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Ship Building HOI style

Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2004 5:09 pm
by Impaler
I was doing some thinking, we are going to have a Research system based on the HOI system ware a Reserch Project is Caped at X points acumulating per turn towards a goal of Y. It struk me that if we use a similar system for ships then we can make our global ships Quee almost Identical to our Global Research Quee.

My though was that each Ship Hull will determine the # of Turns it takes to make a Ship. The ships design will determine the total Cost. So Cost/Turns = Per turn Production Points used (rounded down ofcorse).

Ship Yards would have a Capacity and a Size. Size is the maximum Hull they can make and Capacity the amount of Production Points they can process. Each Ship Yard Quee would be like the Research Quee and we then need some way to tie them all together into something global.

Re: Ship Building HOI style

Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2004 8:48 pm
by drek
Impaler wrote:I was doing some thinking, we are going to have a Research system based on the HOI system ware a Reserch Project is Caped at X points acumulating per turn towards a goal of Y. It struk me that if we use a similar system for ships then we can make our global ships Quee almost Identical to our Global Research Quee.
erm, yeah. That's been the idea pretty much all along.

Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2004 3:52 am
by PowerCrazy
It hasn't been solidfied, but yea.

Basically a shipyard can produce as many ships as it want a turn. However, it can only process X ship points per turn.

Thus assuming we have a ship that cost 1 Ship Point, and our yard has a maximum of 1000 Ship Points/turn, it could theorectically produce 1000 ships a turn. Or one 1000 point behemoth/turn. OR a 10,000 point megaship every 10 turns.

Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2004 7:34 am
by drek
Thus assuming we have a ship that cost 1 Ship Point, and our yard has a maximum of 1000 Ship Points/turn, it could theorectically produce 1000 ships a turn. Or one 1000 point behemoth/turn. OR a 10,000 point megaship every 10 turns.
But then we'd be dealing with multiple capacities: the global queue and the shipyard. This more or less nullifies the advantage of having a global queue in the first place; imo we'd be better off with a moo2-ish build system. (my alternative, infinite capacity shipyards, is of course incredibly unpopular.)

Seems like there's a better way of dealing with shipyards, we just haven't hit on it yet. Something to ponder on.

Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2004 4:59 pm
by Impaler
Thats not adsactly what I ment. Lets say the ship Costs 500 Production total. But it expressed as 100 Production over 5 turns. If the Shipyard has a Capacity of 1000 it cant from scratch pop out 2 of these ships in one turn. It could Start Constructing 10 of them and 5 turns later all of them are completed. If this becomes the case then the Tetris Quee I am working on could be used for Research AND ships as the mechanics for them would be identical the only difference is ships are built at some specific location.

Also I am assuming that plans are for shipyards to still have a limit on how large a Hull they can build, Big expensive Yards build the Big expensive ships . This would fit in well with 6-12 predefined ship Hull sizes each of which coresponds to a larger Ship Yard that can build it and any smaller size hull.

Global Quees are still usefull in the sense that they will dispense thier items to the local Quee. If we use my Tetris Quee then we could simply show multiple columbs one for each of the build locations and stitch them all to gether to give a "global" view though it would likly require scrolling side to side to see everything.

Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2004 6:58 pm
by BreadMan
I was always under the impression that the global que was just a way of macromanaging all your smaller ques. Like, "I need a fleet with 5 pd ships, 8 ray gun ships, and 7 missile ships in the least number turns possible" and the game would then divy up your order among existing shipyards and try to maximize efficiency, putting the biggest/most expensive ships at the biggest shipyards and the smaller ones at smaller shipyards so they'd all be finished around the same time. You could still manage indivdual shipyards if you wanted. Do I have the right idea or are the actual plans different?

Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2004 8:37 pm
by drek
Breadman: the idea is every scrap of Industry goes to the global queue. Our build projects are huge: they require production from multiple planets. Ships are the sticking point, as many people want the number of ships buildable from one location to be limited in some fashion: doesn't really mesh with the orginal idea for the global build queue, so I believe some middle ground needs to be found.

No good ideas from me yet.

Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2004 11:34 pm
by BreadMan
So...ok, still a little confused, answer me this. Ignore everything but the basics: if I have 4 shipyards and they each have a capacity of 10 "points", can I build a ship that costs 40 points? Because if so, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Is each shipyard building 1/4th of a ship? If so, what about the time and cost it takes for inter-stellar shipping of each part and assembling the whole, and where do you assemble it if none of your shipyards are big enough? If buildings are the same way, wouldn't the same thing apply?

What game does HOI stand for, btw? Perhaps if I'd played it I'd understand better. Maybe someone could post a screenshot?

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 12:55 am
by Geoff the Medio
BreadMan wrote:if I have 4 shipyards and they each have a capacity of 10 "points", can I build a ship that costs 40 points? Because if so, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Is each shipyard building 1/4th of a ship?
I think the idea is that shipyards would not have a capacity. Your empire would have the 40 "points", and would spend them all at one of your shipyards. Building another shipyard would just give you another place to spend the points (and would probably not give you any more points to spend).

(Note: I'd personally like shipyards to have localized spending limits of some kind)
If so, what about the time and cost it takes for inter-stellar shipping of each part and assembling the whole, and where do you assemble it if none of your shipyards are big enough? If buildings are the same way, wouldn't the same thing apply?
It has been decided to use pooled production, meaning the production points (PP) generated by any planet are pooled together into an empire-wide pool, and can be spent at any production centre in the empire. (What qualifies as a production centre is not decided, but it will include star systems and planets.) My impression is that spending PP from the pool can be done without any penalty relating to distance between "source" and "sink" (spending location) of the PP, though this may not yet be decided officially.
What game does HOI stand for, btw?
Hearts of Iron, a WWII-era strategy game, on which the tech (and perhaps production) system is based.
Perhaps if I'd played it I'd understand better. Maybe someone could post a screenshot?
Google.

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 1:39 am
by Impaler
I am strongly for the limited output of Shipyards. Think of the Globaly Pooled Production as water into a Spegetti strainer. Your Shipyards are the Holes and can only put out a limited amount of ships each.

Each shipyard needs to have its own Quee that the user can control and manipulate, this would be called a "Local" Quee because it refers to a physical location in the game. Above Local Quee's the player can create a Hierarchy of "Upper Quees" that contain Local Quees and other Upper Quees. The highest of these Upper Quees is the Imerial Quee which contains ALL other Quees in it. Upper Quees are passive lists that simply act to drop their items into the most apropriate Quee Below them when space becomes avalible.

By alowing the user to create their own UpperQuees they can deside the level of control they want. For example lets say I am in a 2 Front War.


Imerial Quee
........Easter Front
..............Shipyard A
...............Shipyard B
........HomeWorld
...............Shipyard C
........Western Front
................Shipyard D
.................Shipyard E

The Imerial Quee will drop its projects intot one of the 3 higher Upper level Quees, they will intern drop them into the Shipyards. Nothing differnt then having all the shipyards under the Imperial Quee, the magic is in letting the user Add ships Directly to one of the UpperQuees so you can in essense say "Build me 3 Laser Frigates on the Western Front" and know that its going to be build in shipyard D or E.

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 4:43 am
by drek
It's pretty simple: every resource is sent to the empire, instead of being spent locally, with a minor exception for Nutrients:

* Cash from trade is immediately sent to the empire
* Research points from science are immediately sent to the empire
* Minerals from mining are immediately sent to the empire
* Industry points from industry are immediately sent to the empire
* Enough nutrients to feed to the local population are immediately eaten by the planet, the rest is sent to the empire.

At the empire level, Industry is combined with minerals to make Production Points. Stuff in the global build queue eats imperal Production Points.

In the future, blockades might prevent the transfer of resources, but the points (with the exception of enough food to feed the population) are still not spent on a local level.

In my version, shipyards are nothing except a "go-ahead". If you have a shipyard, you can build ships at that particular planet. The production points still come from the empire, the ships still appear in the global queue. There's no functional difference between building a ship, a structure, or a build project such as terraforming.

....

A: there are no local queues. there should be no local queues, otherwise ships on the global queue will work differently from buildings on the global queue. The idea is to give the player one place in which to manage all projects. If the MegaFarm is more important than the Doomstar, move the MegaFarm to the top of the queue.

