An idea to make construction more realistic
 

I've been updating the VehicleSize.txt and stumbled unto something that I like a lot. If this has been mentioned before sorry.

The idea is change the cost of facilities and ships, and an aspect of fighters.

With ships and facilities this is what I thought

Bitmap Name := Destroyer
Vehicle Type := Ship
Tonnage := 800
Cost Minerals := 1600
Cost Organics := 1600
Cost Radioactives := 1200

Cost Minerals := Tonnage * 2
Cost Organics := Tonnage * 2
Cost Radioactives := Tonnage + ((Tonnage)*.5)

**(This is just for the hull cost, no components included)**

If you double the cost of minerals for construction of ships and facilities it makes more realistic in terms of length of construction and also resource costs. The cost of organics represents an abstract way to represent works and food consumption, and the radioactives can represent wiring and other minor things. If you use this method than there is more of an equal balance of used resources and also because of a ship or facility of any size would take an enormous amount of resources realistically.

Now with fighters if you increase the radioactives and organics like above, the fighters could be completed in less time compared to ships and facilities but you would also add more realistic resource usage because of the workers food consumption.

This is just a thought and I welcome any suggestions or adaptions to this idea.

[This message has been edited by SunDevil (edited 23 February 2001).]

Re: An idea to make construction more realistic
 

I like the idea of increasing the organic usage to more realistically account for the food the workers eat. But I personally might not increase it so much. In the beginning of the game right now, I have barely any planets bringing in organics. If the organics cost of the hull matched the mineral cost, that would be a pretty dramatic change. Likewise for the radioactivies cost.

Are you increasing the resource cost across the board for all components or just for the hull itself?

Any time you start thinking about increasing the mineral cost of a large number of items in the game, think about how this is going to affect the game play. I am afraid that if you increase the cost of ships and facilities by too much, then you may spend more time just pressing 'End Turn' while you wait for stuff to finish building. Personally, I think they designed the game on purpose so that most planetary facilities finish in just one turn to prevent just that.

In my own mind, I translate one game turn into three or four months of real time. I just can't picture most level one facilities taking just a month (approx. 1/10th a year) to finish. So, when it takes a ship just three turns to finish, in my mind, that is really a year of real time. I think of a year as just a convenient term for ten turns and not as a real year my time. This makes it easier for me to reconcile building a huge ship in such a short time.

Just my opinion, of course.

Re: An idea to make construction more realistic
 

Although I like your idea SunDevil, I would prefer MM to implement a line item in the Settings.txt file called "Population Organic Consumption per Million" the value would represent the amount of food per million consumed each turn. Then people could choose whether or not to have "food" represented in their games. On that same vein, I would also like a separate maintenance % line item for each type of unit (similar to what we now have for ships) which would again give people the choice to implement maintenance costs for fighters, mines, etc. The default on all these settings could be 0. Anyway, just my 2 cents. . .