What to do about Infrastructure?

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Sloth
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Re: What to do about Infrastructure?

#76 Post by Sloth »

Dilvish wrote:As for outposts, it has always bothered me a bit that they get zero infrastructure; especially if we make detection based off infrastructure perhaps they should get at least some base amount like 5 or 10.
I like the idea and 10 sounds good (or make it 5 and some tech gives a bonus of +5).
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Atarlost
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Re: What to do about Infrastructure?

#77 Post by Atarlost »

Assuming this is still an open question I had a thought recently. Make infrastructure act as a cap on production use. Currently there's little reason to have more than one shipyard complex other than possibly the inability to build energy hulls and asteroid hulls in the same location on some maps.

If no planet could use more production than its infrastructure rating each turn or alternately the sum of the sum of its own production and its infrastructure rating shipbuilding in developed empires would have to be distributed and losing shipyards would have incremental impact on your ability to build ships. And shipyards would be encouraged to be built on high infrastructure worlds. Low enough infrastructure worlds would also do things like terraform more slowly.

defaultuser
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Re: What to do about Infrastructure?

#78 Post by defaultuser »

That's trending back towards only being able to build the amount of production points at a world, with all the extra management and moving ships from place to place. The whole idea of the production lanes was to avoid that sort of micromanagement (as I understand it).

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Kassiopeija
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Re: What to do about Infrastructure?

#79 Post by Kassiopeija »

Make infrastructure sort of represent the existance of free space where you can build buildings upon. Larger planets equate more space naturally.
In other words, if you want to setup an extensive shipbuilding planet with lots of different shipyards, you'll need to carefully select a Large or Huge World because smaller types won't get you anywhere.

Give tiny worlds no base infrastructure - as they come they can only act as support for other worlds.
Small worlds +10
Medium +20
etc pp (how much infra an improvement consumes needs to be rebalanced as well...)

This alone will remedy a few negative quirks the AI has (like building shipyars everywhere) but it could also make the game of a player more hard (like, what the heck I can't build a Geo-Processing Fac because I lack a huge planet omg)

Maybe integrate some technologies which will offer additional infrastructure to all your planets, or perhaps only to some planet-sizes - in order to be able to adapt to enhanced technological levels.

AndrewW
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Re: What to do about Infrastructure?

#80 Post by AndrewW »

Kassiopeija wrote:In other words, if you want to setup an extensive shipbuilding planet with lots of different shipyards, you'll need to carefully select a Large or Huge World because smaller types won't get you anywhere.
This could also limit things, say you want to build a shipyard at that blue star but it only has a tiny planet.

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Kassiopeija
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Re: What to do about Infrastructure?

#81 Post by Kassiopeija »

IMO limitation is good because it makes the game harder, because it forces you to create workarounds. In this particular case you could move a suitable planet towards this system, perhaps creating a starlane beforeahead etc

UncleFred
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Re: What to do about Infrastructure?

#82 Post by UncleFred »

When compared to ships, buildings, lifeforms, and pretty much anything else even tiny planets are large. Plus once you have the ability to build things and support populations in orbit planet size really doesn't mean much. I have only been playing a very few months but, as I understand it, a planet that is in supply has access to the total resources of an empire. A civilization that can create planets or move them certainly has the technology to build pretty much anything at any planet unless it's constrained by star type or some similar requirement.

It makes sense that planet size would have an impact on the cost of expanding infrastructure, but, in my opinion, the notion that planet size prevents the creation of infrastructure is foolish in the extreme.

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Krikkitone
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Re: What to do about Infrastructure?

#83 Post by Krikkitone »

UncleFred wrote:When compared to ships, buildings, lifeforms, and pretty much anything else even tiny planets are large. Plus once you have the ability to build things and support populations in orbit planet size really doesn't mean much. I have only been playing a very few months but, as I understand it, a planet that is in supply has access to the total resources of an empire. A civilization that can create planets or move them certainly has the technology to build pretty much anything at any planet unless it's constrained by star type or some similar requirement.

It makes sense that planet size would have an impact on the cost of expanding infrastructure, but, in my opinion, the notion that planet size prevents the creation of infrastructure is foolish in the extreme.

Exactly.
When talking about infrastructure you could easily make the argument that smaller planets are better (less gravity to work against, less max population to support)

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Kassiopeija
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Re: What to do about Infrastructure?

#84 Post by Kassiopeija »

Foolish maybe, but realism-arguments are actually invalid in a sci-fi computer game. Basically everything you see from the interface may just be an abstract, the game doesn't tell you how many people actually live on such a world, or if 1 ship = 1000 ships (realistically it's absurd that a civ that can create planets needs the power of 100 planets combined to construct a few large vessel every other turn etc...) nor what else is needed in order to support such an empire.

