Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => Suggestions => Topic started by: DeMatt on November 29, 2018, 09:31:25 AM
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I would like to suggest a new colony control, the "tariff slider". This would be a slider, spanning from -50% to +50% in 10% increments, and defaulting to zero. Changing it would do three things:
- Every +10% on the slider equates to -10% accessibility.
- Every +10% on the slider equates to +1 stability.
- The slider percentage acts as a multiplier on export value (after it's been adjusted for accessibility).
Want to secure your home? Click it up. Prefer to invite the world in? Slide it down. If it's too easy being able to move it from end to end at any time, maybe you can only adjust it by ±10% each month.
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Yes, please! This is not only structurally better than the existing no-player-agency implementation, but it's also considerably more interesting as well. Put the decision-making power where it belongs: in the player's hands.
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This seems like a bad idea. I'm not in favor of adding player-adjustable settings that are just math challenges. Higher stability is a boost to colony income (up to the max of 10). Higher accessibility is -also- a boost to colony income. While it's possible that changing conditions might make stability temporarily more valuable than accessibility, or vice versa, at any given time there would be a single correct setting to maximize your profit.
Seems like the sort of thing that I could just assume the planetary administrator handles without requiring player interaction.
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Seems like the sort of thing that I could just assume the planetary administrator handles without requiring player interaction.
Agreed. Besides, I'd rather not have to stop every month and fiddle with a bunch of colony sliders in order to maximize my profits. That isn't really all that fun.
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While I do like the overall sentiment...
Isn't this basically Free Port on/off but more granular and without the side effects? As such I think Free Port covers it, and adds a few interesting wrinkles as well. I'd be more in favour of improving what we have first, before adding another slider here. I'd favour other ways of adjusting the tolerance/suspicion levels of the colonies, instead.
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This seems like a bad idea. I'm not in favor of adding player-adjustable settings that are just math challenges. Higher stability is a boost to colony income (up to the max of 10). Higher accessibility is -also- a boost to colony income. While it's possible that changing conditions might make stability temporarily more valuable than accessibility, or vice versa, at any given time there would be a single correct setting to maximize your profit.
Seems like the sort of thing that I could just assume the planetary administrator handles without requiring player interaction.
This isn't really about the first-order effects, that is the stability and profit margin. This is more for the second-order effects, that is how accessible your colony is to the other factions and thus how much effect your colony's exports have on their attitude.
I imagine that the exact numbers would lead to "minimum tariffs = maximum profits in almost any circumstance", but the ability to trade "profit" for "not annoying the major powers by trying to break their monopolies", at a finer level than "don't build industries", is a strategic decision I would like. Similarly, I imagine that the change in profit would generally be fairly minimal - 10% accessibility (or one unit of imports/exports) for 1 stability (or what is lost by not having that one unit of an import).
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If you’re looking for granularity it would probably just be better to have an acessability slider which is capped at the current maximum.
Do you want to risk more attacks/terrorism? Increase the slider
Do you want more profits from trade? Increase the slider
That way you don’t have the math problem of how to maximize profit but you still have the top level control over a primary gameplay lever.