DESIGN: Buildings / Build Queues / Infrastructure

Past public reviews and discussions.
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drek
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#361 Post by drek »

ooorah,

nice speech aq.

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Geoff the Medio
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#362 Post by Geoff the Medio »

I wasn't going to post this, but it looks like this particular thread has been tacetly declared "open for OT tangents"... as such:
tzlaine wrote:I'm totally against infinite-capacity shipyards as well. If that was a major reason for your not liking the pooling idea Geoff, it went right past me
The source of vishn00's and my frustration become all the clearer...

I guess I spent too much time badly describing how I saw global queue / local build working, and not enough time clearly explaining flaws I saw with pooled production.
As a side note, you should all know that getting v0.3 fully defined should be priority #1 right now; for the first time, the programmers are about to move ahead of the design team.
I would expect, as programming gets into v.0.3 and above, features and coding will start to get significantly more coplicated and time consuming. It's also probably generally a good thing that design is only one iteration ahead of programming... it makes it easier to spot and correct for major design flaws with an implimentation of recently designed features, and prevents design from finishing a year before coding, and getting very bored waiting...

PowerCrazy
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#363 Post by PowerCrazy »

Completely OT, but Tzlaine, what are the major hurdles (programming-wise) left for v.3 and beyond?

Also as we have all decided, the infinte capacity of shipyards has been decided against by eveyone, EXCEPT Drek. So Drek, what is your proposal?

Other than that I think we are fairly consistant on the methods of balance, as well as the role of the player throughout most of the game process. Now we just need to hammer out the details especially the formulas. I think Sunday I will hammer out a few formulas for infra growth as well as production models.

Aqui, if you are planning on finalizing anything by then, that would be great. I have declared Sunday FO day :)
Aquitaine is my Hero.... ;)

vishnou00
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#364 Post by vishnou00 »

PowerCrazy wrote:Also as we have all decided, the infinte capacity of shipyards has been decided against by eveyone, EXCEPT Drek. So Drek, what is your proposal?
I don't remember deciding against the infinite capacity shipyard, but as one of the bad consequence of the flawed pooled production model, I'm against it.

Then again, maybe it's just that I'm not part of eveyone.

drek
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#365 Post by drek »

PowerCrazy wrote:Now we just need to hammer out the details especially the formulas. I think Sunday I will hammer out a few formulas for infra growth as well as production models.
Hang on.

Wait until one of the infra models or another has been picked. Also, when and if you get around to it there should be variable (like the Construction meter) that techs, buildings, etc can operate on. Also it would be nice if both the pop growth formula and the infra formula included a method of predicting when the next increase is set to occur (how many turns into the future, given the current situation.)

(It was you who came up with the pop growth formula, right?)

Aquitaine
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#366 Post by Aquitaine »

I will be wrapping up all the public reviews currently on the boards today or tomorrow.

Ideally, and this may be a little bit wishful thinking, I will be writing all of them into the v0.3 DD at the same time. (nervous laughter)

I'm out of town from July 10th-14th to find a new place in New York City, so I'd really like to get it done before then.
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!

tzlaine
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#367 Post by tzlaine »

PowerCrazy wrote:Completely OT, but Tzlaine, what are the major hurdles (programming-wise) left for v.3 and beyond?
The single biggest hurdle will be the combat system. I have anticipated a 3D combat engine will be desired, and I've already investigated alternatives for implementing this, but it will be a long, hard fight getting it to work properly. 3D code alway takes 3 times as long as anything else. Everything else is just going to procede at roughly the same pace you've seen so far.

drek
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#368 Post by drek »

Ideally, and this may be a little bit wishful thinking, I will be writing all of them into the v0.3 DD at the same time. (nervous laughter)
OT: can the design doc be written directly to the wiki?

I've found the most useful wiki tags are the headings:

=Heading 1=
==Heading 2==

and the lists:
* Item one
* Item Two

The wiki will automatically generate a table of contents from your headers.

Aquitaine
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#369 Post by Aquitaine »

That's exactly what I was planning on doing. Saves us the trouble of converting into a million different formats.
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!

Enni
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Re: DESIGN: Buildings / Build Queues / Infrastructure

#370 Post by Enni »

Aquitaine wrote:Thought I'd make this thread before drek accomplishes everything this thread would otherwise be supposed to on the brainstorming board. :)

Some good discussion has already occurred here:

viewtopic.php?t=634
Aquitaine wrote: The issue is: MOO games have traditionally had buildings. MOO2 and MOO3 had a lot of them. Some have suggested that we take a more EU2-style approach, with only a handful of significant structures; in the DD, we settled on the 'focus' approach with the idea in mind that some structures would require certain foci, so in the first part of the game, you could get away with most of what you need on a balanced world, but by late-game, your Empire would get pretty specialized.
You could also combine this with the choosen Political/Economic System.
So you can (and must) set the Buildqueue yourself if you have "command economic" (aka "Planwirtschaft") - but the more liberaly your economic system is, the less influence you can (and need to) take on the buildqueue.

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Krikkitone
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#371 Post by Krikkitone »

From some of the discussion in the Gov. Thread. I think most people are against any 'free acting' part of your empire as having your role as the whole society rather than just the government. (So a 'freer society' would simply result in higher unhappiness penalties.. or penalties for certain conditions+actions)

So anything about stuff in the build queue that is changable will likely be under your total control.

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#372 Post by PowerCrazy »

Tzlaine: *gasp*, I forgot about the combat model. That will be the single hardest part IMHO of the project. The formulas for the economic system will be relatively mild compared to the "balancing matricies" required for the combat system:

[WxW]^N * [AxA]^M * [DxD]^P
Where W is number of weapons, A is number of Armors, and defensive systems and D is the dependency constants that will describe the interactions between the weapons and armors and other factors. And N,M,P are the number of respective tech levels for each. Mind Boggling, I can see why many combat systems in games are not ever balanced.

Drek: Yea I came up with the Pop formula.
My plans for the Infra Structure Growth will take pop into account as well as what Aqui sets down in the design document and of course Tech and your meters. I think i'm pretty sure what has been decided, but I will wait for the official word.
Aquitaine is my Hero.... ;)

drek
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#373 Post by drek »

Tech and other items influencing the rate of infrastructure growth ought to act on a single meter: Construction.

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#374 Post by emrys »

drek wrote:edit: It just occured to me that we could have the half-constructed ships out there in space. So if you enter into combat in a system with a shipyard, all the half-built ships will be out there waiting to die. Hrm, that sounds pretty cool. You'd raid the shipyard system with fast ships, fly right past the operational ships and hit the ships still in queue.
Although I know that it's just plain irritating when people say things like this, I just can't resist: At last, we come back round to my position, muwahahah!

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Geoff the Medio
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#375 Post by Geoff the Medio »

drek wrote:Tech and other items influencing the rate of infrastructure growth ought to act on a single meter: Construction.
Agreed.

However, for some reason this strikes me as less well suited to a 0 to 10 meter range than the resource meters did... though really I can't see why.

Maybe I'll change to supporting 0 to 20... But I guess it's more of a wait and see what works for game balance type thing.
emrys wrote:Although I know that it's just plain irritating when people say things like this, I just can't resist: At last, we come back round to my position, muwahahah!
Nobody ever listens the first four times you say something... but MAN... time number five... it's the clincher!
Last edited by Geoff the Medio on Mon Jul 05, 2004 3:52 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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