I dont understand how our suggestion is considered so alien when we already do exactly this with carrier buy orders. We convince people to do things we dont want to do by setting rewards such as cr. Im worried by how difficult this is to generally understand. Did we forget that this game has an economy?
Mind numbingly boring hauling
- Thread starter Peter Mannion
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Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Read and responded - there seems to be a desire from some to get others, whether they be players or NPCs, to put in the time to progress the colonisation on someone else's behalf as they seemingly don't find it to be to their taste....
They did, once upon a time, try to push emergent player economies by making commodity markets a default, bolted on feature on FCs, rather strange that they completely gave up on it for this update. Or the whole no monoactivity grindfests from PP2... While i do understand devs want to make it so that colonisation can't be afked away with NPCs, it should absolutely need something else other than hauling, becuase in its current state it is worse than AFKing.
You are one of a few. The majority of players follow the flow of credits and not charity. Props to you for being charitable, but my point is that your services are limited. The number of unanswered discord requests in the many servers i'm in from players wanting assistance without any currency reward support this.
You're in a Op Ida bubble and not seeing the full extent of the game's economy and trade.
Again, failing to mention the monetary cost. Its not a "request hauling for free" in which all of your comments are suggesting.
Possibly a significant change would be to allow an architect to remove a facility. Even at the complete loss of time & commodities.
This would encourage cmdrs to correct their system rather than abandoning it and starting fresh.
With growing knowledge of the purpose and interactions of facilities, a system can be greatly improved by replacing low-cost surface settlements. Even large facilities, like a Coriolis that was placed over a useless planet. Or a player that is 25% done an orbis and now discovered it is in a useless location. Currently it is better to abandon an otherwise perfectly good system and start fresh somewhere else.
this made me chuckle lol
From my experience, credits are still of big value. Im not struggling fulfilling my carrier buy orders by setting competitive prices
I have opened my eyes and have seen that hauling companies, distributors, shops, restaurants all exist because we can hire people to haul goods for us.Have you ever opened your eyes and looked at what travels on the roads, rails and sea's today.
I among many others have spent years (over 45) hauling in RL, almost everything needs to be transported at sometime, its a fact of life.
Having hauled for the construction industry (among other things) I am surprised that the amounts are so low
You of all people must know that this isn't an alien concept
i know i feel terrible
It would be neat to have mission rewards that were essentially shipping manifests of some bulk material. So, I assassinate someone for XYZ faction via a mission and one potential reward is that they give me a manifest data-item "mat" worth 5000 steel. I can go to any construction site and "spend" the mat to deliver 5000 steel. That would open up every type of gameplay, and cut down on the tediousness of menu, loading screen, menu. The manifest mats would take up no cargo space, so a player could gather the ones they need and drop them off all at once.
Note, for anyone that has a tendency to take everything literally, that my numbers are arbitrary and would of course need to be set based on game balance.
I think there are plenty of plausible solutions to the problem of this gameplay loop being tedious and boring; it's not a lack of solutions that is the problem.
In my feedback post linked below it is one of suggested fixes, basically to allow to do missions/favors/whatever to local factions within range of the colonisation projects to get them to send stuff from flush markets directly to the construction project.
This way we can avoid the hauling borefest, include meaning in the economy and need it to produce what is neccesary, and get more involvement from factions, without trivialising the logistics of doing projects way out there. Hopefully thereby it feeling more like being an "architect" pulling political favours and getting support to develop your projects, and while i get that is not exactly their role IRL, it is certainly a lot more exciting and engaging than space trucking away your free hours for several days.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
When credits are, to a not insignificant number of players, effectively meaningless and where fun during their game time is more valuable, it's not really about the credits any more.
Wow, what a ride. Thanks OP for this thread. You got me through Monday morning
What lively discussion...I want to give my two cents but I find myself balancing on the fence here.
As someone who just started their first colony, yesterday (FC pulled up at Midnight and I didn't really start hauling until after work, kids, dinner) I have some thoughts. I was originally going to wait out the beta period with my FC at Sag A*. I had just recouped my tritium costs and was working on packing on an extra billion in exobio until I noticed all the hubbub going on with the new release. Intrigued, I figured I could live with a smaller profit out of this trip to try it out for myself. Jumping the carrier between meetings and taking advantage of some rainy weather on the weekend, I made it to the system I'd picked that met some minimum requirements.
I spotted some folks point out that outposts are much easier to start with than the spinny boys. So, in the partially distracted time I had last night, I was able get half of the commodities I need. Huh...well...I have to admit, that feels too easy. I like to do just about everything in Elite so I was prepared to have to hunker down for a week or two to get my first successful claim. Heck, I'm going to make appreciable progress during my lunch break (if I don't keep typing here).
