After eight years of playing I thought the 3 main aspects of the game were Exploration, Combat and Trading.
Which would make hauling maybe 33%.
Colonization Bloat
- Thread starter CMBDI
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Which would make hauling maybe 33%.
I didn't mean THE 3 main aspects of the game i was merely pointing out that colonisation, bgs, and PP2.0 rely way too much on hauling.
Colonisation is 100% hauling.
Bgs which is made up of buying & selling goods (trade) [hauling], smuggling [hauling], black market selling [hauling]. Only combat & piracy make bgs less than 100% hauling.
PP2.0 actually the meta is farming data on planetary tourist sites in anarchy systems, along with wake scanning/hauling cps, nets alot of merits. There's combat too & mining.
And let's not forget hauling rares!
Exploration & exobiology also have a part to play in PP2.0. Albeit minor.
Colonisation is 100% hauling.
Bgs which is made up of buying & selling goods (trade) [hauling], smuggling [hauling], black market selling [hauling]. Only combat & piracy make bgs less than 100% hauling.
PP2.0 actually the meta is farming data on planetary tourist sites in anarchy systems, along with wake scanning/hauling cps, nets alot of merits. There's combat too & mining.
And let's not forget hauling rares!
Exploration & exobiology also have a part to play in PP2.0. Albeit minor.
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Do they?
PP2 is literally just a reward overlay on top of whatever you want to choose to do, so if it's mostly hauling, that's by choice.
Same same, BGS is only hauling if you choose that... I personally don't, instead running missions which are generally combat, hijack, salvage. My cargo capacity on that ship is 64t for those incidental missions. FWIW, hauling is possibly the worst activity you can do in my neck of the woods, because there's a lot of distant ports or outposts which are medium-only, and that's across a region spanning 50Ly in the middle of the bubble.
Colonisation yes, it's mostly hauling. Given the success of PP2 in diversifying it's activities (ironically) I think there should be alternate activities that support colonisation (but require equivalent effort)... but equally.. it's not just hauling, it's a logistics problem, which is quite different (the optimisation of sourcing for many and diverse goods, whether that be via yourself or motivating others, and also how you use FCs and colonisation itself to reduce distances drastically.
You cite "meta"... that's code for "Fastest and easiest"...not best. People do that because the learning barrier is low and access is instant. Hauling is simply "grab cargo racks, move things from A to B as directed".... but there's way better ways. Just like before FD jumped the shark.. HGE's were "meta"... that was just because it's "drop in, grab materials, relog".... again, there were faster, better ways. You can forget doing that now that FD went full-lunacy on it.
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Logistics is my middle name, from telematics to planning, from cpc training to training & signing off drivers into a given speciality, all stuff I've done for decades. And it's all to do with hauling. Whether it be shuttling to and from a fc, or planning a route, fuel, range etc, still its logistical transport. Better known as haulage.
Yeah there's other ways to get merits, I love winging up in a haz res, or plundering a tourist site. Ganking belugas for escape pods, a dozen different ways be they currently suspended or otherwise.
But hauling is king, is predominantly the way to go.
And that's my point!
Too much emphasis on it.
Simples.
Yeah there's other ways to get merits, I love winging up in a haz res, or plundering a tourist site. Ganking belugas for escape pods, a dozen different ways be they currently suspended or otherwise.
But hauling is king, is predominantly the way to go.
And that's my point!
Too much emphasis on it.
Simples.
OK... so you're just redefining all other activities as hauling. When you're a hammer, everything's a nail i guess.
Pointless discussion at this stage.
We create our play according to our preference, surely?
I can say, without doubt, that my game is most certainly not mostly hauling, quite the opposite.
But then, I have zero interest in BGS gardening, even less in PP2 (I tried it, got bored to tears, dropped it) and, having had an intense bit of chugging around (which made a pleasant change, because I was curious) for a week with Colonisation - which I'll now take my own sweet time to develop further - don't intend on spending any large portion of my playtime hauling goods.
Yes, in 2017, when I picked up ED, my first month was spent doing my own trade routes, these days most of the hauling I do is to directly benefit me, and is not done often... (plus the odd CG, if it is offering something I could do with)
I could declare that ED is mostly anything but hauling, and be honest in saying so - because of the way I elect to play it
I can say, without doubt, that my game is most certainly not mostly hauling, quite the opposite.
But then, I have zero interest in BGS gardening, even less in PP2 (I tried it, got bored to tears, dropped it) and, having had an intense bit of chugging around (which made a pleasant change, because I was curious) for a week with Colonisation - which I'll now take my own sweet time to develop further - don't intend on spending any large portion of my playtime hauling goods.
