I have a few simple issues, or ideas, concerning the construction of buildings/units in the genres mentioned above, and thought I would share my ideas here, see what ppl think about them. Firstly, costs of construction. In most TBS games, construction costs are quoted in x no. resources, and then when the building/unit is being constructed, the costs are removed from your store per turn. So if a building costs 100 gold and takes 4 turns, 25 gold is taken from your bank each turn. Do ppl think this is a good idea? For example, in Total War games, I often add a lot of buildings to the queue, only to find out 3 turns down the line, I cant afford them, and as such, _nothing_ gets built! What do you think about taking _all_ the resources needed to construct this building as it is added to the construction queue, in effect, allocating that money. That way the player knows exactly what they can build and when it will be completed. If they cancel the construction, they get a % of the cost back, depending on the number of turns the building has been in construction. Secondly, the use of a construction 'queue'. If the government wants to build a new school and hospital in a city, they dont say "Start the hospital, and in 5 years, when its ocmpleted, start on the school". No, they build them concurently. Could this same principle be applied to the build queue in TBS games? Maybe having some kind of penalty, where the no. of turns to build the construction increases depending on the number of constructions taking place. Im not sure if that might remove of add to the challenge of constructing units/buildings, but that do you think? I did have another idea, that I now cant remeber! And I'm being dragged out of the flat by my girlfriend 'because its a nice day'!! Any thoughts on the two ideas above would be much appreciated Thanks Spree

Quote:

Original post by SpreeTree What do you think about taking _all_ the resources needed to construct this building as it is added to the construction queue, in effect, allocating that money. That way the player knows exactly what they can build and when it will be completed. If they cancel the construction, they get a % of the cost back, depending on the number of turns the building has been in construction.

I'm not partial to either system. The first one you mentioned puts some level of economic strategy / forecasting on the player, which can be a fun consideration if you have time to think (which is the main benefit of playing a TBS).

I do like the "budget allocation" idea if you've got a lot of stuff you're building, as it sounds like you'd be more for given your next idea. You could also simply refund the player a percentage based on how much time has passed, so that if you cancel immediately, you get everything, but if you cancel 50% of the way through, you get 50%. Because it's simple it leaves you free to add other interesting things that complicate it (like corruption) without making it overwhelming.

Quote:

Secondly, the use of a construction 'queue'. If the government wants to build a new school and hospital in a city, they dont say "Start the hospital, and in 5 years, when its ocmpleted, start on the school". No, they build them concurently. Could this same principle be applied to the build queue in TBS games? Maybe having some kind of penalty, where the no. of turns to build the construction increases depending on the number of constructions taking place.

Haha, this always cracked me up in Civilization. I'd think "so what were you guys doing between building that F15 for two years while the people were starving?" In Master of Orion you could crank out large batches of ships, all at one time, but with the only drawback that they all had to be the same ship.

Build queues seem to be more a concession to interface than anything else. You'd have to figure out, at the worst, what it would look like to be building 20 or 50 or whatever number of things per each city. The last thing you want is a spreadsheet with rows and columns of build reports. Construction should also be reflected in the main map, like Civilization 3 does, so that you can scroll around and quickly see what's being created.

Here's an idea: Why do you need to specify buildings, anyway? Rather, why can't you specify systems (rail, healthcare, defense, etc.) that you tell a city or even a region / state to focus on. The cities would themselves grow organically over time, maybe using a cellular automata-like system. So if you tell a city to focus on healthcare, you'll scroll back and find tons of hospitals and research labs in the city, as the technology arises; or if you say defense, you can look at the city and see it ringed by barricades and anti-aircraft guns.

You can then tell regions to split priorities. The number of buildings / defense sites in a city would then represent the priorities you set.

Quote:

Original post by Wavinator Here's an idea: Why do you need to specify buildings, anyway? Rather, why can't you specify systems (rail, healthcare, defense, etc.) that you tell a city or even a region / state to focus on. The cities would themselves grow organically over time, maybe using a cellular automata-like system. So if you tell a city to focus on healthcare, you'll scroll back and find tons of hospitals and research labs in the city, as the technology arises; or if you say defense, you can look at the city and see it ringed by barricades and anti-aircraft guns.

