Elite Dangerous | Colonisation Facilities & Markets
- Thread starter Paul_Crowther
- Start date
I’ve had this issue and dealt with it by parking my FC in uninhabited systems.Well ill go to the foot of our stairs, i never knew that, isn't my carrier a bit of Utopia? Cant i claim diplomatic immunity?
O7
One of the biggest issues to me is starter port location. Not being able to choose or have a feature to relocate it hurts. Maybe some concept to starter port being "most valuable" asset could have more lenient properties for its economy, idk. One of the glaring issues with colonization to me is that system sniping is too evident because at this current time anyone looking to make a long term colony are looking for as many build slots on bodies as possible with as many different ring types as possible while also holding good hotspots.
It narrows down the search so much obvious choices (if not singular) that anyone past this point are going to have to battle hard to catch the more interesting systems to build on. As for myself I'm just targeting systems with specific configurations because we're still in the process of community makes research and in depth guide so I'm sort of in a less fickle spot to build something for the time being, lucky me.
It is a big deal that the 15ly is the farthest limit and a difficult one to balance. This leads to an even more narrowed down colonization beacon race and obvious ones can be seen once you figure out which systems in the near future are within reach.
The day I try to undertake the insane task to bridge 7000 ly's of colonies to reach THE several systems and area I would love to build on my terms would horrendously suck if someone just takes the system before I do after all this effort. Which brings me to a little idea to mitigate a bit of the sniping part.
What if systems can be reserved if you have discovered yourself the system as an explorer, or that if someone hits the system for colonization will need to send a game implemented request for authorization to do so?
It narrows down the search so much obvious choices (if not singular) that anyone past this point are going to have to battle hard to catch the more interesting systems to build on. As for myself I'm just targeting systems with specific configurations because we're still in the process of community makes research and in depth guide so I'm sort of in a less fickle spot to build something for the time being, lucky me.
It is a big deal that the 15ly is the farthest limit and a difficult one to balance. This leads to an even more narrowed down colonization beacon race and obvious ones can be seen once you figure out which systems in the near future are within reach.
The day I try to undertake the insane task to bridge 7000 ly's of colonies to reach THE several systems and area I would love to build on my terms would horrendously suck if someone just takes the system before I do after all this effort. Which brings me to a little idea to mitigate a bit of the sniping part.
What if systems can be reserved if you have discovered yourself the system as an explorer, or that if someone hits the system for colonization will need to send a game implemented request for authorization to do so?
"We value your time" works fine, BTW...
Please make ports adopting economies from the nearest "neighbors" if their own planetary body cannot provide an economy.
For example a port orbiting a gas giant with moons picking economies from settlement on those moons.
That would make a lot of sense, and that would make a lot of automatically placed primary ports actually getting an economy other than Colony.
For example a port orbiting a gas giant with moons picking economies from settlement on those moons.
That would make a lot of sense, and that would make a lot of automatically placed primary ports actually getting an economy other than Colony.
Such a change might still break economies that people built according to the current system.
For example, if somebody has got a 0.5/0.5 something/colony and is happy with that, the game might want to replace the colony part while the player might not.
If anything is to be added at all,
I would vote for a player-defined setting for
1) up to two economy types, including "auto-determined" which would work as it does now, and
2) a slider for distance up to which facilities with matching economies are delivering to that market, where distance "0" reverts to current behaviour.
Then you'd have to account for multiple stations requesting the same deliveries, e.g. by dividing effect by number of destinations.
And you'd have to account for changing distances due to orbits or additional facilities being built, e.g. once a week.
With such careful additions, people who already built something according the current system by the time it's implemented will be able to keep their stuff.
I would also welcome an option to cancel construction projects or even destroy structures, even complete ones and even if all invested materials would be lost. That action could block a slot for concurrent constructions to prevent it from straining the servers too much.
No. I have 1 data point for this scenario:
1 star, no planets, 3 slots
1 Coriolis and 2 space farms - and done, no slots to build more
2 T1 space farms were not enough to completely eliminate Colony from economy or shift T2 Coriolis skin to agri.
15800 pop, low security
It was enough to have a whole range of agri goods, e.g. ~5027 fruit and vegetables,
market buying biowaste instead of selling it and shipyard with 2 ships (Sidewinder and Hauler).
Station economy is Text Colony, journal 50% Agri, 50% Colony.
