Colonization seems to have destroyed the frontier

[photomankc]

Well, My take on grind is that simply making the stations require just more solo hauling to discourage a player doing anything solo is not the right approach. It's not fun or interesting to build systems (to me) by committee and so I am fine with them being a weeks long background solo commitment or a few days of Mountain Dew drinking nerd focus. Id prefer the slowdown come as a result of having more planning and development of a system to a greater degree so that its a useful addition and gives useful missions rather than a chain of useless poop factories to go to X,Y or Z. If I chose to colonize it should not need to be my second job to get it done in the time period but still a commitment. I think that is largely true as is.

So to be clear here are things I would change:

- Maybe up to 10% more to station builds at the maximum.

- Increase range for next system claim (25 to 45LY max), reducing poop station chains to reach some goal or open frontier bubbles.

- Reduce the costs of settlements and surface economy influencers by 10 to 15%.

- Require a certain tech / development / population size or number of T1/T2 structures to open the colony contact. The timer is just to prevent permanent blockades from developing.

- No T2 or T3 stations as initial ports. You need to develop a system to get to those. I sort of doubt upgrades will ever be a thing, but I still stand by this.

- Allow direct payment to haul goods over X amount of time. Offer missions at the build sites that deliver X number of goods on completion allowing plyers to do other things besides haul to get the station built.

 

[sidereal6]

prefer the slowdown come as a result of having more planning and development of a system

What if it was just due to population. You can deliver a million tonnes of steel to build a coriolis but you can’t force people to live in it. And if you can’t get the population up (and presumably behind the scenes you’re getting rent and taxes to pay for station upkeep) then you can’t keep the station online.

You should have to do stuff to make the station an attractive prospect to migrants looking for work

 

[kofeyh]

The biggest issue is Frontier's decision to concentrate growth exclusively from the bubble rather than allowing expansion from multiple areas, whilst that would not dramatically affect the rate of growth, it would reduce the overall apparent speed of expansion as less ground would be gained in a given sector, due to parallel efforts.

It's hundreds of commanders trying to scaffold out to distant places and that creates a huge chain of systems with a single outpost; a) highly wasteful of resources and time, b) adds to the sense the galaxy is being rapidly expanded into (which it is), c) is breaking the BGS due to systems having limited markets and d) is probably contributing more overhead than it should for the weekly tick.

Frontier should have had half a dozen anchor points from which humanity could grow. That was and still is the only viable solution long term. People are going to build given the chance. Everything else is variations on NIMBY punishment to try and put the genie back in the bottle.

 

[Monk]

Frontier should have had half a dozen anchor points from which humanity could grow. That was and still is the only viable solution long term. People are going to build given the chance. Everything else is variations on NIMBY punishment to try and put the genie back in the bottle.

Colonize the core! We shall have our Coruscant

Though really, the bubble is a lame part of the galaxy barely worth colonizing in the first place. If it weren't for proximity to Sol it would have no significance.

 

[krylite]

Eventually there should likely be an overall fracturing of the new expanded 'bubble' where it's no longer uniformly expanded at every point, but becomes just branches spreading outward so there will be a new 'frontier' edge of several locations of the expansion and plenty of unpopulated systems far from densely populated newly colonized systems. While player activity on colonization is decently large in the tens of thousands of new colonized systems, it's not like there's hundreds of millions of player cmdr architects or however number in the playerbase that could expand and colonize the whole ED galaxy and most star systems within the next ten years.

 

[lysan]

Players can finish a station in under an hour in some squadrons chaining out into space. I suspect you know what I meant though.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

 

[WR3ND]

I discovered a POI and have since revisited it a couple times. Frontiers are always being destroyed. But there's still room for more, in the game at least. Right?

 

[sidereal6]

Closest unclaimed non-invalid system I could find to Sol - WISE 2220-3628

There is currently a station there. You can say “well there wasn’t one when I checked a few days ago” but that’s missing the point. Do you not see my point?

 

[ꝁestrel]

There is currently a station there. You can say “well there wasn’t one when I checked a few days ago” but that’s missing the point. Do you not see my point?

You're not making a very convincing point.

The frontier still exists. Except now the frontier is dynamically growing with colonization. You might not like this because you want a static universe where nothing changes and that's fair - it's okay to not like something. But there's no "point" to be made other than "I don't like it".

 

[sidereal6]

The frontier still exists

It doesn't feel like a frontier when there's a gigantic Coriolis space station in the middle of nowhere.

Please try to not be a "debate bro" who disagrees just for the sake of disagreeing. You really don't have an argument against this point, and if this was a game you weren't emotionally invested in, this would be super obvious to you. If Red Dead Redemption let players build their own towns and you came back from being deep, deep in the wilderness, what is realistic?

Come on, what is realist?

What should the first town you encounter look like?

Come on. What should it look like?

There's a term for what it should look like. It should be a frontier town. It should have only a couple of small buildings.

