Elite Dangerous | System Colonisation Beta Details & Feedback
- Thread starter Paul_Crowther
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Dear Developers, Greetings!
I have explored the content of the update enough to share my feedback. The overall concept of colonization with interconnected buildings and structures is exactly what the game needs. It is impressive! Moreover, from my point of view, it requires almost no adjustments. However, there are a few points that definitely need improvement. So:
In simple terms, this would allow players with different playstyles to convert their preferred gameplay method into successful system colonization. Right now, there is no alternative—players who dislike cargo hauling are effectively locked out of this new mechanic.
I have explored the content of the update enough to share my feedback. The overall concept of colonization with interconnected buildings and structures is exactly what the game needs. It is impressive! Moreover, from my point of view, it requires almost no adjustments. However, there are a few points that definitely need improvement. So:
- Lack of an "Elite" rank for colonization.
The new gameplay mechanic is no less significant than, say, the "Exobiologist," which has its own "Elite" rank. In fact, I would argue that system colonization is a much more impactful activity since its results are visible to all players. An "Elite Colonizer" rank is necessary. - No convenient way to track the remaining resources needed to complete construction.
Currently, to check this, you must: open the galaxy map → find the colonized system → open the planet map (if it's a surface structure) → open the structure’s info panel. And the resource list is extensive. Many different locations are visited to buy these materials, and repeating this routine every time is extremely tedious. It would be incredibly helpful to have a dedicated construction progress and resource tab on the left panel of the cockpit interface. - The most critical issue: the lack of alternatives for delivering construction resources manually.
Right now, you have to transport all the resources yourself. For solo players, this is pure torture. For example, I have successfully built a basic starport (a simple station). This took me around six hours of exhausting, repetitive gameplay in a Type-9. It felt like working on an assembly line in one of Henry Ford's factories in the 1920s.
My proposal is simple and requires minimal UI additions:
In the resource delivery menu (either for the colonizer ship or the structure being built), add an "Resource Order" column. Here, players can enter the amount they want to order. The cost of such an order should be 1.5 to 5 times the manual purchase price. This is fair:- Want to make money from colonization? Transport resources manually.
- Don’t want to? Pay for convenience.
In simple terms, this would allow players with different playstyles to convert their preferred gameplay method into successful system colonization. Right now, there is no alternative—players who dislike cargo hauling are effectively locked out of this new mechanic.
Can we get an ETA for the next patch, so those of us waiting to claim a bugged planet can get a fair chance when trying again?
We are players not cyber worker after all, we have our own life in real world. I know construction is a big deal and me myself is a real construction engineer (about EHS) certainly know it needs a lot of human efforts and supplies, but just like real world, 'I CAN PAY SALARIES FOR MORE WORKERS WHEN I DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE TO FINISH THE JOB !! '
An incentive is something that incentivises. What incentivise depends on who is being incentivised.
I know what an incentive is for me, in this case the actual gameplay of building out a system, choosing assets and placements, etc., is a strong incentive. I claimed a large-ish system and I expect to enjoy building it out over the next couple of years in amongst other game activities. Elite is known for its exceptional scale handling, and now we have gameplay loops at a scale to match; I really like that!
If you're talking purely about rewards in terms of in-game player assets, outside of the colonised system itself, we already were told pretty clearly that they are minimal: just credits in the bank and a credits discount on outfitting under some conditions. For a player able to undertake colonisation these are quite irrelevant, I expect.
Since there's been a significant uptake (12,000 claims already is one number) it seems reasonable to conclude that many players don't share the expectation of some asset-based reward or added feature being required in order to embark on such a large-scale task, though it's true the numbers are likely somehwat buoyed by novelty at present - we'll have to wait and see how things pan out longer term.
All these would be decent additions, but kind of frivolous. I wouldn't mind seeing them, but I wouldn't really expect them to repay the development cost. Their absence is unlikely to be a blocker for anyone interested in the underlying gameplay I think.
I guess with passive income and discount and so on we might have something like this, but again I expect ~20M credits/wk is peanuts really for players ready to tackle populating a system.
