Suggestion: Give players manual control of economic Influece

[Tomsgalaxy]

Frontier has tried 2 systems of economic influence and they both suffer from the same problem. They try to automate a system that needs to be precise and controlled. In systems in the previously established bubble you can get 1 station that is Agriculture and another that is Industrial with no issues. If you tried building a system like this you will find that your Industrial station has none or few crop harvesters or power generators. There are many other examples of these issues.
There is a solution, remove the automation and give players control of where economic influence ends up going. How would you do that, after a long time I have figured out 2 options for how this could be done.

Option 1: At each of our Settlements, Installations and Hubs we get to choose which Starport they direct their economic influence to. Each influence must go to at least 1 Starport but can go to additional ones (influence is copied like before) so that your Starports can have different economy types without messing with each other. One upside to this option is that no economic influence in your system ever stands idle (a major complaint of the old system prior to Trailblazer Update 3). There are some problems, first is that if you have built a lot in your system the micromanagement can get heavy, anyone who cares enough to build a system to that point will likely care enough to assign the economic influence properly. The second issue is with completely unwanted economic influence so you will most likely need 1 distraction station per system, since most players started their systems with a outpost to make sure they got the claim, this won't be a big problem.

Option 2: At each Starport we build we set which economy type it is, with either colony as a default setting or starting with whatever economic influence there is most of in the system upon the starports completion, taking in the all of the chosen economic infuence from Settlements, Installations and Hubs across the entire system. Starport types with a already set econmy type, Industrial Outpost, Military Outpost etc, will start with that economy regardless of what else is in the system. Compared to option 1 this has much less micromanagement required, you only need set the economy of the Starports so micromanagement won't reach painful levels. The tricky part if if you wanted to do a hybrid economy starport, Hi-Tech and Refinery stations helped us out a lot before the trailblazer megaships deployed, for this you will be able to set a primary economy and a secondary economy which only takes in partial influence (any more than 2 economy types turns into a mess). This can lead to weird situations if the secondary economy has more influence that the primary, this can be fixed by either building more of the chosen primary economy or changing the starports economy choice.

Regardless of which option is taken a few other changes are required to make this work.

All links become strong links regardless of where they are located

All planetary economic influence (except for Agriculture on Earth-likes world and Water Worlds) needs to be removed

All negative multipliers need to be removed, the positive ones can stay (not critical)

I would like to hear what you think and which option you prefer. I would be happy with either of them. I know that both require some micro but at least it will be controlable.

Edit: I know the title is misspelled, I can't fix it.

 

[PilotB]

Leave it as is and just do 2 things. Restrict each station to having the top 2 influences as their economy. Normalise those values to 100% this is mostly cosmetic. That'd work. An ELW could have 4 influence and you could easily pick which 2 you want. Stations with no nearby slots can still be influenced. Strong links are still bigger than weak links but there's some reliability and you don't have to stack to infinity to try fight some influence or another.

 

[Tomsgalaxy]

Leave it as is and just do 2 things. Restrict each station to having the top 2 influences as their economy. Normalise those values to 100% this is mostly cosmetic. That'd work. An ELW could have 4 influence and you could easily pick which 2 you want. Stations with no nearby slots can still be influenced. Strong links are still bigger than weak links but there's some reliability and you don't have to stack to infinity to try fight some influence or another.

There are times where you will want a Starport to only have 1 economy. Agriculture gets used up by every other type and it is currently impossible to do a pure Agriculture Station. With option 2 you just set the secondary to Colony and your fine. With both options you no longer have to worry about economic influence messing up the wrong station, we might as well have all links be strong ones so we can make best use of slots we have in each of our systems.

 

[PilotB]

There are times where you will want a Starport to only have 1 economy. Agriculture gets used up by every other type and it is currently impossible to do a pure Agriculture Station. With option 2 you just set the secondary to Colony and your fine. With both options you no longer have to worry about economic influence messing up the wrong station, we might as well have all links be strong ones so we can make best use of slots we have in each of our systems.

