While i agree that paying credits would be an incredibly lazy option to add.... And that a proper fix would be fleshing out the colonisation loop to include more activities.
Wouldn't it still be increasing the amount of activities if they dont intend to flesh it further? Would having the option of mining mission stacking hauling, massacre, robigo runs, exobio.... whatever credit metas there are, still be more variety of activities?
Strictly speaking, no.
Thinking about pre-colonization ED, noting credits are, unsurprisingly, still meaningless back then... even the low amounts you get from "non-meta" activities are still enough to get by. FCs bucked that because they were priced in parallel to pre- nerf nu- mining... but while it took years, there's different meta activities.
But that hints at the problem. You
really want an FC? Well, you're not going to hit up a Threat 5/6 pirate activity site, or go explore Guardian ruins, or do salvage/ hijack/assassination missions. You're going to seek out massacre stacks, or one of those meta- gold hauling outposts; a very strict subset of activities. It's effectively a reduced scope of potential activity to get to that goal.
Now, let's introduce colonisation. It now gives more purpose to hauling beyond "haul gold A->B". Is it a
big increase of activity, no, but it's something, and could do with the diversity as we agree. It's also added market strain for some items which creates a level of player demand, something that is pretty new to the game. TDCs kinda hit that too, and arguably selling meta alloys to get farseer was maybe a thing for new players?
But nothing like this, where an FC stocked with, say, water, could spin a decent profit near a bridge extending more than 500Ly out... so there's logistics and sourcing aspects that are now fairly new to the game... nobody has really (Until now) gone "damn, i need to get 20000t of steel 500Ly out of the bubble" save for maybe one or two CGs.
So, there's definitely a few new things in the mix there.
But now, let's make credits be a way to just instantly pay for the delivery of goods.
Problem 1: That logistic supply chain/ market strain problem that's fairly new for the game is suddenly gone, because resources get magicked out of nowhere.
Problem 2: as i mentioned in another thread, NPC concepts of cost to haul make no sense... so the cost to haul all goods for an Orbis could be anywhere between 40m and 10b, depending on your metric[1]... but player defined value would vary even further (with a suggestion someone would pay 5b for a coriolis, which would put an Orbis at 20b)
Problem 3: for whatever it's worth, that need to haul specific goods a longer distance, whether by FC or by hand, is now gone.
What replaces these things? Well... nothing. We go back to those meta-activities i listed before and everyone just continues doing the same thing we did before, at which point there's genuinely zero value-add in terms of activity in the game.
Once built, the colony doesn't need ongoing oversight and management. It exists, job done, and unless were calling "going to the system map and selecting the facility you want to place and clicking OK" the riveting alternative to hauling... it's just a nothing-update then... take from that what you will i guess.
The only way that doesn't happen is if hauling the goods remained a balanced and viable activity. Most of the argument
for paying NPCs is to make this happen faster though.... i highly doubt the suggestion here is to replace 40 hours of hauling with 40 hours of massacre stacking (i read that as being in the order of about 35b credits?)...
Unless of course, that's what's being asked... but that would be a very short lived story of "all these credits and nothing to spend them on" as we'd quickly be back to simply hauling, coz it turns a profit rather than a tens of billions loss.
So, yeah... paying for credits railroads the game back down to that small handful of meta- activities and reduces options... unlike the Thargoid War and PP2 which gives purpose to
many activities, even some new ones, because there's explicitly no option to "just pay credits and be done with it".
I do understand the risk of giving an outlet to the bloat of credits accumulated due to the unbalanced economy, however right now, to engage with colonisation theres only hauling, nothing but hauling, and the worst form of hauling in the game really (mission/trade hauling atleast gets you to think a little bit). Anything else than endless hours of hauling could be better?
Re: mission/ trade hauling... does it? I figure you think even less because its just "grab stuff and take to a place"... don't even need to think about supply or demand. Maybe thinking about stacking to a like location... but even then, if you're farming the meta, you have one place delivering to only one other place, and it's the same goods repeatedly.
It really comes down to the time that makes people unhappy... in general the ED community seems to take great pleasure in insisting on doing the one thing for 8 hours straight and complaining the game literally tied them to their desk and forced them to do this.
I've done hauling once this week to load my carrier... taking some time to play other games for a bit and will probably just grab a time like the Sunday evening to drop the two hours to build the outpost in this new system.
Were there diverse options, i might drop 2h tonight to reduce/ do the outpost through them, and then spend the Sunday dumping my loaded goods on a different, new outpost.
If credits were the option... I'd jump on for 1 minute, click "Give outpost now" and then go back to Factorio. Not a stellar outcome for FD there.
Yes, again, that would be a lazy fix to the borefest of colonisation. But with the current "variety" of hauling we have, wouldn't it still be an upgrade?
No.
There's a sidebar here which I'm indifferent to here around "the point of colonising"... since the end result is literally just an NPC system like any other, except you get to see your face as the architect on the concourse, and you can maybe pay arx to change the names of stations to "Ya hmar" and "Ich bin ein hot dog".
If someone looked at that ignorant to whatever process it took to build these things, I'd understand if they said this was pretty hollow content-wise... and i think paying for assets with credits would hurtle to that point pretty quick.
The point of a feature update like this is to provide activity for people to sink their teeth into for a while. Is the fact that hauling for an outpost takes so long masking that? Maybe... this is actually pretty inline with FD approaches[2]... maybe it's also to buy time until Vanguards, which might introduce a limited squadron asset to can place somewhere as a HQ, so it depends on this feature?
But if the core parts of the update were able to be over and done in a few clicks because you farmed a meta cash cow out of sheer single mindedness (kinda like, i dunno, hauling for a few hours) ... that's a failure imo... even if the only thing between you and that stage is a grind.
In other words... if one thinks this update is a failure because of the sheer amount of hauling grind... i don't think it's going to magically become a success because you can pay to skip with credits.
[1] that's because of the busted economy.
[2] E.g pre- buff Guardian blueprints from the ruins sites... today they cost 1 blueprint, for each blueprint. Before that, it was 3 blueprints. Because you've just spent days finding this site, and just done this neat little puzzle and got a blueprint. I BET YOU WANT TO RELOG AND DO THAT TWO MORE TIMES!
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