This is what I was talking about earlier, if your goal is to have players want to leave the core systems on their own then the cost of being on those core planets must be something which a newer player values less than an older player. Currently the only such resource I can see is permits/base area, so using permits as the currency in land auctions should work to make players prefer to build on less populated worlds. Don’t use something you can derive easily from cash though or you once again fall back into the most established players settling all the best core worlds.
Another frequently suggested way to solve this is to make outer worlds much better or have unique benefits, but you have to be careful with such solutions because most variations of this slows down new players in getting into the game.
I’m not sure I can agree with you here, a large part of the fun of this game is in its attempts to get as close to a real world economy and phenomena as possible.
I’m generally not a fan of overly complicated mechanics. Most of the proposals in this thread around keeping plots seem to have this problem to me, whether it’s via auctioning, rationing, or valuing land in different ways. I’d still prefer having no plot limit, with some kind of tax that disincentivizes any single player from building bases on all the core worlds at once.
I will also note that the prospect of moving a base to another planet isn’t that bad. It’s been characterized in this thread as “destroying what you’ve built”, but packing up all your buildings and shipping them to another world is actually not that big a deal. You lose productivity while they’re in transit, but in terms of actual cost, it’s basically no different from what you pay in regular repairs anyway. Also, you know it’s coming, so you can plan ahead - “When the base tax on planet X gets above 20%, I’ll move the mining operations to Y, and the manufacturing to Z”. I don’t see why this should feel like a penalty for success, you’re just being smart about logistics. Also, in real life, companies do this all the time, moving operations around to take advantage of new tax breaks or changes in regulatory regimes.
If the goal is to encourage spreading out rather than the encouragement of staying so centralized… I think one of the bigger things that could be addressed, without adjusting plots or permits is resources and realistically colonizable planets.
Starter planets have a very desirable setup, because you want your new players to have a relatively painless introduction to the game, and they also have really close access to the local CX.
Perhaps if the resources on planet for a starter system were made less plentiful encouraging folks to go beyond and explore the problem might sorta solve itself.
EX to follow, but all numbers are made up:
If you wanted the best single planet to be able to make 100BFabs a day, It should have inhospitable atmospheric conditions and be a decent travel away from the CX.
Several damn good Bfab planets should be able to make, say 85 a day, and either be inhospitable or a decent travel distance.
The starter system should cap out at about 60/day.
Is it good late game? No.
Is it good mid game? Meh, someone might keep one plot to have access, but they will likely have moved onto better things.
Is to good early game? Yes. Its not the best, and it lets people grow beyond it.
As it stands… Montem or Vallis are the best single planets to make BFabs if you are doing it all on one planet. Yes I understand there are more ideal ways to go about it, but using that as the concept for balancing.
Obviously people can import goods and setup wherever, that gets into how to grow a sustainable population farther from CX. Perhaps… some sort of building development building that decreases upkeep cost the farther from a CX it is? capping at something like 50% discount. This will encourage people to set up more hubs farther away from established hubs?
This does encourage people to move out from core worlds but over time means that the market for bfabs is tuned to the 100+ production, slowing and possibly in the worst cases making it impossible to profit as a newer player in a starting system trying to make bfabs at merely 60.
I think the central planets can keep being as profitable as it is now, as the 4 major factions came here first, so first come first serve. To make this fair for everyone, settle there require a lot of faction reputation. Beside production tax, players settle here must provide some kind of commodities each week (via contracts with low pay). All players will start in surrounding areas and can either race to the center, or keep expand outward. Issue with fuel can be handle by market maker.
Another suggestion is promoting 3 play styles: tall, wide and hybrid. The faction’s centers is for playing tall (with high expansion cost, but high tier workforce), surrounding areas is for wide (with low settle cost and low tier workforce), and hybrid is a mix of both. Each should have their own set of challenge to manage, and advanced features to help (Please add auto queue to basic license, pretty please ). E.g. Tall requires players to provide commodities via low pay contract, so contract management tools is required. Wide require logistic management tools, so on and so on. Further more, center planets can be rich in resources (and/or bonuses) that require (and/or help) for high-tier production.
