Alright, after enough disorganized ranting, i feel like its time i began to properly organize my thoughts, rank issues on how bad they are, and offer up some fixes, from easy, to needing proper work:
Issues:
There's nothing but hours of hauling: Even if you distribute the hauling among people, at the end of the day, its still just hauling, nothing but hauling, and hours upon hours of hauling to get a system set up, i understand a fully built up system has to be a long term project, or group effort, but its not an excuse for it to be a single monoactivity borefest.
Bad communication: I have seen that yes, in the codex theres a throwaway line that hints that economy influences are "local", yet whenever one goes to build anything, they read the label of "system economy influence", when one thinks system, they do think the entire system, not the body theyre on and the immediate orbit. As much as elite dangerous is not meant to be a handholdy game, this is an effort thats going to take hours/days of mind numbing hauling. Its ok to learn by failing if the cost of failure is your ship's rebuy, its not if hours have gone into building something that can't be undone/moved.
Material list is inaccessible while in game: I know it is in the map, but if you are building something, you should be able to add it to the mission board, its pretty jarring while building a main port and have the mission on it, it provides absolutely no useful data.
No seriously, even mission hauling is more engaging than this: With mission hauling you have to think of where to source certain items, where you can stack the most missions, if for a certain mission maybe you are interested more in the engineering mats than credits, what you fill the rest of your hold with, if maybe you want to switch to massacre/tourism missions there..... Here its just go to refinery -> Dock and max buy steel/titanium -> fly back to construction site -> dock and dump everything -> Undock and warp to refinery, over and over for hours, seriously, 90% of goods are refinery too, even farm simulator is more interesting than this.
Does it have to be 90% refinery stuff?: You'd think station construction would need to leverage the different economies, industrial for prefabricated panels (building fabricators, or wherever you decide to put this tonnage) life support (atmospheric thingmajigs) and power (i have ships with heavier power plants than some stations do, apparently), high tech and extraction could too be overall better involved in construction goods. Current state seems to dictate that any "mini-bubble" is going to be 100% reliant on whatever player is building the local refinery, and exacerbates the pain of lack of building variety.
Lack of building variety and mislabelling: Yeah, for refineries theres just the t2 ground hubs, considering that's the linchpin economy of colonisation, perhaps ripping apart and reassembling some assets to make orbital installations and settlements of this economy is in order. Also, the mislabelling has been mentioned by several other players, and made note of in the excels, so im not going to lose too much time on it, landing pads are wrongly marked on those, images incorrect...
Colonisation is unrewarding: Leaving our mark in a system and building it up is cool and is what is driving most of us, but damn the rewards for doing it are pretty poor.
The community effort goal has no mechanics for engaging the community: People are doing the workaround of buying at an FC to try to get people to carry for em, but we really ought to be able to directly reward those who help us build our systems.
I thought after PP2 they learned to not make monoactivity grindfests: Okay, last time, i promise. I know some might call anything beyond t1 a group effort, but even if we can try to recruit other people for our colonisation efforts, its kind of moot if we are still just asking them to engage in monotonous boring gameplay on our behalf. Just like we can have fun with PP2 or farming creds in the ways we enjoy the most/tolerate best, we ought to have more ways of participating.
ELW and terraformables are worthless: Self explanatory, the precious bodies capable of holding life are actively a liability in colonisation, since they tend to lack ground slots and can't be developed thus. I understand if there's no proper system to manage developing pops on em, but having some communication from devs regarding their future intents would be nice. If i dareso to ask, maybe even a placeholder agri influence from ELWs or WWs until something more fleshed out is developed.
All the damn bugs: It would certainly be a lot easier to isolate and replicate the whole "station placing itself in the wrong spot" if there was an undo button, would it?
There's no t3 point sink: Anyone thats not a youtuber with a servile community of haulers, or a total no life hauler willing to solo a t3 station, has absolutely no use for em, even the previously mentioned ones will likely not be willing to use them once the point doubling starts to hit. Something else to use them on that wont require endless hauling, or remains desirable after having a t3 in your system would be nice.
Extremely shallow system identity: Beyond the economy of the larger stations in the system, theres not much to a colonised system, if you want players to actually care for their systems and maybe spring some ARX on renaming stations, perhaps they should have more reasons to care about them and how they stand out among the surrounding systems.
No architect exclusivity to colonisation contact: Plenty of people have mentioned this, its rather pointless to try to build a road towards some system you want to grab if someone else can just grab it under you while you are forced to watch the brewer corp low res "congrats" png.
Why is there the random variance to construction tonnage!?: What do you have against spreadsheets and planners? Seriously, i cannot fathom what purpose this is for, do please inform of us of the reason to exist of this "feature" or remove it.
Short construction range: I understand you are afraid of over tuning this one, but FC jump range is 500 LY, mandalay does almost 100 Ly, i think 50 LY colonisation range is fair enough. Being far from developed economies is additional challenge enough. Perhaps exploration/communication could be made to extend this range, so "road" systems are actually developed and more valuable to players who might want to branch off towards their own claims.
