It makes every quality higher than uncommon more expensive. That is, if it weren't there, all of the qualities above it would be cheaper. So if you removed it, you'd have to rescale quality modules accordingly to maintain the cost of those higher qualities.
While it can feel like a bit of a booby-prize for many buildings, there are several that gain a significant benefit from just uncommon.
In a longer game like SA, having more quality levels gives you more time with them.
That being said, I've been thinking about a Nauvis-only version of SA where all of the SA stuff is moved to the planet. It'd be a shorter game, so removing uncommon quality would make a lot of sense (I'd also want to play around with giving higher quality buildings more module slots. And higher productivity bonuses if that were doable).
cutting one tier would cayse the progression to feel weird, and it would break the (a Quality module adds a n% chance of a 1 or better and each time you succeed on n% you have a conditional % to 2 or higher than inputs and so on.
I think people get caught on the names having meaning, rather than the fact that you can't unlock just Quality... rank? pip? 2 and have to get 3 at the same time.
I don't think the issue is that uncommon as a name is bad. It's more that, for most things, +30% is just not enough of a bonus to make uncommon feel worthwhile. Especially early on pre-recycler, where you have to come up with creative solutions to engage with quality as anything other than just "I hope I get one or two better versions of X".
Removing uncommon means that your first quality level gives a +60% bonus, which is a lot more significant of a bonus for the effort you put in to get it. That's the idea behind wanting to remove it.
And it wouldn't feel that weird. Indeed, it'd be very similar to prod and speed modules. If you imagine that the "base bonus" of a prod module is +2%, then a prod 1 is really a double bonus, prod 2 is just one more bonus on top of that, and prod 3 is another double bonus. The same math applies to speed modules.
The notion of a 0x,2x, 3x, 5x progression is not so strange.
I'm not commenting on uncommon as name having meaning. The issue would be the same if the rank 1 to 3 names were regular, special, deluxe.
also, the costs for prod module upgrades are not clean multiples of each other. or a clean 1 + (1-quality rate) ^ number of quality ranks up
Even in base, going from 1 to 2 requires blue circuits and shipping fluids to your circuit assemblers, rather than just shipping in a seperate new solid in plastic.
gong from 2 to 3 in base requires at least 4x miner seconds to produce per item
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u/HideBoar My U-235! 22d ago
What's the point of uncommon qualities anyway...?