System Colonization: Pessimistic View

[Cosmo]

Beyond the hype for system colonization, there remains a pessimistic view:

Here's each colonization step and feature colored green (good), red (bad, boring), orange (neutral, unknown):

1. Find a free system to colonize. (yay)
2. Buy a claim from the Colonisation Contact for lots of credits. (yay)
3. Place the Colonisation beacon within 24 hours (yay)
4. Select a primary starport in a predetermined location (yay)
5. The Colonisation Ship arrives. (yay)
6. Deliver mountains of materials, goods for many days or weeks (boo)
7. Wait for the weekly server tick so that the finished starport spawns (boo)
8. Select locations to place the space and surface facilities (yay)
9. Deliver mountains of materials, goods for many days or weeks (boo)
10. Wait for the weekly server tick so that the finished facilities spawn (boo)
11. Repeat step 8-10 to construct each facility. (boo)
12. Low limit of development slots per planet and system. (boo)
13. The buildings determine the system economy (yay)
14. We cannot place 100 or 1000 facilities together to create a city / metropolis (boo)
15. If you claim a second or third system you must abandon the previous system (you can develop previous colonies)
16. The System Architect is not the owner of the star system (boo)
17. The Architect is just a player who decides which facilities get built and where. (?)
18. Cannot build infrastructure to connect the buildings. (boo)
19. Cannot designate zones for auto-development (residential, commercial, industrial, office and municipal) (boo)
20. Cannot see NPCs live and work in the town, city (?)
21. Cannot custom design buildings. (boo)
22. Only place building assets from Horizons and Odyssey (?)
23. Cannot build a personal home on a planet for yourself or a squadron (?)
24. There is no house, suite or apartment to live and manage the colony in first-person. (boo)
25. Earn credits or goods from your current colony to finance the next system colonisation (?)
26. Integrated with Powerplay 2, BGS (yay)
27. New tasks related to colonization for players (yay)
28. End-game content that connects the multiple careers (yay)
29. More chances of emergent gameplay (yay)

The majority of the activities are boring with many limitations. Step 6-10 could get dull quick so players might try SC only once.

 

[viper666]

I love settlement building in Fallout 4 as you have complete control of even the smallest details. No Mans Sky was just prefab sections (aka boring). As for EDO I would have preferred an asteroid base, or complete control of what you build, but since we are stuck with online only that's not going to happen. Given we already have server glitches that got worse when PP2.0 landed, I just hope Frontier think this through very carefully.

One thing that has impressed me, is the grind reduction if you join a powerplay faction. I've had to visit bartenders every day to clear space from all the care packages I get every hour or so. Oh, and today I dropped into a signal source, the first in a long time. Choked full of imperial shielding, I couldn't even scoop it all as I hit the limit.

I know some people think there is too much grind, but I remember back in 2019 if you wanted certain materials to upgrade a module, you had to sacrifice a cat while wearing a chicken costume, under a full moon, but not on any day ending with a Y

 

[Fizzatron]

Resource gathering is going to be a fact of life, some like the space trucking, others not, how Frontier allow those who don't to employ those who do will be a factor in this. I'm personally going to be alright with it as it will my colony that I'm supplying.

There's more to say but I'm headed out the door rn so I may revisit this later on.

 

[aRJay]

My main disagreement is with claiming that colonisation not being base building is a bad thing.
Likewise us probably not being able to use it to set us up as tinpot emperors is also good.

It will be fascinating to see what the actual steps limitations and maybe privileges of colonisation are supposed to be come the beta next year.

 

[Flimley]

Would be nice to setup a buy order to boost things. Just encase anyone wants to help out. Like those npc's

Flimley

 

[bigbangnet]

question is .... how solo is this thing. if its a group team squad activity, how much are we talking about here ?

 

[aRJay]

From what they were saying it is as solo as you want it to be except that there is only one architect per system. Do it yourself if you want employ friends if you have them.

