Opinion: 10 LY range for colonization is ridiculously low.

[Disemboweled Ego]

Kinda missed the background on these. Thought it might be interesting to mention them on Lave Radio but could you briefly explain what they're illustrating?

I got the idea from this:

I just had a thought if we were to make a cellular automata of the expansion of ten light years with the rule that any populated system will expand to systems within 10 ly. We can run it until there are no new populated systems created. This would give us a mp of the limits of growth.

Essentially it's visualizing what would happen if every system available for colonization would be colonized at the first available opportunity.

Practically that's never going to happen, but it's a good estimate to how fast you could move in any given direction - though this is only doing it up to 1kLy from sol which doesn't get to the more sparse (or just unmapped) areas except slightly brushing up against the Col 70 permit lock bubble.

I'll probably keep tinkering on this and have something better soon and look into doing this for a wider area in the next few days.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Made a few more improvements to the visualizations, these should have better opacity with the unoccupied systems and show what gets passed over/never colonized (due to not being within 10Ly range of anything) and running it reverse to accentuate it more.

Source: https://youtu.be/RSGYzhYAcYM

Source: https://youtu.be/NkOjH5OeJvs


I also messed around with only having systems that are worth over 15k FSS value get colonized which gives a more snake-y fractal look to the whole thing, but doesn't really shape it differently.

In practice if colonizing systems is worthwhile for capitalistic purposes then the top X FSS value systems would be most likely to get gobbled up every week and that might lead to some different pattern. It might also end up being a gold rush with different groups making lines towards the X highest value systems in the local area.

If it's just about reaching a destination then it's just a pathfinding exercise.

 

[Tifu]

Just be prepared to see a lot of nearly dead, moribund colonies. BGS has a number of detrimental states (blight, plague, infrastructure failure etc) that require commanders to truck in the necessary commodities to address the problem.

Many of these newly established spots will hardly have anyone visiting them except for the architect and his friends - assuming they stick around for the long term.

Building a colony is one thing, keeping it alive is another.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Many of these newly established spots will hardly have anyone visiting them except for the architect and his friends - assuming they stick around for the long term.

Yeah but there's also backwater systems that are actively visited by like 1-2 people or a smaller group over years that see zero random traffic.

And you could never tell because anything and everything they do in the system has no real permanent effect on the system.

As long as colonization has that and a way for the more developed systems to stand out then the outlook will be more optimistic and people can focus on the cool stuff people do rather than the dead babies.

 

[Martind Forlon]

Opinion: 10 LY range for colonization is ridiculously low.

... seriously? ... we have only basic skeleton info yet. Isn't it too soon for panicking?

 

[Tifu]

Yeah but there's also backwater systems that are actively visited by like 1-2 people or a smaller group over years that see zero random traffic.

And you could never tell because anything and everything they do in the system has no real permanent effect on the system.

There are also a lot of megaships out there in the middle of nowhere but have no problems operating indefinitely. Not the same for fleet carriers operated by commanders which run the risk of being decommissioned for the lack of upkeep.

People are assuming a lot of things about colonization which tend towards the extreme end of optimism. Nothing wrong with that this stage, just be prepared for a good dose of reality when the real details of how colonization really works come out.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

But if you didn't see your country does that mean you should go abroad for a trip? This is not about needs, this is about follow the dreams.

Illinois is about nine miles from here.

I can see the Gateway Arch, about eight miles/12.874752 km. East St. Louis is beyond re-colonization.

 

[Don Alvarez]

... seriously? ... we have only basic skeleton info yet. Isn't it too soon for panicking?

Don't know if its panicking. When colonization was announced everybody started formulating their own ideas about how it would work and what they could hope to accomplish with it. About half those players just had their dreams cancelled by an arbitrary expansion limit, and the framework that's been outlined so far doesn't align with classical notions of what one thinks of when hearing the word "colonization." Some of us were hoping to actually get out and tame distant systems, not squat in the vacant lot next door.

 

[angusmadmac1]

I found this and realised the 10 lyr is the least of your worries ."Stations that are attacked by Thargoids or humans require specific commodities (anywhere from 200,000 to 2,500,000 tons) to bring the station back online." So can you imagine what would be required to build one from scratch ?? Or may be that's why it has to 10lyrs ??

 

[Ralph Vargr]

I found this and realised the 10 lyr is the least of your worries ."Stations that are attacked by Thargoids or humans require specific commodities (anywhere from 200,000 to 2,500,000 tons) to bring the station back online." So can you imagine what would be required to build one from scratch ?? Or may be that's why it has to 10lyrs ??

It'll be a community goal level effort to build one first, let alone rebuild it.

Single players, with a favorite private fishing hole, are probably out of luck.

 

[CMDR Jayce MacLeod]

I had a nice place picked out years ago - just incase colonization was developed...

