Public Review: Buildings

Past public reviews and discussions.
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tzlaine
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#46 Post by tzlaine »

Krikkitone wrote: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.
If you build 100 or 200 of the things, they're definitely not wonders! Also, if you're predicating your support for pre-placement on there being only 100 or 200 buildings ever built be an empire during the course of a game (no matter how important each individual building is) what happens when future decisions mean that we actually build 1000 to 2000 buildings? What I mean is, how can you gaurantee now that this is an acurate figure? Finally, your argument boils down to "It doesn't matter, if there are relatively few buildings." But this is not a reason for using pre-placement; if you want to use pre-placement, why so?
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)
I agree completely that whatever "buildings" are associated with infrastructure -- and I expect that these will just be abstracted into a single value instead of being actual buildings or something -- will be created based on planetary foci and not done using a build queue. I actually don't know why this isn't clear from my earlier posts.

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#47 Post by tzlaine »

drek wrote:1: UI is easier to design, implement, and use if the max number of buildings is a) known b) a handful or less
I really don't think this makes the UI any easier to design, implement, or use, and I'm saying this from the experience of having done so. Also, I think PC's concerns about arbitrary limits are right on the money. I hate those kinds of limits too.

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Prokonsul Piotrus
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#48 Post by Prokonsul Piotrus »

Freedom to do everything is good, but some limits are good as well. Perhaps we can balance it by technology (I generally believe that technology is the answer to all problems :D).

For example, planets should have a limit for pop and buildings depending on size and various factors, but technology development shuld increase them infinitly. However, it should be possible to develop technology to do that AT ANY MOMENT - like if you want more buildings on a planet, you research more levels in ocean colonization, subterrean buildings, tower buildings, levitating buildings, orbital buildings, dyson sphere type planet extensions, etc. There should be no limit on how much such things can be increased, but the higher levels should be extremly expensive - so they would be possible, but likely lead to general empire decline like PowerCrazy mentions.


It would be nice if we could create a city-planet (like Torantor, capital of Galactic Empire from Aasimov fundation, or those city planets from Privateer/Wing Commander), that would have extremly high production/research capabilities, but some drawbacks (like requiring dozens of dedicated agriculture planets, not to mention the 'putting eggs in one basket' strategic approach).

If we dont go with slots, we can have entire planet affected by such strange things (the idea seems to nice to let it pass by).
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Prokonsul Piotrus
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#49 Post by Prokonsul Piotrus »

If you build 100 or 200 of the things, they're definitely not wonders!
They fit my idea of 'planet wonders' and 'cumulative planet wonders' :)
Also, if you're predicating your support for pre-placement on there being only 100 or 200 buildings ever built be an empire during the course of a game (no matter how important each individual building is) what happens when future decisions mean that we actually build 1000 to 2000 buildings? What I mean is, how can you gaurantee now that this is an acurate figure? Finally, your argument boils down to "It doesn't matter, if there are relatively few buildings." But this is not a reason for using pre-placement; if you want to use pre-placement, why so?
It all concerns micromanagement. Nobody wants to deal with 'obvious' things like putting Advanced Factories on all planets pr manually managing freighter fleets with food/minerals to thousand planets, but I dont think many people would mind dealing with few decisions per turn concerning defensive buildings or wonders (of various types) - and the amount of micromanagemnt here can be further reduce by using the idea of saving/loading default queues for planets, telling them how to build those 'planetary wonders' or buildings.
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#50 Post by LithiumMongoose »

PowerCrazy wrote: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.
I didn't realize this was an option hehe. Well, it seems no one wants to give planetary or system level building the time of day... I guess the biggest problem I have with only an empire-level queue is the entire empire is then building just one thing at a time, in series; granted this is appropriate for the grandest ship and wonder projects, but you'd think the rest of the time it'd be capable of building things in parallel all over the place. Oh well, I suppose if you want the empire-wide-build-effort ability then this is the simplest way to get it. Soka. I'm going to officially change my vote to match the above quote...
PowerCrazy wrote: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.