At this time 1 space farm was 4.71 Ls away, the other 7.69 Ls.
It's still a lot better than biowaste.
It's the only market selling food within ~30 Ly.
Large pad, close to arrival, beware of noob hammers.
Given my lack of knowledge when starting I've locked my initial Coriolis in to Colony economy. I would like to replace some structures, however its not simple - what if the structure you are destroying is the prereq for another one? Do I have to destroy all Security Installations if I want to destroy the one relay station I have? What happens with the construction points if you destroy a structure which gave a tier 2 point, you now have a deficit for one of the tier 2 structures, so do I have to destroy one of those or at least pay a tier 2 construction point to destroy a tier 1 structure?
Good points.
1) For lack of build points due to deletion, you might want to allow for negative build points.
2) For falling back below 10 structures for T2/T3 built point discount (sounds much better than hike) you'd have to consider whether you would want to allow people to use the discount.
3) For lack of prerequisites, you might want to introduce an "inoperable" state for dependent facilities - and don't forget to remove that state if the prerequisite is built again.
4) For destroying the primary port, you'd have to check if there's another station that can act as a new primary port - and people would complain if they can't choose which one.
It's not easy. If it would be easy, there would be no bugs.
You can also see the difficulty by the weekly tick being aborted last Thursday.
A single CPU core can happily chew 4 FLOPs per clock cycle if you manage to feed it with data by the time it needs it.
But if you're dealing with terabytes of data, even a tiny little bit like a setting "distance of economy influence" may hurt somewhere.
You know what, I'm demoralised. I know it's a beta and we are testing stuff but we are stuck with whatever the outcomes are, there is no delete button. This is feeling like Odyssey all over again. There is no/little information and what there is is scattered over various channels. I am now only finding out the Coriolis station I have worked for and started to build around the main star won't have a shipyard or an economy. I'm out, ED is going on the shelf for a while. I hope that when I come back they'll have it sorted and the system architect had better have have 1st dibs on the next system to colonise as he built the bridge.
Building dependencies and building descriptions is not a new concept in gaming. Nearly every RTS game I've ever played has this feature, and explains to the player exactly what each building does. To use another space game as an example, Starcraft did this back in 1998.
In a way, building out a system as an architect is very similar to building up a settlement in an RTS game. You have to buildfarms/pylons satelites/tier 1 facilities before you can build larger structures that have a bigger benefit to your settlement system.
In those games, if a building is destroyed for any reason (enemy action, player chooses to delete it, etc), the dependencies all break until the chain is fixed. This too, is not a new concept, and could be implemented by following such an example.
I'm not a coder, I don't know how much work it would be to add a delete button to a structure. But I know it can be done, because hundreds of other games have already done it. From that perspective, it seems to me that asking for, at the very least, an undo button for a newly placed settlement, is not an unreasonable ask, because it would save a ton of frustration, and would give players more agency when something unexpected happens.
Please also follow the RTS example and tell us how each building will influence our system in the screen where we can choose to build it. It doesn't have to be super long, just concise and accurate. And please add an undo button for facility placement.
In a way, building out a system as an architect is very similar to building up a settlement in an RTS game. You have to build
In those games, if a building is destroyed for any reason (enemy action, player chooses to delete it, etc), the dependencies all break until the chain is fixed. This too, is not a new concept, and could be implemented by following such an example.
I'm not a coder, I don't know how much work it would be to add a delete button to a structure. But I know it can be done, because hundreds of other games have already done it. From that perspective, it seems to me that asking for, at the very least, an undo button for a newly placed settlement, is not an unreasonable ask, because it would save a ton of frustration, and would give players more agency when something unexpected happens.
Please also follow the RTS example and tell us how each building will influence our system in the screen where we can choose to build it. It doesn't have to be super long, just concise and accurate. And please add an undo button for facility placement.
In my first system the colonization ship forced me to build my starport in orbit around a water world. I cannot build surface facilities on a water world, so I built a surface port on a neighboring planet. Now I'm told this will not satisfy the colonization economy requirements. My second system did a bit better, but of course it hasn't finished yet because it missed the last server tick. I thought that as I waited for the next server tick, and hope that my second port will finish then, I would start on a third system. Found a good one with 3 stars, 37 bodies, of which 7 of 8 bodies in the A star system were all high metal content worlds. So where did the colonization ship decide I needed to put my starport, why 4500 LS from the A star in the AB star system, orbiting an ice moon of the last ice planet in that system and which is also does not surface installation. So exactly how am I supposed to take advantage of the colonization economy? It looks like the only way to make it work in both my first and third tries is to build a subsequent star port where I want it, so I can then build surface facilities, which is more than double the hours upon hours I've already done to create ports that don't work. FDev, you really really need to fix this because my frustration is so high I wonder if I should continue. Yeah, I know, its a beta, but...fix it.
