Elite Dangerous | Colonisation Facilities & Markets

[Mallorn]

Perhaps the economy problem could be largely solved by implementing some of the most asked for features for colonization i.e. the ability to designate the primary port and the ability to undo a planned construction before anything is delivered.

Make the primary port use all the installations in a system to determine its economy type and all other ports use the local planet. Furthermore, if you let us redesignate the primary port at will i.e. after construction too then it would let us fix some of the systems already built. This would also naturally reduce the need for multiple star ports in the system so that you could probably drop the doubling of construction points for the third and later ports too - the only point in building one would be if the system had multiple large planets with different economies in which case it would be appropriate to have multiple ports. It may not be a perfect solution but it's one that's easy to understand and hopefully easy to implement.

If we could add and remove planned installations then all you'd need to add to make the economy macinations easily to understand is to add information showing the future predicted economy type for current and planned stations. We can then look at that and, if we do not like what we see, change a planned station. Again it's not a perfect solution and the limit of 5 planned installations and the construction point requirements will stop you simulating an entire system plan but it would help while also giving us a feature a lot of us would really like to see and again it can hopefully just use whatever algorithm FDEV currently have to calculate the economy keeping implementation simple.

 

[Maolagin]

This means bodies that have only one build slot must not be markets, or else they will only sell hydrogen fuel and biowaste. If a body has more than one orbital build slot, one of the slots could be a market and the other slot(s) could be space installations that influence that market, although there are fewer space installations that influence markets than there are ground stations.

Folks keep saying this but it's not strictly true. You get a perfectly functional, if smallish, single economy market by building one of the tier 1 outposts that has a defined economy. It just so happens that the economy that would be most helpful for supporting further colony structure building - refinery - isn't available in outpost form.

The consequence of this is that, for colonization, most systems with earth-like worlds, water worlds, and even gas giants to some degree, are less valuable than systems with large rocky and icy bodies. The systems that we have been ignoring in exploration because that aren't even worth using the FSS are now the best choices for colonization.

But very much the sort of systems that have been well combed over in the past year or so thanks to the curiously generous agents of Vista Genomics. If you squint hard enough you can almost convince yourself there's a coherent plan hiding in there somewhere.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Make the primary port use all the installations in a system to determine its economy type

You almost certainly do not want this to happen as in most cases it will make your primary port useless for trade production.

There are major advantages if you want high and coherent production to only having a single economy type per station. The moment you have two active economy types on a station, with very few exceptions, it'll start consuming its own production and the export market collapses. Three is even worse. And you're going to need multiple types building somewhere in the system. e.g. I have a military base on an out-of-the-way moon to boost system security a bit; I absolutely do not want its Military economy type applying to anything else, which is why it's all the way over there in the first place.

(If you don't want high and coherent production, then a Colony economy already provides excellent import opportunities on its own, without the need to waste time building influencing installations/settlements/hubs)



My preferred solution would be:
- Frontier does not change which station positions affect which other positions (though does document it a lot better). The current solution is extremely flexible and customisable already once you know what it's doing, and importantly means it's very easy to stop things influencing things they shouldn't.
- there is some one-off compensation given to people who've built stations in Beta so far in places where they wouldn't have if they had known the rules (maybe a one-off ability to move a station to another orbit/planet, or an ability to dismantle it for "construction credits" which give a hauling discount on future constructions, only until the end of Beta)

 

[Kallipar]

I started my singular system and very quickly realised that something was screwy and stopped. Others have not been so lucky.
I feel for those who created an Orbis etc. That has been imo unnecessary and inordinate wastage of players time. Some indeed had help, but I suspect many who did this will not be playing much in future.

That is a crying shame and the level of burnout may very well overwhelm the goodwill that fdev have generated. I know several of my squadron friends have not played much since the op post. They are simply exhausted.

There maybe a need to recognise the sheer efforts in the beta test especially as it seems that the lack of some simple understanding of the functions were not made available in good time. This grind burnout could have so easily been avoided.

