Production based vs. Resource Based Games

[raynor]

I began this topic thinking I was going to argue that colony ships build much too slowly. In MOO2, colony ships take forever and a day to build. Because they take so long, expansion is much slowed, and a colony ship is quite a valuable item. Whereas in SEIV, I build them by the dozens and colonize worlds that I don't even think I can protect. So what if the colony is lost, it's not like that was a whole lot of resources anyways...

At its root, the reason colony ships build so fast is because every colony builds at the same rate--even newly established colonies. Sure, you may say that an 'old' colony on a huge planet with max population is getting a 40 or 50% production bonus. But that is NOTHING in comparison to the different production rates on colonies in MOO2. In that game, you send over as many colonists as you can spare to start building factories on the colony. Until you have any factories, the colony's production is pretty pitiful. But once you have spent a lot of time developing the colony, it can produce ships fairly quickly--and not just ships, it can produce other colony facilities faster as well. That is something which *seemed* to be missing in this game SEIV.

Then, I realized something. The concept of mineral/radioactive resources is completely missing from MOO2. The number of ships you can build in a given turn is not based on the resources you have available. Instead, it is based on production. In SEIV, a colony may not build anything for several turns in a row because you don't have enough minerals to let every colony build something every turn. But in MOO2, if you waste the production of a colony for even one turn, you are just being foolish. Each colony should *always* be producing a ship, facility, missile defenses, increased research or more gold.

Once I realized that, it began to bother me a great deal less that a brand new colony could build facilities just as fast as an established colony. There just isn't any concept of factories in this game. Is that a bad thing? Well, it does take some getting used to. But the resource based economy does make a bit more sense.

In MOO2, you had rich worlds which could build ships faster because of the mineral resources on the planet. In this game, the mineral resources from a single planet are spread throughout the entire empire--speeding production on ALL worlds instead of just one. Your goal is to knock out the enemy's main mineral producing planets--not because that planet is producing a ton of ships each turn as in MOO2 but because it is making it possible for the empire as a whole to produce them.

Ok, I still may start another topic whose title is 'Do colony ships build too fast' but this one message seemed to be about comparing two very different games so I changed the title of the topic to be more in line with my epiphany.

[Baron Munchausen]

It did occur to me some time ago that SE does not take 'man hours' (creature hours?) into account for production, just resources. It's not an "either/or" thing, you know. MOO uses "work" only and makes resources only a general influence, and SE uses only resources, but Stars! uses both. I prefer the Stars! production system and wish that SE could add "work" as a "fourth resource".

It's a glaring lack, in my opinion. Think about it. Right now, the only way to make something more expensive is to make it cost more resources. But very large things can sometimes be simple to build -- a WP "hull" is a bunch of steel-reinforced concrete, basically -- while small things can be very complex to build -- a mechanical watch hardly uses any 'resources' at all -- can you build one in a day? Modern intergrated circuits -- "silicon chips" though they're not likely to be silicon much longer -- use very little resources but need LOTS of labor to create. The addition of the actual "work" necessary to produce various objects would allow a much more logical definition of high-tech components and facilities. Instead of costing huge amounts of resources, as they generally do NOT in RL, they would cost huge amounts of worker TIME to manufacture, as they in fact do in RL. This would solve the problem of brand new colonies being able to produce as much as fully populated worlds, btw. The "work unit" (creature hour? ) would NOT be universally distributed like material resources. It would be a fixed quantity on the given world. If each 1 million population produced a certain amount of "work" capacity, and facilities/components had an additional resource requirement of "work" necessary to produce them, then production ability would be much more balanced. Even more interesting, there might be a powerful incentive to use lower tech facilities on outlying worlds due to the lower construction requirements and you'd have the classic SciFi environment of "frontier" worlds and the inner 'urbanized' and sophisticated worlds.

