Increasing the economic incentives of specialized empire production

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tl;dr in the endgame, it is very easy to vertically integrate your own supplies, “this base makes x, which goes into y, which goes into z” through a dozen steps with planned, reliable inputs. I suggest increasing production bonuses to companies that stay within their chosen “specialization” of maybe 3 industry types. This would require more trading among intermediate production chain steps as you would need to externalize more and more of your supply chain to achieve this, but in doing so, achieve more powerful bonuses.

The purpose of the change would be to create more incentives for trade among players. Creating power powerful combinations for players who collaborate through trade, while retaining the ability for vertical integration if so desired.

The problem, in my opinion, is that vertical integration is a little bit too easy for companies. You’re able to go from the base ingredients all the way to extremely advanced and expensive products completely internally. From H2O–> HCP → C → EPO → NR\RBH\RSE → ABH\ASE, following the chain all the way up through 4 different industries.

At first, you’re discouraged from doing this because mixing industries on a planet has a penalty. Not only from the COGC and expert bonuses which you would miss out on, but also from your empire bonuses. Stacking those is very powerful.

Once your company grows to a certain point, you can vertically integrate everything on its own COGC world. You lose the negative incentives against vertical integration: the COGC and the Experts. The only one which remains is the ~10% empire bonus, which is reasonably small. I suggest buffing that.

My proposal would end up changing production bonuses and efficiencies to add economic incentives to stay within a player-chosen few industries at an empire-wide scale. We don’t want it to be as restrictive as those on a planet, I wouldn’t want all of us having to chose which industry to focus all 30 of our bases on. I think a good number to target here is 3. Three industries which you get powerful bonuses for participating in, even unlocking potential bonuses which impact other aspects of gameplay other than just production speed.

  • capacity buff to your ships (and bases!) carrying metals, making metallurgy focus easier as you’ll be hauling around many many rocks
  • access to powerful specialized recipes that offer better ROI
  • improved space granted per permit
  • “Marketeer”: gain x% more currency when selling an item (you fabricated) to a market maker. Items bought from other players yield the normal amount.
  • Your workforce requires less consumables per day
  • You pay reduced taxes to planetary governments, the difference is made up via inflation
  • “Govenator”: worlds require 10% less popi upkeep and COGC on worlds you govern (governor only, does not apply to parliament, upgrades increase # of planets you can apply this on, not the strength). Enables one-time prestige construction of planetary upgrades, can create a whole resource sink chain here too.
  • Can bypass the plot limit on planets for settling new bases!

Now imagine each of these bonuses has its own upgrade chain, requiring resources into upgrading each aspect of them individually. For example, the permit area ability would only grand you +2 or +3 at first but eventually would become +50 before upgrades became exponentially difficult. And you couldn’t just magically reformat your bases to this every time you researched an upgrade, so its gain would only be realized slowly over time.

What this creates, in reality, is far more public trade among all players at the intermediate steps. Corporate and public cx players all should see increased incentives to specialize their empires, focusing more on trading with people to achieve the best bonuses.

While there are many levers to pull in the game, I think this long-term economic balancing is quite important. I’ve been thinking about these for a while but wanted to get them down in a semi-permanent location. I’d love to hear some inputs! I’m sure my exact numbers are off, there is way more work which could be done there. I tried presenting this from a 10,000 ft view of the systems at play here rather than specific variables which I trust Molp\Counterpoint can do good work on.

Thanks!

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Thank you very much for the input! This is a topic we’ve been discussing quite a bit in the past. We actually have a concept draft in our backlog we labeled “Experts 2.0” that was meant to address this. Basically the idea is that experts would not be attached to bases, but to companies, i.e. you’d specialize more holistically and a new base wouldn’t be as much of a “restart” (where you might as well vertically integrate). On top of that though, expert bonuses would apply to a significantly higher degree for higher-tier workforces (those who actually do “expert work”), which should incentivize veteran players to “move up the tech tree” rather than stay in lower tiers forever. Company-wide experts could also make it more viable to shut down earlier bases (cause you’re not losing expert progress) and setup new, high-tier production sites instead.

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Oh thanks for the comment! I’m glad you have at least already been thinking about this, and it sounds like we’re trying to solve the same problem. And doing the same thing, by buffing the production speed across the empire to specific things. Good stuff!