Maybe an Industrial Center is not a sole factory (that would be unrealistic if it has the power to support several thousand planets instantaneous) but just a headquarter representing several thousands of factories which may really fill up half a tiny planet.

And I don't think Orbital Habitation is as powerful as you describe it. It just gives you a fraction more of what is achieveable on the ground. That is, however these living rooms look like, they don't seem to be able to build them everywhere in space, perhaps only at some specialized geodesic orbits.

Furthermore, the game puts population directly into relation to production & research. So, it's not really that you have to support them in any way, it's the other way round - they support you!

The higher gravitation of bigger planets is already reflected in a supply-malus, which, in turn, can be thwarted by technology.

But to be honest, I really don't care much about realism, because, first off, a computer game will never be realistically at all. Secondly, it's fairly easy to simply use ones own imagination to fill in the gaps... so for balancing purposes it's much better to simply look at creating interesting game mechanisms. That planets offer space (even if that available space is only reflected in maximum population) is somewhat fundamental to most 4X out there....

For balancing purposes, enabling something to be able to rise without ever being capped is usually always bad to a strategy game. Limitations usually make a game more challenging. It would even serve the AI better, because, as of now, it's damn right building all these shipyards everywhere, because, unlike a player, it won't simply choose a suitable planet to serve as a shipbuilder like a player usually does. Such a behaviour may offer some advantages like, if planets are lost, not so much production is lost and shipbuild will swiftly continue, but it comes at the cost of ludicriously nerfing down the cost of many shipyards down to 10 or 20 which really is completely unjustified but needs to stay in place as a bandfix for bad AI behaviour! And although the lesser of 2 evils still the AI is on the loosing front if it will bank literally thousands of prod into repetetive shipyard, drydock, genome bank etc pp build when this prod goes into warships instead on the player side.
And that is only possible because the game allows "negative" infrastructure. (I'm not up to the latest version but I think the AI is also handicapped in its shield-meter growth et al)

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Krikkitone
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Re: What to do about Infrastructure?

#85 Post by Krikkitone »

Kassiopeija wrote:Foolish maybe, but realism-arguments are actually invalid in a sci-fi computer game. Basically everything you see from the interface may just be an abstract, the game doesn't tell you how many people actually live on such a world, or if 1 ship = 1000 ships (realistically it's absurd that a civ that can create planets needs the power of 100 planets combined to construct a few large vessel every other turn etc...) nor what else is needed in order to support such an empire.

Maybe an Industrial Center is not a sole factory (that would be unrealistic if it has the power to support several thousand planets instantaneous) but just a headquarter representing several thousands of factories which may really fill up half a tiny planet.

And I don't think Orbital Habitation is as powerful as you describe it. It just gives you a fraction more of what is achieveable on the ground. That is, however these living rooms look like, they don't seem to be able to build them everywhere in space, perhaps only at some specialized geodesic orbits.

Furthermore, the game puts population directly into relation to production & research. So, it's not really that you have to support them in any way, it's the other way round - they support you!

The higher gravitation of bigger planets is already reflected in a supply-malus, which, in turn, can be thwarted by technology.

But to be honest, I really don't care much about realism, because, first off, a computer game will never be realistically at all. Secondly, it's fairly easy to simply use ones own imagination to fill in the gaps... so for balancing purposes it's much better to simply look at creating interesting game mechanisms. That planets offer space (even if that available space is only reflected in maximum population) is somewhat fundamental to most 4X out there....

For balancing purposes, enabling something to be able to rise without ever being capped is usually always bad to a strategy game. Limitations usually make a game more challenging. It would even serve the AI better, because, as of now, it's damn right building all these shipyards everywhere, because, unlike a player, it won't simply choose a suitable planet to serve as a shipbuilder like a player usually does. Such a behaviour may offer some advantages like, if planets are lost, not so much production is lost and shipbuild will swiftly continue, but it comes at the cost of ludicriously nerfing down the cost of many shipyards down to 10 or 20 which really is completely unjustified but needs to stay in place as a bandfix for bad AI behaviour! And although the lesser of 2 evils still the AI is on the loosing front if it will bank literally thousands of prod into repetetive shipyard, drydock, genome bank etc pp build when this prod goes into warships instead on the player side.
And that is only possible because the game allows "negative" infrastructure. (I'm not up to the latest version but I think the AI is also handicapped in its shield-meter growth et al)
Well I think the bigger problem is HOW the cap should be applied.
Big worlds have a major value because they add more production/research/ etc. to your empire. Supply helps, but the focus is still the big worlds
If buildings are going to be capped by Infrastructure (reasonable) then either
1. all worlds have the same infrastructure (with some special exceptions)
OR
2. small worlds should have more Infrastructure

#2 give greater diversity to your empire (your major ship building worlds aren't the worlds with the most production)

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