Ships: Supply

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Bigjoe5
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Re: Ships: Supply

#151 Post by Bigjoe5 »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
Bigjoe5 wrote:
Geoff the Medio wrote:From your posts, I can't figure out what overall plan you're suggesting or how it would fit with other suggestions or what other suggestions it would replace.
The context is the topic.
"The topic" is insufficient. The context that is missing relates to the recent discussion in the thread. Your first post starts out about how supply ships shouldn't be player controlled, but nobody was talking about there being discerete player-controlled supply ships, so it's not clear what the point of the comment was...
You're right. That part of my post was more or less pointless.
Geoff the Medio wrote:If you mentioned something about the recent discussion and said you agreed with it because it doesn't involve the sort player control you don't like, then that'd be fine. Or you could quoute something from the original post in that started the thread so it's clear you're not referring to any of the recent discussion.
That's true.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
All planets will put forward an equal % of their resources to supplying that fleet.
It's not clear what this means exactly, but there have been suggestions to have supply cost production points or money, but these have been argued against previously in the thread. Does your system not have the problems that were discussed earlier?
This is what I found in this thread related to PP use:
eleazar wrote:* The player may have a global way to control how much PP is diverted from building projects to resupply the fleet.. Perhaps there is a setting, or "Fleet Resupply" appears in the production queue.
utilae wrote:One thing is that missile ships, having ammo will be subject to supply problems. But what about ships using plasma cannons and lasers. A PP supply required by ships to maintain systems could be used or this could be ammo instead. So what happens if there is no supply. % of plasma cannons wont work. Not enough crew, % lasers wont work. Or not enough ammo % of lasers wont work.
Nothing against PP here.
Tortanick wrote:Resupply should be free, it will keep jumping up and down as you're ships change orders and that prevents good economic planning. Per ship maintenance already covers the cost of active ships so leave it at that.
It will keep jumping up and down, but since you know that you're going to be using ships, you can plan around it. It shouldn't make much of a difference to the economy anyway, unless you're in the middle of a war, in which case it should. Sorry if this is a design decision that has been indisputably established, but IMO, refueling should be the only maintenance cost for ships. If I have a big death fleet and it's just sitting there, what do I need to pay for? It's using no fuel or ammo, it shouldn't need repairing, and the crew's pay should be insignificant to my empire. But when I go to war and my ships start eating up all the fuel, that's when resources start becoming an issue.
Tortanick wrote:We allready have a money tax in the form of ship maintenance, do we really need a PP tax for supplies as well? I really think any tax based on supplies will be a real pain to manage because its so unpredictable. If you have ships staying still they arn't using fuel so they'll cost less PPs then moving ships, or ships that just used a lot of ammo in a fight.
More Tortanick saying two taxes is too many....
Tortanick wrote:For example in you're system where resupply is based on PP. Presumably there will be a set price in PP to fuel, if a player is in a sticky stiutation where he has to ration PP he would want to know exactly how many gallons of fuel his fleet has so he could make an informed decission on how to ration PP.
Normally, the player will be working on an empire-wide scale. This proposition is micromanagement which we want to avoid. If a player is doing badly enough for him to need to micromanage fuel, then his empire is pretty much collapsing. If we use a more general idea like mine, we avoid this kind of micromanagement altogether, while still allowing a player to give fuel to his more valuable ships first.
eleazar wrote:I'm not exactly happy with the idea of using PP to create supplies, and would not object if someone described a better way. But here's why i resorted to that idea:

With all the proposals in this thread having your ship more or less "in supply" can make the difference between victory and defeat. This is a major strategic element in the game. But if any colony can provide unlimited supplies acquiring supplies seems "exploitable".
Let's suppose two empires have a no-man's-land between them that is just about the same as the practical limit of their supply lines. Massive fleets are maneuvering and feinting, trying to get a clear shot at the enemy while protecting their flank.
Suddenly one side plants a colony on a nearly worthless world (or such a colony passes the magic point of development after which it can provide unlimited supplies. That side suddenly has a huge advantage, and with a closer source of supplies, makes a devastating attack— or fortify itself on that colony and be instantly repaired/resupplied..

The issue here is the arbitrary way a source of supplies could be attained. It's really hard to prevent the enemy from establishing a quick, lousy colony— and such a colony is very powerful.

