The higher tech your products become the more likely you are to need a subscription to get there, when the higher tiers of a ‘free’ game are locked behind a paywall then is it any surprise the population drops sharply? Of course, plenty of corps are going to be able to get around this by virtue of simply having a finely tuned internal economy made of a few people, but for ‘solo’ players who rely on their being a large population in the entire game for them to slot into… thats simply not going to happen.
Either fewer restrictions need to be made on trial licenses, or this problem isn’t going to ever solve itself.
Edit: Or I suppose the game could explode in popularity, if the relatively low % of premium players increased due to a general population increase then maybe the higher tier economy would work, but as it is the population just isn’t there for things to work out, because its all soft-locked behind a subscription which is, to put it bluntly, very high for an excel spreadsheet simulator lacking eve’s exciting graphics and combat.
One basically needs access to the local market. And perhaps also get beyond the 5th base. And yes, this is locked behind the PRO license. However, the devs need income to keep developing the game.
Warfare isn’t the only way to destroy resources. Anything that follows a marginal benefits curve works. Planetary infrastructure is a bit like that.
Additionally, prestige projects ( on a planetary level or a base-level ) can provide for a resource sink. As someone mentioned, construction of ships is a way to take quantities of cash/resources out of the market, in a way. Any upgrade process that has geometrically increasing costs will provide an outlet for high income players- and can be setup to drive demand for higher tier goods. I think various types of Corp upgrades / infrastructure could work well here. When exploration becomes part of the game, it could have a high tier resource sink as a part of the process.
I think that having a low supply of a resource available for sale on a CX isn’t an indication of a weak market. CAF → COF is a good example. Since COF is so easy to make from CAF, I think you shouldn’t expect CAF to be sitting on the CX, except for someone who is placing it at prices so high no one is willing to pay them. That doesn’t benefit the seller or any potential buyer, so it shouldn’t be considered a indicator of market health.
Because COF is easily and cheaply made from available CAF, in a healthy market, you won’t see much CAF sitting around on the CX. This is the same reason your local grocery store sells more bread than they sell flour. And they sell more flour than they sell unprocessed grain. The people growing grain have established systems to turn that into flour, and that’s fine.
I understand this, but it feels like right now the high subscription and the sheer restrictiveness of it is stifling expansion of the game. How many new players just quit when they realize core features like local markets are locked? Its not a small disadvantage, especially when new.
This is a good game, but if the population is too small for the higher tier ‘general economy’ (outside corporation vertical integration) then thats putting a real dampener on solo players AND new players who haven’t joined a corp yet. I dunno, it feels like a bit of a vicious circle if that makes any sense. Like sub prices are so high because population is low, and population is low because sub prices are high, and both of these things also make the game worse in their own ways either by locking vital content, or preventing a general economy from really working.
I mean access to the local market is the ONLY restriction relevant for new players. Because the restrictions on the number of bases and number of ships don’t affect them at all. They are not at a stage to get the 6th base, and they won’t be able to afford a 3rd ship anyway because it costs millions. Similarly, new players don’t care much about governorship.
But yes, the access to the LM is important and it is also at the heart of the corp gameplay. Any social gameplay actually.
Also, it costs lots of fuel and ship repairs to go to CX for everything, and considering that new players typicaly will only ever trade and produce high volume, low value goods its basically like they’re also using the worst trade goods for sending to the CX, but are forced to anyway.
Edit: AND because new players economies are so low they typically ALSO fly with near-empty cargo-holds, making the journey even more inefficient.
Actually one can earn a lot of cash by relying only on the CX. As I wrote previously, there is a high demand even for some basic stuff. Like on ANT CX the prices for AL are historically high and the volumes exchanged are several hundred units per day, with buy orders for more than 2K units. Also high prices for C. There are avenues for high income provided one starts on the right planets (not on Phobos) and produces the right stuff. But I agree that the starting capital allocated to new players is outrageously low. Because of this the start is a grind.
This is supposed to be a long term “idle” game. In my opinion the starting capital allocated is too much, especially with all the extra fuel. A brand new player can sell most of their fuel and buy two or three additional buildings immediately. I think this rather spoils the sense of being a struggling entrepreneur in the early game.
