Colonisation should be more expensive

[Doctor Dread]

So the point of this thread is....?

pointless.

...shooting the breeze while we wait for them to open the Colonization again.

 

[cmdr chequers]

In practical terms, Colonisation is end-game content. We've just all been at the "end game" stage for so many years that we start to have hundreds of sub-gradations of "end-game" where people with Fleet Carriers are claiming to be "casual" players because they only play a couple of hours a day.

Sure, you can claim a system when what you've got is a C-rated Asp Explorer and 25 million in spare credits. The most likely result if you do is that you will fail to maintain the claim. By the time you have a T-9 at all (cost probably around 150 million) you're extremely rapidly approaching the stage where the difference between "25 million" and "250 million" credits is not all that important, because if you get averagely lucky with cargo mission stacks you can probably use that T-9 to get 250 million credits in a couple of hours at most.

It'd be a reasonable guess that there are somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 players making their own system claims, based on the number of incomplete claims seen at any time. That's going to be under 10% of all semi-active players.


CGs have pretty much always constructed stations in a week or so. BGS wars last at most a week. The process of changing the Power-level influence over a system takes a few weeks. Systems completely destroyed by the Thargoids could be rebuilt and fully repopulated in their billions in a fortnight. All of this "should" take years or decades.

The operational timescale of the bubble has always been far faster than "realistic", just so that things visibly change at all while players are watching.

If you want to handwave it, headcanon that the FSD isn't actually instant - it still takes the same week or so per jump as the previous FFE-era drives - and ED just doesn't bother simulating the "are you actually in this system in the same decade as this other player?" effects that generates because that'd be massive complication for no real gain. Lots of things in the lore make more sense at that point; Frontier have never shown any inclination to address "what would the implications of the travel time between any two points in the bubble being an hour be?" because, when it comes down to it, the Elite setting is not depicting one with a well-thought out social and technological background, but one where space pirates and personal ownership of starships and so on are possible, and that's only possible if you carefully avoid asking questions.


In game mechanical terms, if they'd wanted colonisation to be the preserve of groups capable of coordinating mega-tonne deliveries, then they'd probably just have stuck with "CGs are the way new systems get colonised" like the last decade. They clearly want it to be more accessible than that.

A new player can buy a T9 for £12.99 from the frontier store straight after installing the game.

 

[Exil]

Oh great, here we are again trying to suck the fun out of a feature because some people consider it to be too easy or some other reason that makes sense only to them.

What is bothering you so much about the expansion that you want to have half a bilion cost? You do realize that this won't affect anyone other than newer players right? Because everyone else already knows how to make 1B in a single day, if anything your proposal will only hurt the smaller, casual players who will just end up leaving the game because it was made too grindy for them AGAIN.

If your worry is that we will double or triple the bubble in half a year or less then that worry will be for naught because at least half of the playerbase will just stop expanding more than they have due to boredom, what you're seeing right now is a shinny new feature that everyone wants to play with and when that's done and dusted they'll go back to their original playstyles. I've even seen it happen already with those that enjoy combat more than trading, or exploration.

If you're worried about the daisy chains and the fact that there will be "dead" systems, that's what FD intended and expected. We all knew this was by design and their decision.

 

[Knuttin Atoll]

Some modules are gated. Some ships are gated. Some systems are permit locked.

What activities are gated?
(Often you need the correct ship or modules to be effective, but ANY cmdr can enter these activities. No restriction)

• Entering a HAZREZ site?
• Fighting Thargoids?
• Visiting a Spire site?
• Flying around a busy CG in Open?
• Traveling to Beagle Point?
• Engaging in PowerPlay
• Traveling to a Planetary settlement, regardless of danger. (obviously need Odyssey for some).
• Community Goals

There might be some activities that have gated entry, but I can't quickly think of any.There must be some. But generally not.

Edit:
It is an obvious design choice that the game allows players to make bad choices.
So yes, someone that does not have the means can make a system claim and try to build a huge Artemis space station. And fail.

