So far so good. A few days in and I’m building, trading and shipping, and using spreadsheets a lot. I’m sure my first thoughts are similar to many other new players, but here goes just in case they aren’t…
Relocating experts:
While the idea is appealing, I can see you’d need to prevent 5 bases each exporting their first expert to one other base to avoid the time needed to make that 5th expert. Maybe simply export experts only where there are more experts on the exporting planet. As for a cost, I guess you’d need to provide the expert with a financial incentive to move, and ship a shipment of his belongings… Perhaps limit this to moving to a planet with more buildings/area/workers engaged with the experts area of specialty - ‘following the work’.
Production Queues:
I read a suggestion of longer production queues as having 5 items queued for 36 rigs is just a joke. Could a production queue simply have 1 extra slot for each building or 2 buildings after the first?
Ship design ideas:
Depressurised/Bulk Cargo Silo: Suitable for heavy ores and things that don’t mind the void. Higher mass than volume capacity. Limit items stored by material categories.
Sealed Cargo Tanks: Suitable for gases and liquids. Higher volume than mass capacity. Limit items stored by material categories.
Similar specialised storage buildings could be made for bases.
More bases
While I get the idea is to set up supply chains, the idea that you can’t use the plot next door but can build a floating pressurised area on a gas giant 1,000,000,000km away does seem a bit strange. Extra bases would have the advantage of specialising each base differently. I think the game database isn’t set up for more than one base/inventory per planet. To limit its use there could be a tax based on the number of bases, so by say 3, 5 or 10 bases the tax wipes out any profits. There could be a simple hard 2 or 3 base limit. There could be a time delay of a week, month etc. before building another base and/or a need to have 90% filled the area of your existing bases.
I thought of using a building to implement these limits: the Hyperloop Terminal. Each base needs 1 Hyperloop Terminal per other base on the planet. This provides an initial and repair cost and a rising tax. Say the terminal uses 50 area, by 10 bases there’d only be 25 area left after CM and Hyperloop per base!!!. The problem is what if you demolish/let fall apart the terminals, would you get the extra base for free? Maybe this idea could be redone such that 2nd, third bases have less area. Effectively the above idea hardwired in. This would fit with the below idea, encouraging wide, low rise agriculture and industry on your first base, and forcing high rise on later bases.
Bigger bases:
The hard 500 area limit per planet can be harsh. I’ve tried to think of a way to soften it, but with exponentially increasing costs to limit its use.
If you can’t expand outwards, you’ll have to go upwards (or downwards). Add a Support Beams material/building with a negative area or positive “second-floor” area. Limit it somehow to “cover” the area of the base - except Farms and Orchards because sunlight and soil. This would keep agriculture bases mostly low rise whilst allowing more industrial/technical bases to expand. Perhaps add more floors using 3 support beams for 2nd floor, 6 for third etc so there is an exponential cost, limiting this strategy. Perhaps limit heavy industries to ground floor, manufacturing, chemistry, food processing and electronics to first and second floors whilst allowing core module and habitation up to the third floor.
Tunneling - As support beams, this building/effort creates underground area up to the area of the base. Only works on rocky planets (support beams ‘hanging down’ may be an option for gas planets). Perfect for extractors or rigs (possibly giving them a boost!), usable for buildings but not farms or Orchards (or Solar Panels). This will cost, but perhaps repair costs could be lower and costs for pressure, temperature and gravity negated as it would be a sealed area.
Contracts
Hide fulfilled contracts/sort them to the bottom. Or sort them by origin, destination or time left.
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