Just a few suggestions on the gameplay options.

Always Buy Life Support on Debt is different from Autosell First, since you can manipulate prices.

Which is more or less the entire point of stockpiling resources in the first place, and a central facet of this game. So, yeah. As I said. The current state of the option just punishes players for making any attempt at profiting off rising life support prices. You really HAVE to sell them off immediately and push life support prices down instead of waiting for a better opportunity to sell. Besides, if you're going to massively buy into life support to manipulate prices losing a little bit along the way to pay off debt probably won't stop you anyways.

Edit: All I'm saying is that if you want to allow players to trade cash for debt through life support there's no reason not to go all the way with it. Not unless you're intentionally trying to encourage players to sell down the price of life support, which I guess would be a valid reason to do so.

Sorry, I didn't read your first post carefully enough.

Soren knows autosupply off by default very well, since his client updates so often, and he forgets to change the option. Maybe he's just used to having his buildings off. But given his experience with the pain, he surely has some counter-reason to keep it off by defaultmost likely nonsense Many players have complained about this to no avail, so you'll need some novel argument to convince him. What you've said makes sense, but it's been said before, and he understands it. At least, he believes that he understands it.

NV debt has the same problem as life support debt, modulo autosell, but I stopped caring about many things long ago.

Well, we'll just cover these in order.

1. Auto-supply. My understanding is that auto-supply start off so that new players don't have money leaking out of their pockets and not understanding why. There's enough to get a grasp on when learning Offworld already, and adding a complication like that can be more frustrating at this stage than requiring a player to buy the resource. And of course options like these should always default in favor of new players.

2. Life-support. The option to sell life-support before debt must exist as particularly high-level players will use game mechanics to do it anyways to get their edge. No reason to lock this option away from all but the most skilled. The option to life-support after paying your debt must also exist imo because many players against AI in skirmishes and campaign would likely rather have their debt managed more easily. This quality of life improvement to them is more valuable than the cash.

To handle the argument itself, I'd say that the assertion that the point of life-support is that it is consumed. It is one of the things that differentiates it from other resources, and these differences are important for keeping decisions within Offworld interesting. If these resources could be treated almost exactly like any other, just costing you debt, players would not have as much to consider. It's also important to note that the stockpiling mechanic is not one that players can simply avoid to the same degree as the auto-sell mechanic.

Who knows. Before autosell, life support and debt interacted in a dumb way, and Soren thought it was ok. People couldn't argue him into changes when the problems were much clearer, so you'll have an even tougher time now. I've been very careful not to advocate for certain changes, not because these changes are good or bad, but because any benefits must be presented in an understandable, obvious way. Design is very hard, and someone who can differentiate good design and bad design is exceptionally rare and expensive. For everyone else, the tradeoffs must be explained in a way a fifth grader can understand.

What I can guarantee, however, is that "encouraging players to sell down the price of life support" is not the reason the current design was originally implemented. There was no reason for the current design, given its historical context, since it didn't work that way. But there's a good reason now: it works, and without an obvious, direct problem, Soren is unlikely to change it. You could easily be right that life support to debt is the better model, but how do you plan on convincing him? I don't see how it's possible to simplify the considerations so that anyone less than a top-4 player could understand. Even one step down to top-10 and the player is unable to understand much of the market, rendering any argument full of holes.

Nevermind whether your argument is right or wrong; one of the specific, concrete consequences of being allowed to hoard life support is that doing so will become a factor in the beginning of the game, and everyone will have to consider it. This will in turn have annoying impacts on micromanagement and the resource price curve, continuing until food production has stabilized, if it ever stabilizes. In its current form, food has high price variance and some immunity to price manipulation.

Man I missed like a whole sentence in there. Shouldn't try to write this late. Your statements Jaiwera also remind me that in a lot of ways manipulating life-support can be one of the most sure-fire ways to cause a detriment to your opponent, and so perhaps it's a good thing there is a downside to doing this in such a simple way (managing your own stockpile).

Right, as it stands now life support is an automatic no-brains buyout 99% of the time. Stockpiling life support resources is just too expensive to even be worth considering most of the time. The fact that it's not even an option just rubs me the wrong way, but that's just my personal opinion. The change I'm proposing would make stockpiling an option again without removing auto sell or auto-sell first. The question is do we want to head that route for the sake of variety, or continue as is with life support resources having some interesting qualities (which admittedly does have its merits).

Random prices should be an option in B11 and then introduced as a default after the game is launched.

The reasoning is that it adds a skill level to the game that new players will have to grasp and quickly - given there are so many skills to learn to be competitive with experienced players, random pricing imo is a step to far at the moment. 

I grabbed this game when it was offered for 50% off and have played a bunch of skirmishes.  Needless to say I have no clue what you are talking about in this post but I wonder how would it affect the robotic HQ, since food is not a life support for them?   The discussion implies some sort of advantage for selling food instead of using it for life support, but of course robotics would not have that option.

The test version in development B11 (current release version is B10) has an auto-sell feature which sells resources immediately as they roll into the HQ. One of the options (under gameplay) is to auto-sell BEFORE those resources are used to pay life support. This way using autosell you can build farms and instead of a portion of your food production going to life support (reducing debt) you turn all of the food directly into cash. The result is life support being much stronger as $3,000 cash and $3,000 debt is always better than $0 cash/debt for high level players. The effect is a huge boost in growth as the money gained can be invested, and that investment used to pay off debt later.

Also, you're right. This definitely hurts robotic as not losing resources to lfie support is one of their primary advantages. Granted, they're still coming out ahead as they aren't gaining debt, but it's a noteworthy nerf to their ability.

Duban: Thanks for that explanation.  Now I understand the discussion.  I have learned from playing that, in this game, some debt can be a good thing.

That is the reason I got so excited about pleasure domes, when I saw that the income doesn't go against my debt but goes directly in to my cash.  At first I had no idea that pleasures domes use any power.  There is no power usage listed on tool tips for constructing pleasure domes.  Just recently I discovered the tool tip for power usage  in the colony that shows pleasure domes consuming an entire unit of power.  What a shock that was.  Not nearly as wonderful as I had thought, but still good. 

So many little nuances to learn in this game.