Ah. You were talking about content in your original post, in the above you mention activities.

Content is certainly gated. Ships, FC, modules, engineering, certain system access (most notably Sol), all cosmetics as well as now naming stations.

Activities are almost all accessible (to varying degrees of success that is, depending on skill level, credits and tools available) that's right - it's part of the appeal for me.

It wasn't clear what you were referring to in the post I replied to.

 

[Knuttin Atoll]

A new player can buy a T9 for £12.99 from the frontier store straight after installing the game.

Ha, will you look at that... the Colonisation update being a feature complete hauling grind fest makes complete sense now. Bit on the nose perhaps...

 

[KKomrade Sylas]

Elite players have always fascinated me because they seem to think having fun is bad. The colonization entry point in terms of money is okay. All the work comes in developing the system anyway something that will probably take people weeks if not months.

You're worried about the bubble growing too much? Oh okay. You know, I figured in a game with 400 billion star systems, the last thing we'll ever run out of, is space. Hundreds of people exploring literally hundreds of systems each every day would take us like 30 thousand real life years to discover all the systems in the galaxy.

No bruh, we're not gonna run out of space. "Space is gonna get littered" Okay I'll let you know when I find someone that actually cares about that. Sit tight brother

 

[CMDR Lefty Jackson]

You just wait, one day somebody is gonna find some candy wrappers and empty beer cans on some far-flung tiny moon nobody has heard of.

Don't underestimate the ability of humans to trash a place!

 

[Knuttin Atoll]

A remote community on the other side of the galaxy would actually motivate me to go visit. Shame that FDev don't share that vision and stuck with BGS compliant expansion limitations.

 

[vagabond07]

This may be a controversial or unpopular opinion, but I really think the barrier to entry for Colonisation has been set far too low. 25 really is pocket change to claim a system. And we make a profit hauling the commodities required. Personally I think taking on a full system should be a substantial commitment and the claim price should be more like 500 mill.

Apologies to the newer commanders that this would effect, but I'm not sure it makes sense for commanders just out of flight school to be a able to take on managing a system and building stations. It should be a goal you should want to work towards as you build your rep and wealth in the galaxy.

The current expansion has been crazy. Within a week commanders colonised 8000 systems and built 15,000 stations. A check on Elite wiki tells us that before now the full bubble was 20,000 systems and 66,000 stations. That means that within about a month we will have doubled it's size. The current bubble took like 1000 years to build! The current pace is both game breaking and lore breaking and just doesn't make sense.

Having system claims actually cost a substantial amount of credits will also give us something to spend our fortunes on. Most commanders are billionaires with nothing but an FC to really use them for after you reach a certain point in the game.

I think currently it's just too easy to claim systems and build stations. It really should be an expensive endeavour that requires thought on where to lay the claims. Not just have commanders claim everything in sight because they can.

I disagree. The threshold for entry is exactly where it should be and building an outpost isn’t easy (very doable but not easy) on your own.

Also the purchase of an effective hauling ship (cutter or type 9) is a bar to entry all its own.

Plenty of in game systems have only an outpost or two. No reason for beacon price increase.

The main problem (if it is a problem) is that we have so many commanders with huge ships and are very experienced in moving masses of material.

 

[Staarlord]

There's also an entire galaxy, so I'm not worried about rate of expansion. However encouraging people to exercise those tiered constructions would bring more quality out of the colonized system. As opposed to promoting people just to claim systems just to get to the system they want.

I think that the profits that we make on colonizing the system are just for the purpose of the beta, mostly so we can't say that we were screwed out of credits due to a bug or the like. At least that is what I assumed. I also don't make a profit because of my crewman LOL

 

[Staarlord]

IMO it shouldn't be referred to as a claim cost.

Instead it should be called the greasy bribe for the contract to supply the materials for the entire system being developed. Because that's all the cmdr really gets.

