"Development Level >>"? Figuring out what all these numbers do.

[Kzak]

I'm glad I asked... still, thos

Wait a minute man..... so like I initially thought, you can 100% sell these things at star ports and settlements.

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Certainly, you can sell them, but you can't purchase them from starports or space stations, only from fleet carriers. Only way to get core minerals is to mine for them.

 

[hutandrei]

I mean, back in the day, when Void Opals were a thing, the ability to place star-ports next to the perfect ring would have been awesome. Now, no one bother with mining anymore. It's much easier and faster to do some exobiology for credits.

 

[Taccitus Kilgore]

Certainly, you can sell them, but you can't purchase them from starports or space stations, only from fleet carriers. Only way to get core minerals is to mine for them.

Right right, slight misunderstanding on my part. So now my question is "what are all these stations doing with all of these things once you sell to them".... but also you'd think this whole "station next to rings" mechanic would work in SOME capacity with colonization haha. I get that it wouldn't generate any income for the station to only buy low temp diamonds, but if there's some BGS use for those commodities, that would contribute somehow? Kinda spinning yarn here, I digress. I just don't want this to be a total waste of time.

 

[hutandrei]

Those stations are Refineries. They do refine those minerals, and then sell the resulting metals, which are hugely needed in the colonization effort.

 

[Taccitus Kilgore]

Those stations are Refineries. They do refine those minerals, and then sell the resulting metals, which are hugely needed in the colonization effort.

This. This is exactly what I want. I've seen these new "refinery contacts" or whatever and wondered what the point is. IF this is indeed what they do with them, then exactly, what Fdev. Let me mine my rings and refine them on my star port.

Which makes me revisit the idea of building an asteroid base in the second slot... sigh.

 

[photomankc]

Oh, do Asteriod bases come with the refinery contact? If so, then I will be starting at least that in my 2nd system.

 

[Taccitus Kilgore]

I'm not sure tbh. They influence towards an extraction economy much more so than a Coriolis, which I admit I didn't notice until I after I started building, but you would think so right? I'll take a look what services I have when I get home. I only went under deployement yesterday and slapped a mining outpost on one of the moons.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I read a complaint where a PP player got a weekly assignment to a player colony under lockdown. Are many experiencing damaging BGS states like lockdown, infrastructure failure, famine, outbreak etc?

The initial state sliders for a starter system seem to have extremely low "neutral" zones - even more so if the initial construction was security-negative.

So getting them into extreme slider states - lockdown, investment, etc. is really easy if there's any activity at all other than hauling construction materials.

They're also all low population (even after a bit of construction) which seems to lower the trigger thresholds for all the event states (outbreak, IF, etc.) substantially

TL35 = shipyard is not correct.

Have Orbis with TL18 and it has a Shipyard. Doesnt offer any outfitting though, except for stored modules.

Careful with the conclusions here:
- Frontier Support are revealing their secret internal view of the system values, which Frontier seem to constantly forget we can't see.
- we don't know that new systems start at zero - or even that systems all start at the same amount (which would explain some of the variance reported)
- we don't know that one chevron = +1 to the attribute

unknown TL baseline + 18 chevrons > 35 internal units is entirely possible.

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)?

You can certainly RP the effect of flipping the station market as the facility contributing goods to the station, but I expect the internal cause-and-effect is somewhat more abstract than that. If there is something more concrete going on there are many more basic questions which need answering before we can start to build any sort of controlled experiments for it.

But how does the industrial settlement come into play? If it’s on one of the nearby moons, it’s not in the local sphere of the base, AFAIK. Will it still create a refinery contact in the asteroid base? Will refinery contacts spawn all around the system? Or does another „sphere“ apply here which is somewhere between „local“ and „system-wide“?

The Industrial Settlement will have a Refinery Contact as a service offered at the Industrial Settlement. It won't do anything to the asteroid base directly, it'll just give you somewhere to take the asteroid base's exports.

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?)

Unknown as yet. Some combination of:
- market population
- system variables (with development level seeming to be more important than the others, though it's still hard to be certain)
- market type
- base type (the weird "only 3 commodities" thing going on with T1 planetary outposts, for example)

So the recommendation about Refinery hubs was:
- hubs seem to be a fairly weak influencer originally
- hubs are the only option for Refinery influence
- at least until your station gets to 1.0 Refinery proportion in its economy, an extra hub is therefore going to be the biggest boost to refinery output production at the influenced station

2) Facility/(star)port economy

To what extent are you able to swing/influence economies?

