FreeOrion

Due to the classfication (er focus) system, it's not possible to micromanage such that your output exactly matches your input. Way back in the orginal economy thread, the idea of hording excess resources in stockpiles was brought up as a possible solution.

For each resource, should we have a stockpile? How should the stockpiles work? Should there be a cap?

Here's my example/suggestion:

Nutrients -- Food is stored in a stockpile local to the planet. There's no way to manually transfer nutrients. The cap is population * 15 -- that's enough food to feed the population for five turns. Food does not decay, we can assume a race capable of FTL travel has developed advanced preservation methods.

Each turn, all of the local stockpiles are tallied and displayed as a global stockpile. Nutrients are automatically shipped out to planets with shortfalls.

When a planet is conquered or otherwise lost, the local food stockpile is assumed destroyed.

Minerals -- Minerals are stored in a stockpile local to the planet that mined them. As with nutrients, there's no way to manually transfer minerals. There is no cap on minerals (or the cap is very high, say 1000 per planet).

Minerals are tallied into a global stockpile and automatically dolled out to needy planets.

When a planet is conquered, the mineral stockpile is transfered to the new owner. In the distant future, we might also have raids for minerals.

Industry Industry doesn't stockpile. Unspent industry is coverted to credits at a 4 to 1 ratio, rounded up. (technology might improve this ratio in v.3)

Research Research doesn't stockpile. Use it or lose it.

Credits Works exactly the same as minerals, including the capturing of the stockpile when you conquer or raid a planet.
(actually, I'm not certain credits will be in v.2; haven't seen them mentioned in any design document)


...

Anyway, the floor is open for debate and additional ideas. Once again, this is another dry subject that needs to be figured out for the v.2 requirements document.

The cap for nutrients sounds good.

For minerals however. WE need to get a feel for how much your typical structure or ship cost in terms of minerals. I assume we want minerals for an additional strain on the economy something else to manage etc. And because we are going for planetary classification system we will need to have planets that are strictly mining and are strictly industry etc. Thus a stockpile of minerals is unnecessary all a player has to do is match the rate of production with the rate of consumption. But if we do have a mineral stockpile we need to make sure that ONLY a mineral classified planet can store minerals. Thatway a particularly tactful player can blockade a certain major mineral production planet and effectivly cripple the empires production, etc. etc.

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Aquitaine is my Hero....

I'm working on a document that I hope will fully explain my concept of a full blown Build Queue Manager & Script File Generator.

Within this document I have allowed for the stockpiling of Food and Minerals based on a percentage of Empire wide production. I have included lots of comments that I hope will explain what each section is doing and why.

I should have the first draft ready in a day or two.

Thumper

P.S.

Before the "I don't want a script file" crowd start reacting to this post please wait for the BQM document and then please DO comment.

Thumper


P.P.S.

The document is a MS_Word file and I would like to be able to post it here as a ".doc" file rather than copying it into a forum post. Comments?


Thumper

Please save it as an .rtf file so those of use who believe in open standards can read it.

I'll give it a wherl...

Thumper

Why do we even need the local stockpiles? Why not just use a global one and dump the planet stockpiles. As far a I can tell the planet's pile has no function whatsoever as stuff is transfered to needy planets anyway.

I don't think conquering planets to get the stockpile is going to happen very often so that's not really a big argument for me.

I totally agree. The only place for a stockpile/reserve is at the Empire level.

Thumper

Only having global stockpiles is a possiblity and will work out fine.

I favor local stockpiles for the following reasons:

1: When there is a shortfall, it makes sense for producing planets and planets in the same system to have first dibs. A farming world should starve itself or it's immediate neighbors to feed a random world half a galaxy away.

2: When a planet is conquered, it makes sense for a portion of your accrued resources to be lost. Local stockpiles help determine how much is lost. Otherwise, a mightly empire reduced down to a single world will still have a huge stockpile of resources. As a tangent to this, it would be nice to know how much an enemy can capture in a raiding mission. If they hit the same world reaptely, eventually the local stockpile should be depleted.

3: The player never (or rarely) has to directly deal with local stockpiles. He can gauge the health of his empire from global consumption and stockpiles--so despite the added detail, the system still seems just as simple to the end user.

