I am a new player to the game, but I’ve been reading a lot here on the forums and trying to come up with ideas that might help this game become as great as it could be in time.
Some topics that seem to be discussed a lot are competition between new players and experienced players, and self sufficiency vs specialization / more interaction between players. I believe that giving new players more space to compete, and increasing incentives for specialization and trading with others would both be healthy directions for the game, and make it more fun to play.
The expert system currently works at a base level, meaning an experienced player will accumulate experts until they have a max efficiency base in one industry if they so desire. There isn’t really much incentive to ever change that setup once they grow beyond that base, as they can just set up another base with a different specialty that makes use of the first base’s produced resources.
Instead, what if the expert system was company wide, and you could only gain expertise and the benefit from it if you are focusing a specific industry over another. This way, an experienced player who started out growing food on Promitor, and has since moved on to more profitable / higher tech, is no longer able to compete efficiently with new players who are still focusing on food without sacrificing the efficiency of their new found industry.
I see this as being called something like a ‘specialty’ or ‘expertise’ feature. I really could be very similar to existing experts, but I think an additional change that would help is to make it so you can only accumulate this expertise when you are also focusing it and getting it’s benefit, rather than the current system which is based on how many buildings you have running. This again encourages players to move on to new building types as they progress in the game, and perhaps leave the low tech pioneer buildings for new players who can focus those early and quickly become competitive with each other.
I believe long term this would have positive effects among experienced players as well, as the depth for expertise at higher tech levels could even go far beyond the current 5 expert commitment. This would mean players would have more incentive to trade at a higher level, as each could only do a limited number of things at max efficiency at a time. With the ability to switch focus and still retain all previously accumulated expertise, this still allows players to remain flexible and adapt to the market as things change.
I still have a lot to learn about this game, and I’m curious to hear from people that have been around for a while on what they think. Are these goals in line with what you want to see from the game? Do you think such a system or something similar would have a positive or negative effect towards these goals? Are there other consequences to making such or change, or something else the current expert system does for the game that shouldn’t be abandoned?
Overall I’m enjoying this game a lot and I think it has a ton of potential!