Elite Dangerous | System Colonisation Beta Details & Feedback

[root2]

Beside all the "its much stuff to haul for a T3 station" discussion, I want to share a maybe minor "quality of life" thing, that came to my mind while colonizing.

I know it's meant to cost ARX (real money) to have the possibility to rename a station with your own name.

But, I think also the "free re-rolls" could have some improvements: What about splitting the re-rolls up into two seperate groups?
Group one is the "given name" of the station and group two is the "station type".

So instead of re-rolling over and over hundreds of times to get somethig like "Brewer Astrophysics Complex" it could make things a little easier to re-roll it, when the name "Brewer" can be rolled seperately from the station type "Astrophysics Complex".


So from this:

To this:

I think this will not decrease the number of "paid renames" very much, but gives CMDRs a bit more control about "their" facilities.

What do you think?

 

[SergMx]

The current colonization mechanics punish the solo player and small player groups (casual).

I propose
Tier 3 projects should grow 3% per day 33 days to complete
Tier 2 projects should grow 5% per day 20 days to complete
Tier 1 projects should grow 10% per day 10 days to complete

Would this really be so bad? You do abit of hauling,then you do something else.

The excuse of "colonization has to be hard, it has to take time" is silly with big player groups building a station in minutes.

Someone mentioned RL. So the game does not care who builds, or a beggar scraped for t8 or a man with a lot of billions with FC. They build at the same speed. That's RL

 

[Desirsar]

The current colonization mechanics punish the solo player and small player groups (casual).

I propose
Tier 3 projects should grow 3% per day 33 days to complete
Tier 2 projects should grow 5% per day 20 days to complete
Tier 1 projects should grow 10% per day 10 days to complete

Would this really be so bad? You do abit of hauling,then you do something else.

The excuse of "colonization has to be hard, it has to take time" is silly with big player groups building a station in minutes.

Big group has every player in the group colonize a system. 10% of a station in one system done? Okay, on to the next system, then the next, then the next... They'll finish the same number of installations in the same number of days.

Edit - Realizing that they can also have five construction per system going at once. Forcing them to spread the effort might actually result in more built per day.

 

[K Olley]

The current colonization mechanics punish the solo player and small player groups (casual).

I propose
Tier 3 projects should grow 3% per day 33 days to complete
Tier 2 projects should grow 5% per day 20 days to complete
Tier 1 projects should grow 10% per day 10 days to complete

Would this really be so bad? You do abit of hauling,then you do something else.

The excuse of "colonization has to be hard, it has to take time" is silly with big player groups building a station in minutes.

NO,

The amount of materials have been dumbed down to enable the single player to contribute.

Back in the days before fleet carriers when station repairs was an ongoing way of making money by hauling the average requirement for a station repair was around 670,000 ton, the maximum was over 2.5mil ton.

Now we can build a complete station for a THIRD of the resources it used to take to repair the average station, and back in them days we did not have the additional supply ships or the bump in resources that we have just had.

It was hard hauling with no recognition for any of the work done

 

[CMDR Abe Andet]

Well, don't know if I just got lucky or they fixed the slot 0 station bug and build orbital station first bugs... but here is what happened. Built a T2 Agriculture on planet, then spacefarm installation (in slot 1 but it got built in slot 0) Was going to and should have taken the leap of faith to build a Coriolis but didn't because of the "slot 0 bug thing". So I built a commercial outpost in the slot 1. Left, came back thinking I would have to "shock" the economy by building another ground thing but decided to check the station and found that it had already taken up the Agriculture economy and looked at the commocitiy list... Look at this!!! 14,595 Fruit and Veggies LOL

 

[Jetreyu]

You'd need a minimum of five markets:
- agricultural
- industrial
- orbital refinery (insulating membrane)
- surface refinery (CMM composite)
- surface high-tech (muon imager)

In theory [1] you could do this with four landable planets or moons (because both refineries can be on/around a single planet) in a single mid-sized system. You've then got technical self-sufficiency in all needed commodities - any further build up just means you're generating 2000t/day of Steel rather than 1000t so you can build further things quicker. The agricultural, industrial and high-tech commodities are all needed in such small quantities that a single outpost is likely to provide enough.

This would provide everything you needed for orbital construction; there is no alternative but to return to the bubble occasionally to grab a new pile of Emergency Power Cells for certain surface constructions as these are not a standard economic commodity (they're not quite a Rare, but they're close).

[1] At the moment, the issue where all surface ports, regardless of size, randomly pick just three things to export ... you'd end up needing a lot more stations in practice. But that seems fairly clearly a bug and will hopefully be fixed at some point.

Do you think we could do this with 3 planets, as long as one is quite large? I'm thinking of combining the orbital refinery with agricultural (70-30 or so). Or do you think that would keep you from getting less common foods like grain?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Do you think we could do this with 3 planets, as long as one is quite large? I'm thinking of combining the orbital refinery with agricultural (70-30 or so). Or do you think that would keep you from getting less common foods like grain?

Risky - the Refinery economy will consume pretty much everything produced by the Agricultural.

I think you'd need at least twice as much Agri as Refinery to be reasonably confident that you get any Grain and Fruit + Veg - and at that point you're really not putting much into Refinery production which is the one you really need the bulk tonnage for.

If you only have three planets, then sticking a basic Vulcan Industrial Outpost in one of the sun orbit slots can probably cover your Industrial production without needing to be next to anything, and you could do the same with a Prometheus Scientific Outpost to cover high-tech, so then you'd only need two planets (one Refinery, one Agricultural)

 

[danteuk]

My feedback : Requirement quantities - why make it random ? it doesn't help any one and it doesn't add any 'fun' to the grind of hauling thousands of items!!
( ie values shown on the first screen for quantities required of each item is NOT the actual values when you start building, they all change, mostly up by be a small amount. )

8 mega ships for buying the commodities is not enough - everyone and their uncle has a fleet carrier already parked there - so all I ever see is the 'No free slot' error when I try and jump to one.