After all if its a beta test then we should be testing mechanics, not simple structuring. A straight forward statement would have prevented the massive numbers of false starts for little functional data return and above all player satisfaction. So glad I didn't build a T3!

My opinion is that players should be able to change the space station type and reallocate the starter position over a landable planet if available. Not a rollback or reset but an ability to move things as a one and done.

 

[CMDR Ecaep]

Folks keep saying this but it's not strictly true. You get a perfectly functional, if smallish, single economy market by building one of the tier 1 outposts that has a defined economy. It just so happens that the economy that would be most helpful for supporting further colony structure building - refinery - isn't available in outpost form.


But very much the sort of systems that have been well combed over in the past year or so thanks to the curiously generous agents of Vista Genomics. If you squint hard enough you can almost convince yourself there's a coherent plan hiding in there somewhere.

You are correct, I misspoke when I wrote "This means bodies that have only one build slot must not be markets, or else they will only sell hydrogen fuel and biowaste." I should have said "This means bodies that have only one build slot must not be colony economy markets, or else they will only sell hydrogen fuel and biowaste."

I do think you have to squint really hard to see that coherent plan, though.

 

[Nowski]

My preferred solution would be:
- Frontier does not change which station positions affect which other positions

A big fat station orbiting a highly exploitable planet should prosper, IMO, so I'd rather see the current system but with fallbacks, so that if no other options are available either the type of nearest planet (extraction for GG, HMC, agri for ELW/WW) or nearest other "facility group" (orbiting a common body) could feed into the market.

I guess the data munging would be intense for even this low level of enhancement though, as the number of colonsied systems continues to grow.

 

[PilotB]

As a start point they should go through and remove the economic influence box from all the orbital installations as they have no influence on markets.
While they're at it they can remove the landing pads from all the things that don't have landing pads.
We're being told that building things will provide things that aren't provided. A lot of the problems go away if we're just getting correct info.
These details can be returned if they ever become true.

All systems without planetary slots should at the very least come with a big warning on the construction screen that this facility is not capable of changing economy within the current system. Ideally all those systems should be marked as invalid until there's a viable way to develop them but that would prevent any further bridging which might not be a bad thing.

We're being told how things work. Testing shows it doesn't work how they say it works and repeating themselves isn't changing that.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

All systems without planetary slots should at the very least come with a big warning on the construction screen that this facility is not capable of changing economy within the current system. Ideally all those systems should be marked as invalid until there's a viable way to develop them

You can still build things with an intrinsic economy - industrial/military/high-tech outposts - around those planets. Or use them for installations to increase general system variables like development level.

You're not going to get a massively built-up system without landable bodies, but a basic industrial outpost producing enough to supply some local commodity needs is certainly possible. (It's only really the refineries which need huge mass production)

A big fat station orbiting a highly exploitable planet should prosper, IMO

It can prosper on its own terms. System variables can make its market bigger. A big Colony market doesn't export much, sure, but it makes a great endpoint for bringing in high-profit Gold or Silver. It boosts the system population and system variables making every other station in the system stronger. It may even be that the boost to "Maximum Population" does something important later.

Obviously that's not what people necessarily wanted from it but it's not a complete write-off either.

 

[PilotB]

You're not going to get a massively built-up system without landable bodies, but a basic industrial outpost producing enough to supply some local commodity needs is certainly possible. (It's only really the refineries which need huge mass production)

You have 4 out of 6 outposts and 1 of 2 t2 and 0 of 2 t3 that have an economy. That t2 isn't even available in most system. You can struggly out a shadow of an economy that mostly doesn't even have the landing pads to support the ships doing the actual building. The best you can do is produce the idea of a system. There's billions of viable systems there's absolutely no good reason that systems that don't properly support development should be colonisable until such a point as the around the body part actually works.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

You can struggly out a shadow of an economy that mostly doesn't even have the landing pads to support the ships doing the actual building.

