Snipester

I love this idea because it provides options and depth for players. This would give opportunities for players and organizations to spend an upfront amount of time, energy and resources in order to help automate or simplify a process or transportaton route in the long run. Think of it like an investment with risks and rewards. The risks being that it concentrates a lot of resources in one place/needs to be defended, and the profits or benefits of a certain setup might not be worth the results.

Exactly, and it needs to be there to balance risk/reward, which will cause many players to build together.

Governments and cities were formed for the sake of survival. First and foremost, to provide for the common defense. Secondly, for economic reasons, particularly agriculture, as it allowed our societies to focus on things other than hunting and gathering, and later, it gave us a large concentration of jobs and ways to make a living. So long as there is a present and real danger from outside forces, and a real economic need for players to be in cities, they will form. The key word here is real. Artificial incentives likely won’t work, and making bases too easy to defend will diminish the incentive to congregate.

I don’t necessarily think it won’t work. I think it would be difficult, but I do think it’s possible. If you can get most or all of the larger organizations on board (which would be to their benefit), many others would likely follow suit. I sort of see your point here, but I don’t see that as much of an issue. I have no doubt people would come up with creative ways to make tunnels, patterns, lighting, sidewalks, dividers, etc. to give their cities a unique feel.

Hi all, Since there is now a city building event involving many unaffiliated players, I think it’s a perfect time to have this discussion. Players are going to have all sorts of different structures and ships. At the same time, trade will be a vitally important component of the game, which will, in many ways, depend on infrastructure. Not only does that mean roads for hover vessels, but even landing pads and docking/loading stations for flying vehicles at market units and spaceports. In order to optimally facilitate trade between players, I think it would be very beneficial for a set of standards to be agreed upon between many of the organizations in DU. For example, we might say that road lanes should be x meters wide. Small landing pads should be x by y meters, medium landing pads should be x+5 by y+5 meters, etc. This would make it easier for players and orgs to design ships that can be more widely used across the universe. It would also help city planners and builders have a set of values to build around, and help organizations optimize access to their market units. Obviously this would be impossible to enforce; that being said, I think it would be in the best interest of any organization to establish and follow such standards. It will take time to discuss, but I figured I might as well get the conversation going. Thoughts?

My bad lol, fixed

Thanks for the cliff notes, much appreciated

The best answer is that it depends on the resource. Common materials that are easy to mine and safe to transport will be cheap. As the difficulty and risk of these two tasks goes up, so too then does the cost of the resource.

One multiblock megastructure I'd love to see would be a particle collider. I know that automation isn't planned for resources, but it would be interesting to have a massive machine like this to generate trace amounts of a metal, at a massive cost of resources to make and power to run. It would only be worth using for the most valuable of resources.

I was looking for the same thing and couldn't find anything that really fit the bill. Maybe we could get some people together to make one?