Production / Stockpile Rules

[sven]

• Similarly, you can't queue a ship unless you have the cost in metal on hand - another annoyance when you're making tons of metal/turn, but just spent it on something.

You can, however, use Stockpile to save up production until the metal is ready.

The rules in the build right now are actually a bit more complex and subtle -- basically, metal is subtracted as needed each turn, but, if you already have a stockpile of wrenches on the planet, then you need a matching stockpile of metal to switch production to the target ship.

This can get very weird. For example, if you have 200 wrenches worth of production in a partially complete Factory, and want to switch production to a Transport, which would normally take 132 wrenches and 140 metal (thus, it would be 100% complete after the switch), then you need to have 140 metal on hand.

However, if you want to put those 200 wrenches into a battleship that costs 800 wrenches and 120 metal, then the post-switch project will only be 25% percent complete, so you'll only need 30 metal to make the switch. And starting a ship building project on a planet with 0-wrenches saved actually requires no metal, though, because most planets currently almost always have some stored wrench production, this rarely happens in practice.

tl;dr: The details of the ship production system, as it exists right now, are behaving in ways that even I sometimes find a bit confusing, and I'm convinced that it eventually needs to change.

The core change, pretty clearly, is to stop carrying over wrenches from one project over to another. This will mean people will never see "insufficient metal" errors when trying to start building ships. Instead, you'll only get into trouble if you run out of metal because you were running a deficit -- a situation that makes more sense intuitively; and which we could reasonably handle by either pausing production on any effected worlds, and/or giving you a warning notification.

One subtle detail that needs to be decided is whether or not to carry production left by the *same* production project. For example, if you're building a factory, then switch to a destroyer, then switch back to the factory, should you keep your old factory progress? Personally, I feel like you probably should -- as this is one of those places where think it's both unnecessary and counter-productive to penalize the player for changing their plans.

However -- there's a complication here, which is that if we keep old wrench-production around, then we also probably need to keep old metal-production around, rather than returning any metal in an unfinished ship to your global supply, as is currently done.

I need to think all of this through a little more, but, right now, I'm leaning towards trying to come up with a set of rules that, while perhaps still a bit complex in terms of the details of just how it handles project switching, is less confusing in the common cases of switching between different construction projects.

[Unbroken]

You can, however, use Stockpile to save up production until the metal is ready.

I did this a lot when my factory worlds weren't doing anything else. It enables you to build fleets on demand when you need them without having to pay maintenance or worry about your metal stockpile as much.

One subtle detail that needs to be decided is whether or not to carry production left by the *same* production project. For example, if you're building a factory, then switch to a destroyer, then switch back to the factory, should you keep your old factory progress? Personally, I feel like you probably should -- as this is one of those places where think it's both unnecessary and counter-productive to penalize the player for changing their plans.

Could the game keep the existing wrenches used on the factory, and cause the destroyer to start at zero instead? That will require some new functionality mechanics-wise, as well as a new UI tab/area to allow someone to keep track of their unfinished items. To me, that seems to be the fairest way to treat the issue without having some of the odd things you could do in other games (such as in SMAC, where you could retool to a completely unrelated item and still get progress towards it) or punishing the player.

The main caveat I can think of is in regard to stockpiling wrenches, it may encourage players to instead always stock wrenches, then use them in a single turn as a means of retaining flexibility. That being said, I think the wrench stockpile ought to have some sort of cap dependent upon # of factories, population and tech so that a player cannot pile up several thousand wrenches over the course of the game - hell, in the late game this could be a valid strategy by stocking the wrenches with a shipyard or two then replacing some of your factories for whatever you may need, such as labs, farms or markets.

[sven]

Could the game keep the existing wrenches used on the factory, and cause the destroyer to start at zero instead? That will require some new functionality mechanics-wise, as well as a new UI tab/area to allow someone to keep track of their unfinished items. To me, that seems to be the fairest way to treat the issue without having some of the odd things you could do in other games (such as in SMAC, where you could retool to a completely unrelated item and still get progress towards it) or punishing the player.

This is basically what I'm thinking of doing. The mechanics change is pretty easy -- what would be harder is trying to incorporate some sort of indication of stored unfinished projects into the production UI. However, I'm tempted to just implement the mechanics change, without extending the current UI. Yes -- players might be a little confused about why a project on a world is so advanced, in the case that they switch back to something they'd more or less forgotten about, but, that "bonus" production would come as a pleasant surprise, and a little experimentation will pretty quickly teach you what's going on behind the scenes.