Easy fixes:
Communication, but properly: Do label things more correctly and even provide a glossary, what is system happiness in regards to architect payments? What do the different system stats do? We dont need a BGS manual, but we do need a basic explanation of how we are affecting our buildings and the direction we take our system when we build different things.
Rebalance construction costs: Cut down construction tonnage by 30-40% (Atleast until other activities get added, then maybe just 15-25%) then redistribute the tonnage among different economies so that a "mini bubble" does properly need various players working together to build different economies that can help eachother to further develop their systems. If other activities get added to pull goods from local markets, this also rewards being in an economically diverse area, and nudges people back to hauling if they lack something locally. Furthermore, tonnages could be distributed depending on the building to actually make more thematic sense, a base dug inside an asteroid shouldn't cost the same as a coriolis, should be skewed towards explosives to dig it out and structural regulators to stitch it back together or something akin to that.
Satellites and other communications installations shouldn't have computer components and high tech be a footnote to the bulk metals needed.... You have a wide breadth of commodities in the current game, use them where fitting. Hell id be okay with more "regional goods" like power converters/emergency cells, something that i have to actually look for is far more engaging than doing yet another braindead metal run (however considering the insulated membrane boosts and second CMM buffs, maybe im wrong here? Do feel free to provide insights here).
Actual effort fixes:
Overhaul construction process: I know this one surprises no one, but while hauling can remain the "main" activity for it, it absolutely needs more ways to contribute to it, all while acknowledging that encouraging credit farms is dangerous due to the broken game economy.
Here there are multiple ideas, first is simple mission board, reuse simple missions, except now they take something that is in the local market over 50% stocked and send it towards a colonisation project within range of x LY, maybe diminishing returns the further away? This way, if you have local economies you can leverage them to provide stuff you need for construction, with the proper labelling of those contributions as "investments" from the local factions into your facilities, it could help further cement your role as "architect" rather than space trucker, and administrator, rather than owner.
If bolting on market supply onto missions directly is too difficult, perhaps an intermediary "requisition points system could be added, work for a faction and they give you requisition points up to a cap (Maybe 10k? to balance it out and keep singular players from zeroing out market supplies to build a system overnight), here we could have more granular ton/distance/point cost balancing, as well as getting players to actually care about their local areas BGS. Fear here that people might prefer to farm more reliable requisition points, and thus blob out larger PMFs more than they already are, maybe balance point would be that using requisition points could harm the PMFs influence in the system where they are used? I could use more input from BGS warriors for this. Requisition points could also be used to cheaply unload FCs within system and sned 0 LY commodities from local markets for cheap. Develop systems ought to develop further easily ofc (and with tax cap, i dont see this as risky).
Colonisation UI that actually gives info: Yup, pretty much that, have it give the sum of the colonisation stats, what each facility actually is, because for some reason you dont get to know that after it is already built. Actually showing you what area it means by "Local Economy Influence"... If we are getting spicy, maybe even some general idea of what factors are affecting your system's markets and overall status....
T3 point spending for system "perks": Yup, give a sink to t3 points and give your system more identity in one fell swoop. We could brainstorm a bunch of "perks" for a system for which we could spend t3 points on, with each further perk being increased in cost so to encourage limiting the amount of perks we take, while still being able to give some reward for extremely developed systems. Theres plenty of ways we could use perks, some of them more expensive, like one to make regional products, like emergency power cells, be also produced in your system. Or otherwise not guaranteed to be produced in a valid system, like onionhead gamma. Material traders, tech brokers.... Some product specialisation (like getting deeper market supply for wine to make a booze cruise cellar, or just a construction stash for future developments in a mini bubble)... Again, im sure we could brainstorm a lot more, all to make our systems slighly unique in a way, and make them interesting in a region.
More rewards: I understand to be somewhat reticent to make a passive source of credits too powerful, so we would have to implement new systems, like commodity vouchers for our systems. Perhaps parking a carrier within our own developed system (10 buildings perk) could help reduce its upkeep (This would also reduce the absolute gridlock of FCs within interesting systems, by encouraging players to park them home if theyre not using them). Plenty of other rewards could be brainstormed here, but maybe they are not that much needed if the previous t3 point spending for system perks is considered, as it could make system development more rewarding.
Architect "bounties" on tonnage: Everyone has suggested this, but it was a pretty bad missed opportunity from the side of emergent player economy to not be able to incentivise construction directly at the delivery site. So i'm posting it here again.
Undo/cancel button: I understand its technically fraught with challenges and possibly dangerous, but if you are going to make us beta test such a broken system its absolutely vital. Its sorta easier to replicate a bug if there is an undo button, as well as to avoid their damage.
Theres a lot more that could be said, but i dont want to get lost in "nice to haves" since fdev would rather make a new megaship with twice as many landing pads rather than flesh out colonisation with stuff it needs, but do feel free to give your own feedback, what big points did i miss? Input from BGS warriors? Anything else they sorely need to communicate better on? Anything you want more elaborated on? Where you ok with having insulated membranes everywhere to make them yet another mindless metal run?