The most natural way i can think of to place a variable limit to how many supplies a colony (or network of colonies connected by Planetary Supply Routes) can produce is to link it to PP. I don't want resupply to normally use up a large percentage of an empire's PP, i just want a reasonable relationship between colony development and the resupply it can produce.
It really is the most natural way to do it. There's not many other ways to avoid these problems.
loonycyborg wrote:Rate of resupply should depend on the colony's Construction Meter.
Then where's the cost of having a massive war? With maintenance for ships instead of PP for fuel, my death fleet costs the same amount whether it's flying across the galaxy blowing up everything in sight, or just sitting at some random star system doing nothing.
Tortanick wrote:eleazar, you could link supply production to PP, but not make it actually use the PP on supplies. A colony that makes 10 PP could make 100 supplies a turn if that 10PP is being spent on a ship or not.

I still like the infinite/none system but I thought I'd throw that out because there is nothing I'd hate more than actually useing PP on resupply, since every turn you'd need a different amount based on what you're ships are doing.
1. Then where's the cost of war?
2. Ships activity shouldn't vary that much, and it shouldn't be a really BIG part of what you spend PP on anyway.
eleazar wrote:Quote:
* If resupply costs anything, that cost should not vary rapidly from turn-to-turn, or due to immediate state of an empire's fleets. This could cause large, unpredictable variations in the amount of PP consumed by the supply system, which would make planning and allotment of available PP to queued production projects difficult.

The highlighted portion is IMHO a weak argument. Our PP and RP queues deal with fluctuations quite painlessly.
How true.
Geoff the Medio wrote:I think the issue is mostly the planning, not the allotment. The latter would adjust automatically. It might be a bit confusing where the PP used to fund supply are going, though...
There wouldn't be much planning because it shouldn't cost very much. In times of massively devastating war, maybe 20% of all colonies PP would cover it for an average empire. We can simply tell the player where his PP is going.
MikkoM wrote:Of course if some sort of a supply cost system would be implemented it could cause problems like: should the supply costs be automatically charged from your empire`s/system`s PP or should there be some sort of a menu where you could adjust the amount of PPs going to fleet supplies, so you could reduce the amount of supplies your fleet receives, but at the same time free PP for other tasks?
As I stated, colonies, would never spend more than enough to completely refuel all ships in range, but also would never spend more than the player-set percentage of their PP.
Geoff the Medio wrote:If we need to make wars more expensive, there are various ways to do it, which may or may not be supplies related. We can pick one when the time comes, but details discussions of motivation for doing so are premature for now.
It's not premature if it sheds light on the topic at hand. If we're serious about this, we need to discuss supply in the context of the game, and discuss parts of the game that will affect it.


I think that covers that part of the discussion.


Geoff the Medio wrote:
A special building can be built that increases the amount of supplies that come from that planet, thus lowering the % of resources used by all colonies to supply ships.
Resources are (basically) pooled empire-wide, so what is the use of localizing the cost of supplies to a planet that would have put its resources into a shared pool anyway?
It seems I have been misunderstood. I meant that the supplies that come from this building don't cost anything. Therefore, the overall PP that must be spent on supplies decreases. This would, of course, be an expensive building, and probably quite rare within most empires, as well as being high up on the tech tree.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
Ships can only be supplied if they are within a certain number of star lanes from the nearest colony.
This is an undeveloped restatement of an aspect of the system that's been discussed in detail for the preceeding few pages of this thread. Are you agreeing with that aspect, or restating it as a novel idea? Either way, more useful would be comments or refinement suggestions for the proposed details of how that would work.
Well, it's really just the kind of thing that goes without saying, except that I decided to say it. :P It really wouldn't work if you could supply ships anywhere.
Geoff the Medio wrote:If you like certain aspects of where the current discussion is going, but not others, then it would be useful to state this explicitly, so others can tell what you're agreeing with and what you're suggesting be done instead.

If this were page 1 of this thread, then your suggestions in their current form would have been more useful. But on page 9 or 10, you've got to acknowledge what's already been said, particularly if you're repeating already-discussed suggestions (whether they've been agreed with or criticized) or suggesting a general idea that's currently being discussed in detail.
I'll keep that in mind next time. 8)
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