Elite Dangerous | System Colonisation Beta Details & Feedback

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
Regarding the new Colonisation info, in particular these parts:
The choice of starport and outpost can be further refined with specialisations, such as a Commercial focus which will result in a Colony economy and increased wealth or an Industrial focus which will result in an Industrial economy and an increased tech level.
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Once a facility is constructed, you will see the economy of the star system change, with different facilities influencing the population, standard of living, tech level and more. As more construction efforts are completed in the system, you will gain access to larger and more complex structures to construct
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It is not completely clear how those can be of interest. Any idea how changing the economy, or varying population or standards of living, or tech level can benefit the system architect? Is there any particular specific incentives to fine tune those variables at all? Why bother?

I mean, for example in the game Civilization I can specialize one of my cities to be good at research. That helps me directly into how fast I progress the technologies tree. Or I can specialize a city into producing gold. That helps me directly in buying military units or paying upkeeps. Or I can specialize it in producing ressources. That helps me building things faster. Etc.

How do the above quoted Commercial focus or Industrial focus help me as an architect? How does fine tuning population, standards of living etc help me as an architect?
 
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Julian Ford

Julian Ford
N4KEDP4NTS said:
There are gonna be a lot of 1 outpost colonized systems. This is already boring AF....
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That has been one of my main bugbears since the announcement. They have created a game loop which puts the maximum possible amount of grind between where a player starts and where they want to end up. Want a colonized system in the Outer Orion Spur? Sure, you can do that - if you build 200 outposts between here and there first. And those 199 other systems will be utterly undeveloped and ignored for all time.
 

Kaocraft

Kaocraft
Esvandiary said:
I've picked up from multiple different ports with 1500+ stock in the last day or so. If you're only looking for stations with current data on INARA you're going to have a bad time; going off the beaten path tends to give much better results.

FWIW I think the numbers are basically fine as-is. I don't really know why individual players are expecting to be able to build the most prestigious starports in the game on their own without an extreme amount of effort. I like that outposts are very achievable solo in a matter of days, and I like that creating an entire starport from scratch requires either a significant commitment, or people working together.
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Yeah and even for the solo player there is still an option to set up a carrier and place buy orders at substantial markups to entice players to schlep cargo for you.
 

Nowski

Nowski
Viajero said:
Any idea how changing the economy, or varying population or standards of living, or tech level can benefit the system architect?
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The only relevant thing I've seen was this, on reddit :

riches.jpg


Suggesting the Happiness of the system population can feed into the enormous financial incentives on offer!
 
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Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
Nowski said:
The only relevant thing I've seen was this on reddit:


Suggesting the Happiness of the system population can feed into the enormous financial incentives on offer!
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Yeah, ok, I guess FDEV needs to be a bit more transparent into what types of constructions affect what outcomes, even if we do not get the exact formula details. Also rewards probably need to be better balanced to the effort.
 
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Kaocraft

Kaocraft
Julian Ford said:
That has been one of my main bugbears since the announcement. They have created a game loop which puts the maximum possible amount of grind between where a player starts and where they want to end up. Want a colonized system in the Outer Orion Spur? Sure, you can do that - if you build 200 outposts between here and there first. And those 199 other systems will be utterly undeveloped and ignored for all time.
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Is that really a problem, though?

Seems like we’ll have a lot of waypoint type systems and a smaller number of highly developed regions, commensurate with player interest and effort, which i expect will be pretty consistent with how you would want and expect these colonization efforts to pan out even if they were 100% automated by the game.

Also remember that build orders can stay open indefinitely, so miners and haulers will always have the option of contributing to a given build effort even if the system architect is “asleep at the wheel” so to speak.
 

Nowski

Nowski
Viajero said:
Yeah, ok, I guess FDEV needs to be a bit more transparent into what types of constructions affect what outcomes, even if we do not get the exact formula details. Also rewards probably need to be better balanced to the effort.
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Apologies for quickly editing my post after you quoted - I did it to observe decorum as per forum rules :)
 

Deio

Deio
I can't claim a system, it says "claim unsuccessful" and it's in range. And it's free and should work. Even jumped there and scanned with FSS.
 

mtfatboy3006

M
Kaocraft said:
Yeah and even for the solo player there is still an option to set up a carrier and place buy orders at substantial markups to entice players to schlep cargo for you.
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I've had an order in place for Titan drive components at max price for weeks without a single taker. It turns out there aren't a lot of players looking for carriers to schlep things to for the purchase amounts carrier commodity purchases are capped at.
 

