Wow, I really got it badly wrong.
I really appreciate your feedback.
Is this updated diagram more correct?
Almost, I think: the facilities on planet 1 only generate weak links to planet 2's T3 orbital. The settlement and hub on planet 2 do not receive them
IMO this is far too complicated for normal humans that just want to play a game to figure out.
Weak links complicate things massively if your aim is to have an economy of any particular type, but they were what the loud knee-jerk player request in week 1 was, so that's what Frontier have given us.
Here's a summary of the rules for links
Asset types:
- There are two types of asset - facilities (settlements, installations, hubs) and ports (outposts and up).
- Each asset may or may not have an economic type (e.g. a Coriolis or a Satellite Installation doesn't ; a Military Outpost or a Research Settlement does)
Weak links:
- All facilities with an economic type generate weak links to every other body in the system
- If that body has a port, it will receive the weak links
- If that body has multiple ports, only the most important port will receive the weak links
- If that body has no ports, nothing happens. Facilities never receive any sort of link, weak or strong.
Strong links:
- Facilities, and ports with economic types, generate strong links to the body they are associated with. Strong links never go further away.
- If the body only has orbital or surface ports but not both, strong links are received by the most important port on the same body.
- If the body has both surface and orbital ports, surface structures give strong links to the most important surface port, and orbital structures to the most important orbital port. Then an additional strong link is created from the most important surface port to the most important orbital port. (This additional strong link appears even if the most important surface port did not originally have an economic type)
Planetary economies:
- Planetary economies replace the Colony economy of ports which do not have their own economic type.
- Planetary economies are only passed on as strong links in the case where the same body has both surface and orbital ports.
I am confused on the idea of setting up facilities that can be prevented from influencing other facilities in the system.
You can't prevent facilities from creating weak links. What you can do is prevent certain ports from
receiving them. So in your diagram, the T1 Outpost does not receive any weak links (or strong links, for that matter) because the T2 Coriolis attracts them.
Ports never generate weak links, on the other hand.
So the Science Surface port gives you a high-tech economy which doesn't generate HT weak links. But ... it does receive weak links. So what you need to do is build two of them on the same planet - one of them picks up the weak links, isolating the second one from them. The second one is now a pure HT economy, which is not itself generating HT weak links to elsewhere.
(This is an expensive workaround - since almost every port needs to have two copies built in the same place - for weak links being a massive overreaction to solve a problem that hardly any players had in the first place, and which planetary economies would have solved anyway, but this is for now what the rules are)