High Tech/Refinery economy and High Security. Above average Standard Of Living.
I think this is a logical outcome. If you undo your security station then, no problem. But if you undo the relay installation on which your security station has a dependency on then both get undone. But there must be a warning to the player.
I think we all want to believe that things like commodity markets are affected by the resources innately local or near to systems.
Frankly, I want to believe that a systems self sufficience is based around what resources are available in system and nearby, with the possibility of importing and exporting goods as needed, as long as those goods are around.
It would simply have penalities applied to BGSmood stabilizers states, meaning a system without an architect would always stay a system but not necessarily contribute much to it's greater good.
The factuals are that the buildings you place are what produce the goods you want. You want to sell iphones? Build high-tech stations. Doesn't matter if the only planet you have access to build on is 100% ice. Build the Apple Store and iphones will be there. In some ways this makes things easier, and in others, it makes it less cool to colonize anything because it's just more space to build buildings.
Frankly, I want to believe that a systems self sufficience is based around what resources are available in system and nearby, with the possibility of importing and exporting goods as needed, as long as those goods are around.
It would simply have penalities applied to BGS
The factuals are that the buildings you place are what produce the goods you want. You want to sell iphones? Build high-tech stations. Doesn't matter if the only planet you have access to build on is 100% ice. Build the Apple Store and iphones will be there. In some ways this makes things easier, and in others, it makes it less cool to colonize anything because it's just more space to build buildings.
The problem right now (maybe stretching the analogy as I guess the outposts with fixed economy work as you stated, but tier 2 and 3 don't) is that in order to sell those iPhones you have to have the store on the same icy planet as the iPhone factory or in orbit around it. You can't put the iPhone store anywhere else in the system. If you invested in a big shiny store in the initial location around a non-landable planet it will never get any stock to sell regardless of how many iPhone factories there are in the system. All the shiny store will sell is Hydrogen fuel and Biowaste.
... Unless I'm misunderstanding your use of "factuals".
Last edited:
It's good that the Agri settlements can grow produce because of structures like those highly insulated quonset like greenhouses. And the closed protective environment makes sense on rocky icy worlds where water can be obtained from the environment but surface temperatures are well below freezing.
But I'd like to see more expansive farms for ELW worlds that are cheaper to build per ton of produce. This way nearby systems without local agro resources can import food relatively cheaply while far flung isolated colonies can rely on the current ruggedized agri settlements.
Simple fact is, the game has never worked that way.
That the mechanics of this have never been front-and-center to play though, which means your average punter had nothing else to go on except to make up how they think it was going to work, then be disappointed when the existing mechanics aren't what they thought they'd be on first interaction.
exactly, i cant get thru those people who really think demand and supply system works while in the codex its stated how things are suppose to be. and in reality we got proofs those are never been the case.
my only concern about this baseless and vague information was, with the current system where we cant replace/delete existing building, people will stuck with bunch of useless things and half wit infrastructure but eh idc anymore, we can always make another one. they are free to do so, so much speculations but we got solid data and so far i can tell they dont.
Colony market is broken, it worked for some people but many dont, even a system with 2 refinery and 1 corio in the orbit moved the corio economy and market to refinery (the one you give me @Jmanis ), and another one corio with THREE kind of goods 1 extraction settlement, 1 refinery hub, 1 industrial settlement is all clutered in the Extraction market.
me and mate just finished this lay out aswell with some "supporting" extraction system nearby, nothing changes yet.
and by the fact they telling they gonna "do" something towards current economy system should say it all.
best thing we can do atm is to follow what the codex said and building supporting infrastructure(security, standard of living, wealth) as we focus on the economy we wanted for a system.
Cheers 07
Attachments
This feature would be a lot less interesting if we knew exactly how it works. However if we are to find out ourselves their needs to be some feedback. The architects view should at least give some information like some sliders displaying system stats like wealth and development. Clicking on a body should show the economic influences. As it is we can't even tell what installations we have built.