The issue is the 'tension' between what explorers seem to want and then translating it into gameplay. People seem to love applying cowboy hats to the suits they wear, crave the sweaty, peanut smelling frontier life of Colonia but then there is a disconnect with what being Firefly entails.
Elite Dangerous | Trailblazers coming 26th February
- Thread starter Paul_Crowther
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I think it's more likely that the mechanics will be adopted by BGS gardeners and PP afficionados to bulk out assets in their territories than not.
I do expect long range colonisation desires to be addressed at some point, but more by making distant colonisation start points available than by a radical (more than 30LY or so) colonisation range upgrade. Personally I'd prefer that, though it won't please everyone.
The issue here is that again there is a fundamental tension between the audience- if TB is the expandy part of PP2 its going to be unsatisfying for many because it will have a bias towards speed and high level abstraction, whereas those who want to build bases will do it once and get bored because there is nothing else to the feature other than where you put it.
While I do agree that we should wait to see what the release of the update actually comes with, so far it does all seem to just point toward “Haul to build base/primary starport, continue to do same for other ports and settlements in system or move along, and repeat”. Unless it does have some other features within the feature to it or will be tied to some other reason like (I’ve seen people suggest) the Thargoids parking some big indestructible things in the Bubble’s (rough) center or superpower capitals and spreading outward from there, it doesn’t seem like it’d be the most interesting thing unless you’re a hauler and happy to contribute to building those ports.
I do see it have some application toward getting factions into fringe BGS territory where they otherwise cannot be retreated due to some 3 faction minimum rule (that I don’t quite understand) but that is about it. “Just build more of thousands of largely identical BGS systems that can be taken over by Powerplay later on” isn’t something to draw me into colonizing. I’d only have a reason to do a thing in deep space if my squad were to decide they wanted to get a presence out in an area near the core (galactic core) after discovering it some time during the last two years.
I do see it have some application toward getting factions into fringe BGS territory where they otherwise cannot be retreated due to some 3 faction minimum rule (that I don’t quite understand) but that is about it. “Just build more of thousands of largely identical BGS systems that can be taken over by Powerplay later on” isn’t something to draw me into colonizing. I’d only have a reason to do a thing in deep space if my squad were to decide they wanted to get a presence out in an area near the core (galactic core) after discovering it some time during the last two years.
Yes I see that, so there's three cohorts here:
- people who are doing the CG exploration because it ties into the colonisation narrative goal
- people who do explo anyway and consider this to be free money for something they were doing anyway
- people doing explo for 2.0 who now have to choose one at the expense of the other
You can see how this is frustrating for that third cohort, and it comes on top of the frustration of trying to use exploration for PP 2.0 in the first place.
You could say "well, as it happens, nobody was doing exploration for PP 2.0 anyway, because it's broken" but that's two wrongs not making a right, if you assume PP 2.0 and Colonisation have something to do with each other.
They should be though, otherwise where is the DLC strategy here? What is the storytelling arc? You've posted a good summary of how they fail to relate, because of how things have landed in the release calendar.
So the idea is players create local mini-factions, thus ignoring both PP 2.0 and BGS. And we have discussed elsewhere how Colonisation IS tied to the factions mechanic.
Yep, get that, so we're bored of PP 2.0 already are we? This is like we had one Thargoid battle and then the Guardians popped up the other edge of the bubble and we went off and had a standalone battle with them instead. Actually there was a whole Thargoid war arc, which is how these things ought to work.
Free money for doing unintelligent things is what people usually end up calling "grind" and yeah that does not sound like exploration for any kind of in-universe reason.
That's fair, but see my first para above. Any new feature or loop or CG or even major content will affect some players and others will go "well, that's not for me." But for players who bought into PP 2.0 and pivoted onto it completely you can see how this is annoying. When I wrote my original comment I was actually thinking only of the mild annoyance of the change of direction, I hadn't realised until reply to Ian above that you now have to choose not to use explo data for PP if you want the CG.
That's directly taking players off the latest hero content, so that's just silly. And indeed it's not all players, but it's a cohort and it will specifically be the newest players who will be most confused.