Regarding the word document: save and post it as html somewhere (geocities is you have to).

Though, to be honest, I wouldn't waste too much time on it. The chances of getting a consenus on a scripted build queue is pretty slim--but maybe it's something the AI team would be interested in using.

IF the Local Reserves are always assumed on planets with excess production then the player should never be aware of them. If the player is never aware of them then just let them be handled by the program in some nominal way and or forget about them altogether.

Once your planet starts producing excess food and or minerals just let the Excess be sold to your Empire and doled out from there. If for some reason a planets production falls below its needs it gets in line just like all of the rest of the planets that can't feed itself or keep its industries supplied with minerals. The situation should self correct if the planet has the resources.

BTW my BQM handles this very nicely... IMO.

As for loosing resources when a planet is conquered... I think the loss of the planet should be enough. I wouldn't worry about a few cents worth of food or minerals! They've/You've just lost a whole planet and ALL of its production, research, and whatever facilities. On the other hand if They/You have just conquered a planet you've just gained all of its production, research, and whatever facilities.

IMO this is a KISS issue... Don't go kicking rocks in a mine field.

Thumper

I vote for a global nutrition and mineral stockpile. Industry doesnt stockpile, but is converted into credits, credits are also stockpiled globally.

If a planet is barricaded, it gets its own stockpiles. Thus if you barricade your enemies metall-world, they will run out of food, but stockpile minerals. As soon as the situation is cleared, the barricaded planets stockpiles are added to the new owners global stockpiles.

I can see a simple solution. Minerals are ususlly kept on mining worlds and the shipped to industrial worlds. When the player loses a world, the player loses a percentage of his mineral stockpile. This percentage is equal to the percentage of the added mining and industrial production of the world, divided by two, of the total mining production for the turn.

P.S. This could work similarly for food - this time we factor in food production and population (food consumption).

good call Bastian....seiges are an excellent reason to have local stockpiles.

han_krum, assuming we use global stockpiles that would be a good way to calculate loses due to conquest or raiding.

Well, if the info is there, and if you can get an advantage of knowing about your stockpile people will feel forced to check on them. That's why I'm against local piles as proposed by you. I'm sure we can work out something simpler that can still be used in case of a siege.

How about this: The food surplus is stockpiled globally, with each planet holding the same part of it. So, if I have 100 units of food in my pile and I have 10 planets, each planet has 10 units of food piled up. Things continue that way until one of my planets is under siege. Once that happens this particular stockpile is no longer refilled unless the siege is broken. All we'd have to display to the player is "planet blockaded - food runs out in X turns" No need to check on stockpiles before you get under siege as they are all the same.

To do it really correct you'd not store "food" but "food for X turns", so that each planet can survive for the same number of turns in case it gets blockaded.

Eh, either way is fine. Both involve the about same amount of calculation and design work--the complexity is equivelent.

Note that we don't have show the player the local stockpile (esp. since the player is unable to manipulate the stockpile directly). It's just there as a number in the code, as a reference for raiding, conquest spoils, and resource distribution.

Boy I didn't know we were even going to have Food, my whole Bio proposal over in the Population thread is based on the assumption their would be no food as Bio encompasses food. I figured each planet just providing for itself. How dose the food get produced, please tell me I will not need to assigne some god awfull number like 30% of my space farring civalization's population to food Production as if this were some kind of Civalization in space!
Down with Food!!!

Here is what I would propose insted, alow us to "convoy" minerals, and "Bio capacity" from one system to another much like Tyth's proposal for population covoying. The convoy is just a dash line in space that costs some money each turn and moved X amount of stuff each turn from planet A to planet B (with an apropriate lag time to prevent instant transport ofcorse). A BioCapacity convoy temporarily moves the effect of Bio from one planet to another, the donor planet thus has its pop cap reduced and the reciving planet has its raised. System blockading can stop convoys. This is a lot like the system used in Stars! but greatly simplified. No need for a Central stockpile with stuff being moved around without the players consent or knowlage everything goes were it is needed.

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Fear is the Mind Killer - Frank Herbert -Dune