put in it would be better to make ALL planets types desirable. as it currently stands baron/volcanic planets literally stand as barriers to planets people actually want.

Actually, one of the originally stated uses would be to search for gas planets. (Legion mission and all.)

That said, it does make me think of a good point. Well, it's the same point I made earlier, and that Kirk went into much more and better detail over, but even if there was NOT an increased chance to find a specific planet, but that it would just automatically ignore anything NOT of the type you are searching for, it would still be really overpowered because then that's that many fewer purgers you need to worry about.

to review kirk's comments, this suggestion is WAY TOO OP.

- you save on purgers
- you save on lag
- you get better chance at nice planets
- there is no penalty / trade-off .. just benefit

my additional thoughts:

currently the planet scanning system rolls, based on scan power and number of planets scanned, to determine success / fail of scanning, then picks a random planet from the galaxy, then rolls again with your scan versus planet cloak to determine if you can scan.lock the planet. NOTHING in that process checks the planet type.

the only way this might not be overpowered ?

- only RARE / EXTREMELY RARE planets can be on the selection list (no mythical dysons) - choose x from:

3.1.3.1 Metallic Planets
3.1.3.2 Oceanic Planets
3.1.3.3 Terra Planets
3.1.4.1 Exotic Planets
3.2.1.1 Aphotic Planets
3.2.1.2 Ecumenopolis Planets
3.2.1.3 Crystal Planets
3.2.1.4 Demon Planets
3.2.1.5 Irradiated Planets
3.2.1.6 Oceanic Planets
3.2.1.7 Plasma planets
3.2.1.8 Prismatic Planets
3.2.2.1 Gaia Planets
3.2.2.2 Sentient Planets
3.2.2.3 Chthonian Planets
3.2.2.4 Rift Planets

- planet type check is inserted as step 2 between the current 2 steps
- EVERY scan for a common / uncommon planet is successful
- if rare planet type matches on your selection list, get a x% scan boost before scan / cloak roll
- if rare planet type does not match, planet cloak gets a % boost before scan / cloak roll

are their noninvincable rifts in the galaxy?

there are no natural rifts. Idk about the state of old rift back when mission dysons were invadable, but definitely since then onward I can say for a fact they have been invincable

Fair enough , I had wondered if I hadn't explained my idea correctly - alas I had but the idea just not practical/too op . Better luck next time hehe , cheers for the constructive comments !

[quote="RexMundiAbu":-]Fair enough , I had wondered if I hadn't explained my idea correctly - alas I had but the idea just not practical/too op . Better luck next time hehe , cheers for the constructive comments ![/quote:-]

Yeah, it's a great idea, I'd love it. But way overpowered.

I still like the idea, maybe as a trade off you can select the type of planet (no dysons/exotics) but in exchange for better selection process your chance of scanning ANYTHING is half, this allows you to reduce your purges/scan more often but you will simply not get as many planets overall compared to normal scan. By making the rate half it helps compensate for energy and time (you will end up getting more zip scans) but you still save on purgers.

I think the save on purgers portion is the main part that people are saying is OP. I know I'd love to do a scan specific run and only add a desired type to my database and not have to muddle through the other 95% of trash that comes from the majority of scan runs.