FreeOrion

I favor a limited number of buildings/improvements per planet, and automatic infrastructure growth.

This is the primary argument for using #2 or #2a, but I don't see the need to artificially reduce the number of things that you can have in any one system/planet. Specifically, your hoeworld or core worlds will probably serve you best if they are really built up. I think the way we should limit the number of these things that get built is by making them really expensive, not imposing a slot system, so I favor #1. I think you will probably want to micromanage a handful of systems at every point in the game anyway (though certainly not many of them).

I also favor build methodology #3 (gee whiz, why? ). I also want to use the dreaded post-build placement.

The reason for this is simple: If you select the placement for any item before it is produced, you are effectively doing per-planet micromanagement (assuming buildings, etc. reside in planets and not systems). There's no difference between planetary build queues with macromanagment UI tools and pre-placement empire build queue, other than where the PPs come from.

The point of using the empire build queue is not to speed up production for your frontier systems, but instead to reduce the amount of micromanagement in late-game.

However, post-placement does help reduce the micromanagement aspect of empire-wide production, as I've stated at length in the design thread and before that in brainstorming.

A lot of people seem to be uncomfortable with post-placement because things "pop up" out of nowhere. To me, this amounts to no more than a thinly-disguised realism argument. I don't think it matters whether things pop up out of nowhere or not. It's a video game. Things always pop up out of nowhere.

The only good argument I've heard that applies here is that not having a specific build point for wonders or megaships reduces the strategic richness of the game. While I think this is certainly true, it is predicated on a bunch of things that may or may not make it into the game. For instance, how do you know we'll have wonders or Death Star-type ships at all? How do you know you'll ever be able to find out which shipyard a Death Star-type ship is bing constructed at, if the spying system doesn't allow for this? If you don't know where something is (or even that it exists), it's pretty hard to make strategic decisions about whether or not ot attack it.

I think an exception to post-production placement can be made for megaships and wonders later, if it is relevant. I like having strategic targets too!

Maybe by a high maintenance cost?

When talking about building, I think we should define what kind of building we are talking about. So far, there is:
1. infracture building: things like nanobots enhanced soil, holothingy, facories etc.
2. ships: military (or supports) units who can move from system to system.
3. wonders: ala civ wonder, a building that has a defined effect on a planet/system/empire/universe, usually boosting capabilities or allowing new capabilities
4. wonder ship: ala DeathStar
5. defence type building

Here are my ideas about those:
1. nobody really wants to micromanaged this (as in a Sid Meier game, you always build the latest when you can and it is profitable). I like very much the way Stars! abstracted this with factories and mine: those two thing were the only buildable that affected production, and they were just a number (as in 588 mines and 1100 factories on a planet). To me, SM developments were only an increase in a stat (ah a bank, 50% more money) and it was really annoying to build each and every one of them (or trusting some kind of domestic advisor).
2. they are the reason people don't want 3, as en empire could pump all its production at any controlled planet, effectively making a productive empire everywhere at once, military wise.
3. a fun thing about wonders in SM games is that there is some kind of race to completion. If a large empire can divert all its ressources for a 2-3 turns to complete anything, there isn't much race, only the will to compromise empire development for a wonder.
4. there should be suspens and danger associated with such undertaking. Since they hold such great strategic importance, they could be dealt separately from any wonder.
5. like drek already said, they should be dealt with when we are ready to do the combat thing.


and not just for the megaship argument. If I find a colony to near of my frontier (or even worst, in the middle of my empire) that is well defended (so I won't just stomp it), I want to starve it from ressources from the rest of its empire, not it being able to pump out ships from its whole empire.

It's not about the reality argument, it is about how production is modeled. I always thought 4X games modeled country/world production: you move ressources where it's needed, things are produced where it can/is the most efficient, etc. An empirewide production, as in proposition 3, is like a perfect electrical network: anything produced anywhere on the network can be used anywhere on the network, without any loss. Why are we having system distant if it isn't to create and maintain an efficient production network? Not having that would be like dodging an interesting feature.

With the country/world model, if bandits/pirates/enemies/whatever are not strong enugh to take you head on, they can flay your support network, isolate and conquer some parts of you empire and eventually do something else than being weaker, if you are careless and don't protect the innards of your own empire.