It reminds me of when I was a kid and my father would say "Hey little buddy! Wanna be in charge of making dinner tonight? You can chop up all the onions and carrots, then peal the potatoes." At dinner time to make me feel good my father would say "Little buddy made dinner tonight!".

Yeah this is true. At the end of the day it belongs to the minor faction you expanded. All you did was point and they built a site there. You were the architect that was contracted to determine the structure. I'll admit, I thought there was going to be a little bit more of a builder mechanic. I.e. Placing of a hab and deciding what modules to attach to it etc. Something a bit more sandbox. I know I'm not the only one because Ricardo over on his channel also supposed that the orbital construction site structure was originally a structure that one might add modules to.

I also imagined being able to align my system with my superpower so I can role play "Empire guy" and call myself "Duke of [X] system." But alas! We could not name our systems either LOL ...so it would just be "Duke of Col 285 sector xx-x "

 

[Starshot_Jigawatts]

150 is less than 2% of 8,000. I don't think the cheaters skewed the figures much.

I just listed the most egregious example. Come on you know how exploits work, it's never just ONE person doing it.

 

[Crumly]

I think it's great as is. Hope they add more neat stuff to it over time!

 

[Fizzatron]

It can depend on the location of the supply port and the construction ship. My particular locations work out well as I'm literally parked above the surface depot and can do a round trip from the carrier and back in less than 5 minutes, and same for dropping off too. But I can totally understand why that might not sound appealing and the one pick up and drop off does sound good at this stage for me too, so even though I think it's working out as I initially found a pretty good spot, I will do some timing to be sure, if there's a system within one jump distance that can fulfill my material requirements. Though my T9 isn't equipped to deal with pirates, but it would make it worth dismantling my AX Cutter and use that instead if it works out.

Replying to my own comment. I did do some tests and unless you happen to have a handy station one jump away and a short supercruise then loading/unloading a carrier is still more optimal time-wise, if not fun-wise:

Finally finished at the weekend. To be honest, it wasn't bad, but then I quite like hauling. The back and forth definitely gave me a good amount of practice with using the SCO drive for close planetary maneuvers. The SCO drive made a huge difference in time savings, especially seeing as I was building a station in a ring system around a gas giant which are notorious for choking supercruise speeds.

What was interesting (to me anyway lol) is that my Fleet Carrier was parked in the space between the ring and the planet and the colonization ship was in the ring system, both in non geocentric orbits in relation to each other, which made for variable distance trips as their orbits intersected as the Fleet Carrier caught up and overtook the colonization ship. Using the SCO drive to speed up the trip really started to feel like I was using gravity assisted maneuvers as I could time the SCO boost to yeet myself around the gas giant and use the gravity well to brake in an arc that if timed right would slingshot me around the planet and straight to my destination in a smooth transition that felt like no time at all. But it required good timing or else you end up overshooting quite severely. I enjoy piloting the ships so I found it a nice extra skill aspect.

However, for those who don't like hauling or are that interested in journey compared to the destination the for sure, it's going to feel like a grind. But horses for courses as they say...

 

[SteveWW57]

Replying to my own comment. I did do some tests and unless you happen to have a handy station one jump away and a short supercruise then loading/unloading a carrier is still more optimal time-wise, if not fun-wise:

Finally finished at the weekend. To be honest, it wasn't bad, but then I quite like hauling. The back and forth definitely gave me a good amount of practice with using the SCO drive for close planetary maneuvers. The SCO drive made a huge difference in time savings, especially seeing as I was building a station in a ring system around a gas giant which are notorious for choking supercruise speeds.

