What's the Brand New Feature for ED in 2024?

[Northpin]

Base building makes absolutely no sense in a Space game with 400 billions stars (and an order of magnitude more planets)

Sure, i can understand that some people want to settle, but... we already have carriers.
Why tying yourself to a planetary surface?
And what if they ask for 10bn for it and a weekly maintenance?
Heh, i'm already giggling at the uproar if that happens

However, i woudnt mind if they would actually expand the carriers - in terms of both interiors, interior customization and also in terms of usability

 

[Darrack]

Base building makes absolutely no sense in a Space game with 400 billions stars (and an order of magnitude more planets)

Sure, i can understand that some people want to settle, but... we already have carriers.
Why tying yourself to a planetary surface?
And what if they ask for 10bn for it and a weekly maintenance?
Heh, i'm already giggling at the uproar if that happens

However, i woudnt mind if they would actually expand the carriers - in terms of both interiors, interior customization and also in terms of usability

Cant wait till the Thargoids invade someone's 'Home' system, at least i can shift my carrier

O7

 

[Cosmo]

But you cant, structures like FCs are persistent in all modes.

Ok so most settlements have 1 or 2 pads, i think there's a tourist one with 4 but anyway, you and your mate land Sidey McSideface (sorry Drew) and FDL McFDLface on those pads.
Your friend's also coming to the dinner party then do what most of us do and park around the settlement.
Along comes T10 McGankface and unloads his pack-hounds on the parked ships.

The bases shouldn't be indestructible imo. If we can manufacture and sell goods in large quantities, there must be money sinks to balance it. Such as upkeep costs, upgrades, hiring NPC staff, and base defenses. If the economy is dynamic maybe conditions change where you sell goods at a loss or break-even. If a base is allied with a faction there's a risk of getting raided by competing factions. These raids would primarily be NPCs, because the number of concurrent players is too low and they're spread thin. When a base gets raided it could be plundered and damaged. The owners could hire NPCs to defend the base and repair it. It's a cycle of creation and destruction.

Base Building just makes too much sense as a pre-requiste functionality for DLCs based on new planet type access as it has the potential to tie it all together without the major downside of trying to generate enough new content for 1:1 scale planets to make a DLC pricepoint at say £30-£40 seem value for money.

Player owned assets/unique purchasable assets with unique functionality to aid the players wider game will be the gameplay driving force behind the desire to access new planet types, while the art team can concentrate on creating distinct landscapes and flora and fauna.

Seconded. For example to build bases on lava (metal-rich) and water worlds, gas giants requires exclusive tech which can be unlocked via a DLC.

 

[Shurimal]

That's true but not the biggest barrier to it. (All this also essentially applies to surface mining operations, too; mechanically they're just an industry with a much shorter chain)

Adding a Fleet Carrier module which over time will convert 1t of Indium and 1t of Aluminium stored in the cargo hold to 2t of Domestic Appliances, and keep working through this conversion so long as it's stocked up, doesn't seem that difficult and Frontier could probably put that module together (with a bunch of different cargo chain options) pretty quickly if they wanted to.

There are two big problems with that module, though:
1) 1t Indium + 1t Aluminium is considerably more expensive than 2t Domestic Appliances. It'd need to make something like 20t for it to be worth it. All the arbitrariness of the market prices (every single refined metal is a lot cheaper than the same mass of its ore, most manufactured goods are cheaper than the same mass of even cheap refined metal, etc) would need to be fixed to make most production chains make a profit while keeping to conservation of mass, and that would shake up a lot of the trade economy. The way that BGS states affect trade prices would need to be substantially toned down, too. Lots of things in the trade sim which are currently fine because the NPC factions don't have a budget and don't need to be profitable would need a complete overhaul to be player-usable. [1]
2) What are you going to do with 1000t of Domestic Appliances once you have them? Even with the FC module instantly converting all its raw material supply and not having any separate maintenance costs, the only thing you can do with them is sell them to a station, and you'd likely have been more efficient just buying them from an Industrial station in the first place. The same applies to essentially every commodity. So it needs not only uses beyond "sell them" adding for at least the end-of-chain commodities, but also extreme adjustments to the NPC markets so that they don't provide enough of those commodities on their own. That's again a much bigger change in terms of either the BGS or direct player use of a whole lot of cargo.