Nobody is forced to play. Free tier players can fully participate in base production and CX trading, which is 90% of the game. If someone wants to use the LM that badly, then they can buy a subscription for a single month - that is enough to get lifetime LM access.
The issue with the economy petering out at higher tiers is a separate problem, to do with the way that demand for products is structured. Basically the only use for tiers 4 and 5 is for ship production, so there is no incentive to move up to those tiers unless you want to make ships. This decreases CX activity at those tiers, so then there is less incentive to move up in the first place, and so on.
This has been discussed a lot, and the devs have several ways to address it, but some of them require reworking parts of the game, or altering the existing economy, so we will have to wait and see what approach they decide to take.
The start is very idle indeed. In PrUn the active gameplay time is proportional to the size of the business. So a new player has very little to do. He can connect to APEX once in a week, because there isn’t much happening for him anyway. I believe that the idea that the new players should suffer and earn their fun the hard way is completely wrong. The slow and painful start is the major reason why PrUn has a hard time to retain new players. Actually many try this game, but many abandon after a couple of weeks. By the way, there are many negative reviews on Steam pointing to the fact that there isn’t much to do in game for a new player.
That seems to be a separate issue. It’s perfectly normal for a game to start players out at level 1, barely able to do anything. Unless you’re proposing to start new players off with a full base then I don’t think there’s any way around that. And if the idea of slowly building up a base is seen as “suffering” or “the hard way” then PrUn is probably the wrong game for you in the first place. Also, even in late game you are still sending your ships on multi-day trips, and logging in maybe once or twice a day. So it’s not like the game changes to be action packed later.
The main issue as I see it is that progress isn’t linear. In most games, the amount of XP you need to level up increases with each level, so that progress is kept more or less constant. But in this game, filling your second base is quicker than filling your first one. Creating your third base is quite easy. It should be the other way around - expanding should become more difficult the larger you are, to counterbalance the increased rate of production. Then the rate of production could be increased at the start, to make things quicker for newbies. But currently the only limiting factor is ship capacity, and the two starting ships are enough to service several bases.
This would be quite easy to fix using a logistics efficiency penalty that increased with company size, but the problem with that is the players who would be most affected are the ones playing for the long term, who are also most likely to be paying subscribers. So the devs wouldn’t want to risk upsetting them.
Hopefully the upcoming addition of early game missions will give the newbies something to do at least.
Look, the issue is not that a new player cannot achieve much, the issue is that a new player has nothing to do and doesn’t even have a good reason to connect to APEX more than once a week. Let’s compare with EVE Online. The options for starting players in EVE are limited, but one can at least mine some asteroids, hunt some rats, run some missions and stay connected. Nothing like that in PrUn. Here a starting player essentially waits, and waits, and waits.
There is huge difference between connecting once a week and connecting twice a day. A factor of 14 here. And now I am at the point where I will stop expanding not because I can’t afford it, but because it takes too much IRL time to manage all the bases. I would say that the game is pretty much action packed for me now.
This would be great indeed. Imo one gets to the best part of what the game has to offer once one reaches 3 fully packed bases. I consider the tedious start useless and just a bad moment to go through.
Yes, the larger you are the faster you grow. The expansion stops however at some point. Either because the HQ upgrades after level 20 are extremely expensive. But even before that most players stop expanding because it takes too much time and effort to manage all the bases. At some point the interesting thing to do is not getting an extra base but transitioning from low tier products to high tier products. Or do some CX trading with all the accumulated capital.
Listen, I am precisely a person who hated my first month in PrUn and just wanted to skip all the “slowly building up a base” phase. But I continued playing nevertheless because I knew that the game would become much more enjoyable later on, with a larger base, and with more bases. Now, 6 months later, I have 7 bases, 3 ships and sit on 2+ million AIC cash. And I enjoy the game now. Do you consider that PrUn is probably the wrong game for me in the first place?
