Colonization Bloat
- Thread starter CMBDI
- Start date
Ok. new question. Who pays for the expansion. Does an architect become responsible to pay for all the resources being delivered to their colonisation ship? I've heard there's a profit for delivering resources to help build it by selling resources. But I'm seeing the cost to build a port is astronomical for example, 74 million in steel, 100 million for CMM composites, and 38 millon for aluminum. I'm guessing 1 port is upwards of 500 million to build. And delivery times must make building the ports a community event.
You basically sell the mats to the construction site at a markup. So, you make your money back with small profit. You are responsible for all deliveries.
The cmdr buys the commodities, but when they are delivered to the construction site they get sold. I'm not picky about the costs of the stuff I buy, and my overall bank account slowly increases. Its not a big money maker, but I'm not losing. I have built 8 facilities.
Unless they changed it when I wasn't looking. Nobody can claim any systems right now, because they paused new colonization claims. I hadn't planned on starting one until at least a couple of weeks had gone by anyway.
Right now, my Cmdr is out exo-biologizing about 6Kly from Sol so I can work on my Exo-Bio rank. And maybe afford a fleet carrier. Because all the cool kids have a fleet carrier, or so I hear.
The architect only directly pays the 25 million system claim cost - and that's paid once per system, not once per construction.
The colonisation ship buys commodities at market average price, so if you're buying them from NPC markets you (or whoever else does the delivery) will generally make a small profit on that or at least cover costs, and you therefore only need enough extra cash to buy the first load of cargo. This purchase is funded from the usual limitless NPC bank, not by the architect.
It depends how big a port you want to build. An Outpost is just over 20000t of cargo, which is about 5-10 hours of hauling in a cargo-fit T-9 or Cutter depending on how far you have to go for supplies. That's well within range of a lot of individuals - 2 or 3 hours of hauling a week will complete it within the four week initial construction deadline.
An Orbis is over ten times that, so still technically doable by an individual within the four week deadline for the first construction but most players either won't have the spare time to do that or won't have the desire to do so. The bigger ones are certainly intended as group projects.
Once you've completed the first port, there's no longer any deadline for completing subsequent constructions, so you can take three years gradually building up your own Orbis if you want. I started my system with an Outpost and probably will never build anything Orbis-sized in it.
If it gets clicks, and that lovely advertising revenue, the more sensational the better, surely?
"get thrown in jail for saying that, these days...", etc etc
There's two projects bridging towards the Guardian systems though neither have progressed very far.
I've started a system and I am providing supplies for an industrial outpost. After 4 hours of hauling with a maxed out Cutter with 768 cargo space, no shields and every hungry NPC after my juicy haul, I'm at 25% complete. I can't imagine I'll ever want to do enough hauling to build a port.
Maybe so. But for some more realistic goals, I very roughly estimate that a concerted group effort could colonize Beagle Point (starting from the Bubble) in less than a year, perhaps even less than 300 days.
Cool. So all the people saying we need to lift the colonisation range[1] are wrong i guess!
Considering we've got FCs and how quickly we can get about the galaxy now... this doesn't seem like a bad thing? It's funny because i also say this here when in other threads, i get lambasted by people saying colonisation is too slow.
Edit: the one thing I'll maintain however, is right now there's no value proposition for spending time building up your systems that competes with the value proposition of expanding out... i think that needs to change, even if it's as punitive and lightweight as "you can't make another claim until you've used 10% of your available slots, rounded up. That way people bridging are encouraged to use small "nothing systems" where the initial port is enough to get them to 10%, leaving systems with more slots for those who want to develop systems.
[1] (I don't think we need to, fwiw).
Last edited:
It is only around 15,000 hops, so a big enough group, well organised, could probably complete that in less than a week... (apart from Beagle being a protected system, allegedly)
Although the logistics of hauling massive amounts of construction commodities over that distance might be challenging, but nothing a few thousand players couldn't achieve.
Really, in terms of "reachable with 15LY hops" I doubt there is no region that might be reached, with sufficient determination and player resources, but don't think there are single groups large enough to make this a reality.
I highly doubt it could be done that fast.
Anyway, there's another issue getting to Beagle Point that just occurred to me: Near that system there are very big gaps. I think the largest one is over 40 Ly (and there's nothing smaller than that if you want to go there). Thus colonization can get quite close (perhaps a few 100's of Ly from it), but not to Beagle Point itself.
We'll see the first failures in 10 days. Hopefully the players clicking Orbis will drop off sharply but I'm stocking popcorn for the 26th...
There's an interesting thing here, which is of course somewhat obvious now I see it: if you look at the big Canonn/Mikunn chains as examples, obviously the core of those is chaining outposts together as quickly as possible. But they're now quickly developing a fuzzy cloud of new claims around that chain, because extending out perpendicular to the bubble is the most efficient way to bring new systems into range, some of which are probably quite nice. So give it a few more months and it might be entirely impossible to tell where the original "chain" was, and that a few systems in the cloud only have a single outpost is no different to someone only putting a single outpost in a system within the original bubble.
The actual speeds we've seen for the fastest groups which exist look closer to 150-200 LY a week.
The practical limit from various bits of the interface for a group with access to sufficient hauling capacity is probably one system every 30 minutes or so, which would be 3-5000 LY a week depending on how direct their route could be.
The actual speeds we've seen for the fastest groups which exist look closer to 150-200 LY a week.
Yes, you'd run out of available routing trying to cross the inter-arm void (if heading in a straight line) or at some point as the stars thinned out (if taking a wide detour and heading along the spiral arm)
I think a case can be made that there were never any unicorn systems at all. The systems in the core of the bubble that were completely unpopulated (and thus available) were unpopulated because they were terrible systems; Brown dwarfs with some dead ice balls in the darkness, or brighter stars in empty systems with few or no planets, trash systems like that. Best case scenario is stuff like a red dwarf with one or two rockies among the ice
Some of these bad systems were coveted for other reasons, such as their LOCATION being somewhere convenient, but I'm not sure any of the systems were what I'd call nice.
The nice systems are near the edge of the bubble, and the number of nice systems available is growing daily
Last edited:
Even then though, is a system with 30+ construction spots on a half dozen dustballs in a brown-dwarf system really a "bad" location for, say, a solo player? I have several of those in the bubble earmarked atm... I can't even imagine what I'm going to do with 150 sites and 25 simultaneous construction projects on the go.
Last edited: