Public review II: Buildings

Past public reviews and discussions.
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Aquitaine
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#16 Post by Aquitaine »

I think there is some misunderstanding about what 'pooling PP' means.

Research from every planet goes into a single, global 'RP machine' that allocates it among your projects.

Food and minerals both go into stockpiles, from which your people and your industry eat and are supplied every turn.

PP cannot be stockpiled. What we are saying by 'pooling PP' is that if planet A makes 100 PP/turn and planet B makes 200 PP/turn, you have 300 PP available every turn to build something; this makes it effectively work like research.

My personal problem with this system is that we will inavariably want to limit this somehow; if we don't, it is impossible to balance, because this way a huge empire could build just about everything in one turn (since there is no theoretical maximum PP/turn you could have if you go this route), and if we do limit it, then we are very rapidly making the system very complicated.
When a planet is building a building it is forced to use its own production. But when contributing to a global cause such as feeding people, building ships, researching tech it can contribute all of its production.
Feeding people and researching tech do not use PP, so that is irrelevant. Why is a planet building a building any different than a planet building a ship? Why should you be allowed to pool 10 planets to build a ship but not 10 planets to build a wonder?

With regard to tzlaine's criticisms:
1) Keeping track of the progress of production on each of your planets makes big games with 100 systems or more (i.e. ~300-500 planets and build queues) in your empire very painful. It doesn't really matter much if we consolidate these queues onto one screen or not. If you can pick which planet you want any single item to be produced on, even if the game usually picks pretty well, you are still left with a staggering number of choices.
I think we could have an alternate mechanism for 'placement' of ships so that, while you do have have a particular source to build a ship or ships, there's no reason the ship has to pop up there. However, by the nature of our system, you won't have that many build decisions to make, because you won't be building anything except infrastructure on your less-important planets. I don't think it makes sense to say 'the player gets involved in building only when it really matters' and then say that 'the player has to make way too many building decisions, so let's just make one big production bank.'
We can just determine the typical empire size and production rate. If you play a smaller empire, you will produce items more slowly, and the opposite will happen for a larger-than-normal empire. I don't quite understand what about this is nightmarish.
I don't believe you can assume a 'typical' empire on a game that allows you to have such a wide range of galaxy sizes as we do. Our planets are well defined and we can figure out an 'average' planet for any race, but not an average empire.
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greetings

#17 Post by guiguibaah »

Back from my vacation, this is an interesting thread. Here's my thoughts.

#1: Where should you make the decisions about the remaining things we want control over

To me the best choice would be on an empire level. Its like planet production in early game, and it simplifies things late game.

#2: Should you build them somewhere specifically, or build them in purgatory and place them afterwards

I would recommend both. You could either instruct the project be built on the planet, having empire PP funded to it. Or, you could choose to build the project in purgatory. I like drek's idea of pop=infrastructure. The amount of population (or infrastructure) will determine how long it takes to complete the project when it is taken our of purgatory and placed on a planet. (Or, if the item warrants, placed on something else, like a star, black hole, or trade offer box to another race for exchange purposes).

#3: Should you be able to pool multiple planets' production capacities?

I would prefer being able to pool production. A player who looses a key industrial planet (a planet that created all your ships, troops, etc) wouldn't be incapacitated (and forfeit the game) if they could spread their industrial production around a little more.

The same would go for 'super shipyards'. I worry that if all ships come from 1 or 2 shipyards and an opponent quickly destroys them, then the game would be over for that one player, since they can no longer produce ships to defend themselves.[/b]
Last edited by guiguibaah on Wed Jun 30, 2004 12:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Aquitaine
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#18 Post by Aquitaine »

I would prefer being able to pool production. A player who looses a key industrial planet (a planet that created all your ships, troops, etc) wouldn't be incapacitated (and forfeit the game) if they could spread their industrial production around a little more.
Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a strategy game? If everything is completely distributed, then there is really no such thing as a 'vital industrial world' since you can just as easily distribute it among everything.

To be honest, the only way I can foresee pooling resources in a way that doesn't make me nervous about it is if you created a racial trait that gave you a bonus to all industry based on the number of planets you currently have with industrial foci -- a sort of robotic economics of scale. But I don't see the charm in the 'total Empire PP pool.'
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#19 Post by drek »

Aquitaine wrote:I think there is some misunderstanding about what 'pooling PP' means.