Information has been published on the web and via the livestream, the game community is good at propagating information widely, a further participation draw doesn't seem to be required in view of the large uptake.
If you see hauling as "punishment" which would be made palatable by some cosy wallpaper or station layout option, I'd simply suggest spending your time on something you can enjoy rather than undergoing real life pain for imaginary assets in a video game.
1. I like the fact you can claim system right after deliver commodities, it can boost a lot of making daisy chain, but still I think it creates a lot of scrap-systems. I think big jump would be nice for explorers but squadrons still will stay around the bubble to be in BGS/Power Play range
2. Supplies - You did it interesting.... small station is reachable in one day of grindin even for one player with carrier, but big one is only for squadrons. I think how it will works with point no 1. If we think about this feature lilke feature focused generally on squadrons - it is fine. For explorers and lonley-wolves not.
3. I resigned from PowerPlay, because hauling so much cargo with constantly very aggresive Power Play Security destroyed all fun for me. Looking for commodities only in my Powers systems is insane, because of CMMs
4. Right.... CMMs... just still big no. I spend hours for searching station and best I found is 20 for 10 minutes in big system with Boom economy. My motivation dropped very low.
5. Tier system - interesting feature, great for stategic economy planning, but with point 1 and 2 it makes colonisation only for big groups of players. So lonely wolves needs to wait for feature connected directly with colonisation. The rest of Galaxy is soo interesting too!
I see a lot of work Frontier and really appreciate it. Just I thought it will be more for me after first announcements. I think I will go back to the void to continue storytelling about Arthur Ryan.
2. Supplies - You did it interesting.... small station is reachable in one day of grindin even for one player with carrier, but big one is only for squadrons. I think how it will works with point no 1. If we think about this feature lilke feature focused generally on squadrons - it is fine. For explorers and lonley-wolves not.
3. I resigned from PowerPlay, because hauling so much cargo with constantly very aggresive Power Play Security destroyed all fun for me. Looking for commodities only in my Powers systems is insane, because of CMMs
4. Right.... CMMs... just still big no. I spend hours for searching station and best I found is 20 for 10 minutes in big system with Boom economy. My motivation dropped very low.
5. Tier system - interesting feature, great for stategic economy planning, but with point 1 and 2 it makes colonisation only for big groups of players. So lonely wolves needs to wait for feature connected directly with colonisation. The rest of Galaxy is soo interesting too!
I see a lot of work Frontier and really appreciate it. Just I thought it will be more for me after first announcements. I think I will go back to the void to continue storytelling about Arthur Ryan.
The CMM fix really helped things! I'm in the final stages of building my Coriolis station, without help from anyone else though I advertised for help, nobody showed up, but that's okay.
An outpost is perfectly doable for a solo player to do as it has a comparatively low material cost. A Coriolis requires 20+ hours of hauling, with optimal placement of your fleet carrier, material availability and very low in-system travel time. Ocellus/Orbis can probably-ish be done, but might not be feasible for someone with a job/social life to do in the space of 4 weeks.
This is a Beta, after all, and I expect FDev to adjust numbers, fix bugs and add polish, for there's certainly areas where such is needed. Overall, I'd say Colonization is likely to be a success, adding another layer of depth to Elite: Dangerous.
An outpost is perfectly doable for a solo player to do as it has a comparatively low material cost. A Coriolis requires 20+ hours of hauling, with optimal placement of your fleet carrier, material availability and very low in-system travel time. Ocellus/Orbis can probably-ish be done, but might not be feasible for someone with a job/social life to do in the space of 4 weeks.
This is a Beta, after all, and I expect FDev to adjust numbers, fix bugs and add polish, for there's certainly areas where such is needed. Overall, I'd say Colonization is likely to be a success, adding another layer of depth to Elite: Dangerous.
ridiculous. that's like saying the incentive of space trucking is getting to move cargo from one spreadsheet in a station to another.
it's not an incentive. incentives aren't subjective imaginary things unique to your own head cannon. you can point to them in the game and go 'this is why it's good to do that'
the discussion that started your response was about where that was stated and how it was being sold to the player IN THE GAME.