Yes, in 2017, when I picked up ED, my first month was spent doing my own trade routes, these days most of the hauling I do is to directly benefit me, and is not done often... (plus the odd CG, if it is offering something I could do with)
I could declare that ED is mostly anything but hauling, and be honest in saying so - because of the way I elect to play it
I think that's a different argument, because you could reduce any of the RP elements to this level. I thought we were discussing an inherent skew towards trading, which arises from more or less every RP choice available also having a skew towards trading.
BGS I don't agree that's skewed to trading. Combat is quite rewarding in terms of credits which you can then dump into any BGS element you need credits for (eg donations); very rewarding in terms of INF for a faction; and explicitly has wars, which you directly help to win with combat.
PP 2.0 as-fielded (ie, the current state of it 18th March 3311) is skewed to mining because most of the other mechanisms m'colleague listed above are plain broken, and not fixed nearly five months later. As-DESIGNED sure, you could do explo or exo. Felicia is fairly well skewed to trading (of Agri) whilst the defects and egregious mis-balancing remains in place.
It's also a random, emergent thing. Trailblazers is likely to block many of the long-standing emergent metas (metae?) like Robigo because it will shift where the missions which happen to make good pairs/triplets/cycles sit.
The Thargoid War was of course criticised as being far too combat-heavy and not enough for anyone else to do.
Powerplay has 21 different activities; 12 of them don't use a cargo hold at all, and three (salvage, S&R, recon) don't particularly benefit from a large one
Frontier were fairly clear in their livestreams, I thought, that colonisation was intended to be the feature for people who didn't want to go in for competition and combat, so is more deliberately a collaborative hauling/exploration task. (Obviously not Real Exploration™, but in the broader sense)
(In terms of squadron leaderboards, trade has always lagged a fair bit behind combat; most squadrons have some score on both but combat-without-trade is more common than trade-without-combat. But they're both much higher than anything more specialist, of course)
For strategic play a lot less so because the location requirements make a lot of systems near-useless for obtaining mining merits. The general feeling seems to be that combat powers have a big advantage in contested Acquisitions (bonuses to bounty hunting and CZs, which work almost anywhere, compared with mining which works almost nowhere), and that's the main location where inter-power conflicts might occur.
Powerplay has 21 different activities; 12 of them don't use a cargo hold at all, and three (salvage, S&R, recon) don't particularly benefit from a large one
Frontier were fairly clear in their livestreams, I thought, that colonisation was intended to be the feature for people who didn't want to go in for competition and combat, so is more deliberately a collaborative hauling/exploration task. (Obviously not Real Exploration™, but in the broader sense)
(In terms of squadron leaderboards, trade has always lagged a fair bit behind combat; most squadrons have some score on both but combat-without-trade is more common than trade-without-combat. But they're both much higher than anything more specialist, of course)
For maximising rate of personal merit gain, yes.
For strategic play a lot less so because the location requirements make a lot of systems near-useless for obtaining mining merits. The general feeling seems to be that combat powers have a big advantage in contested Acquisitions (bonuses to bounty hunting and CZs, which work almost anywhere, compared with mining which works almost nowhere), and that's the main location where inter-power conflicts might occur.
Not really anymore (advantaged). Until the BGS bug that squashes PPCZs with vanilla CZs is fixed, if ever. Those that enjoy the combat side and not the hauling are easily sidelined by that and the conflict is now really 100% hauling. Settlement raiding when done as an additional method there is sorta fun. Once it becomes the only way to effeectively earn the needed merits it becomes the grindiest of grinds so that really leaves hunting for infrastructure failure and micro-selling macros that our workhorses do till they burn out. The only gameplay that could possibly be worse than PP1.0's commodity system.
Anyway, colonization is 100% hauling. There is not much else in it. Plan a bit (lol, once others take all the beatings figuring things out) then haul and haul and haul and haul some more. Can't even launder stolen goods to use them in the build. Buy and haul is it. Now, it is allowing a credit-sink for me because I'll pay upwards of 60 million per 1000 units any commander delivers to my carrier. But that's just replacing my hauling with someone else's hauling. I'm glad that is an option, but it desn't really change the dynamic much. I still have to then haul from the carrier.
100% agree. As long as we players play that loops, why would FDev change the mechanics? But it is highly unlikely that we get the biggest part of player base convinced to stay away from it and thus motivate the game designers to introduce other mechanics.
More likely they'll do it, then complain about the grind...
Have you moved a squadron of fighters and five hundred guys halfway across the earth? I have.
Double the distance, eight times the pain.
Watching paint dry is probably more interesting.
It is just starting. Play what you want, where you want. There are new systems available every day. And excellent ones, too.
Can you imagine the reaction when they are down to their last week of hauling when someone else delivers all the last items needed.
The hauling will get longer, though....
The resulting meltdown might be so epic that they get a viewer!
(I don't intend that to be mean; everyone wins if a streamer picks a challenge that is more fun to watch than this one would be! However I guess I might watch the orbis-with-a-sidey stream if the bulk of it is constructing a weird robot device to control a HOTAS so that a bot can take over...
)