Was Colonization Concept Too Big for a single Free Update?

[Greasetrap42]

Specifically: System Economies.

Players are trying to design systems to produce specific markets. Obviously. Its a fairly big player focus when building a system. To be good this requires a fairly sophisticated economic model. I don't know if Frontier originally considered this to be a big aspect or player focus of the Trailblazers update. I'm wondering if they thought players were just going to build some facilities, and expand their favotite PP faction into it (seems to be a focus of the marketing material).

For the size of the free update I don't think it reasonable For Frontier to have incorporated a proper system where the Architect can define the influence facilities can have on each other. A system where the relationships between facilities are defined by the Architect. The % influence of facility A has on facility B, along with all the other factors, affecting prices, costs, and quantity outputs of both facilities. This becomes very big scope.

And obviously Frontier didn't. No complaint, it is too big for a free update that includes a ton of other stuff. Economic relationships is just one aspect.

Instead Frontier is trying to achieve this automagically hidden in the background. Which I don't think will ever be a great solution. It will never make logical sense. It will be a goofy system with a big set of non-intiutive arbitrary rules that players will need to look up if they want a system a certain way.

I am thinking that the colonization update was conceptually too big for a single free update. Frontier bit off far too big a concept. What now, IDK. Live with it and move on.

 

[Kzak]

Good points, but maybe we should wait until Frontier declares Trailblazers to be out of beta first.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Players are trying to design systems to produce specific markets. Obviously. Its a fairly big player focus when building a system.

The model they released with had more than enough flexibility and control to generate specific station markets and overall system markets, especially in larger systems. It also encouraged the construction of "secondary" assets like settlements, installations, hubs, etc. which provide interest to later visitors to a system while not being obvious build options in their own right. You can construct any economy type you want (except terraforming, which wasn't then available) fairly simply. Planning is just a matter of remembering "one economy per body"

The only problems with it were caused by people not understanding how it worked (where "it" is either the original colonisation model, or the basics of markets in general), which Frontier could have solved with better documentation / tutorials / just ignoring the issue for a month while players got the hang of things themselves.

To be good this requires a fairly sophisticated economic model

Arguably a lot of the "problems" of the new model are that it's way too sophisticated.

- hybrid economies have individualised and only semi-predictable interactions (at a level of complexity not practically possible to solve with "more documentation") for every separate commodity they contain
- planetary economy types have a whole range of rules and sub-rules which can give you a weird station even as the sole construction in the system (ELWs, or terraformable volcanic atmospheric HMCs, or similar)
- it's got three separate sources (planetary, strong, weak) for economic influence which mean you pretty much have to interact with the hybrid economy sophistication at least somewhat
- keeping track of what you're building and how it's going to influence current and future builds requires a lot of thinking and a lot of fairly deep understanding (especially if you are going to allow a few weak links)

 

[Greasetrap42]

The model they released.... The only problems with it were caused by people not understanding how it worked (where "it" is either the original colonisation model, or the basics of markets in general), which Frontier could have solved with better documentation / tutorials / just ignoring the issue for a month while players got the hang of things themselves.

... yes, along with lack of documentation, it also did not match the pre-colonisation model that players were used to. Originally I tried making my colony similar to an existing successful nearby system. I thought that made sense. Nope.

Arguably a lot of the "problems" of the new model are that it's way too sophisticated.

Yes, functioning automagically in the background. This can become incredibly complicated really fast. Making a good active economic simulation that makes actual sense would be a software package of its own. Hindsight is awsome, but someone should have realised this.

If they had stuck with a super simple market concept from the beginning, giving each station a basic market that looks 'good enough' (not just hyrdogen & poop) and have the markets grow simply based on population and matching facilities, players would have generally been fine with it. Super simple, nothing complicated. After all, I don't think the manipulating economic markets was intended to be the focus of the update (looking at the marketing info).

 

[PilotB]

Colonisation itself no. The experimental and not completely thought through market changes yes. They could have just stuck to the rules we know and it'd work. Instead they decided to solve the problem by getting fancy and the fancy is too much but the fancy also isn't better. it's just more complicated and unfortunately fixing that would take too much work.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

... yes, along with lack of documentation, it also did not match the pre-colonisation model that players were used to. Originally I tried making my colony similar to an existing successful nearby system. I thought that made sense. Nope.

