Opinion: 10 LY range for colonization is ridiculously low.

[Agony_Aunt]

that's "how the West was won" No intent offend you and I understand that depending on the starting point, it may be a tedious procedure.

Not just tedious, quite possibly impossible. We are well within the bubble, so even if we expanded as fast as we could, we might find ourselves blocked from expanding outside the bubble. Its quite possible there already is no route out even before colonization starts.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

... seriously? ... we have only basic skeleton info yet. Isn't it too soon for panicking?

Expressing an opinion is panicking now? Interesting choice of words.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

From what the devs talked about in Livestream 4 I assumed systems each had intrinsic value so that it was not just numbers:

Interesting - quite a few of the things from back then didn't make it to the final release in their exact form, and there doesn't seem to be any "system value" mentioned on the interfaces now.

There's whatever combination of variables used to calculate the System Strength Penalty, which I suppose makes a system somewhat more valuable to hold as it's a bit harder to undermine ... but if anything that would encourage fighting over the others, and it's so non-obvious as a mechanism that I don't expect people are going to plan around it much compared with "which systems can we actually reach from our borders".

 

[Martind Forlon]

About half those players just had their dreams cancelled by an arbitrary expansion limit, and the framework that's been outlined so far does …

@Agony_Aunt … You can see in quote above. It’s classic 101 “we are doomed”, instead thinking with cold head about giving it first a try (or at least wait for more info near release). It makes perfect sense to have very short expansion range at start, it’s even logical without looking on technical difficulties for game. And it makes also sense from lore perspective, bcs so far all what humanity had were sleepers ships.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Interesting - quite a few of the things from back then didn't make it to the final release in their exact form, and there doesn't seem to be any "system value" mentioned on the interfaces now.

There's whatever combination of variables used to calculate the System Strength Penalty, which I suppose makes a system somewhat more valuable to hold as it's a bit harder to undermine ... but if anything that would encourage fighting over the others, and it's so non-obvious as a mechanism that I don't expect people are going to plan around it much compared with "which systems can we actually reach from our borders".

Its one of the things that we need clarification on, really. Maybe the devs did jettison it, trying to equalise the discrepancy between core sitting powers and those further out? Saying that it would then make less sense, given a tin shack outpost having the same heft as say, Sol.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

@Agony_Aunt … You can see in quote above. It’s classic 101 “we are doomed”, instead thinking with cold head about giving it first a try (or at least wait for more info near release). It makes perfect sense to have very short expansion range at start, it’s even logical without looking on technical difficulties for game. And it makes also sense from lore perspective, bcs so far all what humanity had were sleepers ships.

Not doomed at all. We have a beta test first.

For the moment, just discussing based on what we know and extrapolating from that.

We had our ideas of what colonization could be. With a 10LY limit, for some of us, its not of interest. We hope to set up colonies far from current human space, perhaps requiring a bridge to get there, but not 10LY at a time. Crossing galactic arms will be night on impossible.

 

[Rubbernuke]

How far can someone get in 24 hours too? (i.e. the time limit for plonking down a nav?)

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

How far can someone get in 24 hours too? (i.e. the time limit for plonking down a nav?)

Anywhere with enough neutron jumping and a specialized ship, unless the beacon is very heavy.

The main limitation would be trying to go to only carrier accessible systems if carriers jumps happen to be slow that day.

 

[Kzak]

How far can someone get in 24 hours too? (i.e. the time limit for plonking down a nav?)

Probably anywhere in the Milky Way, yes. Following up the beacon deployment with resources might be more difficult, depending on the requirements we'll probably get to know more about early next year.

 

[Mersozz]

I'd go on a limb to say the founding faction can't be retreated; it'd make no sense otherwise.

Bear in mind though... there's nothing other players can "take" from you.... any player can (and should) be able to colonise with any faction they like... so even if some other faction takes over the system.. you are still it's architect. And that's going to be a big turnoff for other people who want to expend effort "capturing" colonised systems with other factions... they literally have no handle on the future shape of the system if they do.