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.
<nods in very strong agreement>

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#51 Post by drek »

I guess the biggest problem I have with only an empire-level queue is the entire empire is then building just one thing at a time.
An empire-wide build queue would probably end up working alot like the research queue. Projects would build in parallel.

http://home.earthlink.net/~drekmonger/Buildv3/

Check out the pngs specifically.
I really don't think this makes the UI any easier to design, implement, or use, and I'm saying this from the experience of having done so. Also, I think PC's concerns about arbitrary limits are right on the money. I hate those kinds of limits too.
List boxes are noteriously hard to implement. Granted you've already done most of the work.

UI-wise, I'm concerned about trying to squeeze as much as possible into the sidebar. With a limited number of planet slots, it's seems possible to have a mid-size row of icons representing structures on the sidebar. The same general look could be used for an empire-wide view of all planets.

With unlimited buildings, it seems like we'd have to shunt buildings onto the seprate planet "screen".

Anyway, so long as effects don't stack (meaning that building 2 megafarms in the same system won't stack bonuses) and maintaince on buildings curtails population, I don't have a big problem with unlimited structures on a planet. I just think the alternative will make for a cleaner UI.

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#52 Post by emrys »

LithiumMongoose wrote: Well, it seems no one wants to give planetary or system level building the time of day... I guess the biggest problem I have with only an empire-level queue is the entire empire is then building just one thing at a time, in series; granted this is appropriate for the grandest ship and wonder projects, but you'd think the rest of the time it'd be capable of building things in parallel all over the place.
I'd like to point out that I don't see that (either version of) an empire wide list necessarily implies only one thing being built at a time, and I'd be suprised if we went with that.

Certainly the pre-placement version that Krikkitone, I and several others have advocated would really work much better (and indeed was originally envisaged as) if each placement location could in theory work on projects in parallel, and indeed if we used the 'cap on production input' based on location, you'd have to have multiple parallel projects. I'd also assumed that the post-placement, RTS style queue of Tzlaine would at least allow multiple items to complete a turn (in series), if not allow big items and small items to be worked on in parallel (Tzlaine please correct if I'm worng).

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#53 Post by Satyagraha »

PowerCrazy wrote: 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.
1) Player sees "self-destruct fleet" button.
2) Player presses "self-destruct fleet" button.
3) Player gets msg: "You destroyed your fleet. game over."
4) Player cries: "wtf? this has no use at all, why did you put it in?"
5) FO designer: "Because we wanted you to have the freedom to self-destruct your fleet."

imo, if something always causes you to loose, it shouldn´t be possible to do at all. it flattens the learning curve (of an already hard-to-learn game in our case) and has little to no gameplay value.

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#54 Post by LithiumMongoose »

Satyagraha: With all due respect to what you're saying, there's a subtle difference. Your example is a case of something we would have to explicitly add in the name of providing more options. PowerCrazy was talking about keeping existing options open (by not enforcing artificial limits in the form of slots in this case). Your example quite correctly should not be in the game b/c it truly doesn't have any [positive] use for the player... He's talking about things that very much have positive and necessary use -- buildings/spies/etc -- and keeping all options regarding them open, including the dangers of going too far with them. It is then up to the player to figure out what the optimal configuration for their empire and playstyle is, without us holding their hand. (Sorry to put words in your mouth PowerCrazy, hope my response is adequate. :)

Emrys: I think I've been looking at this all wrong. My impression was your system would work just like Zach's, with a single empire build queue not tied to a location, the only difference being that, as part of the process of adding a new item to the serial build queue, you'd pre-pick the destination, either from a pop-up list of eligible planets or directly from the galaxy map. In retrospect that probably wasn't the brightest assumption from a UI standpoint heh.