The star system Is 1500 light years from the bubble though

 

[Orangecrush]

The community beta will definitely help with determining the right amount of lightyears needed for colonization.

 

[LCU No Fool Like One]

Made a few more improvements to the visualizations, these should have better opacity with the unoccupied systems and show what gets passed over/never colonized (due to not being within 10Ly range of anything) and running it reverse to accentuate it more.

Source: https://youtu.be/RSGYzhYAcYM

Source: https://youtu.be/NkOjH5OeJvs


I also messed around with only having systems that are worth over 15k FSS value get colonized which gives a more snake-y fractal look to the whole thing, but doesn't really shape it differently.

In practice if colonizing systems is worthwhile for capitalistic purposes then the top X FSS value systems would be most likely to get gobbled up every week and that might lead to some different pattern. It might also end up being a gold rush with different groups making lines towards the X highest value systems in the local area.

If it's just about reaching a destination then it's just a pathfinding exercise.

Nice. The latest spansh dump will have tens of millions if systems. I could make you a dump filtered just on the inner orion spur.

It looks a lot more expansive than I had thought it would. Is it actually hitting that 1000ly boundary? How many generations before it stops?

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

It looks a lot more expansive than I had thought it would. Is it actually hitting that 1000ly boundary? How many generations before it stops?

It runs out of systems at about 50 which is where I stopped it in the latest videos.

I have the spansh dumps and ways to parse them reasonably fast for just the system coordinates too, what I dread most is how much resources indexing the 3d points to find the systems in a given range fast could get. It should be manageable though. I think I've almost hit the point where I know what data I need and how I want to do the indexing and just need to code a proper version of it and run it for a while.

 

[Tifu]

It'll be a community goal level effort to build one first, let alone rebuild it.

Single players, with a favorite private fishing hole, are probably out of luck.

It's probably why the 10ly limit is there, at least initially. A cluster of colonies 10 ly from each other has a better chance of rebuilding compared to one 500ly away.

 

[Lu-v H8-2020]

I was hyped for colonization then when I heard the 10 ly range my calculations estimated that the place I want to reach just near the bubble's sector with any of the closest tourism oddball systems in nebulas would take me enough time to die of age/game service going down. /holdmyhand

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I gave Spansh a 10LY range and asked it to plot between Sol and Colonia - it took a while, but it did succeed. It spends a lot of time near the bubble hopping between brown dwarf systems because they're really densely packed along the galactic plane ... and then once it gets into the more dense regions around Skaude about half-way there, it can start going a lot more direct.

So you can get to within 15kLY of the galactic core, and once there you can chain to anywhere else in a similar range, and a lot of other places too.

The ultimate limitation with 10LY isn't going to be that much in spread horizontally - at least, not until you get a fair bit further away from the core than Sol is - but how far off the galactic plane you can go. And in that respect it runs into problems pretty quickly even inside the existing bubble, in places.

BGS has a number of detrimental states (blight, plague, infrastructure failure etc) that require commanders to truck in the necessary commodities to address the problem.

Well, or just wait them out - they won't last longer than ten days and most have a maximum length shorter than that.
They also don't tend to get started unless the system has a fair amount of traffic so most wouldn't occur in a largely abandoned colony at all.

What I'm more interested in is if/how they intend to address the opposite problem where almost all the new colonies are BGSly boring for one of three reasons
1) No-one visits so they're stuck in a permanent State: None, so there's no reason to visit, repeat.
2) They've been deliberately designed by their BGS-playing Architect to be boring so no-one tries to take them over: Odyssey settlements are a liability, ringed planets encourage bounty hunting, anarchy factions are too attractive as mission targets, the fewer people who do BGS actions in the system the better (the faction expands much quicker and more controllably via colonisation than it ever did by the BGS Expansion state, so anything which disturbs the perfect balance of influence where nothing can ever happen is unwanted)
3) The Architect didn't care about the BGS at all and therefore didn't bring in any factions beyond the default one, which is pinned to 100% influence and flips between Expansion and None (with the ones on a spur further away from the bubble therefore ending up banning expansion entirely)

Sure, there's no risk of running out of empty systems in the galaxy ... but the bubble is already too large for the number of players to keep the BGS moving much at all in a good half of it and to keep it giving interesting states in rather less than that.

 

[Rubbernuke]

I gave Spansh a 10LY range and asked it to plot between Sol and Colonia - it took a while, but it did succeed. It spends a lot of time near the bubble hopping between brown dwarf systems because they're really densely packed along the galactic plane ... and then once it gets into the more dense regions around Skaude about half-way there, it can start going a lot more direct.

So you can get to within 15kLY of the galactic core, and once there you can chain to anywhere else in a similar range, and a lot of other places too.