Tl;dr: no more plot, and instead introducing many ways to make profit and expansion without relying on a gold-rushed planet.
The plot system is one of the oldest parts of the game. At the time we wanted to have something “tangible” where players could see at first glance how populated a planet is and also be able to see where their base is.
We had different features in mind that would work on top of the plot system:
A slightly different resource distribution, making some plots more desirable than others.
Making the distances between the plots count, e.g. from your base to the warehouse, local market, space port etc.
In the end we didn’t implement these, because it felt too detailed, and would indeed create problems for late comers.
One major other function the plots serve, and still do, is limiting what I call player profiles or profile patterns. Meaning that if everyone could settle everywhere we’d quickly see recommendations for a farming pattern for example. That pattern would suggest to have a base on Promitor, a water tap at X, a base that does Z at Y and so on. Since our players are good thinkers we’d quickly see that some of these patterns do exceptionally well and everyone will copy. In my eyes this way of playing the game is way more boring than having to deal with restrictions and overcome them, resulting in unique company/base setups.
Is the plot system outdated? Maybe so and this thread surely got me thinking. I agree with Ficks_Dinkum:
Maybe we can do away with the plot limitations and replace them with a simple mechanic: every base that is not in your own faction space costs more permits than the one before. E.g, I am Castillo-Ito, my first Insitor base will cost me two permits, the next four, and so on.
And also don’t forget about the simple intend to make land a limited resource so that mid- and end-game features could hook into how this resource is allocated. These haven’t materialised at all so far, but were a major aspect of the initial concept.
Plot counts should scale dynamically with the active playerbasebase count. This way there’s still scarcity but more people overall can join the planets as time goes on (which solves potential supply/demand issues)
P.S: I know this isn’t realistic, but come on, it’s just a game, right?
Keep plots, but have them gradually increasing in number. The ghost plot system stays, so that newbies can always settle their first planet immediately. For everyone else there’s a queuing system - the “Build base” button effectively becomes the “Enter the queue to build a base” button. If there’s a free plot, then the base gets built immediately, but otherwise it gets built when the next free plot opens up. Players can see how long the queue is when they join it, and also see how often new plots are being released, so they can plan ahead, e.g. estimating that if they join the queue today, they will get their new base in roughly two weeks.
This way, if someone really wants a base on a core world, they can join the queue for it, but most of the time they’re better off going to a less populated planet.
The main thing I don’t like about this is that a large influx of new players will suddenly push the queue out a lot. That makes existing players not want new players to join. The system may need some tweaking to prevent this. My first thought is that the ghost plot system could be completely separate from the main queue - newbies joining or leaving is tracked separately. So every player gets one free base on a starter planet, and it increases the “used plot” AND the “available plot” counts in the UI, but then if they abandon that base it decreases them both. Internally it’s a separate number, so those first bases have no impact on the plot queue for everyone else’s second and third bases.
This system doesn’t feel totally unrealistic to me. In real life you can’t just build whatever you want - you need to apply for planning permission in lots of places, and the bureaucracy takes time to process.
Also, at some point in the future, if the hypothesised game mechanics that molp and Martin mention come into existence, then a planet can stop allocating new plots, and we’re back to the existing hard limit.
This would also feel realistic to me, since in real life countries start trying to prevent immigration after they get to a certain size.
I think this ties into the ease of moving stuff around. Other than Hubur, all planets are close enough to each other that shipping is essentially a non-factor. Under these circumstances, it’s normal for a single best pattern to emerge for a given product, like the RAT production pattern. The final product can then be moved across the galaxy at nearly no cost, which means this RAT pattern is the optimal pattern for most of the galaxy.
By increasing shipping costs, more RAT patterns will become viable. Then it’s not a question of figuring out the galaxy’s best pattern for RAT, but figuring out the relative value of that pattern in that area. This value will be determined by the area’s exportable product.