The one case it could potentially work right now is a production chain leading to Tritium, where the NPC markets are insufficient to meet demand once you get a few thousand LY from the bubble, and there's a player demand in the absence of NPC markets. But then Tritium is directly minable, so you'd either need to be able to run the whole production chain from mined materials where 100t of precursors is substantially quicker to mine than 100t of Tritium (or the exchange rates break conservation of mass, of course, so you only need 20t of precursors to get 100t of Tritium), or you'd need a way to transport other precursor commodities to the deep-space factory from the bubble which could be used to just transport Tritium directly instead.
(And that's with all the existing deep-space player-run Tritium depots essentially being run as a non-profit service: they'll cover their costs and make a nominal surplus but it's definitely not a fast way to make money)

I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but the precursor steps of sorting out the entire commodity pricing structure to have something approaching a rational profit-making balance at all points (which would need careful alignment to things like bounties and exploration data which don't have the same considerations) would be immense and should absolutely be done first because if the economy can't even be balanced with purely NPC production it's certainly not going to be balanced once players get involved.

[1] This gets even worse if the production chains can make ship/outfitting modules, which are player-usable, because then comedy points like "the Sidewinder hull costs considerably less than its mass in scrap metal" suddenly become gameplay-relevant rather than minor sources of fun, and all those prices need rebalancing too.

Agreed, the economy would need a major overhaul, too, if we want to have X series style industrial scale manufacturing. I'm not holding my breath for getting any of that

As for producing tritium, I think it does not classify as manufacturing, but mining. It doesn't need to be faster than manually mining it (though reportedly mining ³H is very slow compared to eg Pt)—above all it needs to be convenient. Logic dictates that ³H should be a primary resource minable from icy moons (icy rings that contain ³H are nothing but broken up moons, after all). I don't personally care if it takes 4 weeks to produce 10000 tons of ³H, I just want to go to my production facility and load up before heading to the black with my carrier. As long as the production cost per ton is lower than buying from a station and I can sell the surplus to other players at 30000...40000 cr/ton, it's good enough.

 

[londonx]

Nothing I or FDEV have said indicate the new feature will be a paid DLC, there's no reason for it to be separate from the current Odyssey game, and that still doesn't translate to "base will be required for more planets," that seems a complete invention of your own that simply doesn't make sense!

Of course just fun speculation, but in the real world there needs to be a business case. I don't see the logic in developing access to new planet types as a free update for Odyssey when they could make money from a Paid DLC instead, just like for their other franchises they need the current playerbase to keep buying content just as much as trying to attract new users to generate growth.

Base building not only would boost cosmetics sales but also provide a key incentive for the existing playerbase to purchase yet another DLC so that the players/groups can create other settlements on new planet types with unique features and challenges, doubley so if such territory is linked to PowerPlay 2.0. It will be a stronger marketable feature than just having new flora, new vistas to gawp at or a few different NPC Settlement shapes.

I'll let my imagination go further, I would say that Base Building gameplay challenges/reward can be more easily integrated into all that variety of planet composition out there and when new thicker atmospheres arrive with the potential for hostile weather systems than for ships.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Unless they introduce shortages - some kind of chain of production which needs player-made raw materials and goods to actually produce anything (or much of anything)

Shortages in themselves don't really do much, though. Domestic Appliances production could cease overnight - just whatever's left in station stock is it - and it'd take quite some time for people needing it for source-and-return missions to run that out, and then the only effect of it being missing would be to make a few source-and-return missions need to resort to megaship/installation piracy or be abandoned.

The chain needs to end in something of direct player usefulness - at the moment, mainly just Tritium (but it'd be hard to outdo mining in any location where it's short), engineering materials, maybe a few of the Thargoid/Guardian commodities (but they'd be thematically odd for this!) - because otherwise all you can do is sell it for credits and there are plenty of really efficient ways to get credits which don't touch the trade system or anything with limited supply at all.

Maybe you supply to a faction, and that faction's stations have stock of the item, which increases the factions inf as people come to buy?

It'd have to be a really effective source of INF to be competitive versus the existing routes, though.

It'd also be tough to avoid laundering: supply 10t to the station; buy 10t from the station for INF; supply those 10t back to the station - most obvious restrictions on that could probably be circumvented if there were two of you supplying two stations.

Again, not completely unfixable but the amount of work which would be needed to completely rethink how the in-game economy works and what it's for would be extremely substantial (and quite possibly not inherently popular)

 

[Hellrider]

And what if they ask for 10bn for it and a weekly maintenance?

I could buy few of them, even if I dont need (or even want in game) them, just to effective credit burning, sadly carrier and upkeep are laughably weak in that

 

[Northpin]

I could buy few of them, even if I dont need (or even want in game) them, just to effective credit burning, sadly carrier and upkeep are laughably weak in that

I could easily burn twice as much without noticing - as with carriers, maybe we'd be able to get only one per account.