I like this idea. Why not go further than that and allow the players to specify just what buildings define such a "focus"? Maybe even a pie chart (or something similar) for each focus, to customize what buildings take priority when I tell the citizens of Happyville their city is the new technology and research center of my nation?

Quote:

Original post by Wavinator You could also simply refund the player a percentage based on how much time has passed, so that if you cancel immediately, you get everything, but if you cancel 50% of the way through, you get 50%.

Thats exactly the system I was thinking about, that way, if you do change your mind you are not penalised to much.

The reason I am thinking of ditching the per turn build cost is, as you mentioned, because of my second idea. At times, you dont know exactly how many resources will be generated per turn, and as such, your not guarnteed a fixed income. Having multiple buildings being constructed in multiple places would increase the cost greatly, and could cause more problems than its worth.

Quote:

Original post by Wavinator Because it's simple it leaves you free to add other interesting things that complicate it (like corruption) without making it overwhelming.

This is true, and something I will consider, but the map is not the main area of the game (like in Civ), think more like Total War, so I dont want to complicate it too much!

Quote:

Original post by Wavinator Build queues seem to be more a concession to interface than anything else. You'd have to figure out, at the worst, what it would look like to be building 20 or 50 or whatever number of things per each city.

I have thought about this, and decided on a cap to the number of buldings/units you can have in a queue at any given time. This will make it much easier when deciding on the final UI, as I will have an idea of the worst case senario.

Another issue is with the training of units. I personally feel that keep the system and interface the same when constructing buildings, and trainging units. But if you have one stable for example, can tyou concurrently train 5 horse riders? Is this reality for the sake of it? I tend to think so.

Quote:

Original post by Wavinator Here's an idea: Why do you need to specify buildings, anyway? Rather, why can't you specify systems (rail, healthcare, defense, etc.) that you tell a city or even a region / state to focus on.

This idea goes along the lines of the auto manage feature you see in a few tbs games, and something that I think not many (if any) have truly gotten right. This I think is something the player should be given the option of, leaving them to concentrate on the larger picture, but I don't want to take away the option of building something in particular.

What do you think of the idea of adding a penalty to the construction if more than one is taking place at the same time. For example, increasing the build time of a construction by 25% for each extra construction that is taking place. Would this do anything other than make it less attractive to use?

Thanks for you ideas
Spree

Quote:

Original post by SpreeTree What do you think of the idea of adding a penalty to the construction if more than one is taking place at the same time. For example, increasing the build time of a construction by 25% for each extra construction that is taking place. Would this do anything other than make it less attractive to use?

I personally don't like arbitrary limits like this unless you've got a good reason for them. At least explain them in the game's fiction (for example, as Civ does with Rush Jobs to quickly finish production: "You can't perform a rush job while people are rioting." That at least makes sense to me.)

I'd rather have a straight formula of production power versus production cost. If you have X factories (or whatever), they produce Y amount of production; this then sets the limit for the number of units or whatever you can build for this turn.

Quote:

Original post by Wavinator I personally don't like arbitrary limits like this unless you've got a good reason for them. At least explain them in the game's fiction (for example, as Civ does with Rush Jobs to quickly finish production: "You can't perform a rush job while people are rioting." That at least makes sense to me.) I'd rather have a straight formula of production power versus production cost. If you have X factories (or whatever), they produce Y amount of production; this then sets the limit for the number of units or whatever you can build for this turn.

True, and I think I agree. If I was to limit the number of items in the queue as I mentioned before, this would stop richer nations just whacking everything into the queue and building everything!

Thanks for the help
Spree

Parallel construction that simply lets you build a second object simultaneously without penalising production on the first is uninteresting - if you have the money, you do it. Equally, parallel construction where the total time taken to produce all the items is the same whether you do them in order or all at once is unattractive - you'd rather queue them and get use out of the first items while you're waiting for later items to be completed - so fixed total production output is only a good model if there are limits on how much of it a given project can consume.

