The LIQUIDITY release will be released on July 26th, 2023
General Notes
The Liquidity release will introduce new loan templates for private contracts, an updated company rating system and leaderboards!
If your APEX console is stuck in a loading state after the update, please make sure to refresh it once after the update to ensure you got the latest version.
New features
Leaderboards
Under the new LEAD command, you will find a variety of leaderboards. Finally you can track your progress and compare it to other players!
APEX Representation Center
One of the new leaderboards refers to the APEX Representation Center, which is a new âshow-offâ feature accessible via the ARC command. Invest currency to upgrade your ARC and compare your status across the whole universe!
Loan contract templates
New custom contract templates in CONTD allow you to create loan contracts.
There are three new loan contract templates to choose from:
stable loan: A loan contract with a stable repayment amount and decreasing interest.
annuity loan: A loan contract with fixed installments.
interest loan: A loan contract where the installments are only made up of interest. Full repayment occurs with the last installment.
Improved company rating
Each company now has only one rating instead of three. The new single rating is based on how much âcontract valueâ players actually fulfill of the contracts they close. This means the rating takes into account the monetary value at stake. For example a 10,000 NCC loan will actually impact the rating much more than buying a handful of rations for 500 NCC.
Changes
Recent contract partners are now shown as suggested recipients of contract drafts in CONTD.
Relevant locations from active contracts (e.g. pick-up or delivery) are now auto-suggested as destinations in ship flight controls (SFC).
The destination selection in SFC now shows suggestions when the input field is focused, without having to type any characters.
When planning a route in SFC you will now see a percentage of how much fuel will be used.
The Building Repair Assistant (BRA) now optionally takes a base address as a parameter and will then open with that base pre-selected in the drop-down.
BRA is now available as a context command in BS and BBL of each base (with the respective base address as a parameter).
FIN now uses endless scrolling and can display more than 100 bookings.
When trying to fulfill a condition on a contract where termination was requested by one of the parties, the game will now display a warning and require a confirmation.
New players (in their first week of playing) will now be warned about investing commodities into population infrastructure projects.
Increased CX order size limit.
Balancing
This time weâre focusing on making some (right now) niche approaches and recipes more viable:
Made hybrid habs more area-efficient:
HBB: 15 â 14 area
HBC: 20 â 17 area
HBM: 22 â 20 area
HBL: 25 â 22 area
Made PP2 B-fab recipes more viable alternatives:
BDE: input 75 PG â 60 PG
BSE: duration 0.25 days â 0.22 days
Made INS/HSE recipes more efficient to not disincentivize settling on extreme climate planets quite as much:
INS: output 20 â 24
HSE: duration 0.65 days â 0.4 days
Made Orchard recipe variants using SOI more efficient:
I applaud the decision to revamp company ratings as the Stability rating does not provide any useful info.
I would argue that the Activity rating is important as there is currently no other way to determine when or if someone is playing besides the online/offline notation. (adding a âdays since last onlineâ notation would be good).
More importantly though, Iâm not sure the âcontract valueâ approach is a good way to improve the Reliablity rating. To me, a player is reliable whether he delivers twenty 1 DW contract or twenty 1000 EDC contracts. I can also see people gaming this method by trading a few huge contracts back and forth with a partner to ârepairâ a bad rating. I think a better rating system would be one that makes it harder to achieve and maintain an âAâ rating. As it is, an âAâ is too easy to get and only tells me that someone âmightâ be reliable. Ratings should start at âCâ and quickly move to âDâ or âBâ but be harder to get to (and stay at) âEâ or âAâ. This would make the rating a much more valuable piece of information to me:
A = very reliable
B = fairly reliable
C = indeterminate or no reliability history
D = fairly unreliable
E = very unreliable
I am largely going to echo what Ogrebeef already said, but I want to amplify that having different ratings categories allows different things to be checked depending on the type of deal being discussed.
If I am looking for a short term âemergencyâ type deal â Activity is really important. For a million credit loan, stability might be important (although I donât think many of us trust that rating formula). For shipping, we want Reliability.
Smooshing those together into a single rating will make it harder to read out what we are looking for. And biasing it towards bigger dealsâŚ.thatâs just wrong. An A class company treats every contract the same, they donât discriminate based on deal size.
I can tell you with confidence that it doesnât say anything about a companyâs ability to pay back a million credits.
I didnât read their plans as âsmooshing ratings togetherâ, but rather as removing Activity and Stability entirely and focusing completely on Reliability instead.
If I understood it wrongly: yes, please donât smoosh
Where two players trade a bunch of money back and forth to artificially pump their numbers up. Perhaps add a time delay (1 day, 3 day, 7 day, idk) for where consecutive contracts from two players can raise someoneâs rating.
Also; changes to the area requirements for those buildings⌠oh my. My bases. All of them. Will need to be re-balanced. This is going to be fun
As mentioned on the devlog, weâll not consider an unlimited amount of contracts with the same partner, but ensure thereâs a healthy mix. This is already the case for the current ratings by the way.
Changing the area for Hybrid-Habs will cause quite a few min/maxers to rebuild bases which means more liquidity on the market.
Changing the BDE on PP2s to 60 PG is an underrated change by a majority of the community. While still more expensive than PE, its cost drops substantially making production viable around Antares.
Iâm not a fan of orchards (ORCs) as they are already too productive. It only takes a handful of ORCs to saturate a market and a large number of fermenters to handle the produce. Increasing the productivity of ORCs just means even fewer would be necessary to saturate a market. Perhaps the balance change could happen to ORC fermenter recipes instead?
Okay, sorry, Iâm going to say it. Iâm going to say the same thing I always sayâŚ
The way to solve the issue of ORCs being âtoo productiveâ isnât to nerf their productivity, itâs to increase demand for their high-end products.
The ORC changes are actually intended to increase the demand for SOI, by improving the relative yield of those recipes over the âbasicâ recipes. They actually make the ORC more productive.
If you want to stop ORC being overhorsed, add an ORC-CAF recipe!
My problem with ORC (and I currently have 2 of them) is, that they eat a lot of space. You have to give up so much of opportunities just for having an ORC. I am sure some more advanced players did the math: ORC output is less profitable as alternatives would be.
Hey any chance we can get the order size limit lifted for the normal markets for this release as well? We got the fx markets which I fully take advantage of:
Itâs particular egregious in markets like PE where 100,000 units really isnât that much. Having higher limits would make life easier.
And itâs right in line with the theme of liquidity.
Indeed, twice the faction bonus (adjusted with unused permits) is going to cause some issues with my production lines. However, the increase is most welcome!
Hi, I couldnât see anything on CXâs Local markets being shipping only. Is there any specific reason for that? I wouldnât have built my base so far out if this was one of the changes