The pre-colonisation model was nothing more "this station has the economy Frontier says it does" in a literal sense, which was probably slightly too unsophisticated.
(Pretty much everything else I saw players assuming about what the model was had multiple pre-existing procedural stations or systems contradicting it)

"Lack of documentation" I don't think is exactly right. This was all documented and behaved - bugs aside - pretty much according to the most obvious interpretation of that documentation. The problem is that players never had to understand the things they needed to understand that documentation (because 3rd party tools shortcut answering the question that understanding would have answered).


For example, I saw on Reddit in the early days of colonisation someone complaining that they'd constructed a Government Installation and it hadn't converted their system from Dictatorship to Democracy. They were told (reasonably politely) "no, it doesn't work like that", because there's a big subculture in the game which needs to understand how system government types are generated, so while the more dedicated players might not understand all the subtleties of the Political BGS they do get the basics. If Frontier had responded to that complaint by retrospectively giving installations "favoured governments" there would have been huge complaints.

Building a station around an ELW and expecting it to automatically be Agricultural [1], or expecting an Extraction station to produce different things depending on the ring type / local hotspots is exactly the same sort of misunderstanding of how the game already worked, but there isn't a big subculture that cared about station production levels before, those complaints all seem more reasonable, and "you do realise how much chaos this will create" posters were a minority.


[1] A complaint which the current "give it four economies which all consume each other" model doesn't exactly help with, of course. But they seem to be happy now that it produces something, however useless.

If they had stuck with a super simple market concept from the beginning, giving each station a basic market that looks 'good enough' (not just hyrdogen & poop) and have the markets grow simply based on population and matching facilities, players would have generally been fine with it. Super simple, nothing complicated. After all, I don't think the manipulating economic markets was intended to be the focus of the update (looking at the marketing info).

Yes. Making T1-T3 ports with a full range of intrinsic single-type economies, but generally negative or zero effect on system variables other than population, then giving the secondaries the boosts to those to encourage their construction, I think could have worked quite well as a simpler concept for it.

it's just more complicated and unfortunately fixing that would take too much work.

I think the current one could be fixed fairly simply to get the "best of both".

1) Take out weak links entirely: they're just annoying and the "decoy Orbis" workaround for them is even sillier. These are the main thing stopping people building large/mixed systems and requiring pages of unnecessary "what does this six-type economy do again?" calculations.

2a) Adjust water worlds to be Agri rather than Agri/Tourism: there needs to be some pure Agri planet and water worlds are more common than ELWs.
2b) Or alternatively add a T1 port option which is intrinsically Agricultural so you can put it anywhere for small amounts of production. (There isn't a pure HT planet either but it doesn't matter so much)

3) Make strong links replace planetary influence of a mismatching type rather than just adding their own. So e.g. if you have a planet which is giving 1.0 Extraction + 1.0 Industrial, and you add a 0.8 Extraction strong link, you get 1.8 Ext + 0.2 Industrial. If you add 0.8 High-Tech strong links instead, you get 0.6 Ext + 0.6 Ind + 0.8 HT, then 0.2 Ext + 0.2 Ind + 1.6 HT, then 2.4 HT only: you still benefit from making your economy match your planets, but you can - at least with the bigger planets - overrule it if you really want to.

 

[PilotB]

I think the current one could be fixed fairly simply to get the "best of both".

You need weak links for systems without nice slot layouts to not be worthless but if we simply limited stations to the 2 top economies and stopped consuming all the goods for no benefit it'd work out just fine but as long as they don't remove the consumption the in game market tools are a shadow of what's required to find stuff and the upgrades are far beyond what we could every expect even from a paid expansion.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

You need weak links for systems without nice slot layouts to not be worthless

I'm having trouble imagining a system where the weak links would be a significant fraction of any station's economy (compared with the planetary baseline economies, especially) even if they were all a single type, but the system also lacks any decent multi-slot planets or planets with decent baseline economies that you could use to build up anything more useful with.

What sort of system template are you thinking of here where the weak links are decisive in making it useful rather than useless?

