It’s a good idea, but I won’t use it in my large (23 base permit) empire. It would cost me more time than my current method. And in a large empire time is the most valuable resource. Whenever a ship is going to a base from a station I glance at the base consumables. If it less than 1K RAT/DW, or 100 for anything else used I slap enough in the ship to get it above that level. I often just leave piles of consumables in BEN and MOR because even the effort of buying/selling the stuff over and over is too much time spent. Having 100 WS in every scientist base may seem overkill but the ability to simplify logistics even more than these packages saves me time every day.
We deployed the latest changes to the test server. The changes encompass the reduced packaging materials and we reduced the bundle sizes slightly.
4 Likes
Some time has now passed since the release of the consumables bundles, and I feel like it’s time to make an honest resume of them so far.
First of all, I would like to emphasise, that the idea of consumable bundles is generally a great one and good step into reducing friction and micromanagement. I’m sure more people would use them, if they weren’t that impractical as they are right now.
Most of the arguments are not my own and taken from various community discussions over the last weeks.
They are economically unviable
That’s probably the most and strongest argument, since PrUn is a game of economics. Bundles are by design more expensive then their lose counterparts. You have to provide package material, pay for the workforce, setup a base and ship the commodities. Also, the original design intended them to be produced by newer players and sold on the CX to be purchased by late-gamers. This presupposes a profit margin for the producer to be viable, so the bundles need to be sold for even more, then the original consumables.
They don’t fit in the game progression
Bundles were designed to be produced by newer players and sold on the CX for older ones. But they are a sinkhole for equity, requiring huge amount of liquidity to get even produced, especially higher tier ones. Also, the markets for them aren’t really fast moving, which is another problem for newer players, which need higher cash flows.
As a mid-game player, expanding vertically or looking for high margin markets is way more enticing, than making bundles.
And late-game players, which do have the required amount of liquidity, have to seriously consider using their costly permits for a PAC base.
There are other problems tied to the mentioned above, but those two are probably the most impactful ones.
Overall, making the bundles a commodity, which needs to be produced first, adds more friction than it tries resolve, which leads to their unpopularity. Therefore I would suggest something others already did:
Making the packaging a sub module of the CX. Allow people to pay a fee to package consumables in their warehouse inventories. This would make them still a bit more expensive to micro manage your consumables, but not too much, so people don’t want to use them. It would reduce the over complication of setting up a base for them.
3 Likes
I could see an alternative where it’s used as a means to transport larger quantities of upkeep materials to smaller systems. It’s all sent to a CX by a larger company, but then they can just pay someone to take it the rest of the way to whatever system might want/need it. Because of the volume reduction, using a high weight cargo bay makes it slightly less unreasonable for transportation purposes. As for the weight issue- while it isn’t a net LOSS in weight- there isn’t a gain large enough that it wouldn’t be useful for more volume in any base it’s stored in. The only problem bases have is that they have no way to increase storage weight beyond simply adding more storage buildings that require area.