Not really. It's not that TL10+ planets are exceedingly rare in the Ooniverse.Smivs wrote:I suspect one of the main reasons there are no galaxy-spanning missions is because it would have been such a pain for the player to spend half the time looking for TL10 planets instead of getting on with the mission.
In Cataclysm I also took care that all places from where you have to jump to the next galaxy are reasonably close to a system where you can buy the equipment. Something like this is an integral part of mission design after all, and therefore falls clearly into the responsibility of the scripter. If there are absolutely no suitable planets in the vicinity, there are always fallback methods, like awarding the player a galactic hyperdrive right away. It just takes one sentence on the mission screen. "Since we need you to travel urgently, we have taken the liberty to install a galdrive on your ship as we speak. You don't mind that we have used your credit card, do you?"
The point of galactic jumps taking no game time is a good one, by the way. For me it doesn't feel right, almost buggy (although I think it's inherited). If the eight 'galaxies' in reality represent distant parts of one galaxy, and the travel process is mostly the same than normal witchspace travel, only using more energy (for the player it looks exactly the same), then if anything it should take more time, not zero.
I think it's an inconsistency in the game which usually is ignored, because galactic jumps are rare. If you happen to do one, you probably look somewhere else on your screen and don't even notice (I don't usually compare game time before and after jumps, so without the activity on the screen in form of moving numbers and the '(adjusting)' message I wouldn't really notice that a jump takes time, and how much it is*). Making a quick circle available may probably rub this inconsistency into players' faces. At least it doesn't hide it. But that's not your fault.
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*To be honest, I am not usually aware of game time at all, and I guess that's how it is for most players. For instance, I don't care what time of day the game clock indicates, because there is no discernible difference between day and night, or between AM and PM. My pilot never goes to sleep for eight hours. He also doesn't use any visible game time for things like eating or personal hygiene, which would make up a fair amount of time for anybody RealLife™. In the game only docking, launching, and buying equipment on the F3-screen take time; and of course the witchjumps, but it isn't clear what is actually happening during the latter. Is the pilot aware of it, does he sleep or spend it in suspended animation, or does the jump happen instantly from his perspective (I tend to think the latter, because that's how I'm witnessing it in front of my screen)? In the station-connected cases I imagine there are routines happening which I'm just not shown.
BTW: The possibility to influence game time by script (by advancing the clock) is a quite new one. It was only added in 1.74. So now you could actually attach a travel time to galactic jumps by script, and it would be a very short script. Anything up to 30 days is possible. Now you can start to think: would every galactic jump take the same amount of time? Or would the distance of your entry point to your exit point on the galactic map also come into consideration? The latter would make jumps take much shorter if all systems are reachable, and make them potentially much longer if the player is transferred to the closest interconnected system which might by a fair distance away from his entry point. Or if you have your setting to a fixed entry point, the travel duration would perhaps always be the same. (I take it, by the way, that your record was set with BEHAVIOUR_ALL_SYSTEMS_REACHABLE, because you would have to do a fair amount of travel back to Lave otherwise? And if so, does buying your equipment change that setting permanently, or does the script change it back after making the jump?)
For the record: I don't think that you're blowing your trumpet too much.