Elite has always been about choices right from the start, do I do activity A for credits or activity B for the CG, do I sell my Explo data here to rank with the engineer or there for BGS and Superpower rank.
PP is no different just newer in its present incarnation.
I thought it was fairly clear that it will go to the first ruling faction (where the player chooses to buy the Colonisation Beacon) and after that be set by normal BGS?
Government type is according to the faction ruling a system, right?
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You see those two highlighted words, credts, that's what you were suggesting, that the CG is to help players earn credits, and I said it can hardly be for credit boost because you aren't getting much in the way of credits for the work put in, you are better off ignoring the CG and just doing exo to earn credits ready for the release. In the time I have spent turning in data for a few hundred million credits UC and the final 125m reward for being in the top 25% I could have made 4b or 5b just doing exo for a few days, so it's certainly not for the credits because the reward per hour credit wise is pretty pathetic. It's not a big rewards CG that's for sure. I mean it's almost as if you don't read your own posts. The payouts are tiny compared to any decent credit earning activity.
Though they're mostly asking for different things in terms of what scores for each, so you can if you want hand in systems with high-value mapped planets to Powerplay (which are the only ones currently counting for that), then hand in all the zero-merit scans for the CG, most of which will still count towards the CG. If you're willing to spend an annoying amount of time micromanaging your turn-ins, you can still get close to full scores for both at once.
Also, even if the CG system was a Powerplay system, 11 in 12 pledged players (on average) still would have to choose between the two, because Exploration is solely a Reinforcing action, so anyone pledged to anyone else wouldn't be doing any good. The issue here is that most CG types don't work well with Powerplay at all rather than it being a specifically exploration one; placing it in a neutral system at least means Frontier avoids being accused of putting a finger on the scales to ensure a system was reinforced/undermined.
I think the only CG type that wouldn't have the 11/12 issue and involves a merit-giving activity at all would be Mining (and even then, would need to have an in-system opportunity for the CG commodities). In general, setting that sort of thing up would be likely to put significant undermining pressure on the CG system, whereas all the ones with the 11/12 issue - trade, bounties, rares if enabled, salvage, exploration - would likely significantly reinforce the system. Either way it can't be done "neutrally" so positioning CGs outside of Power space is much less likely to lead to complaints.
I think the strategy here is "give the sort of people who weren't interested in Powerplay a feature that they might like".
As far as storytelling goes, neither Powerplay nor Colonisation - when under direct player control - is likely to be suited to any sort of pre-planned story arc except in the very broadest sense over a period of several years.
Which some of us think is a very good thing.
True, hadn't thought of that!
That's true, which I suppose just makes my "where is the storytelling" grumble a bit broader. The AX CGs at least had y'know AX as the reason and that was pretty well decoupled from PP 2.0 (admittedly because PP 2.0 didn't exist for most of the elapsed time of the AX arc...)
Difference with Colonisation is that IS linked to growth of the bubble and growth of the Powers IN the bubble, but as you say, that's just an eternal CG issue now unless FDev find ways to keep it neutral.
I was thinking yesterday Mining is a fun example of the journey we've been on since November. That went from a forum opinion of "it's hideously broken" to "mining is the fastest way to do PP cycle x y and z" pretty fast.
That's fair but we'll see how might goes, given any five people who "might like it" in this thread seem to have ten opinions between them on what the mechanic they "might like" might actually be.
True. Honestly if it goes back to a sandbox but a more complicated sandbox I'm cool with that, but that does still require the sandbox to Actually Work and there are still many cases in PP that do not Actually Work, so adding another new bit instead of fixing that bit is certainly a ... choice. I guess if we're saying the majority of the Colonisation audience aren't the PP audience anyway, it doesn't matter.
I don't know. There's reasons to be concerned and there's also reasons to be cheerful. I'm fine with waiting without having to think of only the bad things that might go wrong, though of course I'm also somewhat disappointed (as I'm sure many are) that Frontier skipped January for a FU that would have likely provided some much wanted information. But it is what it is and just over two weeks away, so we'll see. I'm keeping an open mind.Speaking for myself only, I don't see my posts as complaints, but concerns.