Edit: explicitly, control can't be bound to faction ownership of a colonized system, because players don't own faction

The first faction in, the one you put in when you set up the system, will probably be counted as a "native" faction, meaning they can't be kicked out. So if someone else wants to push another faction, they can, but they will be vulnerable to being kicked out, unlike the founding faction.

If we are allowed to set up systems further than BGS range, then there will be no chance of that, unless someone sets up another system within BGS range.

Good points, gentlemen. I agree it could be sorted out that way; specifically, the idea that the founding faction becomes native.

I will posit the following hypothetical scenario, and would welcome any feedback.

1. Commander Fancypants decides he wants to colonize a new system. After a great deal of planning, and effort, he establishes his new station in the Candyland system. His small squadron is pledged to the Pearl Clutchers faction, which is a Democracy. His plan is to mine the rich platinium and tritium hotspots and create a bustling commercial system for himself, his squadron, and visiting Commanders.
2. Commander Dragonlady stumbles across the Candyland system. She is the leader of a squadron pledged to the Screaming Banshees faction, which is an Anarchy. She looks at the resources in the system and feels this is a perfect place to set up her pirate lair. The fact that it is currently occupied by another player fits in perfectly with her preferred style of play - pillaging is her strong suit.
3. Within the space of a couple weeks, the Screaming Banshee faction engages in a war with the Pearl Clutchers and wins the conflict and takes over control of the main starport.
4. Months later, visitors are warned to avoid Candyland, which has descended into a hive of scum and villainy.

Given the scenario above, I would have the following questions:

1. After the Screaming Banshees faction takes over the system, if the system architect creates a new asset in the system, does it belong to the Pearl Clutchers or the Screaming Banshees?
2. Given that the Screaming Banshees are anarchists, should we assume that the BGS mechanics within the system have now flipped to Anarchy, which is a feature that is different than the original plans of system architect?
3. If colonization does not allow a system architect to curb the creep of the BGS and/or Power Play, will it cater to all playstyles, or just become an extension of BGS and Power Play 2.0 ?
4. Will colonized systems attract gankers?
5. Given the controvesial (broken) state of Crime and Punishment in the game, will system architects have effective policing powers over the systems "they can't lose"?

Given the scenario above, I'm thinking the best way to assure that players can't "lose" systems is if their assets have the same docking privileges as a fleet carrier. Players who take the time and energy to colonize a system and create the assets within them should be also be given the ability to secure them. The game is already coded to give fleet carrier owners that option, and I'm imagining the cost and time involved in colonization will be similar to a fleet carrier, so I think this would make the most sense.

Another option would be to greatly increase the colonization distance for colonizers who wish to do their own thing far away from the tidal forces of BGS and PP2.

Again, any comments on this scenario are welcome, and my thoughts above are just personal opinions.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Anywhere with enough neutron jumping and a specialized ship, unless the beacon is very heavy.

The main limitation would be trying to go to only carrier accessible systems if carriers jumps happen to be slow that day.

Probably anywhere in the Milky Way, yes. Following up the beacon deployment with resources might be more difficult, depending on the requirements we'll probably get to know more about early next year.

Then really I think the process should be:

you visiting the contact with the faction of your choice > select your claim > claim price is based on distance (so the edge of the galaxy in one go is like, say, 50 billion) > off you go

If FD 'unlocked' this, it means it becomes a race to get there and something that might be a newish spin on travel as well as being risky if you screw it up.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

you visiting the contact with the faction of your choice > select your claim > claim price is based on distance (so the edge of the galaxy in one go is like, say, 50 billion) > off you go

If FD 'unlocked' this, it means it becomes a race to get there and something that might be a newish spin on travel as well as being risky if you screw it up.

Part of it is lack of tools.

The claim range could be 100Ly, 1000Ly or whatever, but if as part of it you'd have to drop beacons off every 10Ly to guide the jump(s) of the construction ships then that would come awfully close to gameplay.

What you'll be doing with daisy chaining is the same, but with more hauling to drop the beacons and time gating to the the colonization system contact and having to plan your route using external tools probably.

This would also of course run the risk of players hogging systems with temporary nav beacons, but I having a separate "temp nav beacon (as many as you can afford)" and "full claim (one per person until built)" state for systems could be a cool way to fix the range issues.