it's so weird how this game relies on external resources to make up for bad design or just missing information and we're all just so used to it that we think it's normal. the question you were asked was where these incentives were described to players in the game so they knew why it was worth tempting their stamina for docking and undocking and looking at a spreadsheet in their space ship game for the next few weeks.
yea, claims are cheap and this is brand new. not impressed, nor is it relevant.
that depends on if the only people who bother being invested are the kind of players who wouldn't care how bad or useless it was. what about all the players who take a pass on it?
it is and yet, fdev still gave an upkeep to something that costs much more than a station, why if it's trivial to pay? eliminating that via a colony has value to the player if fdev believes there is value in applying it.
not acceptable. like every update there is a sharp uptake of players who were consuming information and ready. but all new players coming a few weeks from now will likely not be aware and, i guess stupidly, think the game properly and intuitively describes all the relevant info.
not what i said. hauling wouldn't be more palatable by incentives that go beyond some subjective head cannon being imagined. the feature might be more clear to players if such things were explained in game (and if they existed for those that are suggestions).
hauling the same stuff or between the same stations over and over is punishment and not good gameplay. incentives won't change that, it just changes the line you personally draw for how much punishment is too much.
personally, i wouldn't consider such repetitive single action game loops as something to subject players to and instead find a way to make the colony achievements as rare as desired without using boredom as a tool.
there could be different ways to get resources. different obstacles to overcome rather than sleep (associated with other ways to get resources because space trucking doesn't have any that aren't just arbitrary and predictable and end up just wasting more time).
there could be something other than just gathering resources that you need to do. there are so so many better options than just repeating the same boring monotonous space trucking loop. but that's getting off topic again.
i think this was all in regards to the game not explaining in the game, why the player should want to participate in this endeavour. what is the in game consequence of the players choice of where they start colonizing and what system they colonize and what they build in it.
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It looks like Col 285 Sector UR-F b26-5 has just been completed, and it is within 15 LY of that.
(You may or may not have this update on your map yet)
Six hours of transport, if spent on one of the "optimal" credit earning methods instead (exobio, say) could earn well over a billion credits.
So there'd basically never be a reason to haul the cargo manually - do something else instead (which can maybe also get you materials, reputation, Powerplay merits, etc.) and spend the income on the transportation, and you get it quicker too.
It'd need to be something ridiculous-sounding-but-actually-balanced like 2 billion credits to fast-track a basic outpost.
20 hrs of hauling alone for Coriolis? (Is that one with ~50kT of cargo, and 12-13 K of CMMs?). Feels like I play different game today hahaha
And not only that.The "general" colonization mechanics themselves are okay (just okay, there's a serious lack of player control over the system, but perhaps they've left this for Vanguards?). In any case, the current implementation of colonization-building is terrible and exclusively focuses on grinding in one way - deliver cargo 250 times, then go to the asylum.
Colonization should incorporate all gameplay mechanics - combat, turning in cartography data, biodata, trading - everything should push the construction sliders to some degree. Moreover, we need more BGS systems, for example signals exclusive only to systems in colonization mode, which would also push the construction slider (not necessarily forward, for example if you couldn't protect a trader at T7 in a danger level 4 signal - the construction slider falls down, just as an example). At current state, colonization looks again (wow, how unexpected..) like a "minimally viable product." Once again, the bones are made, but there's no meat, and the implementation looks even worse than mining before its rework. I hope that FD won't abandon another new mechanic and will really listen to feedback this time. The one can dream, i guess..
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I completely agree. But the main problem at this stage is the impossibility of colonizing systems in any other way than by monotonous transportation of goods personally. It is extremely strange that it is impossible to delegate these powers to NPCs in the background (the ability to order resources directly at the construction site). Let its cost be much more than they pay now when handing over resources. But at least it will be possible to convert other types of activities (mercenaries, cartography, exobiology) into colonization. You are right. The fact that colonization can only be done in one way is annoying. There are no accompanying missions. For example, it would also be nice to see the transportation of colonists from neighboring systems in the form of passenger missions. And I am also wildly annoyed by the fact that you still can’t start your own faction simply in the game by paying with credits. Only through the forum. Of course, I would prefer to carry out colonization not for some unknown faction, but for my own. But now at least it would be good to eliminate the need for many hours of monotonous transportation of goods.