 

[varonica]

Of course just fun speculation, but in the real world there needs to be a business case. I don't see the logic in developing access to new planet types as a free update for Odyssey when they could make money from a Paid DLC instead, just like for their other franchises they need the current playerbase to keep buying content just as much as trying to attract new users to generate growth.

Base building not only would boost cosmetics sales but also provide a key incentive for the existing playerbase to purchase yet another DLC so that the players/groups can create other settlements on new planet types with unique features and challenges, doubley so if such territory is linked to PowerPlay 2.0. It will be a stronger marketable feature than just having new flora, new vistas to gawp at or a few different NPC Settlement shapes.

I'll let my imagination go further, I would say that Base Building gameplay challenges/reward can be more easily integrated into all that variety of planet composition out there and when new thicker atmospheres arrive with the potential for hostile weather systems than for ships.

I am sure if FDEV were going to release a new DLC for this new "feature" they would have either have stated so, or not mentioned the new feature at all, at the moment everyone is assuming this new feature will be released as part of the Odyssey DLC so I don't see where this stuff about a new DLC is coming from, that's worse than speculation, that's just making stuff up, straight up inventing it. Maybe you should steer away from the new DLC talk until FDEV actually do decide to release into about a new DLC, because a new DLC is paid for content, and no-one at the moment think this new feature is going to be locked behind a paywall.

 

[londonx]

I am sure if FDEV were going to release a new DLC for this new "feature" they would have either have stated so, or not mentioned the new feature at all, at the moment everyone is assuming this new feature will be released as part of the Odyssey DLC so I don't see where this stuff about a new DLC is coming from, that's worse than speculation, that's just making stuff up, straight up inventing it. Maybe you should steer away from the new DLC talk until FDEV actually do decide to release into about a new DLC, because a new DLC is paid for content, and no-one at the moment think this new feature is going to be locked behind a paywall.

Hmm think there is a misunderstanding, I feel that the new feature is Base Building, a free update for 2024 and then giving reasons as to why it makes sense to develop that as a free update. There was mention on the livestream that they are also working on "something else" with no vague release date. Eitherway unless they are happy releasing free updates for the next few years (not sure investors will be happy about that), but I would think it was reasonable to speculate that a DLC will be released at least in 2025. With Base Building already in the game (or perhaps restricted to Odyssey) in 2024 it would create an incentive for the playerbase to buy into a DLC if it had access to new planet types and thus expanding on the Base Building gameplay.

 

[amigacooke]

Hmm think there is a misunderstanding, I feel that the new feature is Base Building, a free update for 2024 and then giving reasons as to why it makes sense to develop that as a free update. There was mention on the livestream that they are also working on "something else" with no vague release date. Eitherway unless they are happy releasing free updates for the next few years (not sure investors will be happy about that), but I would think it was reasonable to speculate that a DLC will be released at least in 2025. With Base Building already in the game (or perhaps restricted to Odyssey) in 2024 it would create an incentive for the playerbase to buy into a DLC if it had access to new planet types and thus expanding on the Base Building gameplay.

Possibly, but it's all so delightfully vague in the classic Frontier manner.

 

[metatheurgist]

Sure, i can understand that some people want to settle, but... we already have carriers.

It's not about settling; it's about marking territory...that particular bunch of dogs has been yapping for as long as the game's existed.

 

[Fizzatron]

Sorry, missed this one before.

I know right. What people are asking for is insane.

Straight in there with the bait and switch I see! Just so you know, I understood your convoluted response but there's now way I was going to continue down that path. But if you want to side step that part and make a smart tangential remark instead, fair enough. Though it's not like we're talking about onfoot VR or ship interiors now..

Err... that's entirely what a business analyst's role is (particularly in software). Officially, taking business/customer requirements, and turning them into achievable technical outcomes.

Realistically, it's the old Henry Ford saying of "If I'd have asked what people wanted, they'd have asked for faster horses".

I see what you are trying to do but again, you are mistakenly applying it to your comments and is irrelevant to the specifics of what I'm saying. I am not talking about a difference without a distinction, and just because you feel like it can be still does not make it so, but you seem content with feeling that you know more than what people think themselves, people who I might add, are very well versed in the subject and are not synonymous with your example of folks who go starry eyed when confronted with the concept of a car.

