Ive made several ramblings a few years back about how I thought base building should work. Pretty much the only thing I got right was the concept of beacon deployment to claim territory. But with the stoppage its clear that FDev did NOT want expansion to be this fast and will most likely be reworking it.
To give new players the chance to get in, the first beacon should be cheap, maybe 100,000. Then each one gets rapidly more expensive with each colony you already have. 1 Mil, 10 Mil,100 mil, then 1 Billion every time after. With this, even the largest squadrons will have to plan their expansion more carefully. I mean--with the current system people were clamoring to colonize lone-star systems with no actual realistic colonisation prospects just because they were close to the bubble (Sure people would have done that anyway but had this been in place, it would have been much more damaging for squadrons to waste early, beacons like that.)
To give new players the chance to get in, the first beacon should be cheap, maybe 100,000. Then each one gets rapidly more expensive with each colony you already have. 1 Mil, 10 Mil,100 mil, then 1 Billion every time after. With this, even the largest squadrons will have to plan their expansion more carefully. I mean--with the current system people were clamoring to colonize lone-star systems with no actual realistic colonisation prospects just because they were close to the bubble (Sure people would have done that anyway but had this been in place, it would have been much more damaging for squadrons to waste early, beacons like that.)