The only thing I am personally unsure of from that is applying to higher tier workforces - I’m not sure the buff to economic incentives to build the high end buildings is necessary. IMO it puts too much pressure on the bottom of the economy.

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I also had a rework for experts in mind.

My vision was 3 level of experts:

  1. Base level experts : boost production for specific recipes
  2. Company level experts : boost production for specific buildings
  3. Corporation level experts : boost production for a specific industries

That was what I was thinking at first.

However, here’s the issue. Ideally, Prun would have the following properties:

  1. It would reward long term planning. Meaning that a player commiting to produce one thing for longer should be more productive.
  2. It should discourage self-sufficiency, encouraging trade between players
  3. Players should still have a feeling of freedom. Freedom to change their base, to do something else. If they can’t change when they want to, they’ll just quit the game.

Furthermore, we must take into account that there will be players with 30-40 bases. Currently, it’s possible to stay entirely within a faction. However, if I had to specialize in ressource extraction, I would have to operate in the 4 factions at the same time, which would be an issue by itself. This should be kept in mind, a permit rework might be necessary along side it.

I would also remind that one base perfectly feeding another is very enjoyable (FRM feeding INC, CHP feeding POL, etc), it would be a shame for players to not experience that anymore. To do large scale complex supply chain is the most regular goal I see new players coming with. It MUST stay achievable.

Quite honestly, human interaction can be tiring. To produce and sell on the market without feeling the need to interact constantly with humans to stay efficient, is something nice about prun.

All in All, I believe that the game is fine as is. Yes late game player can way too easily do vertical integration, but to do that, they needed capital, a ton of it. IMO, this is a privilege that is earned. In the ADI, I tried to convince someone that self-sufficiency is a very bad idea early on. I won’t explain the whole argument but players need cash, which only happens when selling things to the CX.

I also fear that any meaningful change would make the game far less enjoyable for many of us. PLEASE be very careful with it.

My suggestion would be the following : Try to make it harder to do vertical intergration early on, but keep the late game exactly the same.

Here’s an idea that could implement that : First, we keep experts as they currently are. Second, Players can unlock new tiers of building over time. They start by only being able to build pioneer level for 2 industries, decided by the starting profession. Then, they get exp in the industry of what they are producing, unlocking SET level buildings, then TEC (etc) over time. New industry PIO capabilities would be earned by upgrading HQ.

This way :

  1. New players are encouraged to go tall early on
  2. TEC level of vertical intergration would remain possible
  3. SCI level of vertical integration would probably be impossible in short - medium term (but possible long term), encouraging people to cooperate for said supply chains (One person being able to do SCI building in each industry, at least)

I hope I was clear and that this will help in any small way.

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I think that is a really nuanced and well thought out post, I don’t have a single thing to comment on about it actually. I think you make a lot of really good points that are important to consider. I’ve got nothing to add, good thinking.

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I don’t have particularly strong feelings regarding this issue, though I think I tend to agree that promoting player interactions is positive. I have a personal tendency toward autarky, so I would be a bit disappointed to see that too drastically undermined though.

An anecdote from my personal experience is that, by growing larger, though I have endeavored to maintain a large degree of self-sufficiency, I have reached a point where I have had to accept procuring certain things from the market. For example, while I have dropped a couple nanoresin bases, I just buy my flux because it throws an undesirable kink in my larger-scale chemistry production chain and because it is so readily available and cheap on the open market.

I think a lot of the problem with mid-tier inputs being so scarce has to do with prestige and the maturity of the market though. Lots of people want to make ships and A-fabs. Making fasteners or microchips isn’t as sexy, and some of these either are ridiculously easy to overproduce or are so slow to make (I am looking directly at MHL) that they demand a whole base to make in any appreciable quantity, which is kind of boring.

I think I’ve made better, more coherent posts before, but this is what I have.

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While I understand the desire to increase player interaction - or at least use of the markets - I have to say that I am probably further along the autarky spectrum and if I wasn’t able to actually build ships (from raw material to complete ships) - I would probably lose alot of interest in the game.

But I do realize that encouraging people to use the markets more is probably a net good - I am just not sure how to do that. Sometimes I feel like I am just selling my excess mid-level electronics to Lowstrife most of the time - LOL. But I am not sure how to increase the usage.

Also, thanks Filefolders for forcing me to learn a new word. LOL.

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