I can say, if you don't like hauling...this is not for you. Also, if you do like hauling, your are going to find this boringly easy near the bubble. Maybe I got lucky? I didn't do any research beyond checking for amonia worlds and at least 1 landable yet, I ended up with a system 38.9 ly away that has almost everything I need on regular stations. Then there is the Trailblazer ship that has literally everything.
As for the NPC suggestion, I like it a little bit. I would like the ability to let my over paid fighter pilot take the T9 and follow me in my Cutter. Being able to command a large number of NPCs to do your bidding apart from your immediate and present influence starts sounding like a different game. We already saw FDev put another game in Elite (Odyssey) and it has proven that is an expansion of scope that is very risky.
TLDR: Unpopular opinion...outposts are too easy. This is a hauling update. FDev made required commodities too available. Make the NPC Crew do a little more than get wasted at the bar.
What lively discussion...I want to give my two cents but I find myself balancing on the fence here.
As someone who just started their first colony, yesterday (FC pulled up at Midnight and I didn't really start hauling until after work, kids, dinner) I have some thoughts. I was originally going to wait out the beta period with my FC at Sag A*. I had just recouped my tritium costs and was working on packing on an extra billion in exobio until I noticed all the hubbub going on with the new release. Intrigued, I figured I could live with a smaller profit out of this trip to try it out for myself. Jumping the carrier between meetings and taking advantage of some rainy weather on the weekend, I made it to the system I'd picked that met some minimum requirements.
I spotted some folks point out that outposts are much easier to start with than the spinny boys. So, in the partially distracted time I had last night, I was able get half of the commodities I need. Huh...well...I have to admit, that feels too easy. I like to do just about everything in Elite so I was prepared to have to hunker down for a week or two to get my first successful claim. Heck, I'm going to make appreciable progress during my lunch break (if I don't keep typing here).
I can say, if you don't like hauling...this is not for you. Also, if you do like hauling, your are going to find this boringly easy near the bubble. Maybe I got lucky? I didn't do any research beyond checking for amonia worlds and at least 1 landable yet, I ended up with a system 38.9 ly away that has almost everything I need on regular stations. Then there is the Trailblazer ship that has literally everything.
As for the NPC suggestion, I like it a little bit. I would like the ability to let my over paid fighter pilot take the T9 and follow me in my Cutter. Being able to command a large number of NPCs to do your bidding apart from your immediate and present influence starts sounding like a different game. We already saw FDev put another game in Elite (Odyssey) and it has proven that is an expansion of scope that is very risky.
TLDR: Unpopular opinion...outposts are too easy. This is a hauling update. FDev made required commodities too available. Make the NPC Crew do a little more than get wasted at the bar.
Phew! I'm glad you see the error of your ways. I was worried I was going to see you also suggesting we hire NPCs to do all of the Power Play tasks or BGS missions. Heck I might see a thread from you in the exploration forum lamenting that you can't send out npc expeditions to scan systems and take exobiological samples. So it's good you understand.
I'm in this camp. Two of us have made small stations, we've made two, going on three, larger stations. Since we can't have our own small faction own the place because (some mega-player group controls everything around) that already takes some of the fun out of it. Anything to help offload some of the hauling monotony would be appreciated, because there's no challenge or gameplay involved really. Jump > buy > jump > sell. The hardest thing is not slamming into the ground or cage trying to do it 2 seconds faster than the last 100 trips.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
If a Squadron member, and that Squadron is affiliated to a Faction, the Squadron affiliated Faction is brought in as the third place Faction when the first station completes - "all" that is needed then is to work the influence of the chosen Faction.
I think the issue is that there isn't just one problem with colonization, so there won't likely be just one solution to fix it. I don't hate hauling, but hauling for no real reason? That gets old fast. There's no real reason to colonize except to say you did it. There's no real reason for anyone to go to your system over any other system, colonized or otherwise, except if you build something that bugs out in some hilarious way, and even then, it seems, Fdev will remove that interesting thing from the game. The direct rewards from colonization (a weekly sum of credits) are laughably low for the time-investment involved-- not to mention insultingly uncreative. Colonization is already a credit-earning venture. I don't need more credits, let alone such a small sum of them.
I suspect the reason outposts are so low in requirements is because there are construction points you need to contend with to further build up a system. You're going to be building a fair amount of those smaller structures if you want a T3 structure. You need to build T1 structures to get T2 points, and T2 structures to get T3 points. (Excluding the primary build, which costs 0 construction points, regardless of what you choose.) It's unclear if there's even a reason to build a T3 structure over a T2 one.
And I worry it's been beaten to death already, but it doesn't have to be strictly a hauling gameplay loop.
Does it have to start from a system in which our faction is present in (but owns no station)? Neither system with the platform or first Coriolis we finished have our faction present yet. It might take a server tick or something.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
No, it does not - as long as a member of the Squadron that is affiliated with the desired Faction is System Architect then, once the first station is completed, the three Factions should be present with the Squadron affiliated Faction in third place in terms of influence.
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