What was interesting (to me anyway lol) is that my Fleet Carrier was parked in the space between the ring and the planet and the colonization ship was in the ring system, both in non geocentric orbits in relation to each other, which made for variable distance trips as their orbits intersected as the Fleet Carrier caught up and overtook the colonization ship. Using the SCO drive to speed up the trip really started to feel like I was using gravity assisted maneuvers as I could time the SCO boost to yeet myself around the gas giant and use the gravity well to brake in an arc that if timed right would slingshot me around the planet and straight to my destination in a smooth transition that felt like no time at all. But it required good timing or else you end up overshooting quite severely. I enjoy piloting the ships so I found it a nice extra skill aspect.

However, for those who don't like hauling or are that interested in journey compared to the destination the for sure, it's going to feel like a grind. But horses for courses as they say...

I got used to loading/unloading carriers in the tritium hauling CGs. I had not claimed a system when the pause hit, so looked around and preloaded carriers. Having built an outpost plus an installation using mainly carrier located mats, I gave a try for the third using "locally" available mats. As the system is on the edge of the bubble with colonisation going on all around, you have to make several jumps and then the mats are at a ground port. Grrrr.

So, short journeys in Mm at both ends makes double handling mats a much more relaxing way to go for me.

 

[mtfatboy3006]

Replying to my own comment. I did do some tests and unless you happen to have a handy station one jump away and a short supercruise then loading/unloading a carrier is still more optimal time-wise, if not fun-wise:

EDITED TO BE SOMEWHAT LESS DENSE

This is actually subject to more variables. It depends on the speed and jump range of your ship, docking speeds, your skill with landing on a planet (doesn't take a lot of skill but also isn't dummy proof), the distance of your supply points from the arrival points, etc. I had a 40LY (empty) Cutter and an arrival point 78kls from the station, and started with the carrier, but then tried sourcing locally. Using a surface port one jump away (two jumps back ) I moved an average of about 1000 tons per hour more than using my carrier and a T9*. If I jumped twice to source goods from an orbital station, I moved freight at the same rate as the carrier/T9 combo (ignoring jump delays).

*My cargo T9 hauls about 80T more than my merchant Cutter, so I prefer it for moving mass cargo from carrier to station.

 

[Fizzatron]

EDITED TO BE SOMEWHAT LESS DENSE

This is actually subject to more variables. It depends on the speed and jump range of your ship, docking speeds, your skill with landing on a planet (doesn't take a lot of skill but also isn't dummy proof), the distance of your supply points from the arrival points, etc. I had a 40LY (empty) Cutter and an arrival point 78kls from the station, and started with the carrier, but then tried sourcing locally. Using a surface port one jump away (two jumps back ) I moved an average of about 1000 tons per hour more than using my carrier and a T9*. If I jumped twice to source goods from an orbital station, I moved freight at the same rate as the carrier/T9 combo (ignoring jump delays).

*My cargo T9 hauls about 80T more than my merchant Cutter, so I prefer it for moving mass cargo from carrier to station.

Indeed, some of the factors that made it not so good for me was local availability within one jump and also that my destination was in a gas giant ring which slowed the supercriuse down and it's that part that isn't so conducive to SCO improvement. Being able to zip between the carrier and colonization ship so quickly using SCO made a big difference too. I will say that I did do that last three full T9 runs just jumping around trying to find the odd bits that remained, it was definitely not optimal but it was nice change of pace and a bit more pleasant overall. Though for trying to get almost 60,000 tonnes of commodities delivered solo, efficiency is the overriding factor.

 

[Easy]

100% Disagree with OP. It is never the case that a city is built by a single person, which is what Colonization is designed to require. If there were other mechanics that allowed for construction development other than hauling, I might think the OPs argument might have merit, but as things stands, no - the materials requirements are almost abusive to a single player.

 

[Fizzatron]

100% Disagree with OP. It is never the case that a city is built by a single person, which is what Colonization is designed to require. If there were other mechanics that allowed for construction development other than hauling, I might think the OPs argument might have merit, but as things stands, no - the materials requirements are almost abusive to a single player.

Not all single players are built the same though I would agree that trying to build an Orbis solo is masochistic level hauling gameplay.