There are a good number of constructions where the entire industrial or high-tech requirement for the building can fit in a single T-8 hold (and not many where it would take more than two trips).

Not every system has to be a super-powered production economy churning out more supplies for the next generation of colonies. Half or more of the pre-existing bubble systems are "shadow" systems by this standard. It's okay if not every port is a hyper-optimised hub where T-9s can endlessly load up their nearby carriers.

I don't personally have the hauling patience to build T3s, and I'm not sure if I want to even start a Coriolis/Asteroid base at T2. There are still plenty of things I could do with smaller systems that don't need them to have a "export min-maxers would hate this system so you can't have it either" exclusion plastered all over them.

 

[PilotB]

There are a good number of constructions where the entire industrial or high-tech requirement for the building can fit in a single T-8 hold (and not many where it would take more than two trips).

I've hauled in a t8 and it's about 1/3 the speed of using a large. You either have a carrier to swap ships on and then there's no reason to haul in a t8 from outposts or you have a large station with a shipyard which is either useless or in a system that removes any need to haul from outposts. You're defending something that doesn't need defending. I'd settle for a warning if players want to waste their time building space toilets they are entirely welcome to do so but there isn't a single good reason to enourage it to happen.

NPC systems do not play by the same ruleset. NPC outposts near universally get multiple markets and can do so around any body they want to. If people want to build outposts they can but they're missing out of the majority of the actual colonisation feature for no good reason if they do it in certain classes of system and since there's not really any lack of space it's just setting players up for failure.

There are solutions to the issue but until it's solved I would rather that they disabled those systems and turned them back on when and if they implement a solution to allow market influence around a body to function. I'd hope it isn't a permanent issue but right now they do not work as advertised and that should be adressed one way or the other. Turning it off buys them time and pushes people towards the systems that are in place so they test those more. For the purposes of a beta test period I think that's a vastly superior option to your opinion that they should just stay there incomplete because you don't care.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I've hauled in a t8 and it's about 1/3 the speed of using a large.

For a min-maxer with a carrier, sure. If you're not using a carrier the better jump range and supercruise agility can make it well over 1/2 the speed of a large when supplies are available reasonably locally, especially when the supplies you need from a particular economy are <400t to start with. No point in taking a slow T-9 or Cutter or Carrier to pick up 300t of high-tech supplies when that's literally all the construction needs.

I'd settle for a warning if players want to waste their time building space toilets they are entirely welcome to do so but there isn't a single good reason to enourage it to happen.

Should Frontier also add a warning to when people try to buy a Federal Assault Ship which says "CMDR, this ship has long been obsoleted in the combat meta. Are you sure you don't want a Python II?" or one which marks trade commodities without a minimum 10k/t profit capability as "not very good really?"

Not everyone values the same things you do, not everyone is building colonies for the same purposes you do. All Frontier needs to do (and probably won't even manage that, sure) is provide enough documentation so that you can tell which systems are useful to you and ignore the ones which aren't.

For the purposes of a beta test period I think that's a vastly superior option to your opinion that they should just stay there incomplete because you don't care.

As I said above, I'd be very happy for there to be some sort of "let you move/replace existing constructions" option, for the duration of the Beta, until there's sufficient documentation for people to actually know what they're doing, so that people caught out by that lack of documentation can adjust their systems to suit. People who did something in the reasonable expectation of it having one effect due to poor phrasing and sparse documentation should be able to change their mind since it's turned out it doesn't.

Blocking out small systems, though, would be like the original 2.1 Engineering beta (which used 1t Fish as the universal engineering recipe, so major problems with the entire process went into the "final" release because players simply didn't encounter them in the beta)

And I've said elsewhere, there is only one piece of good advice to anyone who cares about the final result of their system and doesn't want to risk spending time on experiments, and that is "come back to colonisation in a year when the rules are stabilised, any documentation Frontier intends to provide has been provided, and proper third-party guides on how to build systems have been written".

