I partly agree and partly disagree with this suggestion.
Disagree: I don't think there's any point in increasing the size of Colonia's general economy to the point where hundreds of players could just sit in T-9s doing A-B runs all week without ever running the nebula out of stock, regardless of the commodity set picked, as is essentially the case in the bubble. There is, after all, already the bubble for people who like that sort of CG, and that sort of CG comes up most weeks. It'd also mean that the commodity quantities available on Colonia markets were ridiculously over-specified for normal operation. At least at the moment a few of the more heavily-traded ones do move away from the market cap a little.
The nebula is a small region, managing its economy rather than just brute-forcing the whole thing should absolutely be part of the job in a CG because that's something that the vast scale of the bubble means can only be done in Colonia CGs, and it would be silly to lose that. Colonia Bridge Phase 3 was an excellent week with fun collaborations between haulers, BGS teams, logistics planners, buckyballers, and more. Room for Pythons and Kraits to shine in picking up commodities from outposts is also important and makes the CG more interesting.
Similarly Phase 4A last week, while running out of cargo a bit towards the end, had a wide variety of available stations due to its use of Agricultural exports which the Odyssey settlements boost the availability of (Extraction exports would work the same way) - but do so in such a way that you can't just pick one and constantly use it, you have to hop around and try to find one no-one else has been to recently.
Agree: this week's particular CG has an extremely poor set of cargo choices for the Colonia region. Initial stockpiles were perhaps 100,000t (after the stations in Colonia itself were removed because it was the CG host) and regeneration is around 60,000t per day. So that's just over 500,000t of cargo possible to collect - plus a bit more for the zero-supply copying exploit - which not only makes it difficult to meet the CG goals in general, it makes it fairly boring too.
This can be seen on the comparative totals - phase 4A last week got 2 million tonnes, whereas this one, with largely the same number of people involved, is going to struggle to get much above 500,000t.
Colonia CGs need to pick commodities where the regional availability pre-CG is high for at least one cargo (and it's fine if it's a low-paying one). For comparisons:
- Grain there's 1.6MT across the region on markets
- Aluminium or Uraninite 1.2MT
- Polymers or Scrap or Food Cartridges 900kT
These are all commodities which could support a modern Colonia trade CG given the number and equipment of haulers in the region.
Conversely, commodities like Skimmer Components, Advanced Medicines, Structural Regulators, Micro Controllers - there's under 20,000t on the markets in the region in normal times. In a CG that will get snapped up instantly. So a CG consisting entirely of commodities from that end of the scale, like this phase 4B does, is going to run out very quickly.
Simply copying the cargo lists from the Alcor CG onto the Colonia CG is going to work very variably, and in this case it really hasn't. It's possible to have really great CGs that play to the strengths and differences of the Colonia region and aren't just a plain copy of a bubble trade CG - but this week isn't one. Please take more care over the commodity selection in future: I'm happy to go into more detail about how the Colonia economy responds to this sort of supply-draining event if you like.