To answer Piotrus

" planets size x, slot number y, project name (ex. Border Agriculture World, size 4)
Build agrarian settlement, build agraraian city, build agrarian major city, build continent bio farm complex, upgrade agr settlement to agr major city, upgrade agr city to major agr city, buld second continent bio farm complex, priority* build planetary scanner, build agr major city, build continent miliary complex (ground-space missile specialization),"

The idea is that all those would not actually be in the game as 'Buildings', but as Infrastructure

So a planets Infrastructure Rating(s) in some way is combined with its population to give the Productivity of the planet


to answer Tzlaine.. the problem is post-placement makes micromanagement worse, because there are two points atwhich you must make a decision.

Anything that has a 'Location' you have to decide where it will be and whether to build it or not. Ususally those decisions are Very tightly related, and even when they are not, the main Idea behind Infrastructures is to only have Buildings that have special effects.

So it will be important where a building is going to be built.

You are right in that 'where the PP comes from' is the difference between a macromanaged system of planetary queues and an Imperial queue, but managing 'where the PP comes from' can get Very important. If any production is going to be shipped from world to world, an Imperial queue is the only way to efficiently manage it for many worlds.



The main way to avoid micromanagement is to have a small number of things to manage.
Planetary slots will not do this, your number of things to manage is still proportional to your number of planets.

To maintain a small number of things to manage, you need to have a small number in your whole Empire.

An Imperial queue that only consists of a limited number of Imperial "Wonders", 1 or 5 Infrastructures(which are managed with the Focus of planets), and Ships produced at a small number of shipyards only has a few 'Things' to manage. (although you still need micromanagement tools for the Focus, but that is where queues come in)

By preplacing them you have 1 decision making point for each one, and with an Imperial priority queue, you can determine how resources are going to be shipped around your empire withoutdealing with sliders or examining individual planet to get them on the empire's page.

This has nothing to do with post-placement. We haven't decided whether we will allow blockading, and that is the crucial issue in whether or not you can pump out items at a border world. Also, ships will (probably) be producble only at very expensive shipyards, and so won't be at most, and probably not any, border worlds.



This is why I suggested having a surcharge that gets added to the produced items upon delivery. The surcharge is inversely proportional to the infrastructure of the destination planet. This appears in my original proposal.

Good point - if you have the patience, you could give the first post I gave a perusing. What can be decided is.....

If a planet is blockaded, it's "output" (either food, minerals, research or industry) is halted from it and to it. So imperial wise, it will hurt. It will especially hurt if you have a giant industrial planet (pri and secondary) being blockaded (since it needs minerals IN and industry OUT).

Furthermore, here is an option. If a planet is blockaded, simply make it so no ships can be dragged and dropped onto it's appropriate shipyard, since the transport ships lugging the parts (engines, weapons, cores, etc...) won't be able to reach the 'yards without being attacked.

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There are three kinds of people in this world - those who can count, and those who can't.

I disagree completely.

In post-placement, you look at your empire's overall rating in stat X (X is tech production, spying, or whatever), decide its too low, decide that you need say 5 more buildings to help with this, and stick them in the empire build queue. As they are finished, you decide where to place them.

In pre-placement, you make the same decision that yu need more buildings to help with stat X, and you end up finding the places that you want the buildings to go as you put them into the empire build queue.

The number of decisions are exactly the same; the only difference is that in pre-placement you must make a prediction as to where the items wuld best be placed before they are built, whereas in post-placement this occurrs after the items are built. This means that for pre-placement you must examine each colony in more detail, in order to make these predictions.



I'm not sure why you're saying this. Of course I agree with this, and that's why I favor the empire build queue.

Hmmm. If I understand this correctly, the major problem with post placement is making sure that border words dont spring out unreasonably nasty advanced structures/wonders and similar balancing stuff, yes?

Wouldn't this solve the problem then:
- planet population/infrastructure level (aka factories) determines the number of it stots/capability of puting those 'nasty, advanced' things there
If a planet allows that thing to be placed on it, it means it has not been blocaded and it has developed to a point it could have plausibly build it (and actually, it did).
So in pre placement it would have been building this from start, in post placement is has been building 'something', and what it is is determined in when 'somethings' are completed in the empire global queue.

I see a problem with this. Post placement is to me 'cheating the future'. Consider a border world. In preplacing I might start building a non-miliary building, then hostilities break up and enemy fleet arives just after I finish bulding a bio-farm. However, with post placement, the same fleet arives to fidn a defence site I also had in empire queue but was planned for other planet (or kept there 'in case'). Now this hurts my feeling of 'logic' - unless the empire has a tech that allows it to specifically build 'somethings' and tranform them into specific things at the last moment.