I think there's OK reasons to have a 10Ly range, but FDev hasn't given us their reasoning or any justification there really.

 

[LCU No Fool Like One]

I gave Spansh a 10LY range and asked it to plot between Sol and Colonia - it took a while, but it did succeed. It spends a lot of time near the bubble hopping between brown dwarf systems because they're really densely packed along the galactic plane ... and then once it gets into the more dense regions around Skaude about half-way there, it can start going a lot more direct.

So you can get to within 15kLY of the galactic core, and once there you can chain to anywhere else in a similar range, and a lot of other places too.

The ultimate limitation with 10LY isn't going to be that much in spread horizontally - at least, not until you get a fair bit further away from the core than Sol is - but how far off the galactic plane you can go. And in that respect it runs into problems pretty quickly even inside the existing bubble, in places.


Well, or just wait them out - they won't last longer than ten days and most have a maximum length shorter than that.
They also don't tend to get started unless the system has a fair amount of traffic so most wouldn't occur in a largely abandoned colony at all.

What I'm more interested in is if/how they intend to address the opposite problem where almost all the new colonies are BGSly boring for one of three reasons
1) No-one visits so they're stuck in a permanent State: None, so there's no reason to visit, repeat.
2) They've been deliberately designed by their BGS-playing Architect to be boring so no-one tries to take them over: Odyssey settlements are a liability, ringed planets encourage bounty hunting, anarchy factions are too attractive as mission targets, the fewer people who do BGS actions in the system the better (the faction expands much quicker and more controllably via colonisation than it ever did by the BGS Expansion state, so anything which disturbs the perfect balance of influence where nothing can ever happen is unwanted)
3) The Architect didn't care about the BGS at all and therefore didn't bring in any factions beyond the default one, which is pinned to 100% influence and flips between Expansion and None (with the ones on a spur further away from the bubble therefore ending up banning expansion entirely)

Sure, there's no risk of running out of empty systems in the galaxy ... but the bubble is already too large for the number of players to keep the BGS moving much at all in a good half of it and to keep it giving interesting states in rather less than that.

How did you do that? Did you use the galaxy plotter and set the range on the ship config?

 

[Rubbernuke]

Part of it is lack of tools.

The claim range could be 100Ly, 1000Ly or whatever, but if as part of it you'd have to drop beacons off every 10Ly to guide the jump(s) of the construction ships then that would come awfully close to gameplay.

What you'll be doing with daisy chaining is the same, but with more hauling to drop the beacons and time gating to the the colonization system contact and having to plan your route using external tools probably.

This would also of course run the risk of players hogging systems with temporary nav beacons, but I having a separate "temp nav beacon (as many as you can afford)" and "full claim (one per person until built)" state for systems could be a cool way to fix the range issues.

I think there's OK reasons to have a 10Ly range, but FDev hasn't given us their reasoning or any justification there really.

Dropping beacons every 10Ly is (to me) the same as having to jump 10Ly really and busy work- what people want is to get to where the claim is and start the colony. In that regard I'd just focus on that.

 

[Desirsar]

Sure, there's no risk of running out of empty systems in the galaxy ... but the bubble is already too large for the number of players to keep the BGS moving much at all in a good half of it and to keep it giving interesting states in rather less than that.

Is the region of space around my faction an exception? Everyone has ambassador channels on their Discord servers and treaties over expansion and no one actually competes with each other for space. If it's not the exception, the bubble is uninteresting because the players make it that way. If I colonize ten thousand light years out, I'm going to see roughly the same amount of traffic around my new bubble, and that traffic might actually be more aggressive.

 

[Kzak]

A thought experiment: Let's say you start out with 10 LY colonization range, and the cost for that is 10 million. Doubling the colonization range (optional) doubles the cost. 20 LY would be 20 million, and so forth, up until 81,920 LY could cost 81,920,000,000 credits.

This is unlikely to be the model put into the game, as mentioned, just some numbercrunching.

