Maxnano

The Biggest Issue is that NQ dont seem to have any serious planning / modeling / metrics on key points of information.

Avg and Max income per player on 0 skills and full skills
Cost of building / buying a warp capable ship.
Time investment target to build / buy warp capable ship.
Time to mine out 1m units of T1 ore skilled and unskilled.
Income per hour, skilled and unskilled.

These are just some examples of stuff i think is probably important to know. Once you know what your targeting for you can compare with actual server data. assuming that you are collecting such info.
Then you can use it to identify where the problems are specifically.

I suspect a big part of the problem is skills. If you want people to specialize more you need to give bigger incentive. maybe even consider making some skills mutually exclusive. As it is now, Anyone can and often do, do everything. PVP, Mine, Explore and Scan, Haul, Refine, Craft.  i do like being able to do everything, as its suits my play style. but it doesnt encourage a community market, cooperation, grouping up etc.  

One big mistake is having all T1 ores in every Hex.  At best is should be 10k distance to travel to find all 4.   and For T2 ores, it should be Contential.

Lastly, dont look at what the large corps are doing. that isnt typical player behaviour and its almost impossible to ballance a game around that. organisation and division of labour will always win. without imposing artifical limits on territory and resources you cant limit them.

Back in the 50's 60's when the USA was developing the Blackbird, It wanted to make the Aircraft out of Titanium. this was bleeding edge stuff , so much so, that only the USSR actually had access to it. They were forced to trade, via third parties to buy Titanium.  

No one country has everything. 

There is a quick Fix to this, but you and the player base wont like it. 

if your in an Org, only the Org can place TCU's   The First one that goes down becomes the capital and every other TCU must be placed ajacent. and you get a contigious nation state.  add to this the local and contential varience of resources you might get a solution. 

its not Du, its their payment processor, the worst and cheepest in the industry, Xsolla or whatever they are called.
 
 

I think i under quantum physics better than voxel placement atm. 

its not Du, its their payment processor, the worst and cheepest in the industry, Xsolla or whatever they are called.
 
 

not buying anything is a strat decision, and im progressing fairly well tbh, i just have a decision to make now. btw i didnt say i wasnt selling stuff. another asumption. im just not buying.  and i have several TCU's ready.   theres nothing in this game i havent seen before elsewhere. just some odd design decisions, so just because i didnt start in alpha i wouldnt assume i have no idea what im doing.
 
the game dev's also said there wouldnt be any automated mining, and its in the future roadmap now so i wouldnt worry so much about what the devs say , whatch what they do instead. i would put money on resources being changed to respawn rather than deplete.

then you need to be able to upgrade cores