Cebraio

C
Some feedback after a few hours of hauling:
  • We need our carriers for colonization, please buff the servers so we can use them when we need. Currently there are "No time slots".
  • Please allow us to change the construction type without releasing our claim
  • When I released my claim, I was not allowed to reclaim the system. This may be intended but the message before wasn't really clear about it. It just said this may be the consequence.
  • CMM Composites from surfaces are a real grind. Most of us have jobs in RL.
  • ~15LY range is very limited
Despite this, I am very happy with the implementation overall.
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
Nowski said:
The only relevant thing I've seen was this, on reddit :

1740773402133.png


Suggesting the Happiness of the system population can feed into the enormous financial incentives on offer!
Click to expand...

Building a bit on this, what matters to people is mainly credits, commodities and engineering materials (for on foot and for ships). IMHO systems should yield all those for the architect on a weekly basis, not just credits. And do so in varying proportions and amounts, corresponding to the different combinations and sizes of structures built in the system and the type of system (population etc). This way you can make investing in building stuff in the sytem make sense. These rewards can be also made squadron shared with Vanguards etc.
 
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Julian Ford

Julian Ford
Kaocraft said:
Is that really a problem, though?

Seems like we’ll have a lot of waypoint type systems and a smaller number of highly developed regions, commensurate with player interest and effort, which i expect will be pretty consistent with how you would want and expect these colonization efforts to pan out even if they were 100% automated by the game.

Also remember that build orders can stay open indefinitely, so miners and haulers will always have the option of contributing to a given build effort even if the system architect is “asleep at the wheel” so to speak.
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It certainly doesn't feel like meaningful content - it feels like low effort clutter that players are required to contribute to before they can do the thing they want.
 

o2thaZ

o2thaZ
Cebraio said:
Some feedback after a few hours of hauling:
  • We need our carriers for colonization, please buff the servers so we can use them when we need. Currently there are "No time slots".
  • Please allow us to change the construction type without releasing our claim
  • When I released my claim, I was not allowed to reclaim the system. This may be intended but the message before wasn't really clear about it. It just said this may be the consequence.
  • CMM Composites from surfaces are a real grind. Most of us have jobs in RL.
  • ~15LY range is very limited
Despite this, I am very happy with the implementation overall.
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I'am all for point #1
Been waiting all day to jump, so frustrating.
 

GraphicEqualizer

GraphicEqualizer
Current gameplay mechanics, I agree with others who have said that there should be more ways to achieve things than just hauling. However... this should definitely be grounded very hard in actual effort, logistics, materials, supply... so many 'building' games just use a magical hand waving, point a thing at the ground and just build out of magical inventory. I'm glad it is tough work to an extent.

More unique side missions would have been cool (I am always wanting more genuine mission variety, loops we have not seen before).
  • Maybe if you were setting up a piracy themed system you could take missions to take down an extraction site in another system to gain access to their materials as a reward (and not need to ship those), etc.
  • Maybe you could hack a system settlement in a way that caused NPCs to be fooled into delivering their construction goods your carrier. Maybe on foot you could go around a mining/extraction settlement and offer bribes to NPCs to do the same.
  • There should also be a percentage of the material requirements that you can fund NPCs to do the work and be alerted in the message window to missions that require you to occasionally go and protect them like existing missions.
  • There should also be people transport missions to the new facilities too.

MAYBE JUST MAYBE - the new colonisation support ships delivered by the community goal can offer stuff like this. Please!​

There should be a way to collect a good percentage of the resources maybe up to 50% via other means. Missions, NPC actions, Straight up payments,.

Maybe an unpopular opinion too, there needed to be a hard limit on how fast the initial port could be built, as it would help to reduce the rush of plundering of resources and the strain on some commodities like CMM. E.g. rather than being an infinite funnel, maybe the colony ship could only accept X amount per day. Small outposts could be built in a week, larger ones would take 2 or 3 weeks (assuming the player was participating to the max).

Perhaps the current CMM bottleneck could be repurposed as the time limiting factor, as in you have to pay NPC agents to deliver these over time - and it takes a whole week for small outposts, and 3 weeks for the larger ones. You can maybe speed up the process a little by also sourcing them yourself.

In the meantime to offer a bit of variety from the endless cargo shuttling to carrier and waiting to jump the carrier - I am limiting myself to collecting from my own power's systems, that way I can at least occasionally blow up rival power's ships in the vicinity.
 
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DoppyTheElv

D
I would like more player interaction in colonization and the ability to create buy orders in station builds like one can do in carriers. That would allow solo players more leeway with the higher tier stations.
 
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