Add that any influence under 5% after normalisation is removed. Without that if you had 2 economies and normalise the influences you'd be able to get almost pure agriculture which would still be good enough. Giving us a pure agriculture option would be nice of them but the issue at the moment is mostly the lack of limits. It's close to workable but it's not dialed in yet. I hope it gets some serious tweaking because as it stands it makes building interesting systems hard.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Frontier has tried 2 systems of economic influence and they both suffer from the same problem.

Not at all - the two designs have completely opposite problems.

The first design had the problem that people recklessly dived into building stuff without reading what documentation that there was, and then complained loudly when it didn't do what they thought it should have done instead, based on their complete lack of understanding of how economies had worked for the last ten years. It arguably did have a weakness in that single-slot non-landable planets could be a bit limited in use, but the galaxy has plenty of planets which are not that, so people could just have built the important assets on those instead.

The second design is just an over-complicated mess which makes doing most of the things players might in theory want to do in economic terms really difficult (though not completely impossible) and discourages building most of the assets on the list if your aim is coherent economic production, mission generation, etc.

A better third design is possible in theory but given that players can't agree on what it should look like (the correct answer is "exactly the same as the first design but planets cannot have exactly one build slot", by the way) the chances of it actually being a clear improvement are low, and the costs of introducing a third design not compatible with either design which people have already built systems and stations to are significant. So, bad as it is and worse as it is than the original, I don't think Frontier should change it further.

 

[Tomsgalaxy]

Add that any influence under 5% after normalisation is removed. Without that if you had 2 economies and normalise the influences you'd be able to get almost pure agriculture which would still be good enough. Giving us a pure agriculture option would be nice of them but the issue at the moment is mostly the lack of limits. It's close to workable but it's not dialed in yet. I hope it gets some serious tweaking because as it stands it makes building interesting systems hard.

Both of my options allow players to set their own limits on their own terms, something the current system doesn't allow us to do.

 

[Tomsgalaxy]

Not at all - the two designs have completely opposite problems.

The first design had the problem that people recklessly dived into building stuff without reading what documentation that there was, and then complained loudly when it didn't do what they thought it should have done instead, based on their complete lack of understanding of how economies had worked for the last ten years. It arguably did have a weakness in that single-slot non-landable planets could be a bit limited in use, but the galaxy has plenty of planets which are not that, so people could just have built the important assets on those instead.

The second design is just an over-complicated mess which makes doing most of the things players might in theory want to do in economic terms really difficult (though not completely impossible) and discourages building most of the assets on the list if your aim is coherent economic production, mission generation, etc.

A better third design is possible in theory but given that players can't agree on what it should look like (the correct answer is "exactly the same as the first design but planets cannot have exactly one build slot", by the way) the chances of it actually being a clear improvement are low, and the costs of introducing a third design not compatible with either design which people have already built systems and stations to are significant. So, bad as it is and worse as it is than the original, I don't think Frontier should change it further.

While both systems are very different, the automation is a problem that plagues both of them.

The first system makes it so you can only get something good if you have plenty of slots on 1 body but does nothing to direct economic influence on that body, it also pushed players to seek out bodies with more slots once they figured it out. Regardless of if players read the documentation or not this was a bad idea from the beginning since it left a lot of systems mostly unusable.

The second system tried to address this but make weak link not strong enough to help the economy you want but still strong enough to mess up other economy types. This leaves making a single economy station to be highly restrictive, especially with planetary influence in the mix. No way to direct those links to a different station.

Both systems suffer from automation, its just that it was much less noticeable in the first one.

Both of my options can easily be that better third design and I don't see it breaking peoples systems since they would have the power to direct their economic influences to wherever they want regardless of where they built it. There would be a lot of people micromanaging when the update drops but most of that would be sorted within a week.