 

[Urbansparx]

I build one of those bars thinking I would be able to dock there and enjoy the view of my water world. But no, and now I feel baited.

Yep, emailed Fdev about it and they have forwarded my concerns to their QA department. Apparently they are aware of the issue. Same thing on the refinery hub.

 

[Zimous]

Yep, emailed Fdev about it and they have forwarded my concerns to their QA department. Apparently they are aware of the issue. Same thing on the refinery hub.

Yeah, hope they fix it, although it's disappointing we can't dock and walk around those structures. At least the bar would have been nice.

 

[mkizub]

Yes, bar in zero-gravity installation... wait, you can use outposts to drink from tubes, right?

 

[vicwarrior]

Since we are about things that work/dont work, are surface dockables meant to be able to just stock 3 things? They already naturally had pretty low market supply, particularly so in the rather undertuned colony systems, it is pretty laughable to see them further restricted to the point of uselesness, anything from the devs regarding this? What are their intended use case for em? I thought it could be a nice encouragement for people to go planetside by allowing them to get some basic supplies out of cheap planetside stuff

 

[_Flin_]

Regarding the economy influence of stations:
Generally i like how this works. It prevents every system to be a triple Coriolis behemoth.

Nevertheless the communcation was abysmal. Something like "Be careful when you build large stations and make sure that the system and the position can actually support them" would have been very much appreciated. As would have the communication where the initial station will be placed.

A one-time feature to move a built station to another place to heal most issues with parge colony stations would therefore be highly appreciated.

 

[Jumpin' Jack Flash]

Hi

Greetings Commanders,

The current process for growing the market in a Starport is to build up facilities on or around the planetary body that it is orbiting.

It's probably common knowledge to yourself and the players, but I'll put forward the questions anyway as I'm not completely sure.
In the case of a system with these parameters...

1. The system has a *default first orbital station build that will be orbiting a non landable planet, and no other landable planets within those orbits.
The build options are there for all the types of orbital station, but I'm not clear whether any of these stations once built will benefit the player unless further planet based stations (Or further orbital stations) are then constructed around any landable planets in the system.

*Default meaning the only choice the game gives you when first claiming that system.

I suppose one answer to this could be don't claim that system, pick another system that has more favourable positions for that first Outpost or Orbital station. As this is a beta test though I partly understand the complexities of this question at this present moment in time, but some brief explanation of these initial choices would help to better understand what path a player might take when confronted with a system of this type.
For example, I claimed and finally built (with some other players help) a Coriolis station exactly as I describe above without fully understanding the game mechanics, I'm suspecting perhaps a few other players might also have found themselves in the same position.
I went on to claim and build an Outpost in another system, this was after I'd read players experiences on this forum, and found out that an Outpost was generally the right path and better choice (For a Solo player) for the initial first station build. No problem there btw. I was taken by surprise though by the differences in what the Outpost produced when completed to that of the Coriolis station, something that I still don't fully understand.

Is this particular case scenario with the Coriolis station are these types of systems still a work in progress and maybe some needing to have some 'tweaks' to make that first station more flexible as regards output, with or without the further building of other stations in the system Or is this 'As is' and that initial station will never reach it's full potential compared to a Coriolis station that is for example orbiting a landable planet.
Knowing some of these questions would obviously indicate what a player might eventually do, and it would also negate the need to waste a players time and effort in collecting commodities and recourses that are not being used to their possible full potential.

Jack

 

[PilotB]

Is this particular case scenario

It seems to be an oversight. The current system seems to be by design but they are looking into ways that could allow the stations that aren't orbiting a landable planet to be influenced. No details when or if that'll work out but there at least has been a statement that they're looking into options. For now it'll usually place your starting station somewhere useless.

 

[Tifu]

Since we are about things that work/dont work, are surface dockables meant to be able to just stock 3 things?

Same complaint, hoping for a change for the better come the Thursday tick.