The game is for people who like planning. When I started out I logged in regularly because I wanted to adjust my trades - at that early stage every penny counts. I also spent time planning ship flights so that I had zero downtime in my production lines. It felt like I somehow had something at stake, if I calculated wrong I could go bust at any moment, and the game was exciting to me for that reason. If I’m honest it’s a bit more boring now, given that it basically seems impossible to lose money, and the only question is do I make money fast, or very fast. These days I’m just not bothered if I accidentally run out of supplies at one of my bases.
The game evidently appealed to you too, since you were able to plan for what your future bases would look like, and knew that you would enjoy that later stage more.
So the game appealed to both of us, for slightly different reasons. However, if you’re the kind of person who tries it out, thinks “This is boring”, and quits, then I don’t think any amount of starting production buildings would change that. Ultimately it’s still just numbers on a screen, and you don’t get to fly the ships or shoot at pirates.
Also, the early tier 1 and 2 product tree is the most fleshed out, and a common complaint is that people run out of higher tier products to expand into, so I don’t think that shortening the early game, and thereby accelerating the rate at which people get to the “now what?” stage, is a good thing. At the very least, if the early game is sped up a bit, then the mid game should be slowed down (e.g. via the logistics penalty) so that players still spend roughly the same amount of time before reaching the higher tiers.
Yes, there is a problem with a lack of end game goals. Currently the only end game features that require high tier products are shipbuilding and POPI. A good answer to that is not slowing down mid-game but introducing more game features, both for mid and end-game. Essentially implementing all the features that are already planned and are on the roadmap would be a huge step forward. However, the game development in PrUn is very slow and it would take years to see all this implemented. And the game development is so slow because the dev team is very small. And the dev team is so small because PrUn does not generate enough revenue for them to support a larger team. And the generated revenue is low because the player base is small. To attract more player the devs released the game on Steam. And many tried this game indeed. We have seen a huge wave after the release on Steam. However this wave ended after two weeks and the number of players started dropping quickly. And it keeps decreasing. This means that this game has a major problem, like really a huge one, with retaining new players. And this is related to the tedious start. Yes, here we return to the early game issues. It’s not only me who says that. There are many negative comments on Steam which point to that. You can say that one shouldn’t play PrUn if one does not enjoy the early game. And indeed this is what happens, many potential players just stop playing because they don’t enjoy their early game. But because of this we all (other players and the devs) are stuck with a small player base. A larger player base would benefit all the players because it would create a more dynamic economy. It would also bring more money to the devs which would allow them to expand their team and speed up the game development, which in turn would again benefit to the players. The ideal response to early game issue would be introducing more early game activities. That’s what the devs try to do with faction contracts. But for one, this might not be enough, and this would also take them a lot of time. To the contrary, a larger starting capital is a quickfix which is certainly not ideal, but at least easy to implement.
What I also try to say is that the mid game in PrUn is qualitatively different from the early game. And I believe that many potential players who could have enjoyed the mid game never got to it and abandoned because of the early game. A quantitative change in terms of the size of the base can induce a qualitative change in terms of how fun the game is. But it depends on personal preferences of course.
What the devs could also do is dramatically increase the starting capital (not just cash because this will fuel inflation, but also the initial amount of Bfabs and MCG), also increase the area limit on the bases which would allow for larger bases on a single planet, and then increase the cost of the core modules and of the HQ upgrades to slow down the expansion. In this way new player would have a larger base from the start which would hopefully make their early game experience more fun. But they would also have room to expand their first base because of the increased area limits. And it would take them more time to build a second and a third base because of higher costs for CM and HQ upgrades.
By “dramatically increase the starting capital” I mean something like enough construction materials to build 5-6 HB1-s and 10 production units from the very start, just like that. Plus consumables to support 500-600 pioneers for one week. And increase the initial amount of allocated pioneers from 200 to 500-600.
In any case it is better to have more grind in the mid game and a more smoother early game than vice-versa as it is now. Like make a fully packed 1st base and easy goal to achieve within the first 2 weeks,
a second base a goal achievable within the first month. But a 3rd base a goal requiring at least one more month because of the HQ upgrade cost. And a 4th base that would require at least 2 more months (4 months in total), and being efficient on top of that, because of how the HQ upgrade costs scale. Like if one wants a slow progression that requires months and years, then make the players grind for their 3rd, 4th, 5th base, not their 1st base! Because now it’s crazy. To go from 4 to 5 bases requires one week at most, but to get a fully packed 1st bases requires starting players to grind for at least one month!
