Not everyone. Some will stay around the starting systems.
And if they donāt or canāt, say due to inhospitable environment, the existence of more efficient planets causes bases that new players can make to be less profitable, which slows the early game down and hurts retention. This is why I must emphasize the importance that you make the price of occupying popular locations to be something that a new player values less than an old player, which currently would only be permits/area.
A planet is "bestā because A) it has a ton of population (making getting Tech\Eng allocations easy), along with itās COGC alignment and itās close proximity to both other highly developed worlds, and the CX.
Itās not one thing. Like efficiency bonuses, itās stacking. Worlds like Montem\Vallis are powerful because of their proximity to a lot of other strong worlds, like Danakil for construction. And the CX. And a ton of other natural, easy expansion points for your empire when early on, shipping is a huge constraint you need to be conscious of.
Buffing the strength of other planets, which can only be done by raising their resource extraction rates, does very little to offset this centralization pressure.
The problem: Plot count limits suck for new players - being unable to expand in powerful ways which old players were able to take advantage of and new players cannot simply because they are late, by no fault of their own.
The solution: If we remove plot limits, how do we prevent people from building ātallā on like 5 major planets, ignoring everything else, and encourage people to expand āwideā, away from the galactic core and expand into the universe.
I think we can boil down all of the various ways to accomplish this into two major avenues:
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Economic sanctions. Either by making permits more expensive to build on a developed world, or imposing a daily tax that must be paid to have a base on that world, or lowering efficiency of bases that exist on this world or by any other economic means to affect someoneās P&L or expansion cost. The goal is to make existing bases less profitable the more āfullā a world gets. This downside is this penalizes new players where in all cases, itās more expensive for them to grow in a more populated universe.
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Hard-coded limits. You can only have āxā number of bases on starter worlds. Or you can only have āxā number of bases within a certain faction. The downside to this is there will be a blueprint for success: everyone will settle on like 5 planets in each faction, ignoring all other worlds.
- Economic Sanctions
- Hard-coded limit
- Results
0 voters
Iām curious to see what you guys think.
P.S. This is not the only answer for the āplotā problem. It can stay as it is with no changes. Or remove plots entirely with no other changes. But if we want to prevent planets from becoming too centralized with no plot limits, then these are the only two ways to do it. Economic sanctions, or hard-cap growth within āthe coreā per company.
Not all economic sanction methods as you put it penalize new player expansion, or at least no more than would be expected from highly populated galaxies and the more efficient markets they bring. The permit change I proposed should only have an effect like that very late, but at the same time there would be highly developed markets that should make early HQ expansion easier.
You havenāt finished reading my plan. HQās base is permanently rent-free. This not only didnāt punish the new players, but rewarded them. When old players pay higher rent for these initial planets, the new players can invest three permits to get a rent-free 1000-area base. Considering the rising prices of products on these planets brought by rent, new players will get higher profits at the beginning.
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When new players want to find a planet for the fourth permit, to some extent, they have already entered the middle of the game. Considering that they made more money on the first 1000-area base than in the existing universe, it wonāt be very difficult for them to expand to the second base.
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Neither solution seems good to me. I feel like this is our version of the Great Horse Manure Crisis. The issue wouldnāt exist in a different universe. It isnāt an issue with the gameās design, but one about the universe and a different universe wouldnāt have this problem.
If resource output increased with distance from the core, then sustaining a technician population in the core would be impossible. If you want to farm EDC MM, then off to Hubur you go. Because you would need half a dozen bases there to support it, then players would migrate out of the core as they went up the tech tree. Plot limits would then serve to spread players around the outer ring.
The farther away from the core, the higher the productivity? It is ridiculous. It should be adjusted that the larger the population of a planet, the higher the cost. Even far from the core, a planet with a large population can appear.
So your suggestion is one of the two solutions. Itās economic sanctions for those who stay in the galactic core.
Reading through the thread, I do prefer solutions that try to incentivize more experienced players leaving the starter planets vs. more arbitrary restrictions.
