Life support commodities eaten by HQ with none for production

It's actually the opposite... It's much more benficial to gain debt than lose raw funds, and as a result it's usually better to not produce life support at all in the early game, to instead focus on building materials.  You can afford to take on a chunk of debt from ignoring life support for a bit.

You have 2 options - either purchase more O2 at a time so that there's enough to fuel your HQ as well as your furnaces.  Or simply turn on AutoSupply on your furnaces, which will cause them to automatically buy O2 off the market as it's needed.  I prefer the latter as it keeps your factories efficient - just be sure to check prices regularly and turn off factories that aren't making profit, otherwise AutoSupply will end up burning a lot of funds at a loss.

Except that Auto-Supply will not purchase on debt, only with available cash, which is a different thing altogether from buying on debt to meet an essential demand.

(And I think sometime ago someone asked why debt-purchasing was limited to essentials and auctions, to which the answer was "If everyone could buy everything on debt, the game would be about who could click fastest to get their Offworld Markets up and then it's a matter of who picked the highest deposits that were closest.")

Yeah, point is if you build life support production you're basically mitigating your debt, whereas if you build other production and use autosupply you can get a full cash return on your production, and take on a bit of harmless (if careful) debt.  

That was probably me that asked about debt before Zach.  I didn't realize the full ramifications of debt before because I hadn't been able to play the game yet.

Cerzi, the point is, you CANNOT take on careful debt with auto-supply in other industries.  With auto-supply on, if your cash reserves hit 0, then all non-support auto-supplies shutdown.  This might be understandable if all industries worked this way, and I understand why they do not, really, but when one consumer of something like oxygen can buy on credit, but another cannot, it drives a, probably, unintended motivation on what will be produced because of the inconsistency in the rule.

I say its still wonky, but if you want to prevent early purchases and still have this mechanic, then let any building on auto-purchase, use credit if necessary, but require cash for manual purchases.

I mean, EVERY industry requires cash to auto-supply resources.  The only resource consumption that adds to your debt is lifesupport solely from your HQ consumption, and power.  Like, if you have farms set to auto-supply, but have negative water, the farms will use cash to auto-buy water just like any other industry...  So I don't really see what you're saying, unless this is just a confusion.  AutoSupply works equally for all industries.  Simply sell a few things when you hit 0 funds to let your autosupply do its thing - if you're unable to sell anything to cover your autosupply costs then you're doing something very wrong and should probably turn some stuff off.

You are correct Cerzi.  I was considering the colony consuming oxygen an industry, but it really isn't.  I guess when it comes down to it, I have trouble managing cash and oxygen/fuel reserves, to produce things like glass and chemicals, because there is a big hole ready to zero out my inventory if I'm not actively producing oxygen and fuel.

Yeah, the debt mechanic is wonky, but not because of life support.  It is wonky because it is usually GOOD to have a lot of debt, which is incredibly counterintuitive on a superficial level (until you realize companies like Amazon routinely hold on to billions of dollars of debt because it actually fields growth faster than the interest fuels loss).

I don't know how you fox that other than making interest rates variable based on how much planet wide debt there is.  This would probably need to be countered with some kind of bank function like certificates of deposit or bonds, but i fear that implementation may create more complexity than the developers desire. 

You could have the nightly interest be variable based on the amount of debt you have in comparison to your current net worth, as a measure of how leveraged you are.

Would also be interesting to know some of the details on how debt calculates into stock price (we know for a fact that there is a multiplier whose value is detemined by your handicap - it's lowest for Intern and highest for CEO). Sometimes I think it's not just how much debt you have, but also the period of time for which you have it.

This is a really good discussion. I will point Soren to this.

-Scott-