Research from every planet goes into a single, global 'RP machine' that allocates it among your projects.
The idea is that build projects would work just like research projects.
My personal problem with this system is that we will inavariably want to limit this somehow; if we don't, it is impossible to balance, because this way a huge empire could build just about everything in one turn (since there is no theoretical maximum PP/turn you could have if you go this route), and if we do limit it, then we are very rapidly making the system very complicated.
The limit would be the number of turns the project takes to complete. Just like research, you wouldn't be able to decrease the number of turns a project takes to complete via throwing more points at it. More industry=more projects, not faster completion time.

(an additional limit might be based off infrastructure...you need X before placing Y, which is why I'm advocating using a simple class-based system for infra. If a planet is a Core World, you can build everything, if it's Ruined or Nascent you can't build anything.)
I don't believe you can assume a 'typical' empire on a game that allows you to have such a wide range of galaxy sizes as we do. Our planets are well defined and we can figure out an 'average' planet for any race, but not an average empire.
Same could be said for research. How will we determine the cost of research projects, given that the galaxy sizes are not fixed?

As I understand it, half the idea of the global Industry pool is to allow planets to pool production in a simple, easily understood manner---without supply convoys or other mechanics. It also gives the player one number to reference: "this is your empire's production capacity: X", rather than having to swim through a dozen queues to figure out where you want to queue up the next death star.
To be honest, the only way I can foresee pooling resources in a way that doesn't make me nervous about it is if you created a racial trait that gave you a bonus to all industry based on the number of planets you currently have with industrial foci -- a sort of robotic economics of scale. But I don't see the charm in the 'total Empire PP pool.'
Under the meter system, the higher meter scores would be much better than lower. Having a +3 on your Industry meter would be much better than having a +1....rewarding specialization.

Strategic targets would be the planets with buildings. Losing a world set to "industry focus" isn't so bad. Losing a world with a building that provides an area of effect bonus to Industry would be diaster.

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#20 Post by Krikkitone »

and if we do limit it, then we are very rapidly making the system very complicated.
I agree that is a possibility, but just because the system is more complicated doesn't mean it will get too complicated. (same as the research system).

I imagine even the 'local production only' votes want there to be some way of planet 1 contributing to planet 2's production (either of buildings or ships)*

The idea is to find a way of doing that is not too complicated to balance, implement, strategize with, or manage.

I personally favor a system similar to (but with key differences from) Drek's system.

Basically under the idea that if a key industrial planet is taken, it is More important if your production is pooled, because that planet could be contributing to your entire empire's effort, as opposed to just its own situation.



Note: Devil's Advocate Position taken with regard to the "local production prevents special shipyards" arguement.

*One possible alternative to this is to
1. Make Industry so terribly expensive in terms of Minerals that only a small fraction of worlds are Industrial Focused
and
2. Have Infrastructure upgrade for free (no Industry cost)or a cost equal to the output of a non Industry Focused world.

This means that your small number of Industrial worlds will be your shipyards, and production is Totally local (no sharing necessary since all sharing is of minerals to support production rather than the production itself)

