Good.Incidentally, I'm going to love breaking things like Robigo
The one thing that I dislike about his game are the Must Do gameloops whether introduced by design or accident.
Colonisation Answers
- Thread starter Ian Doncaster
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The one thing that I dislike about his game are the Must Do gameloops whether introduced by design or accident.
Can you break it somehow? Wouldn't getting more systems around there just make it better since there's more stations/sources for missions, maybe with better/more optimal ranges.Incidentally, I'm going to love breaking things like Robigo
feeling like there will certainly need to be something in place like a priority system to compliment colonisation generally, imagining the rage produced by the example of someone bridging out to the edge of the galaxy only to have the final system yoinked by another commander...
It sounds like they aren't considering that a problem since they have been very direct on how no other player should be blocking another from colonizing a system.
My understanding is that getting more populated systems within whatever distance would break it, as the reason it is so profitable is that there are only a small number of systems in mission-giving range, so you can stack a large number of missions to the same spots at once and fill up with passengers on a simple run. Putting more populated systems nearby will 'pollute' the mission board, making it less profitable per hour.
(Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons why people asking for very long colonization distances will almost certainly never get it. It would be far too easy to set up a basic two-system bubble to run deliveries or passengers back and forth.)
Well not compulsory but the "short cut or easy" way to gain credits - rank up etc.
All of these "one cool trick" systems are redundant cases where the BGS doesn't know what else to do.
In the Robigo case, the thing that makes it work is that it doesn't know how to generate any other passenger missions except for ones to the Sothis tourist beacon. It will do some long distance missions but iirc there's no bulk passenger missions, because nothing it's sufficiently in range, and a quirk means it'll only do the Sothis tourist beacon when it does the mid- range multi- point mission types
The whole appeal of things like Robigo is that these edge cases make it very easy to stack missions.... but this only works due to the lack of diversity.
By populating more systems around it, you provide more diversity for the BGS to generate more variety in missions, which decreases stackability, destroying the draw that system has.
The same applies to Massacre stacking systems... colonise another system within 10Ly with an anarchy faction, and you'll break the stacking glitch. Same will also apply for any of these types of stacking situations.
Many have falsely believed these were simply "good systems" and not essentially glitches, without realising why they work.
Yep, this one exactly.
It's a counter-intuitive part of the BGS;
- The best place to get lucrative cargo runs are exctraction economies[1] with just a single consumer system (industrial, high tech, refinery), regardless of how many suppliers are nearby, because deliveries don't check how big the demand is or how over-saturated the market might be.
- The best place to stack massacres (and therefore earn best profits) isn't somewhere rife with pirates across multiple systems... it's where there's a single anarchy in range, regardless of the security situation.
I've also had luck doing things which I haven't completely discerned the conditions for, such as:
- Stacking hijack/salvage missions (to the one system)
- Stacking Installation Scan missions (to the one location)
- Stacking skimmer kill missions (though this is less prevalent now they're a rarer mission type)
[1] Because stupidly, cargo deliveries reward based primarily on cargo value, and Extraction offer the widest range of highest value cargo... this is rather than rewarding primarily on volume (which is the rate-limiting factor, not value) coupled with a security escrow which is pretty much how it normally works. There's further nuance, but I'm not going to go into it.
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It's not a must do game loop though. I never did it, and i still haven't, just like HGEs... it's just people go to internet guides instead of just learning to play the game.
I haven't either, HGE's and other increased mats - I have always scanned as I leave stations, scooped the occasional USS and I mine so most of my mats were at almost max when that dropped, and as for the egg - I noticed that Plat and Painite prices had gone up so I took advantage of that
Are there actual A-B personal transport missions where the destination is a station which would clutter up the mission board if there were more eligible stations nearby? I thought the personal transport stuff was just all tourist stuff anyway, but I haven't looked at it under normal conditions in a while.
A bit like station repairs before carriers, an unarmed lightly shielded T9 and good reflexes to beat any interdictions
OK, so this is getting OT, and I did misstate a couple things in hindsight, so here we go:
There's two broad categories of missions:
Group transport is literally just the bulk transport, no-VIP missions. We don't care about them for this.
Personal transport is the one we care about here. Within that, there's three sorts of mission (excluding wanted/non-wanted wrinkles)
The quirk of Robigo is, because it's isolated, it will generate:
If you throw a colony or two within 10 or 20 LY of Robigo; you will
A single colony within 10Ly, will just create another homogenous endzone for the VIP transport missions, so won't really address much. Two colonies though, that'll create divergent split options and diversity. This basically prevents the current situation, where I've just got to Robigo, and I have 19 identical missions, and that's it.
On my "theories"... I suspect there's something in the back end where, if the BGS can't generate a certain amount of diversity in it's missions within a certain amount of attempts, it'll fail out and cease to produce further missions, even if it could theoretically do so... owing to a legacy of optimisations related to timeouts in the boards.