You're saying, then, that the user would have to physically go find the desired destination on the map, and it would have a build queue attached to it if it were eligible to build things. But it wouldn't be like planetary or system level building because it would automatically draw on the industrial capacity of at least some of the rest of the empire. I assume "cap on production input based on location" is your plan for making sure most/all of the places actively building things at the same time all get some production input, rather than one hogging it all? Interesting...

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#55 Post by emrys »

LithiumMongoose wrote: Emrys: I think I've been looking at this all wrong. My impression was your system would work just like Zach's, with a single empire build queue not tied to a location, the only difference being that, as part of the process of adding a new item to the serial build queue, you'd pre-pick the destination, either from a pop-up list of eligible planets or directly from the galaxy map. In retrospect that probably wasn't the brightest assumption from a UI standpoint heh.

You're saying, then, that the user would have to physically go find the desired destination on the map, and it would have a build queue attached to it if it were eligible to build things. But it wouldn't be like planetary or system level building because it would automatically draw on the industrial capacity of at least some of the rest of the empire. I assume "cap on production input based on location" is your plan for making sure most/all of the places actively building things at the same time all get some production input, rather than one hogging it all? Interesting...
Basically that's it. The exact issue of whether you add a project to a central screen, and are then required to then hunt for a location, or if you hunt for the location and then click "add project to queue", or have both options is really a bit irrelevant - especially as you'd have the same questions when placing built stuff from a RTS style limbo production. (I'd like to see both options, for flexibility, since I doubt it'd be much more coding work, and I'd like to be able to simply stick stuff in from the empire/system level if I don't care about the build location.)

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#56 Post by LithiumMongoose »

Right... Again I was having trouble getting over the conceptual hurdle of: adding via central screen = entire empire devoted to this one project until it's done. Of course that doesn't have to be true, I was just so hung-up on pre-placement for strategic reasons it didn't occur to me to use it to mirror the other approach. I like it. A lot. (And have more confidence in my revised vote now hehe.)

Alright... I assume it's safe to say only a minority of planets in the empire would be building these projects at any given time. Then, assuming there is at least one active project at the moment, would your input restriction allow all inactive planets to contribute to *something*, or would some go idle if they're too far away? Finally, would it then be reasonable to conclude you could, under your approach, still make the entire empire work on a single item at a time (if you wanted to), by having only one active project at a time?

I know the post-placement strategy does this exclusively anyway, but yours would then make it an option in addition to parallel building, and that flexibility would be nice to have, as I was originally thinking back on Page 2 or so. :) On the other hand... if your input restriction just uses distance to try to keep the inputs to the currently active projects balanced, and doesn't exclude based on excessive distance, thus allowing the full-empire single-item-build, I *think* you'd always want to use that over the parallel build, since both would take the same total amount of time to complete items X Y and Z, but the serial approach would deliver items X and Y to you sooner. Hrm... I guess you *would* want to restrict production input to a certain max distance from the project location then.

And thus a key difference emerges I hadn't realized before... the post-placement serial queue is more efficient, allowing you to harness 100% of your empire's production capacity for each and every project. The pre-placement parallel build design is less efficient, but this is a good thing: it means the largest empires won't get quite such a run-away advantage from their aggregate size, and it means geography matters for setting up your strongest production points. Nice... Alright I think I'm finally done. :)

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#57 Post by Krikkitone »

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

That is why I want a slot system AND why I want a per building/Imperial slot system as opposed to a per planet slot system.

Looking at the possible ways of limiting buildings

1. Expense... This doesn't work because what was once a limiting cost goes away with improving technology

2. Planetary Caps...This doesn't work because what was once a limiting cost goes away with increasing Imperial size

3. Imperial Caps..works because it automatically does so (there are only a limited number to deal with because the game says so)

4. Special situations required...has the same problem as planetary caps, but less pronounced depending on how rare the special is.

5. Bad side effects... Depends on the area of effect, if the building's negative effects are planetary, then it acts like a planetary per building cap. If the building's negative effects are Imperial, then it acts like an Imperial Cap. But in both cases it is more complicated than a simple Cap, because it requires situational analysis.. Much more complicated in the case of a planet because it requires a planet by planet analysis.

