conquestor3, on 08 Oct 2015 - 1:42 PM, said:
Can you stockpile resources?
In the current model, no.

The best resources system I've seen is in Total Annihilation and its Unofficial Sequel Supreme Commander. You had an income rate based on the number of mines ( let's say 120 metal per second) and your factories used a max of say.. 60/second. If you had 4 factories running, they'd all still run, but at a lower output. With 4, you have a max expenditure of 240/second. So all of your factories would run at 50% speed.

the extra "layer" of a stockpile between mines and factories is what you're missing. that's probably what makes the model you're currently using overly simplistic and therefore boring.

try this:

all mine output goes to an empire wide global stockpile. all factory output is based on their share from the stockpile. if stockpile is 100, and mines require 10 per turn for 100% output, and you have 10 mines - 10 mines times 10 units per mine = 100 units = your stockpile: perfect! if your stockpile is 50 units this turn and you have 10 factories active, output of all is at 50% rate, and so on. and of course you can close unneeded factories - thereby reducing labor costs. this is the high level way to do it, with a global stockpile. the low level way, you get into modeling the logistics of moving resources to factories, each with its own stockpile - a place i'm sure you don't want to go! <g>. so the player can go along happily building mines and factories until they over expand production capacity. then they can just build more mines (possibly requiring further expansion) or close/demolish/abandon some existing factories. it would be the type of thing you'd only need to check on every dozen turns or so: "how are my production levels looking? 87% - not bad. maybe build a couple more mines somehwere...".

I like the idea of factories producing whether or not mines are present, but the mines-to-factories ratio changes something else. Like, you might have it that factories can either make things out of metals or bioplastics. Mines aren't strictly speaking necessary, but using bioplastics cuts into food production a bit (you're making plastics out of the things that you'd otherwise be growing population with), and any ship built with bioplastic instead of metal has a very weak armor rating. If your factories are using 75% bioplastics, then 75% of new ships will be flimsy (albeit nimble) instead of armored bruisers.

The downsides of mines, however, is that heavy mining planets are often barren -- or quickly become that way! -- and the population grows slowly and tends to max out small.

So production continues apace whether or not you have mines, and the emperor has to choose the ratio between two tradeoffs: a higher ratio of weak ships and a bit less food, or the maintenance of little mining colonies that won't amount to much except to be little mining colonies.

it would be the type of thing you'd only need to check on every dozen turns or so: "how are my production levels looking? 87% - not bad. maybe build a couple more mines somehwere...".

But that's how it works now, and it's not so exciting :( I mean, it made wish for a button "always build additional mine if minerals availability is below 100%", if there was one I would use, as a player.

I like the idea of factories producing whether or not mines are present, but the mines-to-factories ratio changes something else. Like, you might have it that factories can either make things out of metals or bioplastics. Mines aren't strictly speaking necessary, but using bioplastics cuts into food production a bit (you're making plastics out of the things that you'd otherwise be growing population with), and any ship built with bioplastic instead of metal has a very weak armor rating. If your factories are using 75% bioplastics, then 75% of new ships will be flimsy (albeit nimble) instead of armored bruisers.

Yes... I feel something along the lines might be the only way. I mean, mines should be somewhat connected to factories, but not in a trivial 1:1 efficiency boost.

The problem with ships quality is that I would need to keep track what quality of ship was upon construction date, which is impossible due to other mechanics (ships are tracked as whole stacks rather than idividual entities). OK, maybe I lied a bit, I have these tracked separately but the whole intereface is stacks based so the player won't be able to see this "quality of materials used for a particular ship" thing.

One way I see it working is comparing the CURRENT minerals availibility and determine the current ships quality, which honestly, does not make much sense from realism point of view :D

Assuming that ships come in various classes (that is, a stack has 2000 scouts, 150 bombers, etc., rather than just a mass of completely undifferentiated "ships"), you could do the difference with ship classes. Any ship can be made out of metal, but only lighter and smaller ship types can be made out of bioplastics.

The fewer mines you have, the fewer heavy-class ships your factories will turn out. So you can always skimp on mining, but it has a consequence for your fleet composition. A plastic-based empire will have a ton of little fighters and few battleships.

