With the player wave, we now have 10 planets over their plot count capacity with promitor now at +1409. There are a 6 more that are nearing the stages of being fully filled in, greatly limiting the expansion opportunities of players to plan out their next bases.
Are there any plans to address this? While it is good to encourage people to colonize worlds further out from the “core” systems, this mechanic does not scale with any growth in player count. It unfairly impacts new & free players extremely harshly as the best worlds that make the most sense (promitor+avalon pairing, montem + vallis, etc) are completely unavailable to them.
There are many economic incentives that could be introduced to remove a hard fixed number and allow price signals and other incentives to do the job that a hard plot count limit would. I won’t go into depth here, this is more a broad question about whether there are plans to address this issue which quite strongly impacts the players we should care the most about.
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I think a follow up system should
A. kick in earlier
B. Impact current residents as much as perspective one
Ideally be a soft one instead of a binary yes / no system.
The simplest to implement system would be that each player is allowed 3 ghost plots.
Any other system would require substantial rework and development (and community argument\disagreement lol)
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I partially disagree. The only real reasons a specific planet is better in and of itself are a) fertility and resources, and b) location. Sure, cost to build a base can be considered part of it, but this is an economic simulator. Supply and demand exist. If a certain planet is expensive to colonize but beneficial due to a or b, make the stuff that allows it to be colonized. But take a planet like Avalon. There is no reason, besides it being a triple green, that that planet has to be the FP planet in HRT. It could just as easily be Beanironia, Hortus h or J (which ironically IS FP) if the player base decided that was what we wanted. Or, start moving to Rathar, or Animus, or Shardonia. Yes, people who got onto Avalon have an “advantage”, but only insofar as colonization costs and location go. Frankly, it’s faster to jump to Rathar than to fly to Avalon. Thus I think this is something we the PLAYERS need to decide how to address, not the devs.
TL;DR: In my opinion, asking the devs to rebuild a system because we don’t want to adapt to the consequences of the system is not a sustainable solution.
I think the point was that this issue unfairly disadvantages new players more than anyone else and I think we can agree that it is important for new players to have a good early experience so that they continue playing.
In my opinion though, the limitation of not being able to build more than one base on core planets is not as much of a concern as it used to be. Heck, when I started several years ago none of my first few bases were on core planets. But now, there are more opportunities for new players to get loans, more shipping options, more developed planets that while not “core planets” are still close by and plenty profitable. While being able to do a promitor+avalon or montem + vallis pairing might be optimal I think it is not as significant a boost as it used to be.
It’s more than just a specific planet. The reason I mentioned planet pairings is that having a pair of planets, with one set of industry on one feeding another, is a very powerful mechanic. If you don’t start on Promitor, the nearest triple green planet (with worse fertility) is six jumps away, AJ-768a. So unless you plan on running substantially more expensive HYF’s, you are unable to participate in that farm to food processing combination at all.
Same for Vallis <> Danakil. Same for Deimos <> Nike. In all of these cases, while alternates do exist, they are inferior in distance, build\repair costs, or both. Or, you can’t build a base on planet “XYZ” which is extremely close and a triple green, right next to a CX to contribute on a logistics & shipping heavy industry like metalurgy. You have to choose something further out, of which there are options, but they’re inferior and more expensive.
And because your only mistake was joining the game later than the people who established there first, you don’t get to have the same experience as the veterans. I don’t really feel like that’s fair to new players.
I would also point out that this will likely get worse as the gateways get built - because that will favor the systems with high populations and will reinforce the “overpopulation” in those systems.
I would point to my earlier “point” system for bases that would serve to incentive senior players to move to the fringes where there HQ points would go further - thus naturally encouraging players to move “outward” from the middle of the universe. A different way to address the same thing would be to make sure the planets further from the core are richer - thus luring players further outwards.
Has anyone considered this option:
Give everyone (new and existing players) $1B in cash and let them do whatever they want with it.
Resource deposit richness is a very small portion of the economy - all of the processing and whatnot that goes on on the dozens of following steps doesn’t depending on RE richness. Making the further planets richer won’t incentivize people to colonize out there other than setting up resource taps and using 5k ships to bring the materials in to established demand centers.