I don't fundamentally disagree with any of that. FD do have limited resources, correct. Which is why now is not the time to be talking base building. To go back to your comment about baseline effort:

People want base building for surface mining. What surface mining? It doesn't exist in the game yet.
People want base building for industry/manufacturing. What industry/manufacturing? It doesn't exist in the game yet.
People want base building for <insert new thematic feature here>. More than likely, that doesn't exist in the game yet.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that Frontier are going to include base building as a purely cosmetic item without any thought for the use of such a feature. To go back to the ship interiors feature, Frontier have said that they would only consider them when there's game play to go with them. Now before you suggest that this is the same situation, I will say that Ship Interiors is a big development which requires onfoot abilities first, of which I will say Frontier did develop onfoot gameplay that went along with the new feature, including many settlement types with assets that showed various types of operation, including mining, research, manufacturing etc.

So when it comes to base-building it would be fair to say that a lot of the assets that would be required for the above list you quote are already there and what is missing is getting these assets to generate the materials that would be associated with them, there are even Horizons assets that could be used that already generate materials:

I could be wrong but I don't think getting these facilities to spawn the resultant materials is the hard part as such.

FD can't boil the ocean when doing base building, as you're suggesting.

Again, you are putting words I didn't say into my mouth. I never suggested that Frontier can't boil the ocean and I never said that Frontier implementing base-building was akin to boiling the ocean either. That's all you, man. The rest is just straw, man. o7

 

[Fizzatron]

The way I see it, the baseline has been established:
1. Creative management games like Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster (which basically are base building at their core) are the current forte of Fdev. The know-how is there and the Cobra engine can do it.
2. Existing Odyssey settlement assets are all modular pieces that can be arranged in a variety of ways resulting in many possible layouts. Odyssey as-is explores just some of these layouts. The "gauntlet" style agri settlement is probably the craziest we have now and showcases Dwarf Fortress-like elaborate maze that's, I dare say, very frustrating for would-be infiltrators I'm sure players would get creative and we'll have things like maze solving/infiltration competitions, race tracks, PvP shootout arenas etc.
3. The procedurally generated nature of placing Odyssey settlements demonstrates that a large surface base can be placed arbitrarily according to whatever the procedural algorithm allows and does not need developer curation to make it work with planet generation. I've seen few, rather inconsequential, glitches with Odyssey settlements.
4. Fleet carriers establish that player-owned persistent assets in E: D are possible and even the problem of non-PEGI 7 compatible naming of the carriers is not prevalent and can be tackled.
5. Fleet carriers have established the baseline and testbed for player-to-player interaction, cooperation and trade. There have been community meetings aboard carriers; carriers act as temporary homes for other players during expeditions; they facilitate tritium, platinum, meta-alloy, Odyssey engineering materials etc trade; they act as support infrastructure for current Thargoid war. It's all working very well (some hiccups excepted), and stationary bases have the potential to expand on these interactions.
6. Base building or owning a stationary asset is not new in space games. NMS, the X series and even Independence War 2 all have proven that player-owned stationary facilities can be a useful and natural part of an otherwise mobility and travel focused game. And it's not limited to space games, either--eg player homes have been a traditional part of most RPG-s, games that focus mostly on wandering and adventuring in the game world.

I didn't see your post before responding to @Jmanis but I think you nailed it pretty much on the head right there.

 

[IstvaanDCIV]

Base building makes absolutely no sense in a Space game with 400 billions stars (and an order of magnitude more planets)

The overwhelming majority of which are only fleetingly visited by explorers, which is just one facet of the gameplay offered by Elite Dangerous. There are plenty of players who never leave the bubble and stick to combat, trading, and other activities limited to areas inhabited by humanity. Base building would potentially offer the opportunity to expand such activities beyond their current scope. Makes sense to me.

Sure, i can understand that some people want to settle, but... we already have carriers.
Why tying yourself to a planetary surface?

Carriers don't allow one to settle on a surface, and there are activities which could be fulfilled by surface bases which are not currently done by FCs.

And what if they ask for 10bn for it and a weekly maintenance?
Heh, i'm already giggling at the uproar if that happens

Meh, I could afford that. Even if I couldn't, it would be something to work towards.

 

[Fizzatron]

I agree, I don't see the point in staying on a planet as your home when you have an immense universe to discover. That's why I am a supporter of ship interiors, I think that your ship should be your home, and you take it with you wherever you go.

Ultimately, I agree. Fleet Carriers serve that purpose to a decent degree, but I also think it's valid consider base-building as a means of setting up outposts for exploration missions etc. for resupply etc. In addition to ship interiors I add, but I think that's further down the road, and maybe base-building would be a step towards those, as some of the plausible ideas of what can be done in a base would be easier to implement with the already made assets, but also would be good gameplay ideas for interiors also.

 

[Fizzatron]

NFTs of all the ships?

Wrong thread.