 

[gorgofdoom]

I think my main gripe with colonization is: what is the reward for doing all 29 steps? Are we just getting our name stamped on the system forever, like exploration? I'm not a particularly vain person, so that doesn't drive me too much. Otoh getting money forever for just deciding where facilities go seems a bit too much.

I do want to be able to stick down a landing pad and private / wing residence. A sharable place where we can actually have our own tech-brokers & material traders in one place. Access to all modules and services in the same location would be something tangible; and something for a group that's worth working for.

Another problem i'll bring up: what happens to all delivered materials if we don't succeed at meeting the deadline? to they just vanish? X:4 foundations had this same problem for many years. New objects would pop up, have 90% of the needed materials delivered (excepting what was most scarce), then it would get conquered by their enemies waiting for the scarce materials, and all the other wares that didn't get used just got deleted. This meant new stations were something like black holes that just endlessly consumed huge amounts of material until it was fixed by allowing the delivered materials to be resold upon failure.

 

[Rochester]

Also what happens when, as with the problem with carriers; players get bored, or hack the code, and we end up with thousands of dead empty settlements littering the galaxy…

It would be great if FD implemented some type of degradation mechanism that erased them from the game over time?

Eg if a settlement falls into detriment said elements start to decay, visually, because resources become loot for pirates.

That ought to affects anarchy status too, etc driving up traffic of pirates / bounties etc, could also be an opportunity for mission generation… same could be applied to the garbage circulating many systems.

Eg factions issue defence or harvesting missions, linked to these areas.

It doesn’t have to be too complex, just a series of visual stages of broken down segments, that eventually results in an erasure of the element, any settlement or carrier own ought to receive relevant notification (in game) or enable them to establish defensive options, and NPC activity could reference this, either actively defending areas themselves or looting stuff as pirates.

 

[Nowski]

I think my main gripe with colonization is: what is the reward for doing all 29 steps?

I agree that a permanent credits or materials firehose is not necessary or really warranted, but some kind of in-game acknowledgement will make the coloniser's burden easier to stomach for players not already won over by the new mechanics of placing settlements and stations and building economies.

My suggestion would be the occassional "care package" when the system transitions into favourable BGS states (as shown by the galaxy map) like Boom, Investment or Public Holiday. The reward package is an existing mechanic from PP2 and Thargoid War II, so would be relatively achievable compared to new assets like private bases or whatnot. Contents could be varied and made more or less generous depending on BGS state, population size and economy type(s).

I think it's a mistake to expect ED to follow designs from games that coddle the player, and a sudden exuberant proliferation of tech brokers and material traders would fall under coddling for me. However, programming the arrival of those facilities in colonies with suitable economies and populations, where there aren't any existing ones within some distance, would be justified (IMO) and incentivise putting effort into growing newly colonised systems.

what happens when, as with the problem with carriers; players get bored, or hack the code, and we end up with thousands of dead empty settlements littering the galaxy

Since we know there's no upkeep or maintenance burden on the player, this is handled by BGS and no permanently dead empty state is possible, afaik.

 

[Tyres O'Flaherty]

I have a somewhat cynical view that most, if not all, viable colonisable systems will be snapped up really quickly at the outset.

 

[aRJay]

I have a somewhat cynical view that most, if not all, viable colonisable systems will be snapped up really quickly at the outset.

That is probably why we aren’t being allowed to colonise anywhere, with shorter ranges the further we get from the bubble the more systems available so the better chance of getting in before the rush.

 

[Sighman]

15 and 16 are both wrong.

And BTW, having a reason to haul (other than adding to my useless pile of credits, or doing a CG) is great news.

 

[gorgofdoom]

I have a somewhat cynical view that most, if not all, viable colonisable systems will be snapped up really quickly at the outset.

I don't understand why they would be at the moment. What's the drive to do a deep analysis of what systems are 'good'? What's the reward for picking good systems besides the name stamp?

anywho we really have no way to proactively analyze data to figure out which systems to rush. We don't know what will make a system a good one (besides maybe having more locations, and terraformable words) while the only reward might be that we have to keep going back to the system to manage it, lest it fall into disarray with it's neighboring economies.