For example, let’s say shipping costs are 100 per ton per system. At 0.21t per RAT, that increases the cost of RATs by 21 per system. If RAT costs 50 in Hortus, then price in Moria needs to be 176 before it becomes viable to supply Moria with Hortus RATs. That’s never going to be the case. Since these 2 markets will never interact with each other directly, then both RAT production patterns are viable. This solves the issue of a single pattern being optimal.
It also changes the purpose of a plot. In the case of Moria, you wouldn’t want a plot on a farming planet to grow RAT, but you would want it to have something to trade in exchange of BFabs. If you need BFabs elsewhere, then it’s either you make them and export them, you grow RAT in Moria, trade for them and export or you import something Moria needs and export BFabs. When the plot limit is reached anywhere in the local economy, then it creates a soft cap to the output of BFabs. There might still be plots available for BFab production, but without RAT plots, the profitability of BFabs is lowered.
As to why should established players not crowd the starter planets, that’s because higher tier materials would unavailable in sufficient quantities in the starter regions. There would be no point to use 3 permits on the best RAT pattern in starter region if you’re looking for RFabs for example because you will be unable to export your RAT for RFabs efficiently. You could sell RAT at the CX, then buy RFabs, but the ratio will always be worse than if you established a RAT base where RFabs are created and exported the RFabs where you need them.
This would require the universe generation to be carefully tuned to make sure all regions have roughly a similar economic output and also that resources are spread in a way that makes a single region vertically integrated impossible. For example, let’s use 3 systems as the distance between regions. Pioneer products would be manufacturable in any 3-system cluster. Settler product would require 2 3-system cluster to cooperate. Technician would require 2 Settler 6-system cluster to cooperate and so on. The trade between Hortus and Moria would be for Settler and Technician products while the trade between Hubur and Moria would be for Engineers and Scientist level products. Since Scientist level materials wouldn’t be available in the inner ring, high level trade would happen on the outer ring naturally.
At that scale, a new player wouldn’t be faced with filled up plots on the best RAT location. They could choose from 30-50 locations, all with viable RAT production patterns. The plot limit would kind of solve itself because players would naturally migrate to higher value sectors.
I think Ficks stipulation of “more simple = more better” has merit, and that mechanism is very easy to explain to a new player. You get a very simplistic explanation of the entire system in one sentence.
I think the concept of making bases more expensive by having them require more permits is fine. I would prefer to see it tied to a seperate HQ level system to make more diverse upgrade purchase requirements rather than just making more bases cost more permits.
However. With your example, I think it forces too much centralization of power within one faction. I would prefer to see it run in the opposite direction. Your first 3 bases within each different faction each cost the normal amount. Additional bases beyond that cost more. This means you can build up to 12 bases, 3 in each faction, before they start getting more expensive.
This encourages equal expansion throughout faction space. I fear with your suggestion would encourage too much centralization within one faction, which would probably end up being Moria, and the rest of the faction planets would be far less populated. I fear that precisely what you said earlier, a pre-planned route to success “x then y then z” would become normalized if you were incentivized to only build within one faction.
Another point against using permits is that would act a hard limit as nobody would pay the increased permit cost. The opportunity cost would be way too high. Nobody will pay two or more permits to build one base. The cost needs to be +20%, not +100%. So IMO, the cost needs to be put somewhere else.
And Tibster brings up another excellent point about the downsides of encouraging centralization within one faction. The balance of the game, and a very good economic decision, was to give each region their own strengths and weaknesses.
Regions which are equally balanced is not fun. Moria should be shit at making it’s own food and require a ton of it imported from Hortus. Antares should be shit at making ship fuel and require it to be imported from HRT\BEN. etc, etc, etc.
Well no. If everyone starts copying a successful profile, there will be more competition between these players doing same stuff and this will decrease their profit margins. For instance, if many players settle a planet abundant in water and start extracting water there, the water will be oversupplied and it’s price will go down. So the market mechanics naturally create negative feedback forces.