BTW when I said 100 to 200 I meant of All types of Buildings (ie 3 allowed of building 1, +1 allowed of building 2, + 1 allowed of building 3, + 1 allowed of building 4=6 for all buildings throughout the entire tech tree ie Civ 3 actually lets you build somewhere between 20 and 50 Wonders)

Anything that you build on more than ~5% of your planets should be like infrastructure, automatically built on planets that have some type of a generic designation. (like Focus or Military Defense level or Internal Security level)


I think one of the ideas behind having the buildings with a limit of 2 per planet is to make the planets special.

I think that is a bad idea, when you have 100 planets, they should not All be special in some unique way. The vast majority should only be part of a group ie Developed Industrial Worlds, with maybe 12 to 20 truly Special planets (the planets that actually Have buildings).

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#58 Post by noelte »

Krikkitone wrote:
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
That is why I want a slot system AND why I want a per building/Imperial slot system as opposed to a per planet slot system.
As zach already said, that's now true. If you have say four slots or a list of slots makes no difference. In fact as the number of slots may differ by planet size or tech modifier, there isn't the same number of slot at every planet. Mods might mant to change number of slots too.

At least that argument for a const number of slots doesn't holds true.

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Prokonsul Piotrus
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#59 Post by Prokonsul Piotrus »

Satyagraha wrote: imo, if something always causes you to loose, it shouldn´t be possible to do at all. it flattens the learning curve (of an already hard-to-learn game in our case) and has little to no gameplay value.
It depends on what do you mean by 'lose' - for example, a 'quit without saving' option is a very popular way to lose, isn't it?
Seriously, in many multiplayer games I dont want to 'win' as in being the first on the score, but I like building and leading alliances, and having one of the best spy networks - even though in the end it means that my alliance won, but I am not the most powerful player in it.

So I'd like to research diplomatic and intelligence tech tree, build small fleet, rely on allies, and eventualy NOT be the first (not that I mind when that happens from time to time :>).
3. Imperial Caps..works because it automatically does so (there are only a limited number to deal with because the game says so)
What do you mean by imperial caps? I hope it wouldn't be something like in Civ3 where at some arbitrary level of cities build, happines of civ would plummet?
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Selecting item construction

#60 Post by guiguibaah »

I can understand that people may not like the idea of an empire build queue, building items a little everywhere and then placing them. This would be to prevent, say, a border world you are trying to attack to keep rebuilding itself every turn you attack it (thanks to the huge capacity of the empire chugging away).



To offset this, I suggested 2 phases. The first phase is the empire 'build' phase, like command and conquer (see page 1 of thread for desc..) and your industry is fed into making the 'parts' of this 'Slot building' / Wonder / Ship / Defence.

The second phase is the placement. Once the item is complete, you place it in the slot. However, there is also a delay at this stage as well. Small, barely populated farming planets would take 3-4 turns to "Install" the slot building. Large populated and industrial worlds would complete it either the same or next turn.

This would also prevent what I always did in Moo2 late game. Simply buy every building each turn. You can focus your building efforts, and yet there's a lag so that you can't mass-pump-out stuff from your weak border colonies.

= = = =

As for placing items so the enemy has a chance to destroy them as they are being built, I don't think this will happen much, if at all. Because of the starlane system, your core planets where you'll be building all your 'stuff' won't get touched for most of the game. Your border worlds will be the ones taking the brunt.

Second, it would be the purpose of a spy to disrupt production of what your enemy is making, and what better spy option than to hit what's next on your build que?

= = = =

Last but not least, I suggested an option to distrubute production in the empire queue. Like having 2 cashiers instead of 1. You split it up into 2 or 3 segments .

Either
1 at 100%
2 at 50% / 50%
2 at 75% / 25%
3 at 43% / 33% / 23%

So you're not stuck waiting for 50 turns to construct a death star, while you have a zillion frigates waiting behind it.
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