DESIGN: Stockpiles

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drekmonger
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#16 Post by drekmonger »

Posted a description of the economy on the design board. I'm all for elminating either Food or Minerals as a resource, but we passed what we passed, so in the interest of moving the process forward it's best just to deal with what we have.

Manually convoying resources: no, that's way too much micro. It would be interesting to stage raids or have pirates attack convoys, but not so interesting that I want to start worrying drawing little lines between my mines and factories.

HoI does something a lot like this (if I remember correctly) and it's absolute murder to deal with.

Bastian-Bux
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#17 Post by Bastian-Bux »

Yeah, HoI has something like it, and its only murder if you are playing a colonial nation. But I agree with you, thats nothing for us as everyone will playing a colonial nation (kind of).

krum
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#18 Post by krum »

Impaler, I think you have a point about "food"... But a convoy system would be a bit too complicated. Something like the system I proposed for minerals - eplace "food" with "bio" and it works the wame way. Does it matter if the effect of the blockade is at the same turn or the amount of turns it takes for the food to get there? We neglect this already when we assume the player gets all the information the turn it happens regardless of the travel time. (not to mention space combat)

Nightfish
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#19 Post by Nightfish »

Food was passed and is in. Personally I don't see any reason to change that. We can't revisit all our old decisions everytime somebody new drops by, we'd never get anything done that way.

Aquitaine
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#20 Post by Aquitaine »

Food sat in the 'passed features' thread on the old board forever. I'm quite sure we passed it while you were here. :)

My only complaint against local stockpiles versus global ones is that it eliminates the need for specialization -- there's no point to having a farming world if you can't ship your excess to a world that needs it.

As far as I'm concerned, Empire-wide stockpiles are a must-have. So the question I want to answer here is whether or not local stockpiles are also necessary.

Consider the following system:

Planet X produces 100 surplus units of food.
(Option) Some setting for that planet or star system might control how much of that 100 goes to the empire stockpile. For example, a setting of 'border world' might equate to 'fill your local stockpiles and then contribute to the empire stockpile,' and the local stockpiles would have to be replenished after a while -- you don't just spend 5 turns not contributing to the empire queue and then you're done; presumably there would be some sort of degeneration on the local stockpile. A setting of 'Provider' might eschew a local stockpile entirely, sending everything that isn't consumed that turn into the empire queue.

So some amount of food comes off of Planet X and goes into the Empire stockpile. The difference between the Empire stockpile and the local one is that the Empire stockpile doesn't last; if you have more in your Empire stockpile than you need, it just goes to waste. So it's not really a stockpile. More of an Empire Pool.

There's also room for government modifiers here, if we want to talk about inefficiency or some other modifier. Perhaps one race does well with highly-specialized worlds because they have highly-efficient logistical means of transporting such things, while another race has a lot of graft and corruption and loses one point of food for every five points that go into the Empire-wide stockpile.

At any rate, keeping it simple, I think we need an empire pool. Moo2 and Moo3 have one (can't remember what Moo1 does). So should we have local stockpiles as well, and, if so, how should they be implemented?
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Nightfish
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#21 Post by Nightfish »

I'm with you on the empire pool. Obviously we need that or every planet has to do farming. Though we should not confuse this pool with a stockpile.

Now, we do we need stockpiles, global or local? One reason is, that our economy system makes it absolutely impossible to produce no excess food. Depending on how the system turns out it will either be a little more or a little less, but excess will always be there. For a lot of players this will be waste of manpower as the excess just goes to waste if there is no stockpile. So, in effect a stockpile creates a "buffer". Let's say I colonise a few new worlds and suddenly my empire eats a little more than it produces. Now I don't have to rush immediately and fiddle with classification until I'm okay again, I can wait a few turns and see if the problem works itself out. Like by my farming planets growing another guy. That seems to justify an imperial stockpile, imho. X units of food stored per person in your empire.

The local stockpile would only be useful once a planet is blockaded, I'm not sure we actually need a stockpile for that. We could just abstract it by letting the blockaded planet drain the imperial pile for X turns and say that this is what was in the local pile. After those X turns starvation would start. There's no need for that local pile to even exists hidden in the code. We could just issue a global rule like "if there's enough food in the pile a blockaded planet can drain it for X turns."

drekmonger
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#22 Post by drekmonger »

My notion was that the sum of all local stockpiles is your global stockpile. The program would only keepstrack of local stockpiles because sometimes systems are cut off from the global (siege, conquest or annhilation) and in times of shortfall it makes more sense that worlds in the same system as a farming planet would be fed from the stockpile first.

