FreeOrion

I think Empire Meters are a good idea.

How would that be immune to the reasons we got rid of farming and minerals?

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By not being a resource, and therefore not needing any rules for distribution. It's just a meter, which makes it more like the Growth solution we have/are in the process of creating now than the Farming problem we had before.

A source of a particular resource wouldn't continuously add to the meter, with it being decreased when you "use" the resource - rather, if you have one source of Neutronium, your empire's Neutronium meter would be a constant 1. If you got another one, it would be raised to 2, and now you can maybe do things with Neutronium that you couldn't do when your Neutronium meter was just 1.

Since the top panel is looking awfully empty, and will even more when we get rid of Minerals, I was thinking it wouldn't hurt to put the values of the empire's strategic resource meters up there as well.

Edit: As a side note, I've already gotten this working on my build, but the lack of parsing for EmpireMeterValue is keeping me from trying anything interesting with it.

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Ok, now i know what you mean.
I don't really like doing "resources" that way. It feels like it's the worst of both worlds, i.e.
1) it lacks the simplicity of a resource supply that is enough for all uses, and
2) it lacks the more logical limitations of a fully quantified resource proper (PPs, RPs, etc). It's feels odd to me that 1 netronium forge allows be to build an infinite number of neutronium foo parts, but only with two forges could i build a single (or infinite) number of neutronium super-foo parts.

Of course if it is a special resource that only allows you to build a certain number of things (i.e. 1 black hole allows you to build 1 singularity system-destroyer ship), then those should be kept track of somewhere especially so the player can see how many things he can still build. Though since we may have a lot of special resources, a new screen may be a better place the menu bar to display them.


"empty" can also be called "clean" or "uncluttered" and is generally considered a good thing so long as necessary information hasn't been hidden.

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I don't see how its significantly less logical that a single source allowing me to build an infinite number of neutronium foo parts to begin with. It also has some good attributes of both extremes. For instance, it avoids the need to add a system of allocating strategic resources to produced items on the one hand, while on the other hand still providing an advantage for having more of a particular resource and potentially making the mining focus a more common option.

Another drawback that occurs to me though, is that there's no way to make it distribution-limited - all sources would contribute to the same meter regardless of what resource group they're in, which was something we wanted to avoid. What we could have though, is something even more akin to the Growth system: A single source could have some rating that represents, say, the quality of the resource being extracted, or something similar. Building appropriate buildings could increase this, and any location in the resource group could do stuff that requires that particular level of neutronium refinement, or whatever.

That sort of misses the mark of what I was trying to accomplish with that idea though, which was to make the mining focus more commonly used.

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You're right, its not any less logical than #1, but it's less simple.


What you are describing could be accomplished more straightforwardly, if i understand you. Throw out the quality rating. The simple existence if a compressed-neutronium forge would allow the construction of compressed-neutronium parts


I'm not so sure we need to worry about that any more.

Adding some of the focus ideas from the 2nd part of this post, with growth and mining foci used to harvest special resources, i think we have a sufficient number of focus options.

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Empire meters exist per empire, not per resource-sharing group. If distribution-limitation is required for a resource (and at least some resources should probably be distribution-limited), then empire meters aren't an appropriate means to track how much of a resource is available.

For a first iteration, distributable resources should probably be uncountable, allowing unlimited production with a single source, like older Civ games' strategic resources.

You seem to have mushed two totally separate parts of my post together without regard for context. The part before the [...] is saying exactly that, and the part after is referring to a local planetary meter.

Sounds reasonable.

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If by "totally separate" you mean "separated by one and a half sentences" and "both from the same paragraph in a multi-paragraph post", then yes. My point was mainly that empire meters aren't appropriate. It wasn't clear (to me?) from your post that the rating a source would have would be a planet meter (or anything else) rather than an empire meter.

Yeah, the simplest possible form is the place to start.
We can complexity it later if we find reason to.


Also:
r4844: "Modified Computronium Moons as an example of my concept of Special Resources. It now benefits all research-focused planets."

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does all information need to be in the main part of the gui? For special resources I feel it'd be appropriate to have an empire status screen that shows their current values rather than trying to cram them all into an empire status bar.

But I digress.

I like Bigjoe's basic idea on resource availability. Even if there is an empire stockpile, it'd be useful to know how much was going in each turn. Thus a "meter" for that. As for why to not just say "ok you have x now"... Binary availability makes for uninteresting strategy(IMO). I've hated it in every game I've ever played that used it.

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I think the idea of special resources needs to be revisited, to do something with runaway RP and PP...