PFE, Premium Fertilizer, put it into farming recipes. Boom. Ka POW. Dynamite.Why is this good? I’d propose giving producers of farming recipes the option to increase their outputs but with the cost of logistics and expense of a consumable, PFE for example. SOI could also be used in the same regard for low fertility planets.Imagine all our basic goods being that much better to mass produce. I’d really value your opinion on this and if you agree on my thought process, but I’d think the highest volume of supply for a material in markets would generally be the most liquid. So if we increase the supply by using PFE in the recipes to boost production, balancing out the boost with a higher recurring expense so its fair, we’d have more liquid market of those MATs… And healthy economy apparently, reading a nearby post to mine about liquidity
. And higher player retention from the cheaper prices because players would like how much more progress they’d make. Some person smarter than me also thought of the idea of using SOI as a way to increase farming on low fertility planets. What are your concerns or issues with this idea?
This idea is just using the only products I know in the game as an example. I don’t know the products enough to provide other suggestions. So please voice your suggestions for other products we could use instead of SOI/PFE.
New topics introduced:
Specialty Buildings
Concerns of hoarding by the veteran players (Potentially solved with production efficiency reduction?)
Would the maker of these products make more money than the lower tier goods? (What type of balancing would need to be done?)
Should we include these specialty buildings in the pro package only?
Additionally you can click on the show summary button.
Proposals similar to this have been made before. However, the devs believe that this would give too much of an advantage to veteran players who would be able to manufacture the (in this case) PFE and use it to boost their own production, while beginner players are left out. So it is unlikely that they will implement anything along these lines.
Yeah it’s a pretty big investment for PFE. But wouldn’t it be the same concept of argument for the consumables used for pioneers? Any other luxury consumable as well. If demand is there, there will be a supply.
I don’t agree with this sentiment tho. We see all the things like FLX which are traded on the market and are sold from the higher level down to the lower levels. Sure the first players to get their would get an advantage but if the demand is there the supply would eventually get filled. Currently new players struggle because old players can already out produce them.
Alternative recipes exist and have been added in the past. TRN was added to the PT recipe and SWF to the EXO recipe in one of the more recent updates so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility. It’s not exactly easy to make though and demands a high pricetag so I think it would be best to add to higher-end agri recipes if any.
I agree with you. I think it would be great to make higher tier products be in demand by lower tiers, since that would incentivise advanced players to focus on manufacturing at higher tiers to sell those products to beginners, rather than competing directly against them with lower tier goods.
However, as I said, this has come up before, and several people have tried to explain how it would work as expected, using economics arguments, but the devs remain unconvinced. I think they see FLX as some kind of unsual case that would not generalise to other situations. And I suspect they added the PT and EXO variants in particular because they’re not actually very useful, so there’s no chance they would give anyone an advantage.
So if we have B=C in a building, but you can do A+B=C but 10% better, and A is the high tier product, have it where if a company produces both A and C, then their output of A is reduced by 10%. The amount of A would have to be equal to C in the recipe. Use this ratio to determine % reduced if deciding not to make A equal to C in the recipe. It would encourage general manufacturers of the product and put more supply on the market for the new players.The plan also adds natural use of high tier products and opens up new markets. But it wouldn’t retract from havign rich and established players invest in the markets needed for new players because all the new markets being opened would have a direct effect on the low tiers product new players need. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the idea.
Higher tier products enhancing lower tier outputs is good game design because it creates a positive feedback loop.
Rich players won’t be able to create a cartel because it’s a low fault tolerance strategy. All it takes is someone willing to sell the product on the open market for the cartel to fall. Their only defense is throwing money at it, but that means giving up their profit margin and they won’t do it. There’s probably more profit to be had selling this to smaller players, letting them enjoy a bit better profit per area and buying back whatever is produced at lower cost for higher tier chains.
I mean something like this already exists. You can use SOI to get faster outputs from an ORC, and some of the FRM recipes have multiple versions that use more H2O or additional NS. I don’t see why they wouldn’t expand on this.
PFE wouldn’t be this crazy rare thing if there was enough demand to justify people making it.
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!