 

[Rubbernuke]

A thought experiment: Let's say you start out with 10 LY colonization range, and the cost for that is 10 million. Doubling the colonization range (optional) doubles the cost. 20 LY would be 20 million, and so forth, up until 81,920 LY could cost 81,920,000,000 credits.

This is unlikely to be the model put into the game, as mentioned, just some numbercrunching.

Its really making it possible to do it all in one go if you want to though using credits to tempt crazy players. The very furthest you could go has to be expensive and also be open to failure if you can't get there.

80 billion is a bit much, and I'd say too my 50 billion is too high, but say 10 billion is a sum worth gambling on for that- a mad dash to the edge would be an epic marathon that actually is just the start of the process.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

80 billion is a bit much, and I'd say too my 50 billion is too high, but say 10 billion is a sum worth gambling on for that- a mad dash to the edge would be an epic marathon that actually is just the start of the process.

Looking at the squadron leaderboards - theres's definitely that much money in the game and there's no other good money sinks really. Expensive, but with a reward if you do it right would make it interesting - a lesson Factorio teaches well is that should apply is that throughput is more important than hoarding when it comes to income/production.

 

[mtfatboy3006]

I'm not sure dreams of colonizing deep space take into account what will come with these systems. Populated systems become populated. Signal sources spawn. NPC pirates spawn. It's already a let down to fly 20 KLY to deliver a researcher to an unusual celestial body just to scan a tourist beacon populated by unengineered Orcas. What is the point of taking a remote system and making it a struggling, barely populated bubble system that it takes you two hours to get to? Plus, the exploits... Create a tourist-centric economy within range of an isolated tourist beacon to spawn stackable passenger missions like Robigo, for instance. Robigo specifically has been fixed, but the math generally governing passenger missions and rewards is still a little wild. (One of the evacuation missions I ran from Sol the other day, for no discernable reason, was for the 50million credit max reward, yet it was no different from a 12 mil mission in terms of number of passengers and threat level).

If there is truly a basebuilding aspect, A strategically placed base of operations in a currently uninhabited system in the bubble would be much more useful than a remote system so much hassle to fly to and from that I will either never use it or park there permanently and play something else instead.

Don't get me wrong. While exploring last week I tagged some systems that I thought might become profitable colony candidates that are obscenely far away, because I don't actually know what will or won't make sense when the feature drops.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

1. After the Screaming Banshees faction takes over the system, if the system architect creates a new asset in the system, does it belong to the Pearl Clutchers or the Screaming Banshees?
2. Given that the Screaming Banshees are anarchists, should we assume that the BGS mechanics within the system have now flipped to Anarchy, which is a feature that is different than the original plans of system architect?
3. If colonization does not allow a system architect to curb the creep of the BGS and/or Power Play, will it cater to all playstyles, or just become an extension of BGS and Power Play 2.0 ?
4. Will colonized systems attract gankers?
5. Given the controvesial (broken) state of Crime and Punishment in the game, will system architects have effective policing powers over the systems "they can't lose"?

1) Interesting question. It'd certainly make more sense to be able to give the new asset to any present faction to start with, or it'd be really tedious if you wanted the Odyssey settlements spread out among them ... but "current controlling faction" is certainly a lower-effort default that they could go with.
2) Seems likely.
3) For non-BGS players the faction owning a system is mostly irrelevant (though highly-expanded factions of any sort can be annoying because of their shared fine/bounty levels); for non-Powerplayers the quantitative impact of Powerplay control is likewise so minimal it's not even advertised any more. Such an ability to lock the system to either would be far more likely to be useful to those who were directly interested in such things to keep their maintenance down.
4) I doubt it, unless you're making a real effort to also attract targets. You're not going to compete with Shinrarta/Deciat/Sol for player number count, especially not if colonisation leads to a big rise in the total number of inhabited systems.
5) No

(I think your hypothetical is unlikely in practice in the first place: given the choice between "get into a potentially extremely long BGS fight for control of one system" and "colonise another hundred free ones somewhere else" the number of BGS planners who would go for option 1 is low, if not non-existent)

Given the scenario above, I'm thinking the best way to assure that players can't "lose" systems is if their assets have the same docking privileges as a fleet carrier. Players who take the time and energy to colonize a system and create the assets within them should be also be given the ability to secure them.