I like the idea of the vaguely Sim City-esque "zoning" of entire cities to specialise in certain areas without direct control over what they construct - but then again, I may not be the target audience for this one - I tend to get annoyed by being expected to micromanage every aspect of my mighty empire - if you're getting resource penalties from corruption amongst regional officials, why can't those same regional officials make some constructive use of their authority to at least suggest sensible projects?

Quote:

Original post by rmsgrey Parallel construction that simply lets you build a second object simultaneously without penalising production on the first is uninteresting - if you have the money, you do it. Equally, parallel construction where the total time taken to produce all the items is the same whether you do them in order or all at once is unattractive - you'd rather queue them and get use out of the first items while you're waiting for later items to be completed - so fixed total production output is only a good model if there are limits on how much of it a given project can consume.

One could probably get away with something slightly different here: rather than typical straight queue, allow the player select as many objects to build as they want to, each of them with priority (e.g. "build before anything else", "this one is pretty important" "this one can wait until there's nothing better to do" "i don't really care about this one" etc.) All these orders land into a pool of "stuff that needs to be built" and are then managed by "city architect" -- computer controlled entity which picks the orders from the pool and carries them out according to their priorities. The catch with the architect is, the abilities of this 'guy' can be customized by the player following the typical "cheap, fast, good; pick two" rule -- if the player decides the architect should be working on multiple projects at once ("fast") then they have to give up on either cost-efficiency or the end-quality. If they want their buildings to be both cheap and done good, then the architect will probably have to limit themselves to just a single project at given time. Etc.

This can be combined with the mentioned idea of AI-controlled city governor, another automated entity which replaces the player in the process of picking the actual stuff which should be put in the building pool, perhaps in accordance with the rules set by the player. Then if you want to complicate the system further you can have the different factors affect the way both the governor and the architect operate -- be it the governing model your 'country' uses, quality of education, corruption, finally the entity's psychological profile, loyalty and whatnot...

Greetings, everyone.

There are some neat ideas being played out here. I'd like to offer some of my own thoughts on the matter, although I approach this issue from a space-strategy game POV. So, instead of individual cities, space-strategy games generally abstract to the level of individual *planets*. :P

First off, should one's money store be the only thing that matters in construction? I think that the production capacity of the planet (or city, etc.) should also come into play. In other words, the greater the planet's production capacity, the faster something will be built.

On an even more fundamental note, I wonder if "money" (or resources, etc.) is even necessary in a TBS. The only problem with not having it, from what I see, is that one would then be unable to specialize on an "empire"-wide basis. I think there should definitely be some kind of internal trading going on, but how to do it?

Finally, I wonder if there's a way to implement planetary management aside from the traditional command-and-control economics of strategy games. What I mean here is that the vast majority of strategy games implement economics from a government-does-everything point of view; while that is very feasible from a gaming point of view, it's not very realistic. The idea is that, instead of being the ruler of a species, the player *is* the species. In that sense, government is not a necessary thing to implement in the game. Of course, that also would seem to do empire-wide management -- how can this problem be alleviated?

I look forward to seeing what everyone's thoughts are on these subjects. :)

- Rob

Quote:

Secondly, the use of a construction 'queue'. If the government wants to build a new school and hospital in a city, they dont say "Start the hospital, and in 5 years, when its ocmpleted, start on the school". No, they build them concurently. Could this same principle be applied to the build queue in TBS games? Maybe having some kind of penalty, where the no. of turns to build the construction increases depending on the number of constructions taking place.

Deadlock did something like this that turned out fairly well. In that game, your City Hall structure produced workers, and you could allocate them to different tasks. The time it took to construct each building depended entirely on how many people were assigned to be working on it. You could have multiple buildings being constructed, but then you would have to allocate your human resources across multiple projects, thus increasing build time.