Right now essentially the only goal an established player would need to grind for is to purchase a new ship. Because these cost millions on the market. And perhaps get their 22nd base permit, because it requires too many Afabs. One could indeed tune the numbers to make a 3rd, 4th, 5th, base etc. less of an easy goal to achieve, but let the starting players progress faster. You enjoyed your slow start and the need to count pennies, but I didn’t, and many other didn’t and abandoned PrUn because of that.
It seems that we agree on a lot of things. It should be progressively more difficult to add bases, not progressively easier as it currently is. And there need to be other things to aim for besides ship building in the long term.
However, I checked out the negative reviews on Steam, and I’m not convinced that giving everyone a full base to start with would entice any of those players to stay. A lot of people are complaining that the game isn’t really free, because “essential” features are behind a paywall. Others complain about a lack of graphics, or that production + flight time takes days. This would be the same thing even with a full base - the brand new player would set all their production going, and then still have to wait 24 hours or more before they had anything worth shipping. You imply that the difference between logging in once a week -vs- once a day is significant, but it really isn’t - people want things to happen immediately, or else the game doesn’t appeal to them.
So I’m not convinced that any of those negative reviewers would have left a positive review instead if the start was faster (relatively speaking) - the game itself will only ever have niche appeal.
Even more importantly, I’m not convinced that there are people who would pay for the game if only they had a full base to start with. But maybe I’m wrong. I’d actually be okay with having two types of start - an “entrepreneur” start where you have enough for two production buildings and one ship, or an “existing business” start where you get 5x the funds and two ships. The latter could be a paid option. Of course, people will immediately complain that the game is now “pay to win”. Still, they’re already complaining about that, and the option might appeal to players like you who want to skip that early game phase, so it could on net bring in more money.
Here is a negative review on Steam with a similar critique as mine.
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Now lastly, let’s talk about the game/gameplay. While I get that games like this are longer term, there’s a bit of a problem with who Prosperous Universe flows. I’ve played (and still play!) games that can have build and production times in the areas of weeks or even months. However, they first start you off with times that take minutes (and then become hours, and later days, and so on). They grow you into the game.
In Prosperous Universe, you’re hit with 2-day (or weeks, if you do bulk) production times right out the gate. This is a problem for me because there’s no complexity added yet. You haven’t nurtured even a budding empire - you’ve got a single base with one, perhaps two, production buildings. So, minus time to read the tutorials, you get maybe 5 minutes of gameplay before it’s “come back in a few days” (or weeks, if you did a bulk production run).
Some may like this, but I think I prefer the older approach of these kinds of games that let you grow into the long term aspects - so that even if you’re only logging in once per day or few days, you have more to manage when you do log in.
Yes, I saw that review too, and it supports my point. This player is looking for production times of minutes, but even if they start off with a full base, they’re not going to see anything close to that. They’d set all their production lines going, and then would still have to log off and come back the next day before they can do anything further, as is the case currently.
So I don’t think they have the same critique as you at all, and I don’t think their experience of the game would be any different if you started them off with a full base. Their review would say something to the effect of “Even with 10 production buildings all working on the same product, I still don’t get anything produced for 6 hours. This game is too slow.”
If a player doesn’t see the appeal of managing a base in PrUn’s abstract long term way, then the game is not for them. Which is fine, of course. It can’t be all things to all people. But there’s no simple way to change the game so that it has mass appeal.
The reviews that are more concerning to me are the ones that imply they could have liked the game, but were put off by the fact that “everything good is behind the paywall”. One change I’d look at for that is making ship building be available to free players, since that’s something that a lot of people might want to aim for. The hope would be that along the way they decide they want LM access and switch to a subscription. Then again, I don’t know how many people ended up subscribing just to get access to ships, so it’s not clear that it would be a net win.
