Request for increase to maximum CX storage and warehouse capacity

[rain9441]

Hello,

As a big fish in the universe in the department of cross CX trade and CX to CX shipping contracts. I’d like to put forth a request to remove the warehouse rental limitation on all of the CXs and increase the storage capacity of each warehouse. I’d love for this to make it into the April steam release.

Currently, the maximum number of warehouses you can rent on any given CX is 10. Each warehouse has 500 m^3/t of capacity. I’ve been at 10/10 warehouses on the CXs since the 2nd or 3rd month of the game (We are on month 13-14). I currently have 5000t of capacity, and probably 15000t of “hidden” resources inside the CX. I have to put inventory on the CX at unreasonable prices to store it temporarily. The issue is that this solution doesn’t help with throughput.

I am trying to move large amounts of resources between the CXs but it’s becoming very hard to ensure space is available for delivery because I have over 2000t of stuff being shipped to the Antares CX at any given time. Every day I have to check and make sure I’m not getting too close to 5000t. If I am, I have to start stowing stuff inside of CX sell orders otherwise players can’t deliver on my contracts.

Additionally, I can no longer setup CX buys without fear of overloading the CX storage. For materials like MCG, which would be nice to ship out to Hortus, I really just can’t afford the space. For RAT, I’m struggling to find a way to provide an adequate buffer in the Antares region to stabilize the price. I’m looking to hold 50,000 RAT on the Antares CX. Technically I can do that right now, but it’s a bit of a stretch. If I put up 10k RAT at a time, I can do that 5 times to get 50,000 in sell orders. But to put up 10k RAT in one sell order, I have to have 2100t of space at the CX taken up by RAT. Once I do that, I basically cannot cancel the order to change the price because I would need 2100t of capacity to cancel the order (You cannot cancel an order if you don’t have space for it).

My projection of what I need right now is about 50,000t of capacity to be comfortable. If I wanted to completely specialize in trade, even 50,000t isn’t enough.

Currently there is only a limit of how much storage a single player can hold. The truth is that the economics of this game are supported by some of the richest players who provide massive amounts of market liquidity. Without being able to provide more market liquidity, I can’t support the region anymore. I’ve basically hit the maximum number of bases allowable as the HQ upgrades are prohibitively expensive.

I propose a complete removal of the CX warehouse limitation and an increase in the warehouse capacity of each upgrade from 500t to 2,500t, which is in line with half the capacity of a STO. I propose this change across all warehouses, even the ones on planets. Planet warehouses being only 500t are lackluster. Personally I only ever used the planet warehouses on gas giants to temporarily hold H which was purchased from someone. I don’t think anyone really uses planet warehouses for planet storage, because STOs are just far more superior (I have 4 STOs on a few planets due to the need for warehouse capacity).

I’d really really really appreciate more storage on the CX. It is my bottleneck for any sort of growth in the game and it feels very arbitrary.

Thanks,

Rain

[lowstrife]

Totally agree. I made a post on discord discussing exactly this.

with the advent of 2k\2k and especially 3k\1k ships, storage space on the cx for those of us who use them as a staging area is going to get… really annoying to deal with

We can already cheat the capacity system by placing sell orders for items and “hiding” the mass that way. But that’s incredibly annoying to deal with and an imperfect system. That shouldn’t be necessary

could even implement a tiered system where each additional warehouse unit becomes more expensive.

1-3 costs 50\week each
4-6 costs 100\week each
7-10 costs 150\week each
11-14 costs 250\week each
15-20 costs 400\week each
etc, etc

(progressive fee system, where additional units don’t raise the cost of prior units)

or some sort of scaling metric so that those who do need it, can pay for it.

Sir Molp did reply and say it’s on their radar, and on topic for discussion in their next meeting. But I’m with you, with the advent of 2000\2000 ships, cx storage space is hugely limiting their usefulness. I’ve been running into cx storage issues for a very long time, since quite early on.

@rain9441

Personally I only ever used the planet warehouses on gas giants to temporarily hold H which was purchased from someone. I don’t think anyone really uses planet warehouses for planet storage, because STOs are just far more superior (I have 4 STOs on a few planets due to the need for warehouse capacity).

One point I’d like to add to this - warehouses on planets are treated as separate storage. You can’t hold additional production buffer in them, so any usage must be inherently a manual process. This hugely limits their usage to basically three very minor use cases. Access to local markets, emergency “shit my production has stopped” storage, and temporary storage for purchases\sales on a planet where you only need it for a few hours. Nobody is using these things in normal production.

It would be really nice if it was just rolled into your overall planetary storage. This would impact the balance though because we would find everyone would just rent warehosues instead of building a STO on a major planet like Montem. I think we would need planetary warehouses to be far more expensive to make this worthwhile. You give up 1 produciton building’s worth of space by building an STO, which is ~2000\day profit, or you pay ~2000\day to rent that 5000 units of warehouse space. Which works out to 1400\week per 500 unit warehouse. This would generate a HUGE income stream for the planetary governments too.

I see several options of how to deploy this.

1. Shared inventory warehouses have a minimum price per week governments can charge. They should be more expensive than a STO.

2. Separate inventory warehouses (as they exist now) should ALSO be available, roughly at current prices, roughly for their current usage.

This would make base deployment a lot more interesting too. A lot of bases fall into the category of “I need slightly more than 1500\u of space, so I have to build an STO, but I’m only barely using some of it”.

It would be worthwhile to build an STO if you truly do need that much capacity, like on a base that deals with metals or hydrogen or whatever. But if you just need a little extra space, the far more expensive per unit but overall cheaper option would be to rent a shared warehouse space from the government. Which would greatly increase tax income for the governments, while also benefiting players. tl;dr there’s deadweight loss on the empty inventory space.

Sorry for the rant and thread derailment lol

[Counterpoint]

Thank you for the feedback and input! We hear you and are looking into a short-term solution to make life easier on the CXs (such as simply increasing the unit limit per company on CX stations by a lot).

We also have plans for larger updates / changes to the whole system in a future infrastructure rework, but we don’t want you to have to deal with the annoyances of the current limitations for much longer.

[Counterpoint]

The change is now live!