It might even fix the problem of all the VIP transport missions going only to Sothis even though there's other tourist beacons... but it's virtually impossible to test this given the static nature of factors here.... there's other situations where you can see this occur for equally inexplicable reasons.
To summarise: The way Robigo works is somewhat weird... if you look at the range of options that missions can generate with and compare to the environment Robigo exists in, it should generate more missions than just "Tourism mission to Sothis". But it doesn't. This behaviour can be observed elsewhere, but the effect is usually to create only mining missions, or only donation missions, or that missions go to specific places only, rather than from a variety of options... the only common theme is isolation or minimisation of most BGS variables.
- Group Transport
- Personal transport
Group transport is literally just the bulk transport, no-VIP missions. We don't care about them for this.
Personal transport is the one we care about here. Within that, there's three sorts of mission (excluding wanted/non-wanted wrinkles)
- Long-range tourism (anywhere from 1000-25,000LY or more)
- Short-range, multi-hop tourism (usually out to at-most 300Ly, and usually to 1-3 destinations)
- VIP transport missions (just like group transport, except needs a dedicated cabin per group; no mixing)
The quirk of Robigo is, because it's isolated, it will generate:
- No long range tourism; I have theories about this
- Short-range tourism; BUT despite there being other viable options, they all go to Sirius Atomospherics in Sothis; and
- No VIP transport missions; due to the nearest populated system being >20Ly away (Ceos, at ~52Ly)
If you throw a colony or two within 10 or 20 LY of Robigo; you will
- Create VIP transport missions to that system.
- Likely not affect short-range tourism, but;
- Likely create long-range tourism missions; again, theories.
A single colony within 10Ly, will just create another homogenous endzone for the VIP transport missions, so won't really address much. Two colonies though, that'll create divergent split options and diversity. This basically prevents the current situation, where I've just got to Robigo, and I have 19 identical missions, and that's it.
On my "theories"... I suspect there's something in the back end where, if the BGS can't generate a certain amount of diversity in it's missions within a certain amount of attempts, it'll fail out and cease to produce further missions, even if it could theoretically do so... owing to a legacy of optimisations related to timeouts in the boards.
It might even fix the problem of all the VIP transport missions going only to Sothis even though there's other tourist beacons... but it's virtually impossible to test this given the static nature of factors here.... there's other situations where you can see this occur for equally inexplicable reasons.
To summarise: The way Robigo works is somewhat weird... if you look at the range of options that missions can generate with and compare to the environment Robigo exists in, it should generate more missions than just "Tourism mission to Sothis". But it doesn't. This behaviour can be observed elsewhere, but the effect is usually to create only mining missions, or only donation missions, or that missions go to specific places only, rather than from a variety of options... the only common theme is isolation or minimisation of most BGS variables.
The funny part is: We can already see the shape of future "trolling" accusations. The current BGS has created groups of people who expect the ability to control all variables in the game... so when someone creates a colony that ruins the edge cases groups might try to generate... or alternately people just "ruin" their own colonies by thinking it's a good idea to expand out, with no way to "un-colonise" or destroy another players colonies[2]. This leads to complaints and frustrations and overall degradation of the colonisation feature.
Though genuinely, this won't be trolling any more than people trading and inadvertently causing an "unwanted expansion". The universe is dynamic, things change.
Unless, of course, FD deals with these edge cases like they should have a long, long time ago when the first Robigo runs were a thing.
[2] Of course, this should not be a thing at all, because it doesn't make sense.
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Another question: Once you establish a system, and possibly move to claim and establish another one, can you go back to the first system and add stuff, more bases etc later? Or does claiming a second system finalize the build of the first one and nothing more can be added?
Can a system architect keep adding stuff (as long as the system can support them) indefinitely?
Can a system architect keep adding stuff (as long as the system can support them) indefinitely?
As far as we are aware you are and always will be the system architect for all system you colonise, and while it hasn't actually been stated directly, I see no reason you can't add stuff to any system you are architect of at any time, all you need is the time available, or some help from others, to shift enough goods to build them. So that hasn't been stated directly, but maybe because they didn't think it needed to be.
The 10LY or so limit will make this worse as players will even unintentionally step on each others feet. There's quite a significant amount of frustration potential with this new feature already and we don't even know all of the details yet.
"making it worse" is the wrong sentiment, IMO. The BGS would be better off without these edge cases, whether because they disappear due to colonisation, or because FD give the BGS more rigor in how these things work. Like I alluded to, there'll be nothing unintentional about me treading on people's toes here.
Bluntly, they've set a false narrative for what the "typical experience" should be, and where the prize activities are. Bounty hunting & massacre stacks is a great example of why these edge cases are bad for the game, essentially disincentivising seeking out the more dynamic scenarios that surface challenging opponents which should really pay out substantially more.
The BGS edge cases set unrealistic expectations for how the game operates.
Yeah AFAICT, you don't "lock in" the system at any point, you can just come back and do it some more whenever you feel like.
EDIT: It's basically going to be user-generatable mini cargo CGs
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