Frontier has now attempted 2 systems, neither of them are acceptable.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The first system makes it so you can only get something good if you have plenty of slots on 1 body but does nothing to direct economic influence on that body, it also pushed players to seek out bodies with more slots once they figured it out. Regardless of if players read the documentation or not this was a bad idea from the beginning since it left a lot of systems mostly unusable.

You needed three slots (one for the station, one or two depending on type to completely replace the Colony economy) which is hardly rare. Now that the initial wave of colonisation has substantially expanded the bubble and the rate of claiming has slowed down significantly, it's not as if "not every system is desirable" is an ongoing problem anyway - you can just pick and choose the good ones.

Smaller systems weren't ever going to be economic powerhouses, sure, but you could still put down some of the pre-set economy stations and get something out of them, too.

I don't see it breaking peoples systems since they would have the power to direct their economic influences to wherever they want regardless of where they built it

Any station currently relying on planetary influence for its economy (e.g. a colony port over a non-landable rocky moon). There might be space in the system to build extra facilities of the right type and then point them at the station to fix it ... or there might not. At best, it'll be broken until considerably more hauling has been done to fix it.

I don't object to your idea as such (I'd scrap planetary influence entirely and allow facilities to be linked to nothing if there isn't a port at their planet, because that's better than having to build a decoy station, if I was going for a "choose where things link" design) but once Frontier introduces a third design the precedent has basically been set that there's no point building anything because Frontier might change their mind again in three more months about how it all works.
(Once was risky enough for that, I feel)

 

[Tomsgalaxy]

You needed three slots (one for the station, one or two depending on type to completely replace the Colony economy) which is hardly rare. Now that the initial wave of colonisation has substantially expanded the bubble and the rate of claiming has slowed down significantly, it's not as if "not every system is desirable" is an ongoing problem anyway - you can just pick and choose the good ones.

Smaller systems weren't ever going to be economic powerhouses, sure, but you could still put down some of the pre-set economy stations and get something out of them, too.


Any station currently relying on planetary influence for its economy (e.g. a colony port over a non-landable rocky moon). There might be space in the system to build extra facilities of the right type and then point them at the station to fix it ... or there might not. At best, it'll be broken until considerably more hauling has been done to fix it.

I don't object to your idea as such (I'd scrap planetary influence entirely and allow facilities to be linked to nothing if there isn't a port at their planet, because that's better than having to build a decoy station, if I was going for a "choose where things link" design) but once Frontier introduces a third design the precedent has basically been set that there's no point building anything because Frontier might change their mind again in three more months about how it all works.
(Once was risky enough for that, I feel)

The only reason Frontier changed the economic system at all was because of player complaints. That precedent is already out the window at this point, if we direct them to a better solution with far fewer issues this can stop.

The current system forces us to only do certain things due to planetary influence, anyone who isn't trying to do Industrial has to avoid Icy bodies and volcanism like the plague.

Having to build an extra 1 or 2 facilities to make up of losing planetary influence isn't a huge deal (unless you are running out of slots, at that point you probably should start a new system). If this does become a problem Frontier can increase the strength of facility economic influence to compensate or even increase the minimum number of slots per body(emergency use only). Both of my options enable you to use a body anywhere else in the system to fix this. A Refinery Hub can be finished in 2 days if you have nothing going on.

Most systems with few slots are built to bridge to a better system. A system with 10 space and ground slots each, is enough that you can get 1 T3 Starport doing what you wish and have a few slots spare.

We shouldn't shy away from pushing Frontier in the right direction out of fear of further changes, especially when the current system is such a headache.

 

[Greasetrap42]

IMO keep the strong link concept and get rid of weak links and significantly increase the number of slots per body.

• This allows a cmdr to have a single system with several economic specialties that don't hurt each other.
• Why shouldn't a planet be allowed to have 10 facilities built on it? Its a freakin' planet!!!
• Why can't 10 assets be in orbit around a sun??? Space is big.
• Any economic model that breaks if there are more than 8 facilities is fundamentally no good.