So we Can have totally local production, and a few 'special' shipyards.
Last edited by Krikkitone on Wed Jun 30, 2004 1:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Geoff the Medio
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#21 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Aquitaine wrote:a huge empire could build just about everything in one turn (since there is no theoretical maximum PP/turn you could have if you go this route), and if we do limit it, then we are very rapidly making the system very complicated.
I quite dislike pooled production, but to be fair, tzlaine's comment should be noted:
tzlaine wrote:As others have suggested, I think build projects should be X PP for Y turns, just like research. I am not advocating building enormous items in a single turn.
That said, tzlaine's micro-phobic reason for pooling production in the first place is flawed, given the limited number of special buildings, and thus minimal micro required, as Aquitaine has stated.
~~~~~
Aquitaine wrote:while you do have have a particular source to build a ship or ships, there's no reason the ship has to pop up there.
Please, please no... For ships in particular, local-only PP building with postplacement is far worse than global pool PP building with preplacement. (imho)

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Everything being completely distributed

#22 Post by guiguibaah »

I agree with you AQ -> if production is spread around to all planets, then the game strategy hence becomes akin to a 'bacteria war'. "Who can consume the other one first", and yes, strategy will suffer.

However, the flip side is having only one mega shipyard (or planet), and if that is destroyed, you've lost the game. This opens up actions to some cheap victories. IE: C & C and early engineering rushes.

I think F.O. would be best to fall somewhere in between. If you made a big strategic blunder (or if your opponent just got really lucky out of circumstance) you would suffer yet still have the chance to regroup and rebuild if you are really careful and play right.
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#23 Post by Geoff the Medio »

drek wrote:Just like research, you wouldn't be able to decrease the number of turns a project takes to complete via throwing more points at it. More industry=more projects, not faster completion time.
This, in of itself, does not eliminate the ability for any colony to produce with the full force of the entire empire. Ok, so shipyard in the middle of nowhere can't produce a Death Star in one turn... that doesn't mean it wouldn't be able to produce 400 small attack frigates in ~2 turns. This is just as imbalancing... assuming small / large ships are balanced.

(and don't suggest the shipyard could have a PP limit... the whole point is to not have limits, right?)

Regarding the following, Aquitaine please pm me if this is off topic for the thread, and I'll edit it out of the post:
drek wrote:(an additional limit might be based off infrastructure...you need X before placing Y, which is why I'm advocating using a simple class-based system for infra. If a planet is a Core World, you can build everything, if it's Ruined or Nascent you can't build anything.)
Now this is a good idea. It would prevent new colonies from building a shipyard and pumping out ships just as fast as a core world, which is bad, imho. Problem is that infrastructure is supposed to be abstracted... so what are X and Y that are being built? They're not wonders, I assume... so they must be mundane buildings... but there aren't any mundate buildings, only wonders and abstract infrastructure. If there's no mundane buildings, then the classification of a world as nascent would have to depend on time to develop only... unless you want a really complicated system of rules that takes into account the # of colonists now (and any extras added later), planet quality, specials, ruins, leftover infrastructure from previous owner and any area effects from special buildings elsewhere. This is probably too complicated for a simple abstracted infrastructure system for something so important (what a planet can build).

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#24 Post by drek »

Correct, I agree with you AQ -> if production is spread around to all planets,
Again, buildings would be the strategic targets. Conquering random world X isn't so important. Taking out a world with the expensive Industry semi-wonder on it would be a severe blow.

Imagine a building that adds +2 Industry to every nearby world that's set to the Industry focus (non-stackable bonus). This building is expensive, took 20 turns to build, and it can only be stationed on a planet with extensive infrastructure (a Core World).

Two targets: taking out an Industry focused planet under that building's area of effect would deprive your opponent of both the focus bonus and the building bonus. Taking out the planet containing the building itself would deprive your opponent of +2 Industry * # applicable worlds.

So, if you want to strike a major blow vs. an opponent's industry capacity, you'd have to (a) be aware of the building's presence though intelligence (b) plan and execute a surgical strike against the facility.

This sounds very strategic to me, in fact, I think it's going to be a challenge to construct an AI that can pull off (and defend against) strategies like this.

Global Industry Pool != No Strategy.

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#25 Post by Geoff the Medio »

drek: Big important buildings and strategies for placing, defending and surgically destroying them are good, but those benefits aren't really relevent to the choice between global pooled and local only production... (The good points would apply in both systems)

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#26 Post by Aquitaine »

drek wrote:[
The idea is that build projects would work just like research projects.

The limit would be the number of turns the project takes to complete. Just like research, you wouldn't be able to decrease the number of turns a project takes to complete via throwing more points at it. More industry=more projects, not faster completion time.
I don't care for this idea at all. This is so much on the macro side of things that the individual planet ceases to be important unless it has a wonder on it.

Yes, we can balance buildings if they work identically to research, but then all we have done is to duplicate the research system.
Drek wrote: As I understand it, half the idea of the global Industry pool is to allow planets to pool production in a simple, easily understood manner---without supply convoys or other mechanics. It also gives the player one number to reference: "this is your empire's production capacity: X", rather than having to swim through a dozen queues to figure out where you want to queue up the next death star.
