For pre-colonisation economic stuff:
- this old thread
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...ly-demand-and-relationship-to-the-bgs.441646/ is still essentially right as far as I can tell (there have been some minor changes, but nothing too important)
-
https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/effects and
https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/specialities have useful data tables to go along with that (the effects tables are a bit bare at the moment, as so many market prices changed with the Trailblazers release that the earlier data used to build them is no longer reliable, so the data gathering and analysis process is starting over - it is, fortunately, fully automated)
- the market information in-game can be surprisingly helpful if you're not purely looking for maximum profits
For new systems there's some interesting things appearing to be going on with economy sizes, productivity, station specialisation
changes, and so on. But I don't have much idea
what other than vague handwaves.
I have been doing that every few days so far with all information I consider reliably determined to that point. As you can tell, that's not very much yet. Unless we get some extra info from Frontier this is something I expect to take months: most investigations of similar scopes, whether mine or other people's, have taken similar amounts of time.
(At the moment the data people are sharing in this thread is great, but mainly is serving to
disprove some of the simpler possible theories)
I'll do another update today but it won't change much.
Thanks for the links! (I canāt access the specialities one, though).
Also thanks a lot for updating your initial post. To be honest, I still have quite a lot of questions that arenāt covered by it but that I am sure you could answer with relative ease. Maybe my āproblemā is that BGS has been an aspect of the game that I just havenāt spent much thought on, so certain game mechanics might be completely unclear to me (and others) that are self-understanding to BGS afficionados.
Let me try to phrase my most pressing questions along with some commentary. I still think that a Q&A would help many CMDRs out immensely. Sorry if I missed something in this thread - it has grown by 5 pages in the time it took me to think about my questions and put them into words.
1) Market
1.1) What determines which goods are available on a market?
In our updated original post, you mention that construction properties (system variables such as security, tech level etc.) seem to influence market sizes, productivity, and specialisation.
But can you also influence available goods more directly by building facilities on/orbiting
the same planet? E.g., does an aggricultural settlement contribute some agricultural goods to a local port/station?
If so, does the facility always contribute goods or only if the station is of he same economy type (i.e. the facility has āflippedā the stationās economy)?
On p.38 you helped out hutandrei by offering advice on facility placement in his system. You wrote: āSome nice rings for asteroid bases to get Extraction-side materials from, too - and then a Large Industrial Settlement on one of the nearby moons to get a Refinery Contact so you can convert those ores directly into even more metals.ā
This baffles me. I can understand that an extraction type asteroid base offers extraction-side goods/materials (ONLY on the the asteroid base, right?).
But how does the industrial settlement come into play? If itās on one of the nearby moons, itās not in the local sphere of the base, AFAIK. Will it still create a refinery contact in the asteroid base? Will refinery contacts spawn all around the system? Or does another āsphereā apply here which is somewhere between ālocalā and āsystem-wideā?
1.2) What determines the quantity of goods available on a market?
Similar to 1.1: Are system variables the only ones that count? Or can you influence the quantity of goods on a local level by building more settlements of the same type?
It sounds a bit like the latter when you recommend building Refinery hubs in all but one slots on HMCs in your aforementioned reply to hutandrei. (Or ist that just about system stats / flipping colony economies in the right direction?)
2) Facility/(star)port economy
To what extent are you able to swing/influence economies?
In your original post, you write that āInfluence replaces Colony economies, but supplements non-Colony economiesā.
What does āsupplementingā mean in this case?
Does it mean you can never completely flip a non-colony economy, but only add a second economy type? Or can there be wild mixes of as many economy types as you can fit facilities into the local area?
What do you mean by āuse caution over hybridisationā?
3) System economy
3.1 How is system economy determined?
I feel almost bad asking this because I remember you giving a concise definition in several places on these forumsā¦ but the threads have just become so humongous!
3.2 What does system economy actually do?
I guess itās just a trait that influences, say, which HGEs spawn, right?
It shouldnāt affect individual stations and their wares, since those have their own economies (which may differ from system economy), correct?
Does it matter which of the two economy types is listed first? In other words, is there a difference between an āindustrial/refineryā and a ārefinery/industrialā system?
4) Building tips
4.1) Is there a generally recommended starting station / line of build or do you have general suggestions that players can build upon depending on what they want to achieve?
4.2) Personal question: I have started two systems with an industrial outpost. One sports quite a number of big HMC worlds, the other has several ringed gas giants with many smaller moons. What would be a good route to go from there?
So many question marks in one post
No matter how many of my questions you or other knowledgeable CMDRs actually manage to answer - thanks a lot for all your effort!
both of these occurences a bug or intentional in some way I wonder