B: most people want limited capacities to shipyards, which implies a local queue.

It's a pickle to be solved. Possible solutions:

1: ignore the pickle, use infinite capacity shipyards
2: build ships into reserves, as in tzlaine's orginal version of the global build queue. Shipyards or mobilization centers define how many ships can be pulled out of the reserves.
3: the sieve approach mentioned above---have two queues. Messy on every level since each project will have to have a place on the global queue and a place on the local queue. A project high on a local queue might not recieve production points if it's low on the globla queue.
4: ??

I think we are missing an obvious, intutive solution this problem. It feels like there's a way to make this work: I haven't thought of it yet.

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 2:31 pm
by Geoff the Medio
drek wrote:B: most people want limited capacities to shipyards, which implies a local queue.
I still don't understand why limiting shipyard capacity is a problem in your mind... If every building has a pre-set location while it's building, then it would seem that by your logic every planet would have it's own local queue. Shipyards having a limit of some sort doesn't fundamentally change the situation... Everything's still in the same global queue.

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 10:42 pm
by drek
Geoff the Medio wrote:
drek wrote:If every building has a pre-set location while it's building, then it would seem that by your logic every planet would have it's own local queue. .
erm, the local building queue is unlimited. You can have as many build projects on a planet as you have capacity in the global queue. The problem is multiple capacities--we end up with the moo2/civ situation x 2, since the player now has to worry about multiple planet capacities -and- a global capacity at the same time.

The interface for shipyards is going be real ugly unless:

1: an alternative solution can be found
or
2: they have infinite capacities

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 11:23 pm
by Impaler
Infinate Capacity is a no go because of its game play effects (spewing out your entire Empires Production Capacity from a single point someware far from your own worlds). We cant go with an inferior game play mechanism simply because it would make a nicer UI.


Lets deside on the points that we agree on first so we can all brainstorm fromthe same page.

1 Shipyards are System Level improvments and not attached to any Planet in the system

2 Shipyards are intended to be rare and expensive, players likly have shipyards in only a handfull of their systems.

3 Shipyards need to be improved/expanded inorder to produce realy big capital ships making these types of shipyard even rarer

4 Production Points that have been alocated towards Shipbuilding get pooled across the Empire and distributed based on Queue Priority to all Shipyards (possibly some exceptions for Blockading)


Are these Points agreeable to everyone?

Posted: Sun Oct 03, 2004 12:15 am
by Impaler
3: the sieve approach mentioned above---have two queues. Messy on every level since each project will have to have a place on the global queue and a place on the local queue. A project high on a local queue might not recieve production points if it's low on the globla queue.
If a Project is low on the Global Queue then it definatly should NOT get any production if their are higher priority projects not being processed to the limit. It wouldnt be possible to get an ambiguity if Local Queue Priority is simply Derived FROM the Global one. For Example

Global Queue

Priority #1 (location A)
Priority #2 (Location A)
Priority #3 (Location B)
Priority #4 (Location C)
Priority #5 (Location B)
Priority #6 (Location A)

Local Queue A (Capacity 200)
Priority #1
Priority #2
Priority #6

Local Queue B (Capacity 400)
Priority #3
Priority #5

Local Queue C (Capacity 300)
Priority #4


Shipyards just mill through their Local Quees from top to bottom. If the player wishes he can put an Object in the Queue as "Build anyware" and this would be placed into the Local Queue that can finish it fastest it will then jump right to the top of that local queue if its global Priority is high enough. The player could do all the manipulation of Build Priority from the Global Quee if they wished or manipulate the Local (such as bump this up/down in global Priority) to make changes to the Global Queue. If the Player wishes to add something directly to a Local Quee they will need to set a Global Priority for it. For example If I wante to add a ship to Local Quee B and have it at top priority their I need to Bump the current top Priority object their and I would get...

Local Queue A (Capacity 200)
Priority #1
Priority #2
Priority #7 (was #6)

Local Queue B (Capacity 400)
NEW Priority #3
Priority #4 (was #3)
Priority #6 (was #5)

Local Queue C (Capacity 300)
Priority #5 (was #4)