If Red Dead Redemption implemented this game mechanic and people built skyscrapers everywhere, you would rightly point out that something isn't right.

...and there'd be people in the forums gaslighting you, saying nothing is wrong. So it's cool. I get it.

But I'm right: there shouldn't be Coriolis stations out in the middle of nowhere.

 

[Desirsar]

It's not the middle of nowhere. A supply chain will exist.

 

[SteveWW57]

But I'm right: there shouldn't be Coriolis stations out in the middle of nowhere.

IIRC, and some more knowledgeable Americans can chime in, on the settler trails going from east to west across the US there were trading posts, and throughout the US there were many fur trading posts in the forests. These were often the only substantial settlements for many miles, out in the middle of nowhere.

 

[ꝁestrel]

Please try to not be a "debate bro" who disagrees just for the sake of disagreeing.

Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean they have an ulterior motive.

But I'm right: there shouldn't be Coriolis stations out in the middle of nowhere.

There have been large starports in the middle of nowhere long before colonization existed. They're sprinkled all over the galaxy. The game simply doesn't make the association of outpost size and "wilderness". You made that association in your head canon.

You said in your OP that Coriolis represents a "larger, older, more developed system". That's never been the case.

 

[Frankymole]

IIRC, and some more knowledgeable Americans can chime in, on the settler trails going from east to west across the US there were trading posts, and throughout the US there were many fur trading posts in the forests. These were often the only substantial settlements for many miles, out in the middle of nowhere.

In gold rush areas you'd get lots of "sophisticated" facilities like hardware stores, pack animal dealers/livery, saloons and entertainment establishments but they'd often be temporary like the population, moving on when the rush was over. Elite doesn't have similar time limited resources.

 

[Raedawn]

They way colonization works the future of EDO is high amounts of single T1 builds, aka Garbage or Chain systems and little of anything else, the reality is colonization is actually creating a far greater number of minimally built systems then the ratio prior to Colonization.

 

[Greasetrap42]

What should the first town you encounter look like?

Come on. What should it look like?

There's a term for what it should look like. It should be a frontier town. It should have only a couple of small buildings.

Elite Dangerous is set in the future. Colonies aren't created by travelers in covered wagons. There are Fleet Carriers and Mega Ships. Thousands of cmdrs have visited Beagle Point. The Galaxy has been circumnavigated many times over. Travel is really really easy. Ships are cheep. Resources are easily available. Populations are easy to relocate (slaves will do whatever we tell them! ha! ha!).

You seriously think that building a realistic Coriolis and populating it 5,000Ly away from the bubble would be much more difficult than doing this inside the bubble? Utilizing Fleet Carriers and Mega Ships it is only 10 jumps away.

A Coriolis is the equivalent to a Frontier Town.

 

[Starshot_Jigawatts]

Do you not see my point?

Nope. I do not.

o7

 

[sidereal6]

You seriously think that building a realistic Coriolis and populating it 5,000Ly away from the bubble would be much more difficult than doing this inside the bubble?

Notice how you used the words "much more"

So you're conceding that it's somewhat, if only a little, more difficult.

That's the only concession needed to prove my point. Understand?

 

[aRJay]

Notice how you used the words "much more"

So you're conceding that it's somewhat, if only a little, more difficult.

That's the only concession needed to prove my point. Understand?

Not really.

There is a lot of difference between something being a little more difficult to do and so much more difficult that it is unlikely to be done.

The little bit more difficult is purely down to the materials having to be moved between systems rather than just used in the one system, which is already happening in some of the colonies.

This is a high technology society that is resource rich the main reason there was a frontier was because it had not bothered to build out any further not because the process of building out further had reached a any sort of limit.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

It doesn't feel like a frontier when there's a gigantic Coriolis space station in the middle of nowhere.

I see your point, but you're at least ten years too late. All the precedent so far is that the larger stations aren't that much harder to place than the smaller ones.

• The Quince system, populated from the game start and well clear of the main body of the bubble, has 2 Orbis stations
• The very first CG in February 2015 was to build an Orbis starport in the system of New Yembo, a system far enough away from the edge of the bubble that it didn't get its own colonisation contact with the Trailblazers release, and which the post-4.1 colonisation is only just catching up to.
• The next starport construction to occur, from an October 2015 CG, went even further, putting a Coriolis starport into the Maia system.
• Moving forward a bit, the various Colonia initiatives in 2016 included a Coriolis-based system in the first wave of settlement after Jaques' unusual arrival, and several subsequent large stations, including the intermediate Orbis stations which really are in the middle of nowhere at Rohini, Gandharvi and Kashyapa.
• The Enclave initiative in 2019 added six Ocellus starports to the Witch Head nebula.

On the system population side, on the other hand, most of these fringe systems have fairly low populations, and the newly-colonised ones are even smaller. So in that respect the frontier is still visible, and the new fringes are even sparser than the old ones.

(System population is certainly a more subtle measure and easy to entirely not notice in normal gameplay, of course)