 

[Kira Goto]

get rid of weak links

Yes, but also planetary influences being arbitrarily active at all points just… has to change. It’s a great thing if for whatever reason you really want to build a (large) colony orbital in (above) a 1 slot body, but it makes it impossible to specialize outside of those economies unless you build stuff which already has its own economy. I don’t particularly consider brute forcing a valid option, if a planet gives a boost to agriculture or has it as a default feature (be that through presence of biologicals or other aspects) it should be possible to say build a space farm and get the station oriented that way, instead of it also retaining tourism, extraction or whatever else it may have.

 

[Titler]

Not at all - the two designs have completely opposite problems.

The first design had the problem that people recklessly dived into building stuff without reading what documentation that there was, and then complained loudly when it didn't do what they thought it should have done instead, based on their complete lack of understanding of how economies had worked for the last ten years. It arguably did have a weakness in that single-slot non-landable planets could be a bit limited in use, but the galaxy has plenty of planets which are not that, so people could just have built the important assets on those instead.

The second design is just an over-complicated mess which makes doing most of the things players might in theory want to do in economic terms really difficult (though not completely impossible) and discourages building most of the assets on the list if your aim is coherent economic production, mission generation, etc.

A better third design is possible in theory but given that players can't agree on what it should look like (the correct answer is "exactly the same as the first design but planets cannot have exactly one build slot", by the way) the chances of it actually being a clear improvement are low, and the costs of introducing a third design not compatible with either design which people have already built systems and stations to are significant. So, bad as it is and worse as it is than the original, I don't think Frontier should change it further.

Blaming the player base for Frontier's decades long terrible design ethos is offensive.

Documentation? It was left for the players to solve out of game, again, at launch and it was also exceptionally broken and buggy too so what you built might not be what you thought you were getting at all; as well as system breaking bugs with replicating null stations. That the system went live, without any way to reverse mistaken choices (including even the actual placement location) was extremely bad development and all blame should be on Frontier, and not the player base who were desperate to engage with anything new; if you don't understand that the player base is going to go wild with the new toys you give them, you shouldn't be involved in the industry. Frontier does know this, because they always go "Wow you engaged so much!" after every content, as a form of self-marketting. But they don't design decently enough to make it good content. And that's not the player's fault.

They may not want to change it too much as they want to tie it closely to how they generate resources automatically for the rest of the galaxy. But there absolutely should be a roll back where the players can rejig their systems to any new design, and at least a one off reset for the terrible early weeks of bugs. Leave each system as claimed, but the architect for each one gets a one time bank of all resources given, the stations all reset, ARX spent on station names returned; and they can place new stations and ports more and put resources in straight from the bank. Respend the Arx to have the personal names where you want again. Other players who sold to the system get the credit for the resources now in the bank still... it doesn't matter that it won't show where they sold too, because it doesn't record where they were now except at the original station as part of System Report.

But don't give reasons why Frontier should do less. This is their responsibility and they should fix it to improve the consumer experience.

 

[Greasetrap42]

Yes, but also planetary influences being arbitrarily active at all points just… has to change. It’s a great thing if for whatever reason you really want to build a (large) colony orbital in (above) a 1 slot body, but it makes it impossible to specialize outside of those economies unless you build stuff which already has its own economy.

Agreed. I think planetary influences are pretty dumb. Why would planet type matter when building a manufacturing facility? Who cares if its icy or rocky... especially when in orbit. But given that Frontier had some desire to match planets to economy type for some gaming variety... sure whatever. Mimicking classic 8yo games might as well match planets by color. Red, blue, green, white. Its silly and dumb.

I am curious if Frontier actually had a different thing in mind for "colony" economy type, but changed their mind and needed an easy way to make colony assets function, so they just matched it to the planet based on simple look-up table and moved on.

 

[Kira Goto]

I am curious if Frontier actually had a different thing in mind for "colony" economy type, but changed their mind and needed an easy way to make colony assets function, so they just matched it to the planet based on simple look-up table and moved on.

