I’ll throw in my two cents here, personally I think the idea of specialization is very interesting, but I would like to see a “dual system” of sorts:
Whilst heavy specialization (say 2-6 CoGCs) is rewarded with bonuses or whatnot, I would also like to see a system where HEAVY diversification is encouraged too (10+ CoGCs). That way, it forces players who want to diversify to touch industries that are generally not very engaged with due to low profits or otherwise (i.e. Fuel Refining). A player that does, say, 7 CoGCs, would get a pretty meh bonus, but if a player specializes into 3 CoGCs or diversifies into 12, then they get substiantial rewards.
Again would need to be more fleshed out and I’m not a game designed, but I think it would be cool if the bonuses were more of a bell curve than just a curve, so they affect both sides of the coin equally, while also (somewhat) stimulating smaller industries.
The problem is that the target is to bring more trade to the game and with that to the CXs, and to make specialization economically viable. So rewarding diversification is kinda doing the opposite: they have a lot of cheap planet (less repair and logistic costs), are save from the market because they can just go vertical, and get a bonus on top of that.
You raise a good point, I do think, however, that some industries just simply don’t feed into anything (again, i.e. Fuel Refining). But yeah, as the objective is to bring more trade to the CXs, encouraging diversification (even heavy diversification) isn’t such a good idea. I still think an incentive to engage in the more niche CoGCs should be added (maybe some bonus for them, the less players in that CoGC the higher?)
One solution would be that it gets “energy” buildings added to it with the energy update to get more content added to it, or it gets folded together with a different CoGC (preferably RE because it also has few buildings) for the specialization math.
If specialisation was incentivised then players who currently dabble in those low profit industries would leave, raising prices and therefor making it a more profitable industry. So fewer players would interact with those cogcs but those players would specialise in that cogc at a roughly normal profit to every other cogc.
I think that is an excellent summary and did accurately reflect my issues and also proposals.
If there were more MMs on critical materials I would be willing to specialize into 3 COGCs (specifically ELEC / MAN / CONST) - which allows me to do most of the shipbuilding - the metallurgy is the big one that is missing due to the alloys needed for inputs into ELEC and also the hullplates.
All that being said, I would be interested in seeing what Molp has to say about that.
Also, as a radical idea - I would propose merging FUEL and FOOD because they are both really aimed at consumables - but leave RESEXT as a separate COGC - this would leave people who could do FUEL/FOOD and RESEXT and AG and they would get the max bonus.