There seems to be a disconnect here. Apart from that you seem to think there's no more to system colonisation than moving things from A to B, are you saying that I don't actually want to do the things that it appears to me I do want to do? If not, then how do you explain that I want to do them? Or are you saying it's "ridiculous" that I want to do them?
I don't find the design bad. I think the company is limited by their developer spend, it's a niche game with low numbers compared to AAA titles and a budget to match, so I think their reliance on the game community is a pragmatic way of focusing their budget, I agree that in-game documentation could be better maintained but the existence of many out-of-game sources is more than compensatory.
I don't think that was asked to me. I just commented that clearly incentives are out there, given the significant uptake and I was jumped on and required to explain myself, which I've tried to do.
Good for them! There's plenty else to do.
New players have always had to sink or swim in the ED learning pool, I don't think this is any different.
If you think undergoing punishment for whatever reward is good gameplay then all I can say is we differ strongly on that. You seem unable to conceive that people can enjoy trucking.
Here we do agree, I would like it if the idea I've seen proposed of something like a PP progresss bar which could be advanced by a variety of assignments from the colonisation depots, for example, were to be implemented. The fact that it isn't is a design choice probably strongly influenced by how much developer reource was available for the feature. With all the competing demands by players for features and improvements to be implemented, I don't envy the people charged with making these calls.
"Optional construction methods" like for example paid by ingame money should consider few things: time needed for construction, costs and benefits to player. I for example would like to have bonus in case of "manually hauled" structures. I also expect huge complains potential if someone would be allowed to just "buy" his way to distant/special places (myself would dislike this for sure).
I think CMM Composites are a good example of where FDev have done a good job of reactively listening to our feedback and making a small configuration change to help.
But it is also an example of where the absolute basics of game design were not done before releasing a major feature. It was obvious on paper that in the initial configuration it was not realistically possible for a player to build even an Outpost solo; now it is, after an exceedingly obvious fix to the exceedingly obvious problem with Composites.
HOWEVER - we have a whole new gameplay which relies on finding goods in-game, not via Inara. Which means FDev absolutely needed to fix the filters on galaxy map in this release. And did not.
I think the design where capability of what you can build scales with the size of the player group doing it is a great piece of design, and I think "build an Outpost before anything else" makes a huge amount of sense, so I agree a lot of the complaining in here is quite entitled and should be ignored.
But "it's impossible to build an Outpost in a month for an average player" could have been seen coming parsecs away, and "hey everyone people will be using the economy and population filters a lot now" could be seen from a good number of light-years too. Arguably the latter is beta grade but the first one should never have made it into an alpha. It's a core loop.
But it is also an example of where the absolute basics of game design were not done before releasing a major feature. It was obvious on paper that in the initial configuration it was not realistically possible for a player to build even an Outpost solo; now it is, after an exceedingly obvious fix to the exceedingly obvious problem with Composites.
HOWEVER - we have a whole new gameplay which relies on finding goods in-game, not via Inara. Which means FDev absolutely needed to fix the filters on galaxy map in this release. And did not.
I think the design where capability of what you can build scales with the size of the player group doing it is a great piece of design, and I think "build an Outpost before anything else" makes a huge amount of sense, so I agree a lot of the complaining in here is quite entitled and should be ignored.
But "it's impossible to build an Outpost in a month for an average player" could have been seen coming parsecs away, and "hey everyone people will be using the economy and population filters a lot now" could be seen from a good number of light-years too. Arguably the latter is beta grade but the first one should never have made it into an alpha. It's a core loop.
Frontier I think needs to be a little more careful when creating painful repetitive tasks for players. Player count is up but the brain dead grind play some are experiencing can result in some people leaving Elite and never coming back…again.
50 kT of cargo on the planning sheet, but 70 kT of cargo when you actually call the colony ship, yes.20 hrs of hauling alone for Coriolis? (Is that one with ~50kT of cargo, and 12-13 K of CMMs?). Feels like I play different game today hahaha
CMM Composites is a great example of FDEV not knowing anything about the game they are releasing.