It is a trade of between micromanagent and playability, I am afraid - something akin to MOO3 fleet reservers and 'ship teleportation' effect - it might have reduced the micromanagent all right, but it also killed an important part of the game for me - inner logic.

I think that production queues on planets like I described earlier are a better solution then post placing things from empire queue.

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OK I think this is where the disagreement comes from. You see the buildings as things where their effect has a generic Imperial benefit independent of location, so deciding where to put them is a matter of getting the right slot combos.

I see a few types of 'buildings'

1. "Wonders": rare, you will probably be starting no more than one per turn to one every 10 turns. Where they go is important because they will take a long time to build and need to be defended properly, they also might offer benefits to specific worlds. In any case, there would be very few that you build 5 More of.. each one is special. probably no more than ~100-200 total built throughout a game depending on tech tree length, and some degree of galaxy size for a few of them.

2. Infrastrucures, closest effect to what you mention, but here, the placement is automatic... ie I want to improve my economy so... I build Infrastructures.. and I am not building 5, I am likely building 500 per turn. I specify 'which' places are building Infrastructures preplacement, because they are continuously building (for the simplest verion it is everywhere ..at what priority is the Infrastructure placed)

3. Ships.. comes the closest to this, ie the fleet rating is too low so I need more ships.. that is partly why we have a small number of shipyards to minimize micromanagement of ship production while retaining some strategic elements. So if you Do care where they appear, then you have to specify ahead of time (if you want it at the near the front shipyard or in the safe core shipyard) if you Don't Care (peacetime buldup) then you can let the computer auto assign ships to empty shipyards.

With such division, the 2. Infrastructure can be postplaced (preferably combined with queues, so you dont even have to make the postplacement decision). It would be similar to my idea of 'population grows -> industry grows'.

Ships and wonders would require preplacement, so you can't move your superwonder from threatened area to safe on, or build ships near the threatened border if when you were placing the orders, you decided to build them in the distant part of the empire, right?

There is just an addition to the wonder definition I'd like to make - there are empire wonders, and what I call 'planet wonders' - planetary scanners, missile bases, shipyards, etc. - and they are likely to be build much more often then empire wonders. They would be optional for buillding (and dont usually appear on every planet), but they are important enough to be preplaced as well, IMHO.

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re: placement.

Although I don't think Infra should be in the build queue at all, I think Krik more or less has the right idea on this. If you are lacking something in your economy, you'd set various planets to a new Focus.

But *all* buildings (aside from those abstracted by infra) are wonder-esque in that they are costly to build and highly strategic in value. At least, that's the notion crazy first proposed alongside infrastructure.

On the other hand, I don't see a big problem with setting newly built ships into a reserve limbo. But that's a dicussion for another day (version .4).

Yare yare... Things are getting so complicated, I wish everyone with an idea or preference on this matter would just code their own full finished version of the game so I could play around with them for a few days each, and decide what I really like the best. :p

I have no problem with abstracting the standard-fare buildings into infrastructure -- the small-scale stuff you'd want to build everywhere and with which the only choice is in what order they go down -- that's why I voted for 2 or 2a.

(To Piotrus' list of planet wonders I would add one more subcategory: Things that have downsides beyond their stated purpose, such that you'd only build them where they're really needed. I'm reminded of a late-tech building in MOO2 that cost something like 10 credits per turn in maintenace, ridiculously high, and converted minerals to food as needed by the colony or something. I could see something like this being justified in our game in a place that has to import food to sustain itself, and has either been blockaded or is at high risk of being blockaded. Just one example.)

And I'm willing to accept post-placement for infrastructure, except that I think Drek is right, the whole point of abstracting standard-fare buildings into infrastructure is to get RID of the individual minor buildings. "Infrastructure" would then reduce to basically just a set of numbers, if I understand this right... Planet X with a scientific focus might currently be defined as having 500 science infra, 200 industrial infra, 50 farming infra, etc. There are obviously implementational details, like do sectors not in the primary or secondary focus grow at all over time, do they have non-zero minimums, are there caps based on planetary population, and so on, but that's not important atm.