 

[Devilish Dave]

When will "System Claim Unsuccessful" be fixed?

I'm waiting around a desired system since February 26th, and now I haven't been playing as much as I want to, because I have a feeling, if I were to go too far, it'll be fixed and I cannot make it back in time to make the claim.

I've spent days playing, but now I'm on for an hour or two just messing around not making any major plans and postponed exploration due to this.

Any amount of information would be amazing!

 

[MPL3D]

My feedback, diversify the needed commodities.
It is more engaging to collect 2k, 3k tons of ten different things than 20k tons of one. This last is more repetitive.
On the other side, the reward feeling is greater when things dissapear from the shopping list in a short period of time.

 

[salek]

Here's my feedback: construction progress should have a fixed background growth, however modest, even if its just a hundred units a week. I don't understand why the Architect and their pals (if they have any) would be the only ones in the galaxy interested in the trade. There's gotta be some background development. You could then get fancy - make it depend somehow on the local and neighboring system economies. But there's gotta be something.

Thank you.

 

[Zador]

Here's my feedback: construction progress should have a fixed background growth, however modest, even if its just a hundred units a week. I don't understand why the Architect and their pals (if they have any) would be the only ones in the galaxy interested in the trade. There's gotta be some background development. You could then get fancy - make it depend somehow on the local and neighboring system economies. But there's gotta be something.

My head canon is that you are just contracted to deliver some proportion of the required commodities. They are nowhere near enough to build e.g. a Coriolis. NPCs are delivering the rest. If you wanted to include NPC deliveries in your counts you'd need to multiply them by 10 ;p

 

[vicwarrior]

My head canon is that you are just contracted to deliver some proportion of the required commodities. They are nowhere near enough to build e.g. a Coriolis. NPCs are delivering the rest. If you wanted to include NPC deliveries in your counts you'd need to multiply them by 10 ;p

Headcannon doesn't change that delivering stuff for hours for the privilige of getting to haul more and deliver more stuff isn't exactly stellar gameplay.

Really could do with being fleshed out more, by having those npcs interact with markets, be motivated by missions, politics, profit, whatever.....

 

[GraphicEqualizer]

Colonisation is great for expanding the bubble(s) but there is a segment of the players left out, those that don't want a colony, like don't want a lot of people, markets, powerplay, factions... those who just want a little hideaway in the deep black.

Here's my suggestion:

• A carrier-only contact to enable a stripped down claim on a system that only enables up to a single surface port with a large pad.
• You would need to have all the required materials with you on board the carrier before the contact can be used - and must be in an unpopulated system.
• This would be a custom layout, not seen before - something very small and spartan with a combination of some features seen in existing colony types, maybe would include a single mining rig, power centre, a single science module, and a hab.
• There will be no market place, no missions boards, no linkages to powerplay, no factions... just you.
• It would only offer some cargo storage say a few thousand units - but as soon as you store anything there, this settlement will also be prone to random 'scenarios', e.g. a hostile NPC ship might circle overhead and attack any attempt to land or depart, or a hostile NPC ship might drop scavengers while you are on the surface.

Making it carrier-only buildable will mean these facilities are not able to just be built by anyone everywhere, it still makes it a deep commitments/endgame kind of thing.

 

[Zaphod Beeblebrox IV]

The random nature of picking the primary port needs to be changed (unless of course I'm missing something). Just got a nice system 2 stars 4 landable HMC within 55ls of the star and 2 gas giants with 9 moons between them orbiting the barycentre of the 2 stars. It put the primary port on the 3rd moon of the 1st GG 1800ls from the star. At least it's a landable moon with space for a planetary base because apparently that's important.

 

[Niamhy]

the way to fix that is to have a system whereby things built in orbit can be moved to a different slot or even a different planet orbit. charge credits for the service. but it's not canon or astrophysics breaking to be able to move/tow a station from the orbit of one planet to the orbit of another. that way, if your primary port ends up 200,000 ly from the star, you can tow is back to a better slot. (and is also a solution for fixing systems built before we worked out how economies worked... which is most of them that have been built so far)

 

[Xenia_K]

Whao!
Did anyone notice that we now are able to build Thargoid Sites (T4) - with a staggering amount of nearly 1.5 Mto of Mats - including 120Kto of Meta-Alloys?

here in China its Apr 1st already

 

[Astraeos Darkstrider]

I found something weird in one of my owned systems; Col 285 Sector UF-L b9-5. I don't know how I did this but I am able to build more orbital installations on the last planet which only allows 3, plus it has an extra construction slot. And I am able to have more than 5 active constructions projects. Don't know if this is a bug or I found an exploit. At the moment I have stopped all construction in this system until this issue is fixed

 

[Tifu]

Don't know if this is a bug or I found an exploit. At the moment I have stopped all construction in this system until this issue is fixed

Better ticket it

 

[cmdr remo_d]

My impatience is starting to win. One goal, a major goal, is an asteroid coriolis. Now I have to come up with 3 tier 2 points to begin construction. That should be easy, right? I'm thinking doing something cheap that will raise the security and the standard of living. So... I think, "Where can I put these to do the least amount of harm?". Well, thinking at the moment is the orbits of a star are useless. The orbits of a planet or moon with no landing is useless. Maybe a planet with no orbits. Maybe use a planet with a couple of land sites and an orbital slot for Agriculture? The last seems like a safe bet. I would hate to use the 'useless' star-orbiting slots only to have Fdev later state, "Oh yeah, those influence EVERYTHING in your system!". sigh.