I don't understand why having one queue that always assumes the fastest location, and sorts your alternatives in descending order of build speed, wouldn't work; and if you augmented it with a local planetary interface to do the same thing, you can manage your Empire without ever dealing with a local planet, or you can visit your favorite planets and check up on things if you're that sort of player.

My problem with pooling PP is summarized pretty well in the 'bacteria war' in an above post. HoI effectively has pooled PP, except it has a bunch of rules regarding how much PP each province can contribute (depending on your government, whether the province is one of your national ones or if you've occupied it, etc.). This makes it extremely simple to use, but it also makes provinces in HoI very un-interesting things beyond the strategic value of their location. Contrast this with something like CK, where everything is based locally, and the player values the individual places much more. This helps the immersion factor, since the player has several 'core worlds' in their head that form the heart of the Empire, whereas HoI is just a hundred blocks of a handful of production points.

This would be alleviated somewhat with wonders, but I don't really see the advantage of pooling PP in the first place. I don't think we can balance a relatively small number of buildings as effectively as we can balance a relatively large number of techs; I don't think that micromanagement is an issue with an Imperially-driven but locally-produced system; and I have not enjoyed the 'pooled PP' concept when I've seen it in practice, although if there are better games that do this, let me know, as I'd like to see it.
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#27 Post by PowerCrazy »

Aquitaine wrote:
I wrote:When a planet is building a building it is forced to use its own production. But when contributing to a global cause such as feeding people, building ships, researching tech it can contribute all of its production.
Feeding people and researching tech do not use PP, so that is irrelevant. Why is a planet building a building any different than a planet building a ship? Why should you be allowed to pool 10 planets to build a ship but not 10 planets to build a wonder?
Well that seems like a good balance to me. Just hashing it out. You can use your entire industrial might to make your armada, but each planet is on its own to develop. I want the empire to be able to help itself, but we need a way to limit it. Anyway regardless I stay with my original vote perhaps the exact method of PP sharing will come to me. I shall think on it.
Last edited by PowerCrazy on Wed Jun 30, 2004 4:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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#28 Post by drek »

Do I have to check to make sure each queue is doing something worthwhile, as in Civ and SMaC? For me, part of the allure of tzlaine's global queue is that there's just one queue to check.

If queues are local, will it be possible to share production between worlds when building large projects, and if so how? Supply convoys like Civ/Smac?

Another question, for both kinds of queues: what happens to unspent PP? Do I have to ensure that every drop of PP is spent? If so, it would seem easier to manage in a global queue.

Are farming/mining/money worlds screwed as far as building large buildings is concerned? I'd like to be able to place a farming semi-wonder on a farm world--but with local queues I'd either have to deal with a system for sharing production between worlds (like supply convoys) or temporarily switch to Industry focus to build up the wonder. Correct or incorrect?
I don't understand why having one queue that always assumes the fastest location, and sorts your alternatives in descending order of build speed, wouldn't work;
People were talking about most buildings being area of effect. In this case, you wouldn't want to build in the fastest available location, rather the most strategic spot. Even if building effects aren't area of effect, you wouldn't want to build an expensive building on the border of a hostile empire. In the case of ships, it's obvious you'd want to choose the location of build at a strategic spot (assuming there's no Moo3 reserves)

In short, I think build location decisions are heavily based on the geography of the map. If this is true, a queue that assigns projects to the fastest build location would be virtually useless.

Off topic, but for distiguishing different planets as unique characters in the game, I'd like to see lots of interesting planet specials (physical and political) spawning off EU2 style events that string together as a story.

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#29 Post by PowerCrazy »

drek wrote:Are farming/mining/money worlds screwed as far as building large buildings is concerned? I'd like to be able to place a farming semi-wonder on a farm world--but with local queues I'd either have to deal with a system for sharing production between worlds (like supply convoys) or temporarily switch to Industry focus to build up the wonder. Correct or incorrect?
Incorrect. I imagine that a farming world would be able to build all of its focus specific buildings (weather controller, etc) just as fast as an industrial world can build its focus specific buildings (shipyard, etc). However Food, is used to feed people, minerals are used to feed industry, research is used to feed research, industry is used to create ships, NOT to create buildings. Buildings would be a product of infrastructure. Where the type of infrastructure is unimportant only the overall amount.
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#30 Post by vishnou00 »

Maybe we could have a public review: infrastructure aside from this thread? It could be more focused (on both thread) and maybe we would achieve something (before "Public Review VI: Buildings").

I thought we could have the infrastructure (related to a focus) built with the output of a focus: farm is mainly built with food (see it as byproduct of farming used to extend farm), research mainly use research to extend its capacity, etc. The planet (system/empire) would decide how much ressource is used to develop its infrastructure and how much to actually produce something.

This is all to avoid linear start of planets: mining->industrial->farming->etc.



OOPS! I missed the first page, maybe I'll edit this post further.

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