Aquitaine
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#23 Post by Aquitaine »

The interface for 'sum of all local = global' might be tricky.

I'd be fine with that, though, so I'm on board there. But just to suggest an alternative, let's say a planet comes under siege. Instead of having a 'some number of turns of stockpiled food' and then they start losing population, let's say they start losing right away (people escaping a blockaded planet) but only a little bit. growth goes to zero or near-zero. Every turn that goes by, the rate of decrease increases as the stockpiles get smaller; more people leave to try and accommodate their lifestyle rather than living on canned soup.

This seems a little more intuitive to me than 'everything stays as normal while people eat all of their reserves at a constant rate.' I think we could give a little bit of character to the individual worlds by somehow indicating the cultural affect of a siege and let the player watch while Paradisia suddenly has to live off astronaut food. Seems to me that a blockaded resort world would empty out faster than, say, an industrial one -- people will leave a vacation spot if it gets cloudy, but they won't leave their homes and jobs unless they have to.

But maybe I'm making this too complex. :P
Surprise and Terror! I am greeted by the smooth and hostile face of our old enemy, the Hootmans! No... the Huge-glands, no, I remember, the Hunams!

drekmonger
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#24 Post by drekmonger »

Aquitaine wrote:The interface for 'sum of all local = global' might be tricky.
hrm, you might be thinking of something a couple of degrees more complicated than I am. The interface would be identical to moo2's: you see your total resources along with a vector change right on the galaxy screen.

Maybe (just maybe) if you drill down to a planet's screen, click the correct tab, and chant a magical incantation you might see the local stockpile of a planet. But mostly it's an internal variable that the player doesn't deal with directly.

That's how I'm thinking of it anyway.

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#25 Post by Thumper »

Impaler wrote:Boy I didn't know we were even going to have Food, my whole Bio proposal over in the Population thread is based on the assumption their would be no food as Bio encompasses food. I figured each planet just providing for itself. How dose the food get produced, please tell me I will not need to assigne some god awfull number like 30% of my space farring civalization's population to food Production as if this were some kind of Civalization in space! :x
Down with Food!!!
I disagree with this concept. The simple fact is that the different species have needs for sustanance FOOD and the game needs to deal with it directly. It does take a portion of your populace to produce that food ... but as your tech improves the number of populace needed is decreased.


Thumper

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#26 Post by Thumper »

Aquitaine wrote:This seems a little more intuitive to me than 'everything stays as normal while people eat all of their reserves at a constant rate.' I think we could give a little bit of character to the individual worlds by somehow indicating the cultural affect of a siege and let the player watch while Paradisia suddenly has to live off astronaut food. Seems to me that a blockaded resort world would empty out faster than, say, an industrial one -- people will leave a vacation spot if it gets cloudy, but they won't leave their homes and jobs unless they have to.
What I think is being overlooked here is the fact that the planet IS producing a surplus in the first place and has no need to try to live off a reserve.

If the planet is not producing a surplace and is blockaded then you have a real life situation just like Berlin had is the '50s. Either you find some way to "run" the blockade or the populace starves and or its industries stop producing.

The Empre is the place for all reserves and it is the simplest to maintain.


Thumper

Aquitaine
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#27 Post by Aquitaine »

Thumper wrote: I disagree with this concept. The simple fact is that the different species have needs for sustanance FOOD and the game needs to deal with it directly.
I've said this a thousand times before and I'll say it again.

There is no fact that any species has need for any resource, or that gravity has to exist, or that spaceships travel with some relation to the speed of light, or anything else that is based on whatever idea of physics you or anyone else has.

The game does not need to deal with anything for any other reason besides that it makes for a good game. We decided on having food and minerals as strategic resources for gameplay purposes. We could've decided on drektopian dollars and bars of soap. It doesn't matter. It's two strategic resources that have some effect on gameplay.

I don't mean to take this out on you, but the realism argument is getting very tired.