This might be an excellent substitute for the "population required to operate one facility" setting that seems to be deactivated in the settings.txt file, too. It would be a cleaner way to limit planetary production of physical things while not restricting information resources like research and intelligence. It could have a fascinating affect in limited resource games, too. If techs were altered to not used more resources at higher levels but more "work" and LESS resources there would be huge pressure to get tech levels as fast as possible. A whole new kind of "budgeting" would enter into the game as you struggled to become as resource efficient as possible.



[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 31 January 2001).]

[Alpha Kodiak]

I really like Baron Munchausen's idea. If you have more people (or whatever) then you can build stuff faster. (Certain types of computer automation should probably provide some work units as well, if this were to be implemented.) At the same time, you need resources to make the stuff. Pretty simple, at a high level view. Obviously, the actual game mechanics of it would have to be thought out with an eye to balance, but the idea just "feels" right.

[jimbob55]

There is an easy way to do this.
Alter the population production modifiers so that you need 2000 Million population to get 100% productivity. All numbers below that incur a production penalty, all above give you a bonus..... The new colony with 34 Million people would be looking at -80% production rate until you ship in more colonists (draining the bigger world of skilled labour).

:-)
The AI would have to be told how to optimize population distribution though....

[Tenryu]

raynor,
Your observation is right on target. It has implications to the SE4 'economic' model that have bothered and annoyed me since I first started playing the game.
( This should no way be misunderstood as a general condemnation of the game. I love it, but...)

Baron M's post represents one reasonable improvement to the issue.

I approached it from another angle and have commented several times in this forum regarding what I believe would represent one possible improvement.

I have suggested that we have the ability to set the percentage maintenance cost for EACH component, ship or unit hull, facility, and even enhancements. ( By percentage cost I mean percent of the resource build cost of that item. )

For example, lets build an Escort.
( All costs are hypothetical )

**** (Grumble, grumble ... things won't line up in columns, go figure. Sorry ) ****

Item Mins Orgs Rads
ES Hull 500 100
Ship Bridge 50 100 150
Ship Crew Qtrs 50 150
Ship Life Suprt 50 250 50
Engs ( x 3 ) 50 50 250
DUC 100 50

Total build cost 800 550 600

Item maintenance cost for the ship, each turn, would be as follows:
Item Percent Min Org Rad
1. Hull 1% 5 0 1
2. Bridge 2% 1 2 3
3. Crew Q 2% 1 3 0
3. Life Sp 10% 5 25 5
4. Eng 2% ( 1 1 5 )
( x3 ) 3 3 15
5. DUC 10% 10 5

Total cost per turn 25 34 34
Per year 250 340 340

Under this scheme of things I think we would have some real control over the 'economy'.

We already have pretty fine control over our resource 'income' each turn.

We now need FINER control over our resource 'expenses' each turn.

I think it would be great. We could make stuff that is cheap to produce but expensive to maintain or the opposite.

I will keep advocating this and a few other refinements to the basic idea( player setting for frequency of maintenance charge and racial modifiers to 'basic costs )until we get it, something else that works, or MM says "Shut up and for-geda-boudit!"

[Taqwus]

Some notes regarding the Moo2 model --

Note that there is much less sense of facility competition in that game; every colony can eventually have one facility of every type you've ever researched. In addition, for research, production, and food, you allocate colonists; buildings serve primarily as force multipliers and, in certain cases, can produce flat rates (e.g. a certain farm type producing a fixed amount of food per turn IIRC). Spies were merely produced, and didn't require any infrastructure before or after, beyond taxes, if memory serves. And so forth.

This means that you can get away with having far fewer worlds than in SE4, where facilities compete for space, and not all planets are suitable for all tasks. You must find mineral-heavy planets and mine them early. You must devote space to research, and eventually intelligence. And the limited space per world, and their different values, means you generally have to have multiple planets in a system to ensure resupply depots, space ports, ship yards, system computers, and everything else. IOW, you must colonize quickly to compete; this is one reason why the "build five shipyard bases immediately on emergency build" idea makes such a large difference.