I have always been a fan of Civ-style great wonders. But for this discussion it looks like we are defining everything that's not going under the infrastructure umbrella as a wonder, or wonder-esque (lol). By definition then, that means everything that, for whatever reason, you *wouldn't* want to build everywhere without restriction. And there are two basic kinds of restriction I can see: drawbacks attached to the items in question (maintenance fees, pollution generated, unrest generated, the usual suspects), and artificial caps (Great Wonder X can only exist in one place in the galaxy at a time, Small Wonder Y can only exist in one place in each Empire at a time, a Death Star class megaship can only function with a ship leader of rank Legendary Admiral assigned to it and you would probably only have a few such leaders available, etc).

But I absolutely have a "big problem with setting newly built ships into a reserve limbo." Sorry to be debating a 0.4 issue now, but it plays into the build methodology question. On the surface the first issue with that is that finished ships are exactly that, in limbo. While in limbo they are invulnerable, and even if the enemy spontaneously conquered 95% of your systems next turn he still wouldn't be able to find or destroy those reserves. I am not forgetting the idea of damaging or destroying a percentage of reserves whenever one of your shipyards is lost, but really, are you comfortable with that logic? I'm not. Ships are not an amorphous gas cloud floating over your empire, where if you lose a construction site a set amount of that cloud is siphoned off and the rest redistributes itself evenly over the empire at a lower concentration... They are real, tangible, finite chess pieces that come into existence at a specific place as they are built. This is not *just* a realism argument, it's a strategy argument. Location matters. Geography matters. And in that spirit, undertaking the construction of a ship (or wonder building) means taking the risk that that location won't be captured or destroyed before it's done. That's a strategy element I consider very important, and it requires pre-placement.

(There's also the nightmare of the MOO3 Delay Box which I would hope to avoid at any cost... If you do have limbo reserves, and choose to make them the place where repairs, upgrades, salvage, leader assignment/removal, troop loading, etc take place as MOO3 did, then you need a mechanism for ships to move into the reserves from the galaxy map, and back out again... Hence the Delay Box, where a bounded random number of turns are imposed to prevent ppl from using this to teleport ships across their empire... Personally I can't stand the blurring of detail this results in; if it takes 10 turns to get from Point A to Point B with Engine Type C then I don't, under *any* circumstances, want to see a ship traverse the distance in 8 turns or 12 turns because those were the bounds on the Delay Box. But this is a side point, you can use limbo reserves without this and handle all the ship functions listed above from the galaxy map; I just wanted to make sure one potential pitfall was clear.)

All that being said, I would prefer to see the argument be between "methodology 3, empire level, with pre-placement of all ships and wonder-esque buildings" and "methodology 1 or 2, where pre-placement is more-or-less required by definition". That's the question I was trying to focus on originally, and I'm still a bit hazy on how they're different.

Let's keep the ship stuff out of this thread.

Time for me to chime in.

Automatic Infrastructure with the exact details of infrastructure to be defined pending the decision.

Empire Wide build queue with Pre-placement All planets can help build up a new planet with say a starbase/defenses/shipyard or whatever but at a penalty related to the planets infrastructure.

Buildings are rare and expensive to maintain no need for an artificial slot system. This allows a race with an economy bonus to have more buildings/ships/etc then a normal race. That of course will come later.

If money is NOT in the game ( I think it is but Aqui hasn't made an official decision yet) it will alter my preferred buildings approach.

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Aquitaine is my Hero....

Two reasons for an artificial slot system:

1: UI is easier to design, implement, and use if the max number of buildings is a) known b) a handful or less

2: We can fill slots with trash: like ancient ruins, alien ecosystems, massive pollution. The player'll have to figure out how to deal with the trash in order to use the slot. It could be an interesting part of the story the game is telling...

Ascendency eh?

My problem with slots is that if every planet has 2 slots or whatever, the player feels obligated to use all 2 of the slots on every planet. This is bad as the player will have to check every planet everytime he gets a new building and determine if it would be more advantagous to build the new one. Whereas with unlimited buildings per planet he just checks the new building makes a descion to build or not and plops it down on one of his "building planets" and moves on.

Also I for one HATE to feel limited arbitrarilly. I can only have X ships, or I can only build X buildings per planet. Or have X cities, etc. As I have always advocated the player can DO anytihng but at certain costs. You want to build every building everywhere? Have a 1 million deathstar fleet? Have a spy network so prevasive that the spy to people ratio is 2:1. Go for it, but in time you will be a bankrupt, impotent, worthelss empire.

However as always I will support the final desicion whatever it may be.

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Aquitaine is my Hero....