Colonization : Why, benefit and ROI

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Colonisation is more of a "journey" rather than "destination" feature - a lot of the fun comes from gradually building up a system and seeing it expand over time.

In terms of quantitative benefits:
- you get paid for the hauling, which will pay for the 25 million setup bribe easily enough, and then start making you a small profit
- you get a small weekly payout from each system (though you'll need to build them quite big for this to add up to anything significant)
- you get minor discounts once you've built ten constructions in a system
- you can potentially set up systems to interact in particular ways with their neighbours for lucrative mission opportunities

(By and large, if you're in it specifically for the money, by far the more efficient way to do it is to find some systems which are already "right" - it's a big bubble, they'll be out there somewhere - and use them instead)
 

[VR] Mad Mike

[VR] Mad Mike
with colonisation is the payment automatic and infinitely passive?
ie if i do not play for 6 months and i log in, will i have 6 months of money from the colony or do i have to manually collect my taxes each week?

thanks

PS anyone who thinks colonisation does not pay enough.................. try talking to the CQC players. that pays REALLY badly! :D
 

tomalus

T
my idea was to build hoping I could get a passive income to negate carrier upkeep.
For now it looks like its gonna be imposible to get to 15 mil passive revenue as a solo player. Well I guess if you haul 10 hours every day 355 days a year its "doable" as some claim.
 

[VR] Mad Mike

[VR] Mad Mike
tomalus said:
my idea was to build hoping I could get a passive income to negate carrier upkeep.
For now it looks like its gonna be imposible to get to 15 mil passive revenue as a solo player. Well I guess if you haul 10 hours every day 355 days a year its "doable" as some claim.
Click to expand...
initially that was my hope as well. that seems quite a way off but for me its a long term goal. money is so easy to come by now, making that much in colonisation is a goal for me...... but in reality its a goal i am doing for fun rather than any inherent need .

a billion credits is fairly trivial to earn but will cover fleet carrier costs for ages. (for instance top 100% in the 2 CGs last week netted almost 200mil iirc and getting to top 75% was easy enough in both of them and that would pay out significantly more.
 

tsh847

T
Ian Doncaster said:
Colonisation is more of a "journey" rather than "destination" feature - a lot of the fun comes from gradually building up a system and seeing it expand over time.

In terms of quantitative benefits:
- you get paid for the hauling, which will pay for the 25 million setup bribe easily enough, and then start making you a small profit
- you get a small weekly payout from each system (though you'll need to build them quite big for this to add up to anything significant)
- you get minor discounts once you've built ten constructions in a system
- you can potentially set up systems to interact in particular ways with their neighbours for lucrative mission opportunities

(By and large, if you're in it specifically for the money, by far the more efficient way to do it is to find some systems which are already "right" - it's a big bubble, they'll be out there somewhere - and use them instead)
Click to expand...
Can you please quote "a small weekly payout"? Any real number goes, I don't want to know what you have in your colony, just an honest number. I suspect all this colonisation is not about a casual player and don't wat to commit myself to weeks of monotonous hauling for nothing. If it is not in the order of millions I don't bother. I know that arbitrary naming of facilities you build is 5k ARX each and a colony still belongs to a party to which you pay for that hauling. Thus, the only reason to participate is a weekly income.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
tsh847 said:
Can you please quote "a small weekly payout"? Any real number goes, I don't want to know what you have in your colony, just an honest number. I suspect all this colonisation is not about a casual player and don't wat to commit myself to weeks of monotonous hauling for nothing. If it is not in the order of millions I don't bother. I know that arbitrary naming of facilities you build is 5k ARX each and a colony still belongs to a party to which you pay for that hauling. Thus, the only reason to participate is a weekly income.
Click to expand...
You generally get 10k credits per week for each point of "system score" you have, which is then modified slightly by the "system happiness".

After four weeks my system score is up to 29, so I got very slightly over 290k credits on Thursday. I've built a little more since then so next week's payout will be slightly higher.

The cap is 5 million per week (system score 500, or lower but with good happiness). Don't know if anyone has got that far yet...

It is not in any way a defining reason to participate in colonisation; you can get 50 million in ten minutes with a single hauling mission if you look in the right places, so the weekly payout is trivial and does not in a credit sense remotely pay for the time involved you could have spent doing those high-end missions instead.
 

Rebel Yell

Rebel Yell
Look!
1743765540355.png

What?

At my house!

But it is the same as the other hundreds!

Yeah!

And so...?

Yeah but I have built it

Ahhh...
 

tsh847

T
Ian Doncaster said:
You generally get 10k credits per week for each point of "system score" you have, which is then modified slightly by the "system happiness".

After four weeks my system score is up to 29, so I got very slightly over 290k credits on Thursday. I've built a little more since then so next week's payout will be slightly higher.

The cap is 5 million per week (system score 500, or lower but with good happiness). Don't know if anyone has got that far yet...

