Current CG screeches to a halt at Colonia
- Thread starter Enrogue
- Start date
Watching the initial progress of the CG I was afraid I wouldn't have time to jump my carrier to Colonia in time, despite starting to load it up as soon as the CG begun.
Are you selling to anyone? I'd gladly use your services if they're available..
If your cargo is up for sale, drop your carrier name please
Personally I don't care, but can't you organise a few people with FCs and carry goods from the bubble to colonia? Use the forum, discord, player groups, ask a few youtubers to support the campaign. Work together, you know? Like a community goal?
Yea... I tried to get someone to pack my carrier and refuel it on the way. Only asked the closest ones, because others certainly wouldn't do it. Clan is hibernating or then they're too fresh, or just couldn't be arsed for other reasons. Didn't want to push it, odds are it wouldn't have worked anyway, the pushing. So going solo at it like usually.Personally I don't care, but can't you organise a few people with FCs and carry goods from the bubble to colonia? Use the forum, discord, player groups, ask a few youtubers to support the campaign. Work together, you know? Like a community goal?
What happens then? I've seen vague references to some special rule for zero-supply stations, but haven't found the details.
As I'm working from home today with ED running in the background, I'm OK with sitting in a station and checking occasionally, and Rock is working for me.
Sounds very much intentional from fdev. The bridge won't build itself. The heroes that may come finish the job from the bubble will deserve to be the top 10% of this cg, if it succeeds.
Maybe.Sounds very much intentional from fdev. The bridge won't build itself. The heroes that may come finish the job from the bubble will deserve to be the top 10% of this cg, if it succeeds.
Off topic a little here, but this is my bugbear with a lot of CGs. Technically it's already successful. As soon as we hit tier 1 (which was always going to happen- supplies around Colonia are never that bad) were delivered we were already at the stage of how big our bonus is going to be....if it succeeds.
On topic though, you can't get too annoyed as players emptying all the CG commodities in a 100ly radius happens every time. It was always going to be like this (bunch of locusts!
), especially since in this case the inhabited area around Colonia is smaller than that. However, it's a CG, in Colonia, which promises further development for the area. Let's not put FDev off with a pile of complaints.Let's also not forget that the very earliest CGs in Colonia had much worse conditions than this.
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These CGs aren't successful (for the community) until T5 - as the megaships (and FSD) are tied to tiers. If the OP had their way then I could see fdev bumping up the goals as the CG would otherwise be nearly done.
Still trying to decide whether to ship out another FC - it actually seems pretty close between relying on the restock or shipping stuff out ... decisions decisions
Still trying to decide whether to ship out another FC - it actually seems pretty close between relying on the restock or shipping stuff out ... decisions decisions
Basically it's to do with how market data gets synced between clients and servers.
1) Once you see a market quote, it's yours. If two people dock at once and see 100t available, then they can both buy that 100t.
2) If there's 1000t available and two people buy 100t each, then eventually the market servers will sync up and there will be 800t available. No extra cargo is created.
3) Supply, unlike demand, can't go negative. So if there is only 100t available and two people buy it, an "extra" 100t of cargo is created. If ten people buy it, an extra 900t of cargo is created.
4) This allows a lot more cargo to go to the CG than should be possible - on paper, the initial stockpile and regeneration rate should make it impossible to finish the Colonia CG before Wednesday without a lot of transport from the bubble. In practice, it'll probably be done by the end of the weekend.
If you do this on the demand side, and 10 people sell 100t to a 100t demand, you end up with a demand of -900t on the servers after everything syncs up. That displays as zero on the client, but it'll have to get through than -900t on the server at the usual regeneration rate before it goes above zero on the client.
Supply can't do this, it won't go below zero and need to catch up, so you're guaranteed to get the ten minute regen showing up (at Rock, in the current BGS state, I think about 100-150t?) and an unlimited number of people can buy and copy it.
On the one hand, this is probably a bug. On the other hand, if they fix it, then the total supply regeneration across Colonia for the CG goods would be one T-9 trip per participant per day, and the issue from the original post would be even more substantial, which would be even less fun. So the fix can't just be to allow supply levels to go negative in the background.
...........
To go back to the issue in the original post a little, back in 2018 when the last Colonia trade CGs were, we used to haul about a million tonnes over the course of the entire week. We'd run into this sort of whole-nebula supply issue a little bit on the final day, perhaps, and we'd have to monitor a few BGS states to make sure we didn't lose key supplies before we'd emptied them, but it basically worked out.
Colonia has got a bit more popular since then, we've got readier access to heavy haulers, plus carriers, plus better FSDs, etc. So if we weren't supply-constrained we could probably haul two million tonnes in the week, easily. Actually doing it by hauling a million in three days ... both drains the supplies too rapidly to be fun for basic hauling, and doesn't really leave enough time, with pending periods, to do much interesting with the BGS state optimisation either.