Largely because the lack of information Frontier is willing to share beyond the very basics (it's their way of building hype, cuts both ways I guess) and me not trusting them to roll it out without plenty of issues.
And as much as I like regular updates, releasing one before fixing the previous one is just asking for trouble. I'm sure they have it all under control though
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I just want a hydroponic farm and a bar with a view of a pretty sunset to stare into while I drink away my space blues.
Well, this ties into what I was saying about taking a long view. The Colonisation feature (as currently understood) is IMO better thought of as a sandbox/BGS extension that will give some long-term player agency over system disposition, and that's all. Anyone who wants to build bases will get close to literally nothing out of it - it simply doesn't offer any possibility of building a base.
The assets you can place - starports, settlements, whatever - are not "bases" in any meaningful way, except for the same rp / headcanon that can make any existing system asset into a "base". They don't offer any unique facilities or benefits to the player and give players no reason to hang their space hats there rather than anywhere else before logging off for the night.
A Fleet Carrier is much much closer to the notion of a base than assets in a colonised system. You get to name it, control access, operate a market (when working), fire the staff, choose to offer services or not, ...
Conflating Colonisation with base-building has been and will be nothing more than a source of unnecessary and avoidable disappointment AFAICS. FDEV have talked about empire building, and "owning" a system, but "base building" was (falsely) claimed only by third parties initially (before the actual feature was announced) and has unfortunately coloured expectations since then.
This could change if FDEV decided to build in a degree of actual ownership - the possibility of a "vanity" starport/settlement to which the player has the same kind of relationship as they do to their Fleet Carrier, for example - but there hasn't been any such indication to date. Without FC-style features, shuffling modular building blocks around would ultimately prove as unsatisfactory as merely building settlements, for strictly base-building purposes.
Tl;dr: complaining about poor basebuilding in Colonisation right now is barking up a tree in a different forest entirely - at least that's how it looks to me.
people grasp onto base building because without that, or without some un-documented new crazy gameplay they are keeping secret, all you have is "adding another bgs system".
And really you dont need more bgs systems. Nobody is wishing there were more stations to do the same exact thing you can do in the thousands of existing ones already to the same impotent affect.
And really you dont need more bgs systems. Nobody is wishing there were more stations to do the same exact thing you can do in the thousands of existing ones already to the same impotent affect.
It would be nice of there was other new stuff, that I must agree with, but it isn't base building for sure, that's just purest hogwash. But it doesn't matter because even if all we get is what we know so far, there's still enough in the game that ignoring colonisation completely is a perfectly fine option for most players. It's an added thing to do, it doesn't take away anything that's already there, and it expands the available feature set to help attract new players and retain old ones. If there is other new game play.....possibly, it probably won't be earth shaking, but colonisation is a huge undertaking and there will be stuff they haven't told us about because all we have had so far is small snippets.
Personally even if I never use it to colonise a new system I am still excited for it simply because it makes the game better!
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"Just more stations" is a very miserly characterisation of what we know of the colonisation. The point is choosing where the stations are and growing them out, not simply increasing the number.
If that's not your bag then, rather than crafting a beautiful club out of thin air and smacking your own face with it, carry on enjoying the game in the normal way, or .. just play a game that you actually enjoy?
My point is that TB has been pitched wrong, and that the players want something different to what has been shown. TB is very much making fodder for PP2 and having dibs on superficial choices. As a PP2 guy this is fine for me, but I can see for many others it won't scratch the itch they have- but we will have to see in two weeks time.
And thats my other point: is placing a new station in predefined slots enough? People want more customization (as made known from FC feedback) rather than the whole gameplay being a lot of hauling / placing / hauling / placing."Just more stations" is a very miserly characterisation of what we know of the colonisation. The point is choosing where the stations are and growing them out, not simply increasing the number.
If that's not your bag then, rather than crafting a beautiful club out of thin air and smacking your own face with it, carry on enjoying the game in the normal way, or .. just play a game that you actually enjoy?