It is not in any way a defining reason to participate in colonisation; you can get 50 million in ten minutes with a single hauling mission if you look in the right places, so the weekly payout is trivial and does not in a credit sense remotely pay for the time involved you could have spent doing those high-end missions instead.
Click to expand...
Thanks a lot, at last I've got an honest answer. My son wanted to participate and I've just finished a colony after two weeks of sleepless nights for him to name a port after a person dear to my child. Had to purchase ARX for it. A randomly picked claim with a brawn dwarf and nothing in it. Laws of nature say that you can put almost arbitrary number of human-made objects around a massive body of a star... No, there was a place for one.
"It is not in any way a defining reason to participate in colonisation" So... what's the point then? Own something? No, you don't own it. Fame? No, because you have to pay real money to put your name on anything. Socializing? No, because auto-clickers put claims on anything of value and keep them indefinitely without doing anything and 80-90 percent of what's left is nothing but depressing. I never wanted to have more than I need. It looked fun and romantic on paper but in the end it's a disappointment.
It's to keep you online and pay a little bit more. Do you actually build anything? No, everything is prescribed. It could already be there if they turned their RNG on at will. Another 200 hours of life spent. And no, I don't need 50m for one haul. I am happy with socialising with my kid and usual 20-30m per hour is enough. Also, it's very kind to strictly remind me how many days, hours and minutes left to finish my duty bought for 25m credits. How generous. Your faithful serf always, Pranat Anal or whatever you are called, whoever your are, proud bot farmer or autoclicker.
 
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Shurimal

Shurimal
Rebel Yell said:
Look!
View attachment 424820
What?

At my house!

But it is the same as the other hundreds!

Yeah!

And so...?

Yeah but I have built it

Ahhh...
Click to expand...
Hey, I didn't build a little box of ticky-tacky next to 100000 other little boxes! I built my little box of ticky-tacky in the mountains at the edge of the largest crater on a beautiful neon-atmosphered ice world. The view is spectacular and once the anarchists are in control, you get to buy all the guns, ammo, e-breaches and sell all your Lazarus and synthetic pathogens there👍 I'm sure they're also doing some... science... in that scientific surface port. Like how many bottles of Harma rum can a (wo)man drink each night.

Maybe I'll run a little experiment next—involving a system that's nothing but pirate outposts and installations.
 

evanevery

evanevery
tomalus said:
my idea was to build hoping I could get a passive income to negate carrier upkeep.
For now it looks like its gonna be imposible to get to 15 mil passive revenue as a solo player. Well I guess if you haul 10 hours every day 355 days a year its "doable" as some claim.
Click to expand...
What's with all the hauling?

You can easily run "50 Mil mining missions" in only a jump or two with a properly prepared large ship (Cutter). Just buy the commodities instead of mining them. Basically you end up with about 35-40 Mil in profit for running a single 50m wing mining mission solo.

Basic Upkeep on a FC is only about 10M per week so that's about 500M per year. Run 15 or so of those 50M Mining missions and your FC upkeep is set for about a year. (Wing up and share those very same missions and you have about 4 years worth of FC upkeep in the bank)
 

Greasetrap42

Greasetrap42
Best said:
I ask you, why colonize?

Just for the glory? 😄

Give me a list of the benefits (current and future) to colonize!

What is the ROI? (ROI = Return On Investment)
Click to expand...

In terms of credits, modules, ships, or ingame 'powerups' the ROI is negligible. Especially if you are including player time in your ROI calculation. Compared to the time investment any credits made from building a colony or the weekly payout is negligible.

Its kinda like asking what is the ROI of playing PacMan or Streetfighter.

Everybody is different. Some Benefits:
  • Some players like the idea of a home base.
  • Some players like the idea of a deep space home base, so they gotta colonize a chain of systems to their destination.
  • Some players like the multiplayer friendly cooperative aspect to building a colony.
  • Some players like to solve puzzles. Figuring out the undocumented economic relationships between facilities is a big puzzle.
  • Some players like easy fun no-brainer busy work while watching netflix.
  • Some players like to 'complete' every aspect of a game. So 'completing' a colony before moving on to the next ED update is desired.
  • Some players like to try every aspect of their favorite game. Whether they like the aspect or not. So they know what its about and can talk intelligently about it.
 

geoffrey.hdt

geoffrey.hdt
Why should colonization be about earning credits?

I hate hauling without danger, I hate repetitive actions, I am not into using my second monitor to watch shows while I fly my ship on the other one.
I am, therefore, not into colonization.

However, based on what I read here and there, some people are. They like to haul 22k tons of Titanium on their carrier, then unload, rinse & repeat, until they have completed their constructions within days.
Good, I LOVE the idea of the inhabited space growing, spreading, and hopefully leading to player-driven content, or FDev shaking up things in the future (maybe adding interesting features to a newly developed area of the galaxy, like new engineers, Thargoids showing up, etc...).

If all you care is credits, give a try to Exobiology, learn the ropes, get to understand the methodology to find the high paying bio-signatures, and by the time you have mastered it (in my case, 3 trips of 3-4 days each were enough) you will get so much money that carrier upkeeps or rebuy screen will mean nothing anymore (I found a system worth 350 millions of bios, which would have been 1,750,000,000 credits with first foothold...later found another where I was the first foothold and got 500,000,000 after a couple of quick scans. You will earn in average a billion credits every few hours if you do it right).

ROI is not the point of colonization. It's about building something, leaving your mark, if you like it.
If you do not like it, let the other players do it, and see what comes next.
 
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