I really hope this is a bug
It's definitely a very weird decision if not.
The previous design was pretty coherent:
- you needed to build all the settlements, hubs, installations etc. because that was how you got economic influence, and therefore were encouraged to build interesting systems for other people to visit (see also the unpopular but necessary decision not to let the architect pick which faction got each construction)
- you could decide whether you were building something for its economic influence or for its global properties (do you want a military economy, or just some extra security?) by where you placed it
- the Refinery economy was tougher to get than the rest (though still fairly easy) making self-sufficient colonies a little bit more challenging
- you could make pretty much any system with a landable body do something useful of your choice
Most of the problems with it came from players building stuff before they understood what that would do (which to an extent I'm sympathetic with, because
someone has to test things first ... and to extent seemed to come from "I think the system should work this way so obviously it does" and committing 200kT to a build project before checking if it really did, to which Frontier had pre-emptively said "tough" in the release announcement)
Now:
- the planetary influence is so overriding that it makes building most things which give economic influence pretty pointless
- with the right system you can get a large refinery economy just by building a single station, so all the previous design to make that require more effort is irrelevant
- system functions were essentially (retrospectively) pre-determined in 2014
- it doesn't match the in-game documentation any more; anyone who built stuff (or builds stuff) according to the documentation is now retroactively wrong
It was instantly pretty worrying when Frontier said
we will continue to investigate ways to allow all facilities to find a route to market elsewhere within that star system
because that would just have created a whole bunch of unwanted hybrid economies somewhere, and while I think it's entirely fair that most
players two weeks ago wouldn't have understood that they didn't want a hybrid economy, I would have hoped that Frontier would have been able to look at "players want their stations to produce stuff" and "hybrid economies work this way" and conclude that what players were asking for as a solution and what players actually
wanted as a solution were almost completely unrelated. They've succeeded in that before...
But this planetary influence model is if anything even worse than that for messing with the previous coherent design, and doesn't even solve the "I built an Orbis around a single-slot ELW and now it's permanently a Colony" problem some early builders ran into, because there's no way to build anything else there and get it to recalculate...
But no, all the industry markets killing our refineries don't even get to enjoy boosted industry.
Though this potentially gets recursive - the industry market is also feeding a wide range of its exports into the refinery.
From an in-universe perspective this is reflected in the two halves of the market
also having reduced imports, rather than increased total output - but of course from a playing-the-game perspective, reduced imports is also somewhat bad.
It's worked like this for the entire last decade, but other than the occasional player getting stuck on a "source HE Suits" mission, no-one has cared because it's never been at all relevant in the bubble how many commodities an individual station produces.
