1) Market
1.1) What determines which goods are available on a market?
In our updated original post, you mention that construction properties (system variables such as security, tech level etc.) seem to influence market sizes, productivity, and specialisation.
But can you also influence available goods more directly by building facilities on/orbiting the same planet? E.g., does an aggricultural settlement contribute some agricultural goods to a local port/station?
If so, does the facility always contribute goods or only if the station is of he same economy type (i.e. the facility has „flipped“ the station‘s economy)?
Could answer some of these if only the weekly tick went through.
From limited experiments so far:
Standard goods provided by market economy. All of them. My HighTech outpost has all the HighTech goods, not only some of them, as do many vanilla stations.
Settlements are little harder to judge. Has supplied minerals switching randomly yesterday in an L Extraction Settlement.
Other economies do have an influence, e.g. building an industrial settlement chaning the agri market to offering Leather.
1.2) What determines the quantity of goods available on a market?
Similar to 1.1: Are system variables the only ones that count? Or can you influence the quantity of goods on a local level by building more settlements of the same type?
It sounds a bit like the latter when you recommend building Refinery hubs in all but one slots on HMCs in your aforementioned reply to hutandrei. (Or ist that just about system stats / flipping colony economies in the right direction?)
Population, Security, +x
Population is in the Pilot's Handbook.
Security was found in experiments. At least you need a positive security for meaningful market.
The exact influence of Wealth, Development, Standard of Living and Tech Level are unknown as of yet.
As are the exact influences of the economy multipliers in the "Docked" event in the journal.
3.2 What does system economy actually do?
Apart from painting a dot on the galaxy map? Unknown.
4) Building tips
4.1) Is there a generally recommended starting station / line of build or do you have general suggestions that players can build upon depending on what they want to achieve?
Generally it depends on what you want to do.
Do you want to longterm build up a system?
1. Start with a large station in case the starting location supports this. You will probably get a "free" station without doubling of costs for that. Well worth the additional 30%.
2. Get as many building slots as possible, especially ground based. The M settlements offer excellent bang for the buck in regards to getting Tier2 construction points. These are bread and butter buildings and much better than their orbital counterparts.
3. Plan out your large stations carefully and do not fill up your best bodies with junk.
4. Leave some room in your plan. We do neither fully know what is "good" and "bad", nor do we fully know how tech works, production works, population works. So those planetary ports might play an important role here.
5. Make sure to build adequate security facilities asap to ensure at least medium security. Help while building and help production.
6. If there are limited resource systems around or the supply lines long (>20ly) or strictly ground based, contemplate setting up a Refinery orbital station Tier2+.
I'm debating putting a mining outpost there, or around the last moon in the chain with 3 settlement opportunities. I built a mining settlement there yesterday while my Coriolis was still under deployment. Curious where it will be in the next few days.
