Global experts for higher tiers

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#1

The goal here is to create a production advantage for specialization, without changing new player gameplay.

The idea would be to have global experts which improves efficiency of a given industry type across all of your bases. However, these experts would be less powerful on pioneers and more powerful on scientists.

While experts work well when you have a single base, when you have multiple bases, you can specialize your experts across planets, which allows you to get the best efficiency bonuses while also reducing market risk. This leads to vertical integration across bases as the optimal pattern.

With global experts, it would become more profitable to run multiple bases of the same industry. The dynamics at play during new player phase where you have a single base and do a lot of trading would expand to late game. Just like you can do everything in your first base, that’s not as efficient as stacking experts and trading.

By having these global experts not affect pioneers as much, new players do not have a big disadvantage.

For example, 1 expert could increase pioneer by 1%, technicians by 5% and scientists by 15% with scaling like base experts. You would want to run full experts for scientist buildings and since you’re running them, you might as well switch to that type for mid tier planets. The minimal impact on lower tier still allows vertical integration to secure your lower tier products. You could still be self sufficient, but it wouldn’t be as good and might require a corp.

Ideally, there would also be higher tier buildings for all industries otherwise it will only work for manufacturing, chemistry and electronics.

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#2

Excellent proposal. There should be an incentive for a company to globally specialize into one branch. Right now, different bases on different planets specialize each in a different branch.

I would also remove the COGC and their bonuses. The COGC pushes into specializing each planet into one single branch, like agriculture on Harmonia, metallurgy on Deimos, construction on Nike. Doing something on a planet that goes against the COGC bonus is very suboptimal as of now. I would prefer planets with more diversified economies and companies that are to the contrary more specialized.

#3

I fully agree with the COGC bonus. In theory it’s a nice feature because it creates choices, but these are fake choices as you mentioned and they’re set in stone by the community. Although simply removing it wouldn’t magically create diversity on planets because there’s little benefit to producing something locally by importing raw materials, instead of simply importing manufactured products. That’s primarily due to products losing mass and volume as they get processed, which means shipping is cheaper while consumables and capital depreciation is the same. Even with global experts, that would still be the same, so you’ll be better off mass producing higher tier products elsewhere and fulfilling LM ads across the galaxy.

We would need different limiting factors in shipping for a FP to make sense on Nike for example, otherwise it would still make more sense to do construction there.

#4

True. But I could imagine a balance where each planet gets much more different types of raw materials, but in very different concentrations from planet to planet. Like a typical planet would offer a dozen of different ressources, many of which in low concentrations. So in theory one would get many different options for what to produce on a planet, some being economically inefficient of course. However, whether a particular industry on a particular planet is efficient or not would depend on the relative prices and could change over time.

#5

I see your point, but I’m not sure it would change much. It would be a fine balance since the economy is unidimensional. From extraction to consumption, there is a single optimal path in the entire economic graph. It can change slightly when the state of the universe changes, but most options will always be under performing.

For example, Proxion. The H2O there was probably fine early in the universe, because there wasn’t any other option and shipping a full load wasn’t possible yet. However, as soon as someone established a pure H2O extraction route that was cheaper than running a local rig, that planetary H2O became obsolete. It could become useful again if fuel or transport capacity becomes more expensive than running local rigs, but I wouldn’t bet on it since economies tend to develop more efficient paths over time.

The only way I would see it work is if there was some difference in locally produced goods. That would require a second dimension to the economy, like quality, that would decay when transported. It would then make sense to import low quality materials and turn them into high quality goods locally, rather than import high quality goods that mostly decay into low quality at arrival. The relationship between the agriculture and manufacturing planet then depends on this second dimension. Importing low quality RAT is cheaper and producing high quality RAT is cheaper.

Without a second dimension, there’s always going to be a single optimal base layout. Since it doesn’t seem like it’s in the roadmap, I wouldn’t rely on that concept to fix current issues.

#6

You are rigth. I would like to see each planet as a distinct eco-system. Right now it’s not the case. Rather constellations around each CX form an ecosystem. Yet, having more diverse ressources on each planet, with low to average concentrations for most, won’t hurt, imo. I also strongly support your idea of global experts.

#7

For that to happen, we would need much higher transportation costs between planets. Kind of how Hubur is in its own bubble because it costs too much to trade with that region. I don’t think planets are meant to be isolated ecosystems. I would bet on systems and clusters being the desired range of local trading.

Much higher FTL costs and lower STL costs would allow systems to have their own isolated economies. At that point planets could have a lot of diversity in their resources. If it costs 2 per ton to ship between planets and 50 per ton to ship between systems, then shipping RAT from 5 jumps away makes no sense and local RAT producers can thrive despite low farming availability.

But that would also imply a higher player count, otherwise we’ll have 10 systems with 100 players in each at most and would feel as empty as Hubur. It would be great to have this huge world going on, but I don’t think there’s enough players to fill it properly.

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