In your original post, you write that „Influence replaces Colony economies, but supplements non-Colony economies“.
What does „supplementing“ mean in this case?
Does it mean you can never completely flip a non-colony economy, but only add a second economy type? Or can there be wild mixes of as many economy types as you can fit facilities into the local area?

Yes. So if you have Colony 1.0 and you apply 0.5 Industrial influence, you end up with Colony 0.5 + Industrial 0.5
But if you have High-Tech 1.0 and you apply 0.5 Industrial influence, you seem to end up with HT 1.0 + Industrial 0.5.
Stations influenced to have at least five simultaneous economies have been observed. (They're not especially useful, but you can do it)

What do you mean by „use caution over hybridisation“?

Hybrid economies (i.e. more than a single type of economy on the station) can very easily consume their own production. e.g. if you have a Refinery/High-Tech economy hybrid (as many NPC High-Tech stations are)
- the High-Tech economy will consume a lot of the Refinery's metals, so they won't be available for export
- the Refinery economy will consume all the High-Tech economy's HE suits, so they won't be available for export

If you want to maximise exports for a station (and that seems to be the primary concern of a lot of players) then keeping the station single-economy is really important for that.
(If you want to maximise imports then a hybrid economy can do better, depending on what you're after)

The need to keep things single-economy for maximum exports is why I'm really hoping Frontier uses a lot of caution to the "we didn't know the rules so we put an Orbis around a non-landable planet" problem, because a lot of the obvious fixes / player-suggested fixes would actually make things a lot worse.

3) System economy
3.1 How is system economy determined?

I feel almost bad asking this because I remember you giving a concise definition in several places on these forums… but the threads have just become so humongous!

It's the two highest components of the size-weighted sum of the station economies.
So e.g.
Extraction 10000
Refinery 5000
Industrial/Agricultural 7000 (say a 50:50 split so 3500/3500 of each)
gives you a Extraction/Refinery system.

Add another 5000 Industrial and it moves to Extraction/Industrial. Add another 5000 Industrial on top of that and you get to Industrial/Extraction

3.2 What does system economy actually do?

The only thing it does as far as I can tell is change what colour your system is on the economy filter on the map, and what gets shown in the map data table when you select the system.

Does it matter which of the two economy types is listed first? In other words, is there a difference between an „industrial/refinery“ and a „refinery/industrial“ system?

The first shows up as yellow on the map filter, the second shows up as orange.

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?

Not really. At this stage I'd say

1. Don't build anything at all if you care about achieving a particular effect. Seriously, wait until Beta is over and there's more information. There'll always be somewhere suitable to colonise. Now is for experimentation in the knowledge that it might go "wrong" but you'll perhaps learn something.
2. ...and therefore, stick to whatever size of construction your personal tolerance for hauling considers "fairly low effort"
3. Keeping all of the system variables going up seems beneficial
4. Separate bodies for separate economies (subject to Frontier changing things)

4.2) Personal question: I have started two systems with an industrial outpost. One sports quite a number of big HMC worlds, the other has several ringed gas giants with many smaller moons. What would be a good route to go from there?

So many question marks in one post No matter how many of my questions you or other knowledgeable CMDRs actually manage to answer - thanks a lot for all your effort!

Big worlds are probably good for the bigger stations - T2 or T3 - because they seem to take more to influence the economy, and you've got space to build it.

Lots of small moons are great for isolating things (e.g. you'll want to build some military stuff to keep security up as you build other things, but military isn't the most interesting economy in its own right so you probably want to keep that away from anything important)

But all that could change, so the good route might be "build things which look cool and don't worry too much about exactly what economy they end up with"

 

[Ralph Vargr]

What if there were a game, where the players didn't have to be Bletchley Park, breaking down all the coded intelligence data...

 

[Ralph Vargr]

Or, how about a game with documentation written on bar napkins, in Sanskrit, with crayons ?

 

[Ralph Vargr]

Or, a Beta, conducted with a LAN party, on Commodore 64's?

 

[Taccitus Kilgore]

Or, how about a game with documentation written on bar napkins, in Sanskrit, with crayons ?

