But if more facilities = less commodities in the station's market, that would be absolutely detrimental to that vision and goal.
It doesn't make logically sense. The bigger the system, the more facilities and industries it has, the more it should produce, not the less. If I keep filling up every slot in the system with more facilities, does that mean the marketplace will become almost empty?
It's a lot more complicated than that. Think of it a bit like outfitting a ship: more SCBs equals more shields, but doesn't necessarily equal more combat
performance because you might overstretch your power plant, or not have enough heatsinks to safely use them all, etc. It's not a
simple more=better. And similarly, the Type-8 isn't a better warship than the Vulture just because it's bigger - you'll get better results working with the system's inherent advantages and disadvantages rather than against them.
"More facilities" will always either not affect general market sizes, or will increase general market sizes in the system - either by adding a new market, or by improving development level to boost the size of a market, or by adding strong or weak links which increase the sizes of specific markets. So if your goal is more cargo in
total - especially if what you want is Hydrogen Fuel - there's nothing you can add which will decrease that in a general sense.
The problem is - just as by analogy a dedicated combat boat will flatten a multirole, but the multirole
also doesn't carry as much cargo as a dedicated freighter - that if you start mixing economy types on an individual station, you can end up making it worse at its primary economy type. If you have a working Industrial economy turning out (say) Computer Components, that's great. If you start adding high-tech links to it, then the High-Tech economy consumes Computer Components, so even though you're improving the size of the economy overall, you might lose
specifically Computer Components exports.
That leads on to the bigger problem with Colonisation in general:
- hybrid economies where a station has multiple economy types are somewhat unpredictable in outcome and can often lose output of certain key goods (even though they're better at some things) as well as having possibly unwanted effects on mission generation
- "weak links" are very easy to generate, very difficult to avoid the effects of, and will turn your economies into hybrid economies
- a lot of planet types (the more "interesting" the worse!) generate hybrid economies and rarely well-paired hybrid economies to begin with
(These are the equivalents of System Focused Power Distributors and Shielded Fuel Scoops in ship builds - sure, they make some numbers go up, but they're not the numbers you want to go up and the numbers they make go down are more important)
This is mitigated somewhat by the default populations and productivities on colonisation ports (especially T2s and bigger, and the surface T1 ports) being really large since Update 3, so you don't actually need very many constructions to already have more cargo than you can personally use (and indeed more cargo than a medium-sized squadron can use), and with careful choice of constructions (and the right base planets to build on) you can get a good spread of economies and services with relatively low amounts of construction and no interference.
Unlike ship outfitting, however, you can't "try it and if it doesn't work, try something else" without starting over in a new system. And while the community has documented various "recipes" to achieve various effects, there's nothing like the decades of accumulated experience, documentation, Coriolis/EDSY-equivalents, etc. that means "oh, obviously you don't use System Engineered on your Distributor" is common knowledge. (This may change somewhat when/if Colonisation leaves 'Beta' - a lot of people may be holding off on doing documentation work until they're sure it won't need throwing out to start over).
So it's important to understand:
a) what you're trying to achieve
b) how to achieve that
before you start building a system, if the outcome of building that system is important to you.
(Also, given that Frontier have shown willingness to make major backward-incompatible changes to how system assets function during Beta, if the outcome is important to you then you shouldn't be constructing anything right now)