 

[SergMx]

I love settlement building in Fallout 4 as you have complete control of even the smallest details.

Looking back I see, the Thargoid War, Titans, Spires, Hunters, Revernants, etc. basically basically represented a change in the game world. I think it was on the order of 95%.
Now I'm playing PP2 and I see that there's virtually no world change here, it's basically menu changes. I.e. by my standards in PP2 it's 90% menu changes (and only 10% is visual game play, Forts systems, banners).

I'm really curious how much of that percentage will be in Colonization, or will it be 95% just menu changes?

 

[Markov Chaney]

I have a somewhat cynical view that most, if not all, viable colonisable systems will be snapped up really quickly at the outset.

It's a good line of thinking but I really really want someone to work out how many viable systems there are in a spherical* layer 10ly out from the current border, so we have a bit of sight on what "all" means and how that relates to the size of the regular player base.

* not really, the Bubble is raggedy-ass

 

[Markov Chaney]

Looking back I see, the Thargoid War, Titans, Spires, Hunters, Revernants, etc. basically basically represented a change in the game world. I think it was on the order of 95%.
Now I'm playing PP2 and I see that there's virtually no world change here, it's basically menu changes. I.e. by my standards in PP2 it's 90% menu changes (and only 10% is visual game play, Forts systems, banners).

I'm really curious how much of that percentage will be in Colonization, or will it be 95% just menu changes?

The upside of this is ... building new digital assets requires expensive digital asset artists, a lot of elapsed time, and a long tail on quality (if something looks 5% wrong, you'll get 50% of the complaints immediately, just look what happened with the various black liveries and such)

Whereas building a new gameloop is a small amount of pretty traditional development, and if you get something slightly off in one or two menus, well, we're used to that and we have it priced in. So provided you build in time to fix bugs adding "menu-only" content as you call it is massively easier.

Of course if you build it and then just refuse to fix anything for two months, it's possible your consumer base might start getting a little bit bitter about missing parts of the gameloop even though they are not very serious in the overall scheme of things. So if I want anything from Colonisation, it's two rounds of bugfixes and balance in a timely manner. I don't really care how "boring" it is as long as it actually works this time.

 

[Cosmo]

Now I'm playing PP2 and I see that there's virtually no world change here, it's basically menu changes. I.e. by my standards in PP2 it's 90% menu changes (and only 10% is visual game play, Forts systems, banners).

There's visual changes in the Concourses based on the power and the galaxy map. I'd like to see more too though.

Of course if you build it and then just refuse to fix anything for two months, it's possible your consumer base might start getting a little bit bitter about missing parts of the gameloop even though they are not very serious in the overall scheme of things. So if I want anything from Colonisation, it's two rounds of bugfixes and balance in a timely manner. I don't really care how "boring" it is as long as it actually works this time.

The Architect places facilities in a few slots of a system, then hauls heaps of materials, goods to spawn these facilities. This determines the system economy. That's all. So this gameplay loop is too shallow. It needs depth and customization to make it a popular career that lasts for years.

 

[huehnerfaust]

All Architect does is basically place facilities in a few slots of a system, then haul heaps of materials, goods to spawn these facilities. This gameplay loop is too shallow. It needs depth and customization to make this a popular career that lasts for years.

And i bet, that all the old horizon buildings are not even on par with the odyssee buildings on foot gameplay wise.

I still remember the fun i had when horizon released and we had to hack these ground bases (via simple scanning beacons with the srv under a certain timing), in order to get some data.

I would like to build race courses for example, but i wont believe that we can place more tham ten buildings on a planet surface. Let alone free placment of single buldings. They will only allow us to place premade structures but not single buildings. The preview they gave us showed the placement of complete set of buildings.

10ly espansion rate is quite boring, at least give us the pp influence/expansion range.

 

[Rebel Yell]

Integrated with Powerplay 2, BGS (yay)

Powerplay is already broken lol