Considering the fact the original system couldn't be much more different from the current one if it tried, it seems pretty obvious they had very different ideas originally. Now... well... I'll just say I preferred the original one because you could build what you liked where and how you wanted. Then again I did also read what little documentation there was so I was aware I wouldn't get much out of a Colony orbital built above an ELW or WW with just one or no other orbital slots, but it would've been a conscious choice to on my part, even knowing the market wouldn't produce much (or anything of value, besides biowaste for agri structures). So, yeah.

And I'm sure they put some thought into the planet economy types, with exception of Terraforming and the Earth-like world, the issue really is just not allowing specialization to occur above or beyond that base layer. Part of me theorizes this is because the planetary influence is treated as an underlying (invisible, unless planetary links to orbital market) strong link, but it's not something I could exactly prove easy.

 

[Screemonster]

A better third design is possible in theory but given that players can't agree on what it should look like (the correct answer is "exactly the same as the first design but planets cannot have exactly one build slot", by the way) the chances of it actually being a clear improvement are low, and the costs of introducing a third design not compatible with either design which people have already built systems and stations to are significant. So, bad as it is and worse as it is than the original, I don't think Frontier should change it further.

The way I'd go with is something to the effect of "if a strong link exists, then weak links of different economic types only affect production, not consumption" or else have a minimum threshold before weaker economic influences start to affect a station's markets so the odd 5% pressure from an unfavourable economy type on the other side of the system would just get de minimised out.

Especially where the weak links in question are providing strong links to somewhere else intercepting their economic output.

 

[Tomsgalaxy]

They may not want to change it too much as they want to tie it closely to how they generate resources automatically for the rest of the galaxy. But there absolutely should be a roll back where the players can rejig their systems to any new design, and at least a one off reset for the terrible early weeks of bugs.

Both of my options would result in most if not all bad placement of facilities to no longer be a problem so there would be no need for a rollback. I am sure that many players won't want a rollback of construction since they have already invested a lot of time building up only for most of it to disappear.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Documentation? It was left for the players to solve out of game, again, at launch

It could have been a lot better documented - at the very least, it needed examples rather than a bunch of unlinked sentences; equally "if I build a Orbis around a 1-slot ELW will it sell anything?" and similar was a question answered correctly by what in-game documentation existed.

Additional documentation wouldn't have stopped people doing that, because they wouldn't have read that either. And if they had read it, ten years of the game's economic complexity being completely short-cuttable for all practical purposes by "just search EDDB/Inara" meant they wouldn't have understood it.

To be clear, that's not me blaming the players. Frontier went from "you can completely ignore how this incredibly complex system works" to "you need to understand a whole bunch of subtleties of it" overnight. Of course the results were bad. But the results were bad because they assumed that players (in general, rather than about four people total) understood this stuff already. That's not a "bad" you can get out of with a bit more documentation on release day. That's something which needs an extended series of talks by someone who knows this stuff and can communicate it well, and also some lower-stakes in-game content to make people see the point in listening.

And then having got into that mess, they listened to the knee-jerk demands of players saying "obviously if you build something it should influence station economies", which is how we now have weak links messing up all but the most carefully prepared systems. And we have an even bigger mess. Which again, to be clear, is Frontier's fault for (unusually) listening to a bunch of players who obviously had no clue what they were doing for identification of the solution rather than identification of the problem.

They may not want to change it too much as they want to tie it closely to how they generate resources automatically for the rest of the galaxy.

It doesn't resemble the way NPC stations get economies at all at the moment. (Nor did the first version).

I can see why they didn't go for replicating that (you'd have no planetary, strong or weak links at all; every asset would simply have a fixed economy type and you'd build the ones you want directly) but it would probably have been better all round if they had, with some other mechanism to encourage building hubs, settlements, installations, etc.

But there absolutely should be a roll back where the players can rejig their systems to any new design, and at least a one off reset for the terrible early weeks of bugs. Leave each system as claimed, but the architect for each one gets a one time bank of all resources given, the stations all reset, ARX spent on station names returned; and they can place new stations and ports more and put resources in straight from the bank.