His main complaint is that there is nothing to do after 5 min in game. The start is way too idle. One basically builds the buildings recommended by the starting package, sends a ship to the CX to buy some extra consumables and construction mats for some extra production lines. Since the Bfabs are expensive, there isn’t a great deal of extra production lines one can afford with the starting capital, even if one sells part of the initial fuel. After a few days the ship returns from the CX, and one builds 2-3 extra production lines, for a total of 4-6. Then one just waits to accumulate a significant amount of products to send it to the CX. And this takes one week, or even two. And all this time one is completely idle, essentially not playing the game.
What I would recommend is
Abandon the concept of starting packages all together.
2)Give to starting players significantly more BSE,BDE,BBH,BTA, MCG, RAT, DW and OVE, so they can on average afford 10 production lines (depending on what they decide to construct of course), and so they can support 500-600 PIO for one week. This amount would be the same for every player, not like now depending on the starting package. In this way they would have a great deal more planning from the very start, because now they can build much more and thus have to decide themselves what to build. To guide the new players in their decision, there should be a tutorial describing what are the typical starting paths, what buildings, what inputs, what outputs. But this should not affect the allocated resources. A larger starting base does not only require more planning from the very start. It also allows to fill the ship with goods faster and the players would have to send one to the CX more often. Therefore they would need to connect more often to the APEX. They wouldl also generate
more credits per week and therefore expand further faster.
I believe that this would significantly improve the early game experience and it is easy to implement. Because for me the best part of the game is not slowly building the first base and counting pennies. The best part is managing several bases, managing all the related logistics, optimizing the fully packed bases so as to get the most from the maximal area, etc.
The fact that the subsequent bases are to easy to spam needs a separate balance. One can just make the CM and the HQ upgrades more expensive. The HQ upgrades could require not just more of the same materials, but actually a more diverse list of materials. This would also create demand for more diverse stuff and encourage trade.
I don’t think that a large number of production lines for new players is the solution. It just makes the game harder to learn. I think the combination of “nothing to do” and “paywall” complaints shows a possible solution: Market makers for shipping contracts that can be done with an “U” company rating. These should be profitable above fuel cost, and thus give new players without a subscription something reasonable to do with their idle ships.
Yeah, some of the complaints on Steam are that the game is too complicated to understand. So removing the starting packages and giving new players more resources will just make those people feel even more overwhelmed. I myself made several mistakes when I first started, leading to a COLIQ, and I’m exactly the type of person that the game is suited for!
I don’t think there is any change that can be made that would solve the complaints by people that the game is too slow to start with. If you’re the kind of person who wants constant action in a game, then PrUn will never appeal. Whether a new player has to spend 5 minutes setting up 2 production buildings, or 20 minutes setting up 10 production buildings, they’re still going to reach the point where they’ve set production going, dispatched their ships, and now have to wait until the next day before they can do anything else. That’s the moment where those new players leave, because in their minds that is too long to wait.
To be honest, the faction missions probably aren’t going to help this much, because I assume they involve ship flights, and so by definition they will involve several hours of waiting. Unless the player burns their entire 1500 units of starting fuel for one flight, but that’s not a good outcome either. I don’t think that opening up the LM to free players would make much difference either.
I think we have to accept that fact that a large proportion of people who try the game will decide that it is boring. The thing to focus on is making it so that the people who DO like the game think that it is worth paying for.
Faction missions should be balanced so that they pay above the fuel costs when the slide bar is positioned somewhere in the middle, so the player’s could use a middle burn. This will also drive up the shipping costs on the LM, because one wouldn’t pick a shipping ad unless it pays more than a faction mission. This will be definitely beneficial to new players who aren’t constrained in terms of shipping capacity. This will be also beneficial to fuel producers. It will be however detrimental to larger players who are constrained in terms of logistics. They will have to pay more for their shipping ads. So it will also slow down a bit their progression.
Potentially, faction mission are a good way to farm some much needed initial capital. The ships of newer players are often idle, unless they get PRO and pick shipping ads, but even then the shipping ads often don’t even cover the fuel costs, with some rare exceptions. If it’s balanced correctly (reward not too high), this won’t be interesting for larger players because it would be much more important for them to ship mats between their bases.