I completely understand the desire to have the economy be fully player driven. However there is an ocean of lava players have to cross in a wooden rowboat to get there currently. Name the fact that player would currently need "YEARS" for a very small playerbase to get a player built shipyard up and running. And even several months for a large playerbase all working in perfect unity and pooling resources to build one. During that long length of time 99.999% of the playerbase is going to quit the game, I'd wager several thousand dollars on that happening in fact, as I'd be one of them. You can't expect people to play a game for months or years on end with no real progress or achievements. That's not how people work. So how to solve this? Offer ships/equipment upgrades in the default npc starting station. Not all of them, but several ship upgrades and equipment. You could even tie them to missions that help seed resources for station construction. Next you need to heavily curb station destruction. I was able to blow up key infrastructure in blowing up a station in just two minutes with a starting ship. This means that even after months/years of progress someone can come along and reset the game in minutes to square one. That's just about the worst game design decision anyone has made in the history of gaming, and has to change immediately. Either by giving stations vulnerability windows, or heavy unavoidable defensive weapons, etc. I'm not going to farm pirates for 5-6 days straight to build a refining station that can be destroyed by someone afk with a heavy object on the spacebar in a few minutes. A "LOT" of things need to be completely rebuilt at the concept level and up before this will function as even a basic game loop at this point. You have a good idea, as this game has been done before a LOT of times from star sonata through dozens of others. So it can work, but this needs a lot of reworking.

Hello Valhallis, Thank you for your suggestion and opinions. Good thing about having open alpha tests is this kind of feedback. And looking at it now, the balancing is truly required. I already have a plan to balance the game, which will come in the update at the end of January as I am currently abroad for 3 weeks to visit my own family and this spare laptop I have with me is not suitable for game development. [u]Current balance plan for the next update:[/u] - cheaper space stations (a lot cheaper, possibly removing some dependencies on parts from other stations) - higher base HP of Refinery station and a review of other stations HP - cheaper equipment (again, a lot cheaper) to build via factories of space stations The stations already have the safe-zone feature - once activated, the station cannot lose HP and, in addition, the players in its vicinity also get protected in exchange for not being able to shoot their own weapons. This safe-zone station shield can be activated by the station owner at any time (or at least 10 minutes later from the last deactivation). Of course, there are limits - each station can accumulate up to 30 safety points. Each 10 minutes without protection grant 1 safety point and each 30 minutes with protection consumes 1 safety point. Once the station reaches 0 safety points, the safe-zone shield collapses and the station becomes vulnerable. Thre is also a plan for the future to review the space station spawning mechanism, to allow more stations to be build in a single system, to allow the players to build the stations anywhere in the system, to add more control of the station security (choosing station armor type, automatic defense turrets) and to mark the built space stations on the StarMap window. Thank you. Regards, Lukas Tokar

Some solid design changes planned there. I did in fact build a refinery in the 2-1 system, it was a LOT of grinding to get 75k credits, but was doable. The rest of the stations are obviously impossible to afford jumping to half a million. If I could make a suggestion, greatly lower the credit costs for stations, but actually significantly raise the "basic" resource costs like copper/iron to compensate. Would give mining more of a purpose. Credits are the nightmare to get since there are so few credit sources while we have tiny ships. But mining is plentiful and works fine with a small ship. And yes, a boost to the station HP and giving them automated defenses will fix that issue. The safety window is nice, but still leaves stations open to attack a lot with no way of know if they are being attacked or defending themselves currently. Glad to hear these will be addressed, look forward to building up more stations once they are more affordable.

I also had the idea earlier of something that could speed along progression significantly without making the game easy. You could have two classes of stations. A smaller and larger one of each. Smaller stations would be vastly more affordable for solo players, however would have very limited protection, hp, etc and would have less production. For example a smaller refinery could still refine all the ores, but would do so at a much slower pace. Say one refine every 5-10 minutes instead of once every 30sec for the current larger one. This would be far more suitable for a solo player, as a full size refinery already refines faster than 3 players can even mine at, leaving that more suitable to a group/organization of players. This could also be scaled to say a shipyard, the smaller version being a wharf, it would only be able to build fighters/frigates etc, and not carriers or battleships. But of course would cost vastly less to setup, allowing people to get into new ships in a week instead of a months/years.

Hello Valhallis, It has been quite a while now since your suggestion. The station are already cheaper and more affordable. Additionally, new NPC shops will arrive to the game with the new game update v0.2.7. This update will also make station spawning process a lot easier with the reworked station spawner feature. A plan was also made to add smaller defence platforms as constructs available to build around space stations in order to protect them from assaults. No smaller factories are scheduled -> the stations are really cheap to build now, in comparison to the open-alpha launch version of the game. I believe this new update will cover your initial idea, so thank you for that. As it is scheduled to go live, I am closing this thread now. Regards, Lukas Tokar