 

[Fizzatron]

Since I just wrote a skeptical post I'll balance it out a bit - I do like this point a few people have raised: that base-building is basically CMS, and that is absolutely core competency and territory for 2024 FDev's stated business plan. It is a bit odd that settlements got good in Odyssey and they took the time to fix the FPS issues from making them so good, and then... nothing.

Well observed and pointed out. It would entirely fit their focus on CMS and the commitment to continue to develop existing titles.

 

[Fizzatron]

That's true but not the biggest barrier to it. (All this also essentially applies to surface mining operations, too; mechanically they're just an industry with a much shorter chain)

Adding a Fleet Carrier module which over time will convert 1t of Indium and 1t of Aluminium stored in the cargo hold to 2t of Domestic Appliances, and keep working through this conversion so long as it's stocked up, doesn't seem that difficult and Frontier could probably put that module together (with a bunch of different cargo chain options) pretty quickly if they wanted to.

There are two big problems with that module, though:
1) 1t Indium + 1t Aluminium is considerably more expensive than 2t Domestic Appliances. It'd need to make something like 20t for it to be worth it. All the arbitrariness of the market prices (every single refined metal is a lot cheaper than the same mass of its ore, most manufactured goods are cheaper than the same mass of even cheap refined metal, etc) would need to be fixed to make most production chains make a profit while keeping to conservation of mass, and that would shake up a lot of the trade economy. The way that BGS states affect trade prices would need to be substantially toned down, too. Lots of things in the trade sim which are currently fine because the NPC factions don't have a budget and don't need to be profitable would need a complete overhaul to be player-usable. [1]
2) What are you going to do with 1000t of Domestic Appliances once you have them? Even with the FC module instantly converting all its raw material supply and not having any separate maintenance costs, the only thing you can do with them is sell them to a station, and you'd likely have been more efficient just buying them from an Industrial station in the first place. The same applies to essentially every commodity. So it needs not only uses beyond "sell them" adding for at least the end-of-chain commodities, but also extreme adjustments to the NPC markets so that they don't provide enough of those commodities on their own. That's again a much bigger change in terms of either the BGS or direct player use of a whole lot of cargo.

The one case it could potentially work right now is a production chain leading to Tritium, where the NPC markets are insufficient to meet demand once you get a few thousand LY from the bubble, and there's a player demand in the absence of NPC markets. But then Tritium is directly minable, so you'd either need to be able to run the whole production chain from mined materials where 100t of precursors is substantially quicker to mine than 100t of Tritium (or the exchange rates break conservation of mass, of course, so you only need 20t of precursors to get 100t of Tritium), or you'd need a way to transport other precursor commodities to the deep-space factory from the bubble which could be used to just transport Tritium directly instead.
(And that's with all the existing deep-space player-run Tritium depots essentially being run as a non-profit service: they'll cover their costs and make a nominal surplus but it's definitely not a fast way to make money)

I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but the precursor steps of sorting out the entire commodity pricing structure to have something approaching a rational profit-making balance at all points (which would need careful alignment to things like bounties and exploration data which don't have the same considerations) would be immense and should absolutely be done first because if the economy can't even be balanced with purely NPC production it's certainly not going to be balanced once players get involved.

[1] This gets even worse if the production chains can make ship/outfitting modules, which are player-usable, because then comedy points like "the Sidewinder hull costs considerably less than its mass in scrap metal" suddenly become gameplay-relevant rather than minor sources of fun, and all those prices need rebalancing too.

Great points overall. For sure, if there were to be a raw material -> commodity -> ship/module/etc/Coriolis. crafting tree, all the things that make it up would have to be revisited. Let's hope that the new Powerplay update includes trading aspects that align with that process, though I wouldn't say that it would be beyond the scope of the work done to include such features.

 

[Northpin]

The overwhelming majority of which are only fleetingly visited by explorers, which is just one facet of the gameplay offered by Elite Dangerous. There are plenty of players who never leave the bubble and stick to combat, trading, and other activities limited to areas inhabited by humanity. Base building would potentially offer the opportunity to expand such activities beyond their current scope. Makes sense to me.

What Scope? FDev do not seem to consider the game playing by itself a path to take.
So there is nothing automated in the game. No automated mining, no automated manufacturing.
Nothing that would hint you could have an automated mining station that will fill your depots while you are not actually playing the game - pretty much like we dont have a plotting system for our carriers nor fuel tanks big enough so them carriers can freely roam the galaxy with us, the owners, being out of the game.


Yea, you could have a planetary base.
To do what? Have it mining while you are there, landed and pressing some buttons?
I dont really see this coming - ED is a space sim, not a mining management sim nor Satifactory