The ultimate limitation with 10LY isn't going to be that much in spread horizontally - at least, not until you get a fair bit further away from the core than Sol is - but how far off the galactic plane you can go. And in that respect it runs into problems pretty quickly even inside the existing bubble, in places.


Well, or just wait them out - they won't last longer than ten days and most have a maximum length shorter than that.
They also don't tend to get started unless the system has a fair amount of traffic so most wouldn't occur in a largely abandoned colony at all.

What I'm more interested in is if/how they intend to address the opposite problem where almost all the new colonies are BGSly boring for one of three reasons
1) No-one visits so they're stuck in a permanent State: None, so there's no reason to visit, repeat.
2) They've been deliberately designed by their BGS-playing Architect to be boring so no-one tries to take them over: Odyssey settlements are a liability, ringed planets encourage bounty hunting, anarchy factions are too attractive as mission targets, the fewer people who do BGS actions in the system the better (the faction expands much quicker and more controllably via colonisation than it ever did by the BGS Expansion state, so anything which disturbs the perfect balance of influence where nothing can ever happen is unwanted)
3) The Architect didn't care about the BGS at all and therefore didn't bring in any factions beyond the default one, which is pinned to 100% influence and flips between Expansion and None (with the ones on a spur further away from the bubble therefore ending up banning expansion entirely)

Sure, there's no risk of running out of empty systems in the galaxy ... but the bubble is already too large for the number of players to keep the BGS moving much at all in a good half of it and to keep it giving interesting states in rather less than that.

It will be interesting to see how populated new colonies can get too, because that will be a PP groups motivation as they plump up places for a better PP score.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

It will be interesting to see how populated new colonies can get too, because that will be a PP groups motivation as they plump up places for a better PP score.

Does population matter that much in PP2?

The Power leaderboard just shows system count nowadays, and while it might help a bit against undermining with the System Strength Penalty, most of the new colonies are going to be far enough out the "back" that the Beyond Frontline Penalty should provide even the weakest with a substantial defence.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Does population matter that much in PP2?

The Power leaderboard just shows system count nowadays, and while it might help a bit against undermining with the System Strength Penalty, most of the new colonies are going to be far enough out the "back" that the Beyond Frontline Penalty should provide even the weakest with a substantial defence.

From what the devs talked about in Livestream 4 I assumed systems each had intrinsic value so that it was not just numbers:
Taken from the transcript (sorry for the jibberish but it all has context for timestamps)

13:24
important yeah so the overall right the the goal of the powers specifically is is to basically be the biggest power in

13:32
in the in the Galaxy um so one of the key factors that goes into that is

13:37
basically you know how much do they get and how much is it worth which means that certain star systems that are

13:43
particularly you know they're long-standing star systems they've got like noteworthy um you know economies

13:49
they are full of people they are like hubs of um trade that sort of thing like

13:56
those star systems are probably worth quite a lot so there's a score attached to each of

14:02
the star systems based on its value like it's primarily this is based on its population I think there's quite a few

14:08
factors that go into this but it essentially the the more populated a system is the more it might affect your

14:14
powers ability to do what they want to do so narratively speaking there's a ton of stuff that they get off the back of this they get to basically be a bigger

14:21
power as a result of this um that means they're going to reward you for taking systems that are higher in uh in value

14:28
um so it's not just raw numbers so if I have the 100 star systems and this power

14:34
has 100 star systems we are still probably going to be quite different in score because if I'm holding on to

14:40
something that is like dead center of the bubble I've got like a excuse me I

14:45
got a ton of systems that are you know of extremely high value like very big trade hubs and this other uh Power is

14:51
like on the outskirts of the bubble they've got like the small little outposts they've got a couple of research locations that sort of thing

14:58
those systems aren't quite aren't worth nearly as much as the other systems so it's going to make it interesting about

15:03
how you navigate territory and uh which systems you choose is good so I think that's really important for for players

15:09
to understand right curs it's like and when you're pledging to a power and I think you said it there luk it's not just land grabbing you have to be quite

15:16
strategic in terms of like um what star systems you're going to want to take because population count obviously we we

15:22
spoke about right at the start you know power play 2.0 is about controlling I say controlling people influencing

15:27
people to to be likeminded to the power that you've pledged to so we are kind of

15:33
hoping this this mechanic or power play 2.0 ctis is to it will create areas of natural conflict right because there will be systems where all the powers are

15:40
going to want to have them right yeah exactly there will be like sections of the bubble that are very

15:46
dense in these like high territory value systems that are going to be hot spots for powers to fight over um equally

15:52
though that will leave a lot of systems that go unnoticed because perhaps maybe they're not worth quite as much and they

15:59
might not have players fighting over them which might make it something for players to come in and easily take on their own like couple of players you