Space station economies are too prone to become "palette"-like. We need to be able to restrict certain economy to keep it pure and focused.
We need the ability to disable a specific economic type
- Thread starter Deimose Mantou
- Start date
My suggestion would be to add the ability to isolate ports from specific weak links or turn off certain economies per port entirely, so they do stop canibalizing each other.
The current system is a ugly mess and I am very unhappy about it.
The current system is a ugly mess and I am very unhappy about it.
Basically in any case where you care about a stations imports, exports, or mission-related consequences of those. Obviously not everyone will - if you don't care about station economies, you don't care about station economies and they could all be fixed at Colony type for all the difference it would make.
For example, a single small extraction settlement (total output three commodities at maybe 50t each) will disable - via its weak link - mining missions at every major station in the system. Or a single small military settlement (total imports of Insulating Membrane maybe 100t) can completely stop production of Insulating Membrane at multiple T3 refinery stations throughout the system. This does not happen in NPC systems.
There are workarounds possible - building systems either to avoid ever generating weak links, or much more expensively building decoy ports to isolate weak links away from other stations - but they tend to lead to very weird-looking systems by the standards of the NPC systems.
Because it currently is impossible to get certain goods at a station with strong links, because even a single weak link will eat them up.
Agri is the most extreme example, as almost any other economy type will consume Agri production, so you will lose goods with a single different weak link in the system, amking it impossible to get a full spectrum Agri production in a mixed economy system.
Keep in mind that certain stations and installations that provide certain boosts also come with Economy Links (for example for system security), so your options are extremely limited if you try to avoid those weak links.