With the 10LY chaining requirement (or even with a longer one) this would allow anyone to gatekeep further colonisation in sparser space simply by denying all access so that no-one else could use their colonisation contact to chain from ... while not even necessarily being all that effective at keeping out a dedicated BGS attacker [1] who still has access to murder, bounties (via FCs), scenario outcomes, and potentially a bit of messing around with targeting missions from neighbouring systems.

I can't see anything like that being implemented: I think "Architect" rather than "Leader" or "Owner" has been picked fairly carefully as a name here.

[1] I think your scenario assumes initial colonisation by someone who doesn't know how to defend their BGS setup the conventional way, yes?

How did you do that? Did you use the galaxy plotter and set the range on the ship config?

Yes, exactly that. (Range 9.98 LY because I couldn't be bothered to keep fine-tuning the mass further, but close enough to test the principle)

Is the region of space around my faction an exception? Everyone has ambassador channels on their Discord servers and treaties over expansion and no one actually competes with each other for space. If it's not the exception, the bubble is uninteresting because the players make it that way. If I colonize ten thousand light years out, I'm going to see roughly the same amount of traffic around my new bubble, and that traffic might actually be more aggressive.

I'm not talking about deliberate BGS manipulation here - though, yes, in my experience many BGS planners will try to make the BGS behave in as boring a fashion as possible because that's less work - but about the general fluctuations which take place as a result of the vast majority of players who don't care about BGS outcomes just "doing stuff".

They're unlikely to get those fluctuations to the extent of starting a control conflict in the system - especially not if someone is actively trying to stop that happening - because of the general "random traffic benefits the system controller" setup that the BGS usually has, but they will keep influence levels wobbling about, conflicts between secondary factions moving, BGS states and events being applied, and so on.

A system with daily traffic levels in the 10-100 range is usually interesting for people who don't care about who "wins" the BGS - there are active states, so there's good trade prices ... there might be Civil Unrest or a War or something throwing up combat opportunities ... or maybe there's a Bust or Terrorism shutting down Odyssey settlements for some reactivation opportunities.

A system with daily traffic levels in the 1-10 range is usually boring because everything is in State: None - no special combat, no interesting markets, the basic signal source types only, etc. (And a system with weekly or monthly traffic levels in that range is even worse)

It's not really the players' fault that "they make it that way". They're doing the best they can to play the game and therefore fluctuate the BGS - but there's just not enough of them to cover all 20,000 inhabited systems of the bubble regularly enough. And if that increases to 40,000 inhabited systems, unless it also comes with a long-term doubling of active player numbers ... and Colonisation is certainly interesting but I don't expect it to be quite that popular ... that just means more dilution of the players and more systems falling into disuse.

(Which is of course why I'm very much hoping that Colonisation comes with a Decolonisation mechanism where persistently disused systems get eaten by Thargoids / wiped out by Outbreaks / everyone emigrates to somewhere with better pay / etc. so that the eventual size and shape of the bubble is what player activity can actually support and keep interesting)

A thought experiment: Let's say you start out with 10 LY colonization range, and the cost for that is 10 million. Doubling the colonization range (optional) doubles the cost. 20 LY would be 20 million, and so forth, up until 81,920 LY could cost 81,920,000,000 credits.

This is unlikely to be the model put into the game, as mentioned, just some numbercrunching.

Given that most of the galaxy doesn't contain stars, paying for 20 LY would always be cheaper than 2x10 LY (because you'd actually need 3x10 LY at best) on that model.

The problem with long ranges is that it only takes a couple of hundred minimalist colonies at 5000 LY intervals to make the maximum range to any system be <5000 LY (and most places under half that) - and that's probably within the abilities of a large group with good planning and logistics to do before most individual players interested in the feature have finished their first system.

So if they're going to have a range limit at all, it needs to be a short enough one to stop a project like that making it effectively unlimited in a few months.
(Doesn't have to be as short as 10 LY, but it does need to be surprisingly short if it's supposed to stay at least somewhat relevant for "the rest of the game")