Make infrastructure affect building times

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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Oberlus
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Make infrastructure affect building times

#1 Post by Oberlus »

As commented in many places in this forum, infrastructure is kinda underused in FO (or more specifically, it has little effect and no importance in the game).

But reading the Phillosofer Planet special description ("[...] Infrastructure on the Philosopher Planet is decreased by 20. [...] Construction on his surface is difficult as is to be expected from a living being.") I had this idea:
Make infrastructure of a planet affect the number of turns required to build anything in that planet (including ships or just buildings in the surface).

How to do that I'm not sure. If there is an objective/agreed maximum value for infrastructure meter, then maximum infrastructure would mean normal building turn requirement, and lower infrastructure values would imply more turns to finish. Maybe +1 turn (or +X% turns) for each 10 points under the agreed infrastructure threshold.

You like it?

This could open the door to a new species trait: good/bad infrastructure (the door is actually there already, just that it takes you nowhere).

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Dilvish
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Re: Make infrastructure affect building times

#2 Post by Dilvish »

Oberlus wrote:As commented in many places in this forum, infrastructure is kinda underused in FO (or more specifically, it has little effect and no importance in the game).
It has less importance than it used to, because the ways it used to matter were deemed overly complicated without really adding strategic merit. And I would disagree that infrastructure has no importance-- the fact that outposts have no infrastructure means they only get partial benefit from defense regen techs and wind up being more difficult to defend. That may not have huge importance, but I'd say it has some.

Keep in mind that even though our 'fluff' explanations often refer to some semi-realistic kind of mechanism, that is only for fluff purposes, we don't particularly value realism for game mechanics.

Making things take longer to build on an outpost, or just after a planet was bombarded, would be an extra detail that could potentially be interesting, particularly to make another mechanism for planet bombardment to have an impact, but we're already planning to cover that via happiness, and outposts and bombarded planets also often already have slower construction due to supply/PP constraints. I'm doubtful that leaves much space for this to add additional strategic consideration not outweighed by the hassle-cost.
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Gault.Drakkor
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Re: Make infrastructure affect building times

#3 Post by Gault.Drakkor »

I have put some time into a revamped infrastructure (Goal: Better scaling from beginning to beyond current end game.)

Of note:
Currently infrastructure is better labeled "defence construction". That is what is is used for. Several places in the engine(outside of scripting) use and alter this value. ie attacks reduce it to zero, it increases defence growth depending on tech.

The name been altered to infrastructure with the intent that it represents the capitalization of a given world. As you note, it is not being used for this purpose.

As to older/bigger economies building things faster then newer/smaller economies, that could be interesting. Additionally if buildings have increased production rate, so should ships. As to max infrastructure, that should be derived from current population.

This does have the concern of it could be tediously slow to build anywhere but the capital or other old colonies. So probably something like if infrastructure is beyond x, stuff is built at max speed even though infrastructure is beyond that value. That is infra could be from 1..70
but once infrastructure is > 40 you can't build any faster. Perhaps a 4 x current min time as the upper limit of turns. That could be implemented without touching any of the building/hull scripts.
More advanced could be a per building/hull/part, a value saying infra has to be X to build at max speed. With second value Y being infra at which it will build at min speed no worse if less infra. Linear interpolation between the points for simplicity.

But is the hassle of paying attention to which planet you are building at interesting? ie not just where it is, but how big it is.?



Personally I will working on my plans for better scaling, easier game balance. -- which involves infrastructure, but not in the way you are suggesting. I have been considering the PP (production point) multiplier that would be applied to pop, that is
PP = (<planet hard infrastructure> + <empire+planet soft infrastructure> * population) * <current production bonus>
as opposed to the current
PP = population * <current production bonus>

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Dilvish
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Re: Make infrastructure affect building times

#4 Post by Dilvish »

Gault.Drakkor wrote:I have been considering the PP (production point) multiplier that would be applied to pop, that is
PP = (<planet hard infrastructure> + <empire+planet soft infrastructure> * population) * <current production bonus>
as opposed to the current
PP = population * <current production bonus>
If you go back about 5 years, you'll find that PP used to be based on a combination sort of like that. Your formulation is different, but I think pretty much all of the same concerns would apply. If you search in that timeframe here in the forums you should be able to find a fair bit of discussion.
If I provided any code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0

Gault.Drakkor
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Re: Make infrastructure affect building times

#5 Post by Gault.Drakkor »

Dilvish wrote:
Gault.Drakkor wrote:I have been considering the PP (production point) multiplier that would be applied to pop, that is
PP = (<planet hard infrastructure> + <empire+planet soft infrastructure> * population) * <current production bonus>
as opposed to the current
PP = population * <current production bonus>
If you go back about 5 years, you'll find that PP used to be based on a combination sort of like that. Your formulation is different, but I think pretty much all of the same concerns would apply. If you search in that timeframe here in the forums you should be able to find a fair bit of discussion.
Thank you,
I have read some of the discussions, and from the commit I have some idea of how it was implemented.
What I plan to do, which includes more then just infrastructure, should avoid many of the concerns. I want to have a few more pieces in place before I create a topic about it.

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