Expanding planet development mechanics

[shock]

Currently colonizing, and then developing a planet is basically always the same thing over and over. Find the closet planet, and invest in ships to send over food, water, machines, and people. The colony becomes mid size, and profitable, while you increase your ship count. Colony growth levels out, you send your machine ship else where, and scale back food/water ships as needed. Then you go to the next planet and repeat.

First main problem is there no reason to foot the initial investment of a colony (same can be said about mines and other planet production structures). The most profitable strategy would be wait for someone else to foot the bill then swoop in and profit. Im not saying players should own industries, but maybe something along the lines of getting a % of everything produced by it. Water is fine being transported at a loss but in exchange it builds a reputation with the planet, giving you access to more of the good produced at the planets compared to other players. (and it should be clear to players water isn't profitable). Sounds like its already planed to be changed by the politic update so i won't dive any deeper here.

Next is there isn't really any depth to the planet development (or else where in the game). As you just do the same thing for every planet. One of the main ways would be to add more resources to transport. Two of the ways i see using them is unfriendly planet conditions, and/or tiered planet development.

As for unfriendly planet conditions i am thinking of planets that need a constant supply of something other then food/water to survive. For example, planet with an extremely thick atmosphere stopping the colony from relaying on solar power, requires a steady supply of a power source to be delivered. A mining planet with conditions to hostile for humans to live on, requiring a steady shipment of robots to operate the mines. These all would require items that mined and then manufactured on other planets creating a bunch of more interesting production line and trade routes. It would also add flavor to planets, bonus points if you tie planet events into these environments. (nuclear wars happening more often on the planet needing constant supply of uranium for power due to higher ease of access. Volcano taking out a large chuck of robot workers increasing demand)

The other idea was tiered planet development levels. This would be the main sink for all the resources. When you first colonize a planet its tier 0. Once you get the 4k machinery there its becomes a basic tier 1 planet. If a tier 1 gets a steady supply of X item(s) it gets upgraded to a tier 2 planet (maybe consumer goods). Once at tier to it gets the ability to manufacture more advanced items. Once there are a few tier 2 planets, if enough advanced items are sent to one planet it becomes tier 3, and can make tier 3 items. Enough tier 3 items on 1 planet makes it a tier 4 and etc. Each tier higher giving access to better items to produce. Possibly limiting the max tier a planet can be by its habitability

Rough outline to get the idea across
Tier 1 - basic mining/agriculture planet (low normal needs food/water, any hab%)
Tier 2 - Simple production world (Two T1 planets needs to support, >20 hab%)
Tier 3 - Advanced production world (Two T2 and two T1 planets to support, >40 hab%) - two T2, six T1 total
Tier 4 - ??? (Two T3, Two T2, Two T1 planets, >60 hab%) Two T3, six T2, 26 T1 total
Tier 5 - City world, a world that is just one huge highly developed city (2 of each tier below, >80 hab%) Alot of planets total

Transporting goods from higher tier planets would have a larger profit margin. Getting hire tier planets would be a main way to increase profits, and be a motivation factor to colonize specific planets. Needing a planet that can mine X resource so Y planet can produce Z. Which would then upgrade planet A so it could make W resource for a nice profit. Combined that with some colonize needing a specific resource to survive you start getting interesting colonies popping up across solar systems. Some solar systems may have every planet colonized to get a high tier planet, while others might just have one colony because that planet has a rare resource. Also creating a progression system of once you find new resources or hit a new tier of planet allowing you access to new options. I could go in more more detail but i think this gets the point across for now, i can expand apon it if interested.

Two important things would need to change though. First a limit to how many mines are placed on a planet. So a planet cant have 10 mines and supply the galaxy with a common resource, but the need to have multiple planets mining it to support the human race, (of course not the case for any ultra rare resources). The other is ship slots. You don't need a ship slot for each item, but will need a way for a ship to transport multiple different items using the same slot type (i.e. food and consumer goods in one ship). I'd recommend basing the ratio on the demand of the next planet. So if a planet has 140 food demand and 60 consumer good demand, it picks up 70% food and 30% consumer goods.

% picked up = (demand for item) / (total demand of items on that use this slot)

[mt_worlds]

We're getting closer and closer to adding more cargo types and adding a couple more supply chains, this will really help increase the need for players to focus on certain planets and have more of a reason to go interstellar. We will be working on a few new cargo types in the coming weeks.

We also are planning some things to give you more reason to subsidize a colony yourself and build industry. Also will be working on this in the coming weeks.

Your tier system is actually pretty similar to how it works currently. I think once we have consumer goods and raw materials rebalanced along with a few new cargo types most of these problems will be reduced.

In short, we are aware of the problems you are referring to and hope to have them mostly resolved in the next couple months.