You mean D&D?

 

[Ralph Vargr]

You mean D&D?

The white box edition of Chainmail

 

[_Flin_]

Or, a Beta, conducted with a LAN party, on Commodore 64's?

If you want to contribute, please do so. If you want to complain, this isn't helping anyone. Least yourself.

Not knowing the rules to the game is fun for some. Just go on and play the game. Do nothing you dont find fun. If you made a wrong move, just say "i made a wrong move", learn from it and move on.

 

[CMDR Ecaep]

The AXI and XSF communities have been working to build a couple of truly large systems, and in some of them they have build more than 2 "ports" that count towards the increased build points needed for future "ports". They confirmed that the price continues to increase after every additional port is built.

What was already known:

• A "port" means a tier 2 starport (Coriolis and Asteroid), a tier 3 starport (Orbis and Ocellus), or a tier 3 planetary port. All other installations do not contribute to the increased build point costs, nor are their own build point costs effected.
• The initial starport does not count as a port, at least as far as counting towards the facilities that increase the cost of additional ports.
• A port is counted as soon as construction begins. Unfinished ports still count towards the increased costs, even if no ports have completed construction.
• The first two ports in a system cost either 3 tier 2 build points, or 6 tier 3 build points.
• The third port in a system costs either 5 tier 2 build points or 12 tier 3 build points.
• The only documentation of this build point increase is in the last (third of three) help page available when you click on the guide button while claiming a new system at a colonization contact. That help page says "Tier 2 and 3 port Construction Point costs increase as more are built in a system, this increase starts after the second port has begun construction."

What AXI and XSF discovered:

• The fourth port in a system costs either 7 tier 2 build points or 18 tier 3 build points
• The fifth port in a system costs either 9 tier 2 build points or 24 tier 3 build points.

This gives enough data points to extrapolate a pattern, although I don't have any hard data beyond the cost of the fifth port.

Ports Started	Tier 2 Cost for next port	Tier 3 Cost for next port
0	3	6
1	3	6
2	5	12
3	7	18
4	9	24
5	11	30
6	13	36

 

[Tifu]

So getting them into extreme slider states - lockdown, investment, etc. is really easy if there's any activity at all other than hauling construction materials.

They're also all low population (even after a bit of construction) which seems to lower the trigger thresholds for all the event states (outbreak, IF, etc.) substantially

That's what I was afraid of, thanks Ian.

 

[regdc]

Hi All,

I have not yet managed to read the whole thread, but I was wondering if anyone could offer me some colonization advice.

I am the System Architect of a small modest ice-planet system, Tucanae Sector CG-W b2-3, and I have so far added 5 additional facilities to the system, after the Primary Port.

I have the following facilities and stats so far....

I have one planet slot free on Planet 2 and that is orbited by the Industrial Outpost.

There is only one orbital starport so far

The two facilities on Planet 2 are the Decima Civilian Port and the Mantus Medium Mining Settlement.

The Civilian Port has a Colony economy and currently buys and sells nothing. However, I only completed it at the weekend, so it has not been through a Server Interval on Thursdays yet.

System Economy is Industrial/Extraction

Population is just over 6000.

I would like to add a Refinery Hub on Planet 2.

Will that affect the economy of the Civilian Port and/or the Orbiting Industrial Outpost?

Can the economy of an Industrial Outpost evolve?

Or should I build the Refinery Hub on a different planet and build a new Starport around it, that it can influence?

Also, has anyone built an Agriculture Economy yet?

Thanks in advance for your advice!!

 

[Easy]

Does the position of a Relay Station or Security Station have in impact on overall security, or does their mere presence reap the overall security benefit?

 

[Xenia_K]

the latter, interestingly - to build an industrial outpost IIRC you need that mining/industry outpost/sat thingy first - even if you have no astro-belt, planetary ring or whatsoever to place it to and also spreads that release-factor systemwide.

 

[KKomrade Sylas]

If you want to contribute, please do so. If you want to complain, this isn't helping anyone. Least yourself.

Not knowing the rules to the game is fun for some. Just go on and play the game. Do nothing you dont find fun. If you made a wrong move, just say "i made a wrong move", learn from it and move on.

I agree with the complaining but I probably agree with you that it doesn't need to be on 3 consecutive posts. Not sure Frontier even reads this forum thread to be honest.