My theory is that most of those higher tier / lower tier hybrid recipes (e.g. FLX in a SME, PG for DW) were originally created by someone else, who had the vision for how it would work. The current devs have inherited those recipes, but not the vision. Now when players lobby for more of those kind of recipes, the devs suspect that we are mostly being self interested and trying to gain an advantage for ourselves over beginner players. So they are skeptical of our economic arguments.
If you look at the recipes of this type that have been introduced recently, they are all carefully chosen to not really have any impact at all - e.g. SOI in an ORC - only a few players have an ORC in the first place. SOI in a FRM would have far more of the effect that we are discussing here, but the devs don’t want to risk unbalancing the economy, and don’t have the time to sit down and analyse it all properly.
It’s a shame, because adding recipes is presumably one of the cheapest changes to make in terms of dev time. But even when we lay out the exact recipes and amounts for them, they still don’t do it.
However, to be fair to the devs, they are focused on attracting new (paying) players above all else. Would these sorts of changes really affect sign ups? Probably not. It’s only after you’ve been playing for a few months that you start thinking about gaps in the recipe progression. So I can’t really blame them for ignoring our suggestions on this one.
Did the devs really change? I don’t think so. I believe that Martin and Michi (molp) are here from the very start and they basically created this game.
I don’t know. But I have no other explanation for how it is that PG and FLX are in those recipes in the first place, and yet comments from the current devs on this topic are along the lines of “we’re unsure why those recipes don’t unbalance the game, but we don’t want to introduce similar ones in case they do.”
I think a worthwhile question is to consider if it is actually more efficient (in resources and/or time, not necessarily money) to have recipes of this manner? If it’s not - then it’s just added noise to the markets, even if it “looks” more efficient. At the end of the day, if you don’t get more outputs per unit input, it’s not the benefit you think it is to the economy.
That is - if you spend 2 DW to get 30 DW, it’s not necessarily better to spend 6 DW to get 60DW in the same time.
It’s not about efficiency, it’s about encouraging tier 2+ production. If this is adding noise to the markets, then yes, that’s what we want.
It would have the benefit of giving players a better progression in terms of buildings/workforce, and also means that more advanced players have an incentive to focus their production on higher tiers instead of competing directly with beginners to make all the same starting package products.
In terms of overall production of the lower tier materials it probably doesn’t make any difference by definition, since the demand for the tier 2+ inputs will stabilize around a level where overall production is the same with or without them. At any given moment, if it is more cost effective to use the original recipes, players won’t bother with the tier 2+ ingredients. While on the other hand if it is more cost effective to use the new recipes, then demand for the tier 2+ ingredients will be driven up to the point where it isn’t any more. This falls apart if the market is flooded with cheap supply of the tier 2+ ingredients. But then in that case… objective achieved!
I guess - isn’t there enough incentive to make higher tier goods already, to obtain the goods that require the higher-tier goods? Why do we need more incentive?
Also I don’t want noise in the markets - I want signals (e.g., signal to noise ratio).
Of course I’m not in the economic school that thinks more trading is always better; I think it needs to be the right kind of trading, not just trade volume for the sake of trade volume.
An interesting discussion to be sure though. I just think it’s odd to single out this particular recipe set. And I could even personally benefit from higher yields, so I’m not just complaining about “the other”
Ship building and RFabs is about all I know of about the products we use from those tiers. But I could be wrong, there’s probably more. But I would like to see it to become a good size by having our higher tier goods help the lower tier more. I’n new so please tell me your thoughts on my thoughts here. We know there isn’t enough incentive because we can look at total pop counts. TECH/ENG/SCI is very low in population. I think thinking about it economically vs a game development stand point is important here. I’d guess there are signals for us to increase low tier product output because of the lack of liquidity in those markets. I don’t necessarily know if there are signals that we need to increase the lower tier outputs, but I do know there are game development points that we should integrate these higher tiers into low tiers. I know nothing about any market, so anyone with information on them would be appreciated to share here. Just my 2 cents
That’s only true if the world was compressed into a single point. The extraction rate of raw materials and distance between them alter these ratios negatively by wasting DW in the production chain through fuel and spaceship opportunity cost. This enables unlucky star systems in having some productive use.