I agree there. They shouldn't have changed the set up the first time without having some sort of reallocation option in place ... they certainly shouldn't change it again before having that in place.

But right now I'm not seeing any consensus on what a "good" system looks like from the players, at least half the suggestions out there might make things even worse, and I don't see Frontier rolling the dice another time based on which group of players they perceive as shouting the loudest being any more productive than it was last time round.

"if a strong link exists, then weak links of different economic types only affect production, not consumption"

That fixes the thing which players are currently most obviously annoyed about, but weak link effects on consumption are also really damaging in many cases. I've got an Extraction Settlement in my (mostly Ind/HT) system. The effect it has on the markets is fairly minimal - I don't lose too many exports to it, and gaining exports of a few minerals isn't a big deal for the commodity market. But it also means that my Ind station has completely stopped generating mining missions, because having Extraction on the economy list at all blocks that.

"Weak links only attach to things which already have a strong link or intrinsic economy of that type" I could see being a lot less damaging. But that's so close in terms of practical economic effect to "just get rid of weak links" that it would still be simpler to do that.

 

[Tomsgalaxy]

And then having got into that mess, they listened to the knee-jerk demands of players saying "obviously if you build something it should influence station economies", which is how we now have weak links messing up all but the most carefully prepared systems. And we have an even bigger mess. Which again, to be clear, is Frontier's fault for (unusually) listening to a bunch of players who obviously had no clue what they were doing for identification of the solution rather than identification of the problem.


It doesn't resemble the way NPC stations get economies at all at the moment. (Nor did the first version).

I can see why they didn't go for replicating that (you'd have no planetary, strong or weak links at all; every asset would simply have a fixed economy type and you'd build the ones you want directly) but it would probably have been better all round if they had, with some other mechanism to encourage building hubs, settlements, installations, etc.


I agree there. They shouldn't have changed the set up the first time without having some sort of reallocation option in place ... they certainly shouldn't change it again before having that in place.

But right now I'm not seeing any consensus on what a "good" system looks like from the players, at least half the suggestions out there might make things even worse, and I don't see Frontier rolling the dice another time based on which group of players they perceive as shouting the loudest being any more productive than it was last time round.

In many ways Option 1 started out as my take on how "if you build something it should influence station economies" could be implemented. Frontier knee-jerked before I worked out the details.

Option 2 is much closer to what we have in the previously established bubble than either of the 2 systems used for colonization, i would say the if Frontier were to do Option 2 and you set a station to say Refinery with none of that influence in the system you wouldn't get much (double digit numbers of each commodity) to incentivize building facilities.

Both of my options have a reallocation system built into them, so while your facilities won't be moved, where they are placed won't matter much anymore. Player can pick and choose which Starport get which economy type.

I can see most players accepting either of my options in the longrun. Even with the micro and having to build a few more facilities to make up for losing planetary influence.

 

[Screemonster]

"Weak links only attach to things which already have a strong link or intrinsic economy of that type" I could see being a lot less damaging. But that's so close in terms of practical economic effect to "just get rid of weak links" that it would still be simpler to do that.

yeah, or "weak links are overridden entirely by strong links" which would allow stations with only weak links to benefit from structures around the system without interfering with dedicated economies.

 

[pvaljann]

I can see why they didn't go for replicating that (you'd have no planetary, strong or weak links at all; every asset would simply have a fixed economy type and you'd build the ones you want directly) but it would probably have been better all round if they had, with some other mechanism to encourage building hubs, settlements, installations, etc.

Again, you are spot on. This was actually what I was expecting from the outset - a player chooses the economic assets, but would have to actively build other things that would support and expand them - security, tech, population etc. - and it would have some minor market variances based on the resources and population of nearby systems.

It would have resulted in a lot of player systems that do "everything," but that would have been more acceptable than having to plan and manage links, which is where we are now.
I also +1 strong link agree that changing it further would probably break more than it solves.