You are beginning to see the light.

+1!

+1

like +

make it so you have place the outpost

...or accepting the darkness

I sincerely appreciate the transparent response to the work involved in creating what seems a SINGLE new Beta island. That kind of information goes miles and miles to discussion ideas on the forums. Clearly my hope (fantasy) for 99 islands is years away under current production capacity.

I just wish you would now at least give us more info on what is happening with Gamma, as it's very clear from this single golden nugget of info that Beta Utopia is far from the light.

Im guessing creating a Gamma island takes way less time?

True Pros make a Podcast to influence the Devs minds, 
The rest of you guys are Hacks

PS. I got my Highways & stopped playing b4 they came in & have never used them! ...... Irony much ?

Its a design decision by the DEVs to not do stuff like "copy&paste island, give it another name" like some have suggested to create beta versions of Alpha islands.
Its their definition of what a "Beta Island" has to have.

to go with this design defintions,
Beta 1 islands are those with a Terminal and 3 outposts and missions.
Beta 2 islands are those with only two Outposts and no missions
Beta 3 Islands could be those with minimalistic Niani infrastructure

The Automatic map generator only generates the land profile based on some noise shaders. everything else is done by the DEVs in manual labour with almost the same tools player had for beacon terraforming.
The decorational building placement probably is manual placement and rotation, and eventually automatic "blocked terrain" painting with manual tweaking.
Though, the terrain of tellesis was obviously partially painted in photoshop for the hexagon shapes.

A whole new, fully decorated, beta island being added to the game every month.  That would actually be awesome.  Six months of that would surely be more new content than we have had in the last year.

EDIT: oh and you can keep the NPCs to a minimum, nobody likes them anyway

Tbh I think adding three beta III islands a month or two would be freakin sweet. As a new bro I really like the challenge beta presents and the potential benifits. The sap mechanics are decent and the ability to use squad based PvP and roams is getting objectives is great. Either spark Tele needs a small tweak to stop people from covering all three corners of the betas (no this doesnt stop multiple accounts but that is fine, mechanics shouldn't be worked around the basis of needing multiple accounts) so easily or there needs to be enough space so a single character can't cover it all. I also like gremrods post about a beta iii with specific areas for mpcs. Awesome content here that could be implimented even if most of your engine makes everything hardcoded in and inflexible.

Key question that the Devs should be asking themselves is why should players be risking assets necessary to stake claim to Beta/Gamma, instead of simply staying on Alpha.

As the current situation evidently shows, the vast majority doesn't consider Beta to be worth investing and risking assets necessary to take it. So whatever incentives might be there, evidently they're not enough and need to be increased or expanded.

Gamma will be in an even worse position since it will require significantly more investment asset-wise and bear more risk (destroyable terminals), but the incentives can be summed up as 10-15% better facilities and all 3 color plasma NPC buy orders. The solution obviously cannot be moving epriton back to Gamma, that would be just childish.

The only thing more islands will do is provide space for people to hide/ninja-mine, it won't solve the root of the problem - the potential gains are not worth the actual effort required.