-Aquitaine
Surprise and Terror! I am greeted by the smooth and hostile face of our old enemy, the Hootmans! No... the Huge-glands, no, I remember, the Hunams!

jbarcz1
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#28 Post by jbarcz1 »

There's really no reason to have stockpiles unless the resources are finite.
If you only have xxxx amount of minerals on a planet that can be mined, (as is the case in Stars!), then I would want to have stockpiles, but if planets can go on producing minerals forever, there's no need to stockpile them since you can never run out.

I'd say let's have your surplus food and minerals be converted into money, at some predetermined rate, and have an empire-wide money stockpile as in MOO2 which can be used for whatever.
Some of the surplus would first, of course, be distributed to planets to meet shortfalls, provided the planets aren't blockaded.
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PowerCrazy
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#29 Post by PowerCrazy »

Ok lets think about this. In a typical specialized empire. I have 7 planets. 1 food, 1 mineral, and 5 others. here comes the evil drektopian fleet. It appears that their intelligence is good, and they decide to blockade my Mineral Planet. Now what happens? First my empire wide stockpile can no longer replenish as the only input into the system (the minerals) can no longer reach the empire level. Thus all my industry planets will EVENTUALLY run out of fuel.

Now lets say the drektopians blockade doesn't seem very effective to them. So they scoot over to my food planet. Now my empire has a problem. as ALL of my food is being produced at that ONE planet all my other planets begin to starve.

We can have an X Turn grace period or we can begin the starving immediately it doesn't matter for now. So after X turns, the starving begins. Now the planet being blockaded doesn't really care. They have lots of food but they are out of a job as they can't get any minerals so the ones not farming are sitting there idle. Meanwhile the rest of the empire suffers some kind of penelty (starvation) This penelty should be in the terms of both loosing population AND a production penelty. Perhaps 50%? Or based on a formula to be decided later.
Last edited by PowerCrazy on Thu Jul 17, 2003 7:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Thumper
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#30 Post by Thumper »

Aquitaine wrote:
Thumper wrote: I disagree with this concept. The simple fact is that the different species have needs for sustanance FOOD and the game needs to deal with it directly.
I've said this a thousand times before and I'll say it again.

There is no fact that any species has need for any resource, or that gravity has to exist, or that spaceships travel with some relation to the speed of light, or anything else that is based on whatever idea of physics you or anyone else has.

The game does not need to deal with anything for any other reason besides that it makes for a good game. We decided on having food and minerals as strategic resources for gameplay purposes. We could've decided on drektopian dollars and bars of soap. It doesn't matter. It's two strategic resources that have some effect on gameplay.

-Aquitaine
Then why not toss in two or three more strategic resources for each species. Like for Humans the need for Beer Flavored Jam, Candied Hornets, & Used Tires and the Industries needed to produce them. For the Clypznoids you could have Frug Fenders, Bleery Ives, & Crum Scruds. Etc.

Of course these could all be handles under the heading of Trade Goods.

I fully understand where you are coming from and I sorta agree. My only point of stressing these things is to keep the game from becoming one dimentional.

The production of Food and Minerals or what-have-you in excess of any given planet's needs and the ability for your empire to manage these excesses including intra & inter empire trade allows for a much more deep and engrossing game. Especially if the profits from sales goes back into the Empire's treasury and thus into planetary development and military builds and research. It is even more engrossing if the player has some control over the overall pricing and tax levels on these items.

For example your empire's spies return from a neighboring empire and tells you that the other empire has a severe shortage of "Flub Nums" and he has an example to give to your engineers and designers. After a thorough analysis you see that a "Flub Num" is no more than a glass marble and you have a few planets with people looking for employment... You add importance to building Inter Empire Trading Goods Industries and start making a money hand over fist which goes directly into your Empire's development. On the other hand your scientests discover a combination of Rare Minerals and Rare Plants that will cure Planters Warts. your empire does not have enough of either of these to meed the demand so you buy them from a neighboring empire... the neat thing about this is once again you can add income to your empire's cash coffers by taxing the imports and selling the items to your industries at a profit to boot. What I see here is your empire's populace would have a fit or a riot or two if you raised the taxes above a certain amount BUT they will spend a goodly portion of their wages for certain items.

Without this you have no external income nor the need for the player to get involved in income production... and the game gets flat very fast.

Thumper


One not looking for realism... just fun fun fun! :D

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