(Actually, this would be a good thing to have a few tech trees nodes about. At the start of the game you can only build plastic scouts and fighters, but there are a few materials-research nodes that allow the possibility of increasingly "heavy" ships made out of plastic, up to a plastic battleship. But even then, the really big ships still have to be metal, as a bonus for people who keep mining going until the end.)

it made wish for a button "always build additional mine if minerals availability is below 100%"

auto-manage mines option.

games like CIV and Total War do that kind of stuff all the time. Sounds like one of those choices (build mine: yes/no?) that's not really much of a choice at all, because the correct choice is always obvious (only build if factories are short on raw materials). or build factory: yes/no? only when you have extra raw materials. same idea. such trivial decisions are good candidates for auto-management, assuming your code does a decent job of auto-managing them. Bad auto-management or auto-management that can't be sufficiently tailored to the player's needs is almost worse than no auto-management, due to the frustration factor of a "broken" feature that could have been a valuable enhancement to gameplay.

sometimes you simulate something and it just turns out that by nature its kind of boring. manually micro-managing mine/factory construction ratios might be one of those things, unless perhaps you're some sort of obsessive-compulsive efficiency freak: "yes, My Lord Emperor! I can proudly report that every last clod of dirt form every mine on every planet in the entire Empire is being used by a factory, and no factory is going clod-less!" <g>.

BTW, stockpiles might still be nice, what if there's a miner's strike? Takes time to send Imperial troops to put down a thing like that.... <g>.

So... from what I understand so far... You have mines which produce minerals You have factories which produce Goods You don't want mines to produce stockpiles You don't want an optimal ratio You want factories to produce even without minerals... I am still confused though, factories produce objects called "Goods" or factories produce a variety of objects all of which are considered "Goods"? Also, are mines directly related to factories? Do all mines add to a resource pool from which all factories retreive? or Does Mine X supply Factory Y while mine A supplies factory B? If your factories only produce a generic item called "goods" then I think you will have difficulty making it more interesting then it currently is. The best a mine could do in that case is to boost production speed. Which in turn means that the number of mines required to maximize "good"s output will be the optimal ratio. If mines feed specific factories and factories produce a variety of "Goods" then you could do something where the qnty and type of mine "unlock" certain goods to be built from a factory... A factory with no mines can only produce Tier 1 Goods A factory with 1 mine feeding it can produce Tier 2 goods A factory with 2 mines can produce Tier 3 goods... If mines are of specific ore types then A factory with no mines can produce Tier 1 goods A factory with a gold mine feeding it can produce Tier2 Electronics in addition to Tier 1 (gold wiring or some such) A factory with an Iron mine can produce goods of type xyz So... in this way you could define goods with a required factory setup i.e Super High level shield generators require a factory with 2 Iron mines a gold mine and an shieldium mine feeding it in order to produce it. If you did this then each factory would have a ratio of mines assigned to it based on function... you wouldn't waste 3 mines on a factory dedicated to producing Tier 1 goods...

Honestly, factories should just produce regardless of mines, and mines should produce resources to increase factory-production.

sometimes you simulate something and it just turns out that by nature its kind of boring

Then that mechanic should not be in the game in the first place :)

Anyway, I solved it by cheating heavily and adjusting my requirements, now mines make minerals which are used to buy ships directly and factories are used to pay maintenance cost for ships, so no connection between mines and factories anymore. Not what I wanted but much better gameplay wise :(

But if you have more ideas about the traditional mines to factories relationship continue posting, I find this topic interesting. Althrough, personally I doubt it could be solved in a reasonable way as long as the logical requirement that factories use minerals is here.

I always thought mined goods go to refineries, not factories. Factories make products from refined ore. Factories make cars, vehicles, crackers... Refineries produce solids metals from ore.

sometimes you simulate something and it just turns out that by nature its kind of boring

Then that mechanic should not be in the game in the first place

Anyway, I solved it by cheating heavily and adjusting my requirements, now mines make minerals which are used to buy ships directly and factories are used to pay maintenance cost for ships, so no connection between mines and factories anymore. Not what I wanted but much better gameplay wise

But if you have more ideas about the traditional mines to factories relationship continue posting, I find this topic interesting. Althrough, personally I doubt it could be solved in a reasonable way as long as the logical requirement that factories use minerals is here.

Doesn't that just introduce a different trivial-to-optimize ratio? That if you have n ships, you need F(n) factories?