Fortunately, there's this Colonia Bridge initiative which ...
... if completed successfully gives Frontier a good excuse to increase the populations and economy sizes of our systems and stations [1], or at least to hold further Colonia CGs to construct that local infrastructure.Galnet said:
[1] I'm very much in favour of developing Colonia by enhancing the existing systems rather than by adding new ones. Outside of special occasions, there's plenty of the current systems which only get a couple of visitors a day, so we don't need more to be fought over in BGS but not add anything otherwise - depth rather than breadth, please, Frontier!
Something bigger than just a like button for this please.
This would be preferable, to have gameplay. Up the goals and give us something to do.
Overcoming supply challenges isn't something gameplay?
I mean, i avoid most A-B trade CGs where supply isn't a problem, because it's
- remove frontal lobe
- supercruise go brrr
CGs with supply issues to overcome need planning, forethought.
Genuinely, i don't understand how removing the supply chain issue is adding gameplay. Just sounds like it's removing it.
I might actually try it....who knows when or if these FSDs become available at the tech brokers.
I think it is also fair to say that the supply chain issue isn't generating the gameplay it could, though.
1) The zero-supply effect means that the most efficient solution probably is to bypass it by having almost everyone sit at Rock and get cloned supplies every ten minutes, and then a few people (single-figures all that's needed) pick up the rest. This is also more efficient than mining can be, so throwing in Samarium as a fourth commodity won't really help.
2) As a result of that we're still rolling along at a couple of percent an hour, which means it'll be finished sometime Saturday. That means no time to really have BGS state changes come into play. Most of that really needed to be lined up in advance - Chrysus and Union will go into Expansion on Sunday and lose a lot of their production ... well, without a couple of weeks lead time on exactly what the CG is going to be, we couldn't prepare for that by lining up positive states in advance.
3) Similarly, no advance warning of the details means no time to do advance stockpiling of the commodities on FCs (you'd need a lot of FCs, of course, but that'd be an actual challenge). Again, with bubble-Colonia travel time it'll basically be done by the time you could move a FC over from a cold start.
4) Most of the logistics information needed not only isn't available in-game, most out-of-game trade tools don't support it either.
There's some great potential for something a lot more interesting than an A->B mass haul, and I'm very positive in general about Frontier using Colonia to experiment with CG types which couldn't work in the bubble, but this isn't quite there yet.
So ... what would an actual fun logistics CG look like?
1) Lasts at least four weeks (or possibly like station repairs, not explicitly time bound at all, you're just trying to get the benefits quicker) so that BGS state changes become a serious part of it, with a target set to match.
2) Cargo demand is a mix of mined goods [1] and low/mid-supply bulk goods to make mining a competitive way to supply, and maybe throw in something like Power Convertors which have to be hauled from the bubble, or Modular Terminals for yet another possible source. Having something produced by orbital refineries on the list would let people travel up the Bridge megaships collecting as they went.
3) Zero-supply issue fixed, no cloning your way out of this. Mining / inter-bubble / mission reward as sources need this to be competitive.
4) Bulk goods are picked to be ones with interesting state effects on supply (e.g. Robotics you can get 6x production by optimising states ... or <0.1x if you mess up badly)
5) Make Galnet hint that Boom+Civil Liberty is desirable and how to get it. If a stronger hint is needed, have a low-target bounty hunting CG pop up in a couple of key supply systems for a few days, here and there throughout the four weeks. (No point in having bounty hunting in the demand system!)
6) Give out any non-credit rewards like modules to top 100% so that people who are doing BGS work or similar don't miss out.
[1] Doesn't have to be mining-exclusive. Throw in something like Indite or Silver and the Odyssey surface bases become interesting - there's a huge amount of extraction bases in the region but not much stock at each, so small-ship hops make sense once the big bases are emptied on the first day.
well, some of us guessed it would be the same* I like your ideas, but we could have done the BGS work - we had a week. I was going to suggest it, but was worried about alerting troublemakers (and fear a galnet would do the same). I think the OP is highlighting the issue with most of these good ideas: a lot of people really don't want complex gameplay - they just want to take stuff from A -> B and get paid
* Unlike that time I ended up with 15kT of Helix ... that didn't go well ...
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That's the problem - there was no particular reason for it to use identical cargo the second time, and it'd be more usual for them to vary it a bit.
Agreed that advance notice could attract attempts to sabotage, but I think that's also fine - nothing wrong with a bit of BGS warfare on the economic rather than political layer once in a while.
I don't think players are necessarily opposed to more complex gameplay - but it needs to have enough in-game information that you can tell it's going on and be able to support it without having to find a particular community. Basically the Powerplay problem:
- you can do it in a disorganised fashion and not get anywhere useful
- you can read a strategy guide produced by a few people and do that