Including labor would be a good thing. Facilities, at least, should take population to operate and support, based on type (hrm. Perhaps not all facilities should be the same size, either; wouldn't a shipyard and all its infrastructure take both more space and more labor than a research computer installation?). Maybe each should even have a minimum and a maximum amount of manpower that can be devoted to it in order to function.

Stop me before I start suggesting numerous pie charts and sliders and complex multi-tasking labor-allocation schemes. ;-)


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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[SunDevil]

Are you guys emailing your suggestions to MM. I would, I've liked everyone's idea so far.

[dmm]

A complicated, small thing can take just as many resources to build as a simple, large thing for the following reason: in the latter case, the thing itself uses up the resources, whereas in the former case, the workers use up the resources. So the current resource allocation scheme implicitly takes labor into account already.

However, the labor "resource" would be an improvement if construction times/costs depended upon racial attributes. Then, for example, an emotionless race could build small, complicated things at less cost in resources because of their simple lifestyle. But large, simple things would have the same resource costs. As another example, warlike races might get a labor bonus when building/maintaining warships and a labor penalty when building/maintaining infrastructure, but other resource costs would be unaffected. Another aspect that could be explored would be how usage of labor (i.e., employment) affected happiness. A worker race might be unhappy with unused labor resources, whereas an artist race would love it. The happiness level would, in turn, affect productivity. (Not sure how to balance that so that worker races don't get unfair advantages. Maybe worker races should be harder to keep happy [because they're Type A], or more prone to set up independent empires [because they're more entrepreneurial].)

[Baron Munchausen]

But EVERY advancement in technology should not have to be paid for in higher minerals/organics/radioactive usage. Sometimes technology REDUCES the resource cost to do something rather than increases it. If we had a "labor" cost to components along with resources, and population generated "labor" (adjusted by mood like other forms of production), there would be another way to prortray the relative costs and benefits of technologies. Some technologies would cost more resources anyway, of course, but some would not, and some would cost LESS resources but more labor.

Since I hold that maintenance is "implied" in the duties of your ship crews, I don't see any need to charge labor for maintenance, just resources. You could then increase the difficulty of BUILDING higher tech ships, bases, facilities, etc. WITHOUT increasing the maintenance. It might be interesting to use labor cost for repairs, though...

This could also adjust the "floating space yard" problem that some have talked about where a spaceyard in a ship can go anywhere and build anything lickety-split. Sure, a space yard ought to have a "default" labor pool (representing the crew that comes with it) but to build a huge, complex thing like a starbase you want to be near a labor pool, like a large planet. So, if orbital space yards could use the labor from a planet in their sector, space yard bases would tend to be built at large population centers like you'd expect in a "realistic" game. Building a starbase in an empty system ought to be tough. It would be really cool, though, if MM would implement the "habitat" ability we've been wanting for "nomad" races and you could build a space-dormitory ship for a work force to generate the labor at your construction site... I don't think a population in a cargo bay should be able to work... unless they're slave labor? There should have to be a reasonable custom-built living area for them.

As for racial abilities, I suppose that "Mining/Farming/Refining" aptitudes would have to be modified to work from your labor pool. In other words, production for each facility would be based on labor available, multiplied by these aptitudes.

I do like the idea of technologies that increase available labor, though. The "Robotoid Factory" facilities could be changed to increase available labor, for example. But there might be other ways to increase labor avialability that could be added for increased interest.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 01 February 2001).]

[Puke]

a thought on space habitats mentioned below (and previously). not possible on ships under the current game mechanics, granted. but if we could create a stellar construction (ie ring/sphereworld) in open space, and then be able to put an engine facility on it as people were talking about with the 'planet moving' thread a while back, would that not be equivilant to a habitat ship? you could colonize it and put facilities on it. you could make the build requirements small(er than for a rw/sw), and it would have the capabilities people describe.

we just need the ability to create a new kind of stellar construction, do it in a non-star sector, and have it be able to move. now, wither or not a moving planet is possible within the game engine is another question.