Having different recipes could be a good thing if there was randomness in the production chain. Asteroid mining might do it by giving players random amounts of ores, flooding a particular production chain and improving its DW ratio.
Another way would be if we had another dimension to experts. For example, you get to choose between plastic or liquid processing on top of agriculture and extraction.
That said, I agree in the current system, once you solve your location’s supply chain, you never need to tweak it so it’s definitely noise.
Currently there are only two reasons to produce most higher tier goods - either to make ships, or to sell to specific high tier MMs.
Creating a demand at tier 1 for higher tier goods, i.e. creating demand from beginner players, would mean that there was suddenly a massive market for those goods, which would generate an incentive for advanced players to move up to higher building tiers to make them.
This would not only give players more to do in the mid game, but it also better mirrors how economies in real life work. The simplest agriculture creates food that everybody wants to buy. But the most sophisticated manufacturing chains for high tech devices such as smartphones - they also create things that everybody wants to buy.
So… prestige items? The danger in making high-tier goods improve efficiency of low-tier goods is that it’s too easy in this game to diversify. Sure advanced technology is something everyone wants to buy, but it’s not something that is required for living like agriculture. And if you look at agriculture, there are reasons why small family farms are disappearing: they are getting priced out of most markets by the high-capital corporate farms. Sure there are niche markets for “family organic farms” but those goods cost far more than the mass-market foods.
So maybe in conjunction with these recipes they should add branding - that is, you can buy from specific companies at different prices, not just the best bid/ask. This way you can advertise “we don’t use any of that crazy fertilizer - only the purest food from Pure Foods!” and charge a premium for it.
This would also provide more real diversity, instead of a marketplace where everything is literally fungible; you can’t even distinguish between RAT made with NUT versus that made with VEG, which is unfortunate for those people with nut allergies.
‘It just makes sense.’
PFE and SOI currently suffer from false affordance. Affordance meaning what the environment invites the player to do, and False Affordance being when that invitation is a dead end. PFE and SOI invite the player into thinking that they will have an impact in boosting agricultural output because that’s what the gut reaction to soil and fertilizer is, but when they can’t directly be input, the invitation is shown to be false. In this context, having the solution be to let SOI and PFE boost agricultural output in some way just makes sense.
Something I haven’t come across yet is if the devs have a formal stance on buildings in bases that take inputs but output a buff instead of materials. Soft of like a PAR but at a base scale and outputting a different effect. You could have an agriculture ‘Terraformer’ (TF) building that takes in PFE and SOI and outputs some local fertility modifier. If you want to make it more or less impactful, just set a certain min/max, like only works on planets with a natural fertility lower than 0 and only modifies it up X amount. If you want to make it more meaningful to newer players/tier 1 producers vs veterans, you could make them limited in terms of how much output they modify and introduce tiers. So for a massive farming operation with 1000 tons a day of output, you’d need way to many TF1s to be feasible (a TF3 or whatever would work just fine though and require as inputs the tier 3 equivalent of PFE and SOI), but for a starting farmer, a TF1 implemented right as their production meets the cap on the TF1 gives a nice bump to their production two or three steps into the game. That shot of capital right when they may be starting to flounder financially or losing a clear direction on what to do next might open doors previously closed and inspire a little further activity/learning before COLIQing or leaving PrUn.
Once the door is open to these types of infrastructure buff buildings, the possibilities are basically endless in terms of how granular their effects can be (Buff to Manufacturing vs a buff to Plastic Materials production.) and what overlaps to create similar to the PIO/SET dual habitation buildings. Though that may actually be an argument against including them.
I think restrictions like the ones mentioned above may solve the concerns Ficks mentioned about unbalancing things while still allowing for the logically sound desire to have PFE and SOI boost ag output.
