So, that regeneration estimate seemed to be good, but what led you to believe we could possibly triple that? Has that happened before in other low-supply CGs?
Yes - Colonia Bridge Phase 3 the amount retrievable through normal market operation would have been about 1 million tonnes, the target was 3 million tonnes, the actual amount handed in was 5.7 million tonnes.
There's no upper limit on how much the zero-supply glitch can generate. If a station has a 10-minute regeneration of 10t, and 1000 people show up to take it, then that's 10,000t towards the CG, and they can all come back ten minutes later and do the same again - because supply (unlike demand) can't go negative, once it hits zero you're no longer competing with other players for that tonnage.
But it does require massive participation, which see next comment.
Loss partly due to initial overconfidence from the serious players who hang out here?
Probably not - I wasn't at all confident about getting beyond 500k! I think it's the just the psychology of it. In Phase 3, the 10-minute regeneration was a couple of hundred tonnes a cycle at the best locations, so it didn't take long at all to fill a medium ship, and even a large pad ship could be loaded up in 30 minutes with optimal play.
Combine that with 1400 players wanting to do their bit to get superpowered FSDs and that's a huge amount of extra tonnage.
This one combined 10-minute regeneration levels of maybe a few tens of tonnes, with the best supplies being on medium pads only, with a fairly minor global and personal reward. ~400 people is comparable participation with phase 4A; the amount delivered is also comparable given the relative stock/regeneration levels.
Do Frontier look deeply at market availability, so this was deliberately intended as a likely-to-fail, or do they not calculate that hard?
I don't think it was deliberately intended, I think it's just that these are the first Colonia trade CGs in several years and they need to get their calibration in.
In the bubble they can pick almost any combination of three commodities, and the supply cap will not be the limiting factor. The bubble has over three thousand times the supplies of Colonia - but only ~20 times the CG haulers. So it'll run out the nearby stations, but in the bubble there's always more.
So phases 1-3 used the same commodities (Ceramic Composites as the bulk option).
- phases 1 and 2 finished extremely early, as while their targets weren't unreasonable for Colonia 2017, the number of players in the region, their access to bulk haulers, and the region's economy have grown considerably
- phase 3 they set a more reasonable modern-day target and we beat it through a combination of approaches, including heavy use of the zero-supply rule to massively boost effective regeneration
Phase 4A then switched commodities around, but had Coffee as a decent bulk option and the other two were okay as well. The tier targets were set to trivial, but we hauled about 2 million tonnes anyway.
Phase 4B they seem to have taken the 4A totals as a reasonable calibration of the tier targets - 1M and 1.75M would have been fine in 4A - but not realised that unlike the bubble if you pick three low-supply commodities it's not just based on the number of haulers.
We'll see what happens in phase 4C - regardless of the target setting, it is nice that Colonia trade CGs aren't all like each other.