The main caveat I can think of is in regard to stockpiling wrenches, it may encourage players to instead always stock wrenches, then use them in a single turn as a means of retaining flexibility. That being said, I think the wrench stockpile ought to have some sort of cap dependent upon # of factories, population and tech so that a player cannot pile up several thousand wrenches over the course of the game - hell, in the late game this could be a valid strategy by stocking the wrenches with a shipyard or two then replacing some of your factories for whatever you may need, such as labs, farms or markets.

My current thinking is that if/when we switch to a "no carry over" production model, the "Stockpile" activity will be entirely retired.

[Arioch]

This is basically what I'm thinking of doing. The mechanics change is pretty easy -- what would be harder is trying to incorporate some sort of indication of stored unfinished projects into the production UI. However, I'm tempted to just implement the mechanics change, without extending the current UI. Yes -- players might be a little confused about why a project on a world is so advanced, in the case that they switch back to something they'd more or less forgotten about, but, that "bonus" production would come as a pleasant surprise, and a little experimentation will pretty quickly teach you what's going on behind the scenes.

I don't think any UI hint here is necessary -- this is the way Civilization works (all progress on a production item is remembered and retained, but there is no UI hint except the reduced cost).

[evil713]

Can I just throw a bone in here, for future stockpile changes, could you do it so that if a planet picks stockpile there industrial output goes to the rest of the system?

Example: I have 2 planets in a system, ones say a food or ore world and one is industrial, I use stockpile on the food/ore world to mildly boost the industrial world, or vice versa, I use stockpile on the industrial to grant a massive boon to the food/ore world to build defenses?

we could bring freight into play, say one freight carries 20-50 wrenches?

[Arioch]

Can I just throw a bone in here, for future stockpile changes, could you do it so that if a planet picks stockpile there industrial output goes to the rest of the system?

That's an interesting idea. My first concern is that it could be frightfully overpowered. I think it would need to be mitigated through requiring special infrastructure and/or imposing limits (such as a % loss of production when it's directed off-world).

[evil713]

Can I just throw a bone in here, for future stockpile changes, could you do it so that if a planet picks stockpile there industrial output goes to the rest of the system?

That's an interesting idea. My first concern is that it could be frightfully overpowered. I think it would need to be mitigated through requiring special infrastructure and/or imposing limits (such as a % loss of production when it's directed off-world).

that's kind of why I threw in the suggestion of the action taking freight slots, trade would go down and if you have really few ships planets starve taking this option.

or when using it the price/requirements of the item being built go up, like a reverse shipyard bonus.

[sven]

I need to think all of this through a little more, but, right now, I'm leaning towards trying to come up with a set of rules that, while perhaps still a bit complex in terms of the details of just how it handles project switching, is less confusing in the common cases of switching between different construction projects.

The current dev build (r14339) gets rid of the stockpile activity, and more or less just stores metal / wrench production on a per-project basis.

There's a few quirks to the new rules; the biggest being that if you switch between two ship building projects which are different variations of the same hull, both metal and wrench production will carry over to the new project. That exception means that players are still free to update ship designs in editor, and have their changes reflected in any ships currently under production. It also means that if you want to build a battlecruiser equipped with weapons you don't yet have access to, you can start by building a battlecrusier equipped with something else, then switch once you get the relevant techs. That feels more or less fair -- and it's certainly closer to realistic than the old system, under which you could generate production for a battlecruiser by putting time into building, say, a research lab .

[sven]

I'm sure Sven has plans to put a resource-shortage pause feature in there at some point though.

The current draft rules (on r14339) basically just pause production for ship building projects that you don't have enough metal for. You'll get a warning message when this happens. It's worth noting that if you have some metal to invest, it will get used up, and production progress will move forward by a corresponding amount. So basically, in cases where raw materials, rather than industrial potential, are the limiting factor on your production, you'll still move ahead as much as possible.

However, If several different planets are *competing* for a limited metal supply, the allocation of metal between those planets isn't fair. The details are a bit obscure, but, you'll probably end up with one or more planets sucking up all your available metal, and the rest being reduced to 0% production speed.