Coming at this from a corp perspective, I think if you had both the highest resource extraction efficiency and the highest production efficiency planets further from the core, gated behind higher planet tiers so that everyone doesnāt settle them as new players, that would help draw more experienced players away from the core over time. Itās possible to balance it through weight and shipping costs so that the most efficient place to produce low-tier goods to sell on a faction CX is some place nearby that a new player can settle and be competitive and grow their production, while still having more efficient places to produce them for local consumption (with an eye towards higher tier production) much further away.
It probably needs to be more than just resource extraction efficiency, otherwise you might decide to extract near the periphery but have all of your Electronics/Manufacturing/Chemistry/etc. in the core for the higher tier workers. Perhaps in addition to specific resources and concentrations, higher tier planets could also have features that improve a specific type of production or a specific tier of worker that could stack with a CoGC. Maybe you would need higher tier ships to really make good use of all these planets if the desire was to gate it further or add additional stages of progression.
A corp would then invest in POPI in the peripheral locations to build up higher tier worker populations to get the benefits of the higher efficiency for endgame production (FTL ships, afabs for higher tier permits, or whatever the future endgame is) without caring too much about how far away the CXs are.
In the current universe the problem with investing a lot in building out a region like Arclight for example is that you donāt actually end up with a more efficient place than faction space to make FTL ships or afabs. If this is fixed in the next universe, Iād expect corps focused on high-tier production to naturally migrate away from starter worlds (and perhaps even take down their bases there to free up permits for the higher tier worlds).
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There is a technical issue with your poll. Somehow āResultsā is one of the possible choices and 25 percent have voted for it.
At the fundamental level, I suppose the loss of potential productivity is like an economic sanction, but it isnāt imposed on the player. If a player wants to remain in the core and do pioneer tier stuff, then thereās nothing preventing him from doing so. A sanction would prohibit him from doing it, while an incentive merely tells them to move on if they want to progress.
It is a complex issue
Distributions exist, and we see similar distributions of population in RL
Hard fixes or band-aids should not be used to influence the distributions in a system
Additional costs, luxury permits, or something similar is the only appropriate method that also simulates RL (i.e. more expensive to live in the city than in the sticks). This therefore is not a hard fix or band-aid but introducing a realistic property of population distribution
Before making it I didnāt know if there was a āshow resultsā button.
Itās good poll etiquette to make sure thatās an option to get less biased data.
Economic sanction is not a full-stop ābanā. Maybe economic incentives would be a more broad term.
But whatever you call it, itās still affecting P&L.
tl;dr make transporting more specialised raw resources between systems in large quantities prohibitively expensive to encourage processing on planets nearer to each resource source rather than at the factionās central specialised worlds.
For me itās about the costs of long distance transport. Cheap transport means itās a bit too easy to bring various materials in to a central processing planet.
If the costs of FTL cargo transport were higher it would push manufacturing towards decentralisation as you want to process the high mass resources into lighter forms before transporting. Rather than one central processing hub that everyone wants to be on, each system with a useful resource would ideally want a planet in-system or nearby to process the materials down to a compact enough product to ship to a central planet or to the CX. This may reduce the number of older companies wanting or needing bases on the starter planets and should massively reduce the incentive to set up bases in other factions starter areas.
Making transport costs more expensive would require some care and possibly adjustment of certain recipes. Any recipe that takes multiple heavy resources would need either relatively light intermediate products (not requiring other rare resources) that can be more easily shipped around, or all of the heavy resources required to arrive at the lighter product would need to in the same system or very nearby, which would probably need manual intervention in the universe to ensure.
You would also need to ensure that there was enough distribution of the important basic resources for upkeep and consumables (water, hydrogen, etc.) so that the majority of systems can have access to the basics. Alternatively ensure that the basics are light enough so that they can be shipped from the centre/CX, but having them being slightly heavier and available in multiple places would mean this production could also be decentralised to ease the load on the starter areas.
