Paying for construction in our systems

[jurema543]

Bringing material to construction can be really a pain to do
Especially with T3 starport
So, i suggest to let us just pay Brewer for everything and let them handle the construction.
But of course, it would be broken and too easy you might say
So, here's a suggestion to allow to pay and balance it

T1 construction cost : 250 millions
T2 : 500 millions
T3 : a billion

and make it taking until the server maintenance to be completed and then the starport stay in the construction state for another week

It will make possible to pay for the construction but those who bring material themselve will get the station/installation working faster


and make it so it's IMPOSSIBLE to pay for the primary starport
Could even make it so you can only pay for ONE construction at a time per system

Of course, if you choose to fully pay for an installation to be build, nobody can deliver stuff to it
You pay for it, it will take 2 weeks to get it working.

(and you pay when you order it, not when it's delivered)



you can even add a range limit for this method
like "you must be within 50 LY of 5 habited system (or within the range of an Industrial/refinery system)" for it to work
the range limit will prevent easy distant colonization and still make it so players who really want they own faraway systems to work for it, one way or the others.

I do not think it would be perfect with this suggestion alone, i post that here so people could help us enhance and balance this and then hoping the dev would consider it

 

[Ian Doncaster]

T1 construction cost : 250 millions
T2 : 500 millions
T3 : a billion

This is very cheap for the T3s especially - a T3 construction takes 10-50 times as much tonnage as the various T1s do - and pretty cheap for the larger T2s as well.

The way to look at it is probably "could a min-maxing player make the credits faster than they could do the hauling", which sets a price of at least 50,000 credits per tonne hauled and possibly higher. So that would be at least
T1: 1 billion (a bit cheaper for the installations and Odyssey settlements)
T2: 3 billion (less so for the hubs, of course)
T3: 10 billion
and maybe at least twice that to be sure.

Yes, neither you nor I would make credits that quickly, I expect. Unfortunately it has to be balanced around the sort of player who'll go around some make-money-fast loop at max speed, then spend that cash on setting up parallel paid-for constructions in lots of systems at once. And once even they're priced to the "they might be better off hauling too" point, it's obviously way more expensive than anyone else would bother spending time on. A billion credits for a single fairly small outpost? Two fleet carriers for an Orbis which is - on its own - a lot less apparently useful? Seems absurd. But it has to be that high to stop "earn credits elsewhere and spend them" becoming the obvious colonisation approach.


Credits is just too hard to balance. More non-credits ways of accelerating constructions on the other hand I think would be very welcome:
- handing in Building Schematics could do something
- maybe give some missions bigger commodity rewards (in the hundreds of tonnes range) and let you allocate that reward directly to a construction site

 

[HerrCrazi]

Many great ideas here ! Although the prices suggested by @jurema543 are a little too low I'd say, having an option to pay at least part of the effort would be nice ; perhaps a price could be set for a supply effort that would either be tackled by other players/npcs or as an automatic daily progression bonus that would take like one or two weeks to complete the supply. This comes especially useful (and canonically pertinent) once a first point of presence has been settled into the system, acting as a logistic spearhead for further colonization efforts.It would not make construction automatic, but would lessen the grind required for subsequent constructions.

 

[jurema543]

Well, it's just a suggestion for now as i said

but i disagree with Ian Doncaster's price suggestion
mine might be too low but your feels too high

but we could make it more specifics

Outpost and surface outpost: 500 millions
space installation T1 : 250 millions
Surface installation T1 : 250 millions too


Space installation T2 : 500 millions
Coriolis and asteroide base : 1 billion
Surface installation T2 that give one T3 point : 500 millions
Surface installation T2 that give two T3 point : 750 millions

All T3 construction (since they are all huge base basically) : 5 billions.

 

[Atlantharo]

Hmm... i am ok with the way it is now ...
But if they implement a way to buy it with Credits, without having a big time advantage to other players, i'm ok with it.
For me it would be also ok, whenn there would be a possibility to let brewers get the ressources by themself, but in anycase i prefer to work for what i want, instead of just "Pay" for it.
And don't forget, there are players out there, which have not 100 Billions of credits fly around in their pockets ;-)

Just one thing should be possible ..
We all have to Buy the ressources, and a lot of us has carriers.
It would be nice if the Carriermarket will not only "looks like it have customers" but instead "generate cusomers" by setting a wishlist of commodities.
How higher the price is above the AVG-Price, how mire NPC will bring it.. (Players just do this in a Fleet/Clan/Squad)

 

[GroG79]

No, get haulin

 

[Hydrino]

Why not spawn missions in the surrounding systems (and current one once the first base is built) to bring the resources in and allow players and NPC/ BGS to prompt the hauling to get the job done. Frontier still likes grind despite progress last year reducing it. The same principle of just paying for things applies to every game loop with Engineering being the most logical target of all. Some grind is OK or even good depending on how it’s implemented and if it is as tedious as a real life job or not. So what’s the right balance and how does it work and does it make sense in the game context. I’ve not tried the expansion yet myself but just thinking from a design and game logic perspective.

 

[metatheurgist]

And so it begins....

 

[Ameeleean2]

I would opt for mixed ability. What I would like to have is ability to donate credits to construction site which would then slowly import goods.
Each facility can have it's own construction time, for example 3rd tier facility would take 4 weeks to be completed if proper amount of funds were deposited at construction site. In this case hauling cargo personally would be still a choice for the simple reason of speeding up construction.
The only facility exempt from this could be primary port which would require player effort. Construction time could be also relative to system population.