(Not that even a small non-landable system is entirely useless: a few T1 outposts and supporting installations for development level boosts can still have substantial Industrial or HT output)

as long as they don't remove the consumption

If they just add the supplies and not the demands then it becomes too easy (even accidentally) to produce a station which sells everything and buys nothing. That's not a problem for chaining colonies ever further out but it is a problem for doing anything with them afterwards.

 

[Darth Ender]

They could have made these colonized systems rely on just player supply of items and some predetermined output product(s) based on either player choice or some rules based on the makeup of the system and colony choices.

Output products and input products stay until consumed by a player or converted to an output by the station. once the station reaches a certain quantity limit of output and has subsequently timed out to it's min price (which varies based on supply/demand over time), the station just sits and waits - not buying anything until there's room to produce.

That would simplify a lot and be intuitive. Everything else related to the bgs trade behavior doesn't offer anything to the game and can be excluded. System states can remain and be related, likely impacting price and production efficiency.

 

[Greasetrap42]

For example, I saw on Reddit in the early days of colonisation someone complaining that they'd constructed a Government Installation and it hadn't converted their system from Dictatorship to Democracy.

I remember reading that! And thinking.... don't dictatorships have government buildings too?

I'm not a super expert at all, but I probably know slightly more than some players. And I honestly don't know if government and medical installations provide anything to a system other than system stats. I assume they don't, but I really don't know.

 

[pvaljann]

When Trailblazers was released, I was initially [overthinking] that there would be more specific economies, with influence from nearby systems also being relevant - a successful refinery would need extraction somewhere within [some defined] sphere of influence, with more common facilities (security, quality of living) and agricultural economies required to support the inevitable population exodus - supporting bubbles, or your system may end up a tourist economy or refuelling stop.

With all the tweaks, it has greatly increased what people are seeing. Still needs UI improvements to let us know the end result without a spreadsheet, and like others have said, the function of some of the installations seems...well, maybe not fully realised yet.

 

[Mersozz]

It’s too big for my addled mind to grasp. So of course I’m all in.

 

[Starshot_Jigawatts]

I agree with the OP. We already have to know and understand the nebulous and hidden rules of how the BGS and PP works, and now Colonization too? Weak links, strong links, economies - it's a convoluted mess. Why not just cut through all that and let the Architect decide what the facilities do, what economies they have, and so on and so forth. What they are trying to do is so complicated, arbitrary, and sans any guide for the player!

"I built a stables for horses and the next day it just filled up with corn and potatoes!!"

Said no colonizer/explorer in history ever.

 

[SteveWW57]

If you built a cowshed it would fill up with methane and poop.

 

[Starshot_Jigawatts]

If you built a cowshed it would fill up with methane and poop.

True but at least you would have the cows!!

 

[PilotB]

I'm having trouble imagining a system where the weak links would be a significant fraction of any station's economy (compared with the planetary baseline economies, especially) even if they were all a single type, but the system also lacks any decent multi-slot planets or planets with decent baseline economies that you could use to build up anything more useful with.

Under the current system where body influence is massive yeah they're of limited value but there's lots of places with ELWs or WWs with just a single slot and that's the only way to boost anything. Body influence is blowing stuff away right now but if we had max 2 economies and weak influences then you'd be able to actually control a ELW market that doesn't have local slots to the 2 body influences you want to have.
Something needs to change there's options but the simpler the fix the more likely it is to work and the current system is I believe too complex for them to ever put in the work required.

If they just add the supplies and not the demands then it becomes too easy (even accidentally) to produce a station which sells everything and buys nothing. That's not a problem for chaining colonies ever further out but it is a problem for doing anything with them afterwards.

Part of the reason why I said limit it to 2 market types but there's already markets without demand so risk reward. You chose to do it by over mixing economies which is IMO better that it's a situation you actively build yourself into with effort rather than the current one where you must build yourself out of it but can't as there aren't enough slots anywhere to recover a mixed economy. The game doesn't have the tools to handle the restricted markets. There is however a system it was bought in flag for materials so they already track the required information to prevent players doing a buy sell loop to the same station. I struggle with transport missions now because I can no longer reliably find materials. It's not enough to find the correct economy and pad you must visit check and once all the markets are finally updated we can use INARA to find stuff unless the owner builds something and then boom you're out of data again.