Another way to to limit copying the patterns is to have companies more specialized into one branch. Right now a company can vertically integrate over several bases by dedicating each base to one specific branch (extraction, metallurgy, construction, etc.). This is because the expert system works at a per base level. You could replace experts per base by experts per company. The expert at a company level rather than base level would incentivize the companies to specialize into one branch to maximize the productivity. That is to do same kind of stuff on every base. This will prevent the companies integrating vertically. Therefore one would need several different patterns to cover all the branches.
I really do like one aspect of the current system which is that player bases are directly influenced by presence of other player bases. Discarding that aspect entirely seems like a downgrade to me.
If you increase starting permit count to 10 and make the default base cost 5, everything stays the same but allows more granular control over the cost like this if you want something to cost a fraction of a current permit.
EDIT: Though upon thinking about that some more, you might want to rename permits to bureaucratic capacity or something instead of permits if you did this.
I’m not sure that last part is true, since the products are all fungible. If a particular profile is the most cost effective way to produce RAT, then everyone who wants to produce RAT should still copy that profile. If the result is that RAT floods the market, then the price may drop, and that may change the profitability of RAT in general versus other products, but it wouldn’t change whether or not that particular profile is the best way to produce RAT.
I like the idea of some sort of “planet full” mechanic because it drives the universe to grow and spread out to other planets. But the current plot mechanic system doesn’t achieve this. There’s only a handful of “full” planets, and none in ANT space. The limits are high so they only occur on starter planets (which have the ghost plot system). So it has never meaningfully functioned in this way.
I’m surprised by the idea that limiting people to one region might help with this problem. Are planets running out of plots because players are building bases on each starter world, regardless of which region they are in? I’d be very surprised if that’s common.
The current plot system doesn’t block enough planets to limit player patterns. There’s no maxed planets in ANT space. (Come do your Harmona/Farm, Norwick/FP, Deimos/SME, Nike/Constuction combo builds here )
I think the plot system can be entirely removed. These are good gameplay ideals, but some other system is needed to achieve them. Plot limits would need to be 1/4th of what they currently are if the goal is to drive people to new planets.
Furthermore, new players don’t have the deep gameplay knowledge to understand the game mechanics and logistics when evaluating planets for their first and second base. So the limitations imposed by the plot system don’t work into their decisions, and they don’t meaningfully interact with the system.
The fact plot limits / ghost plots are only under discussion for starter planets suggests some kind of fundamental change to how starter planets work is called for. I’ve got no idea where that might lead, though.
I’ve always had the impression that a core design principle of PRUN was that experienced players shouldn’t have too much of a production efficiency bonus over new players. That prevents big players from pushing little guys out of the market. Snapping up the “good plots” early, and leaving “bad plots” for the noobs that don’t know any better could be a concern. They wouldn’t have the knowledge or capital to skip out of populated space into the frontier to chase high profit plots.
This is the exact issue which started this thread. So… yes.
This what has happened. The best plots in the universe, i.e. the ones on the prime starter worlds (except in ANT, apparently) are all full. For example, a lot of veteran players have bases on Promitor and Montem, but a brand new player can only ever hope to have a base on one of those, using their initial ghost plot. The other seems to be forever out of reach.
Throwing out another idea here mainly to aid the discussion.
Introduce another tier of permit that allows a plot on a fully populated planet
New players start with enough of these to resolve the discussed issues
Older players have to grind to obtain these, perhaps within the HQ upgrade system, perhaps not. If there “Luxury Permits” were craftable, it would create a good money sink also and add some richness to the economy
Part of the problem here is not just that new players can’t make use of the best core world locations, but that it’s an optimal or close to optimal strategy to simply build a ton of bases near the core and on core worlds even when it’s already highly populated. Luxury permits are basically just ghost plots but now anyone can become one of those established players who has a base on most core worlds, and everyone as a whole has even less incentive to be spreading to the outer reaches of the galaxy.
). E.g. Tall requires players to provide commodities via low pay contract, so contract management tools is required. Wide require logistic management tools, so on and so on. Further more, center planets can be rich in resources (and/or bonuses) that require (and/or help) for high-tier production.
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