TyG, I think your suggestion of having buffs from buildings is more unbalancing than the tier 2+ ingredient recipes. If there was a high tier building that boosted output of all other buildings, then advanced players really would have a significant advantage over beginners, since beginners wouldn’t be able to afford that building yet. The key with the enhanced recipes idea is that everyone is on a level playing field, since the ingredients will be freely traded on the market, and the price will be [waves hands in economics] close to the cost of making them yourself.
Actually, I think that adding these recipes would help with this problem. Currently, if I’m an advanced player, I can build some FRM and SME and produce the same things as the starting packages. If the proposed alt recipes were introduced, then everybody else would start using them, and I’d have to use them too in order to stay competitive. But now I need SOI and SEN inputs too. Where would those come from? It gets to a point where it’s not feasible for me to source my own BRM and N and SIO - there are too many different inputs now - I have to start buying some of them from the market. Which means someone out there is specializing in producing those in turn, instead of having their own FRM and SME.
These additional recipies incentivise specialization, rather than diversification.
You’ve seen the prices relative to cost of production, yes?
That said, you guys are familiar with the gold rush, yes? The people that got rich from that weren’t the ones finding gold. The ones that got rich were the ones that sold the prospectors shovels, housing, etc. So if you are the supplier of SOI, PFE, etc, you are going to gain more than those that have the more efficient farms.
This is what the “unbalancing” is - the producers of the “required inputs” will control the markets, all with the advertising message “but it makes your FRM so much more efficient!” So the advanced corps already have FRM or SME or whatever, and will have the advantage of capital needed to keep running the ones they have efficiently with the added benefit of making the “boosting” reagents too because they can afford to set that up, further enhancing their capital engine.
Of course all this is speculation, because human behavior is not deterministic. I don’t think anyone can say exactly what will happen.
Yes! This is actually a key piece of the argument. One of the objections to these enhanced recipes is that the advanced players will hoard the SOI and PFE for themselves to boost their own production, and beginner players will be disadvantaged.
But as you have identified - the economic incentive is to sell those ingredients on the market instead of competing to make the farming products. So nobody is disadvantaged - beginner players get increased production, and advanced players get something else to do besides compete directly with the beginners.
Except we’ve seen what happens with FLX and PG - when the universe started up, the most advanced players raced to be the first to supply those goods to the market, and in the final equilibrium everyone is using them to get more efficient production.
Basically any argument against adding more of these kinds of recipes is an argument that the game would be improved if we removed the FLX and PG recipes for metals and DW.
(Note to devs: Please do not remove the FLX and PG recipes for metals and DW.)
After more thinking - I feel that this proposal sounds like regulatory capture: “Hey devs, change the rules so that this particular activity gives me a short-term advantage.” Sure long term the advantages will “average out” but having that first-mover advantage is a real thing.
It sounds like a meta-effort to address an issue of “I want to sell X but nobody’s buying” or “I want to have Y without making it myself, and nobody’s selling.” Not everything in the game has the same supply and demand, nor should it. Do people really need “incentive” to produce a particular thing? What happened to trying to find the things that are in demand and make those? So it feels odd to particularly single out this particular production chain.
If there was a more broad proposal, that was not focused on just a particular production chain, it would not feel as… conniving.
Would a solution be to combine the output capping I mentioned above (A Terraformer that takes up X space only modifies the efficiency of 1 ton of crop output on a farm that outputs 1000 tons.), the generalized restrictions on how strong the buff is, and a new tier based restriction on the input output relationship these buildings have? Basically saying that a tier 2 buff building only buffs tier 2 outputs. Implementing such a restriction immediately confines buff buildings to the early stages of whatever tier they belong to. Ideally a TF would be a little smaller and a little cheaper than a FRM.
Has the idea of a ‘dispoable’ building been explored? Basically the condition degrades extremely quickly and they cannot be repaired, eventually you exhaust the usefulness and demolish it, recoup whatever materials you can from a TF at 18% condition and either build a new one or use the space for something more diverse.