I would see the starter systems as being remarkable only in that they have usable quantities of all of the basic resources needed to start up, provide upkeep and consumable supplies, and reach a point where you can expand to other systems. They would however lack the resources used for more advanced recipes. So a new player would be able to use the starter system to get going (plentiful basic supplies on the CX and easy to produce themselves if they wish) but when they have enough capital to build enough bases and buildings to sustain themselves further from the CX they would disassemble bases and move out and specialise in something more profitable, and probably even relocate their basic farming etc closer to where they will use it.
There may still be central planets for higher tier production as itās not easy to set that up, but the demand from newer players for that is much lower, and thereās no reason that has to be near the CX.
A problem to be consider would be that the further distances donāt have ready access to the CX so the local markets would be the only practical trading method for things that arenāt cost effective to FTL ship. It might make it difficult for basic accounts. Theyād have to be sufficiently vertical that they are able to import the rest. The local market interface would also need to be able to effectively handle and sort a higher volume in the absence of a CX.
A positive side effect of more expensive FTL cargo shipping might be that rather than the high levels of vertical integration like we have now, companies may need to specialise in one or two products - because if they need multiple bases to efficiently create and sell products of a single group of resources at one location, they wonāt have enough bases to be able to efficiently create all products of all resources and might be better buying the products from someone that did invest in that resource.
This would also increase liquidity of this type of intermediate.
A minor side effect might be that FTL out of system and back in will no longer be cheaper than just using STL travel within the same system!
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After considering your idea more carefully, I think realized I like it. A taxation depending on the cluttering of a planet would also act as a cash sink and PrUn needs more scalable cash sinks.
2 Likes
IMO, the first step would be (/have been) to block anybody from having bases in more than one Capitol System (Moria, etc). New players should always be allowed to start on those planets, but established players should be āencouragedā (ā¦forcedā¦) to look outward for expansion. It would be very simple to implement, and to understand. It would make the idea of Faction Citizenship a little more important, maybe leading to more Faction Rivalry.
The first and biggest problem here is that the starters are so much better than everything else. The curated worlds are just better and more conveniently located than anything that the random generation came up with. The starter ring not only has everything it needs, thereās also several other trading markets in short jumping distance.
Second is that players by and large do not like expanding outside of the immediate area they started in, even when offered new bases for free. So the most popular starting planets will by default have the largest and most vibrant markets. The larger the market is, the easier that region is to start and play in, further centralizing more players into the same areas.
Third, new players massively prefer starting within a system with a CX and the starter planets that are good enough to retain their players within a CX system will always be the most populated. This is why Montem and Promitor are so packed.
Fourth, regions that can build their own CXs will eventually just be dead if they arenāt made into starter planets. See Hubur and Arclight.
So overall, I think the best solution here is one thatās fairly straightforwards: Change the starter planets over time. Removing the plot limits would be fine so long as players arenāt all starting on the same hugely populated planets every single time, since most players donāt tend to settle outside of their starting regions. In addition, do a massive overhaul of the universe generation to create the potential for lots of new colonization hubs all over the universe. This way veterans gradually move outwards to settle new worlds which eventually become new starter planets that new players start up on and gradually move further outwards themselves. At the same time, retire old starter worlds in reverse order of popularity. Perhaps with some balance options to make old starter worlds less appealing to settle over new worlds.
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The limited number of starter planets is a large part of the problem as Twilight said people tend to stick to where they started, what is needed then is to have more starting options some of which are outside Faction space with a Notice that those are in more challenging areas.
Have a mechanic where planets can become starter worlds once certain regional qualifications are met and allow them to be removed from the pool of starter worlds if they fall below those conditions for any reason. Infrastructure, Population count, Space facilities within 3 jumps could all contribute to this qualification and would allow for dynamic starter planets anywhere in the universe as areas are colonized.
One advantage of this is that new players are more distributed and it gives corporations etc incentive and options to support a region to bring in more pioneers (in the form of new players) making Faction space an option but not the only option. Each Faction would obviously keep at least one starting world but which world that is that could change from time to time as the current one fills up.
Why have outer regions if nobody has any reason to go there? If we can provide infrastructure options to allow the dynamic creation of a starter world then the universe would be more balanced (it would also give people a need to maintain outer regions) and provide different trade routes not just between core systems.
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