I am enjoying the experimental Ashon start and trying to survive in harsh conditions. This situation makes SV play and transitioning playfields more important than the other starts and this in turn results in transitioning between playfields more often as part of travelling within a planetary sector to get necessary resources. However it also highlights the shortcomings of the timer system which does not accurately reflect time spent away from the playfield for three critical survival activities. Oxygen generators dont continue to make oxygen when not in the active playfield. Solar panels dont charge while the player is away. The farm plots do not seem to work reliably either, sometimes they work sometimes not. These three are a constant source of disappointment and make it impossible to use a strategy of setting them up and then going to do other things, instead you have to babysit each kind of generator to get a yield and that means inevitably you need to have them all in the same place and then you have to turtle there. This boils down to a single most viable strat for Ashon which is building a farm base on the moon, as that has more reliable solar power and free oxygen, you can do different strats but only if you are willing to take the hit and have passed the point where resources matter. This is not really the fault of the scenario, it is a limit of the engine which does not seem to be able to do the math required to work out production from the time the avatar left to the time they returned. This seems like simple arithmetic to me so I want to suggest it is worth doing because it would open up survival play and make different strategies possible if you could set your oxygen gens up and go to the station and come back to find them full of usable oxygen, likewise solar panels charging a base while you are off planet etc.
Base attacks do not happen either if you are not on the Playfield. The Playfield gets unloaded whenever the Player leaves it so no progress of any kind gets calculated by the Game engine. Solar Panels on the other hand are, still, something that causes problems. At least for some Players.
That's because making turrets and terrain work when you are not there is a whole different ball game. Not simple arithmetic. And it is not a trade off in my view because I disable base attacks anyway since when you core a wreck to recover blocks and salvage etc the game cannot distinguish between a cored wreck and a base and generates a base attack every time you visit a cored wreck you have not been to for half an hour or so. That timer seems to work! Its just that after the hundredth attack I find that a bit too much, so its off. I dont think base attacks and production timers should be dependant on each other, doesnt make sense gamewise and there are very different practicalities involved. Its very easy to calculate expected production.
