Draft: factories and commodities (new crafting/trading mechanic)
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This is important: commodities will become the only resource types NPC traders are interested in, they will stop buying raw minerals once factories go live (NPC sell orders will remain). Now, if you want an NPC trader to buy your, say, Lemergium, you need to process it into Lemergium Bar first. NPC traders will buy all types of commodities constantly adjusting their prices based on the supply, there is no fixed price for anything. Players will continue to place buy orders for anything they want, of course.
If factories are available from RCL7, I really think that there needs to be a solution for excess minerals between RCL6 and 7. I know it's not a long period, but it's a glaring omission.
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Once set, the factory level cannot be changed. When the effect duration ends, the factory simply becomes inactive, but its level remains the same. You need an Operator with the same power level to reactivate it again. The power of another level will not be applied, the only way to change the factory level is to rebuild it (and the construction cost will be quite high).
The consequence of this is that Operators will tend to be restricted to a single base (or a handful of bases). It will not be viable to make a flexible operator role that moves from base to base depending on demand in different bases (e.g. if you have changed the remote rooms you're exploiting after another player has moved into or out of the area, you might find that your requirement for spawn capacity changes, so you might call in or send away an Operator with OPERATE_SPAWN. Likewise if you're attacking from a particular base for a while, you might want to have that operator work from that base).
Is it an intended consequence that operators become more-or-less locked to a single room?
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This wouldn't be a problem if we are able to pass a lvl on the operate factory intend.
This also helps to prevent to set the lvl "accidentally" since you must pass a int.@o4kapuk is a higher lvl factory without a operator still inactive or able to process lvl 0 stuff without one?
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@wtfrank said in Draft: factories and commodities (new crafting/trading mechanic):
Is it an intended consequence that operators become more-or-less locked to a single room?
I dislike this. It seems to be forcing a restriction and constraints that didn't exist before. Those constraints aren't that interesting: I think moving power creeps around should be incentivised rather than keeping them still as that leads to more interesting problems to solve.
I don't think it's quite as bad as you say as it seems operators aren't needed for level 0 production. I still think it's an annoying restriction though.
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@mrfaul said in Draft: factories and commodities (new crafting/trading mechanic):
This wouldn't be a problem if we are able to pass a lvl on the operate factory intend. This also helps to prevent to set the lvl "accidentally" since you must pass a int.
The problem with this is that it goes against the interesting design of needing multiple power creeps with different levels.
I think instead:
the level of the factory is permanently set to the level of the power
Should be removed. Just set the factory level to the last level cast on it.
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You can relocate your Operators though, you will only need to rebuild the factory in this case. Consider this construction cost as a capital investment into your production line. Your Operator builds some factory equipment, sets conveyor belts up, adjusts the machinery somehow specifically according to his skills, and now it's tuned to create things. But in order to launch a different production line, you have to spend some resources to readjust, it's not free, but still doable.
Such resources investment would encourage players to specialize their production rather than dynamically adapt, and allow for more interesting trading interaction.
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Also, if there was no such restriction, it would be possible to have just 1 factory and operate it by 5 PCs, thus managing full production chains with only one room. If you have 5 rooms, you would rotate their levels which kills any rooms (and players) specialization. This is not the desired usage of the factory mechanic.
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@artch locking is totally fine, the issue @wtfrank has is that the operator would be bound to a specific room.
If higher tier operators are able to operate all lower levels and are able to lock a factory to a specific lvl available in the operators range,
They wouldn't be bound to one room.(Sry for any borks I'm on mobile)
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@mrfaul This kills specialization even more.
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Whether rebuilding factories is reasonable or not depends entirely on the cost of factories. I had assumed the cost was likely to be the same as terminals/power spawns/nukers, if not more (given "and the construction cost will be quite high" in the OP).
If that is the case then I would argue that your operators are locked down for quite a lot of ticks if you don't want to waste a lot of energy.
Also, if there was no such restriction, it would be possible to have just 1 factory and operate it by 5 PCs, thus managing full production chains with only one room
I think we don't have enough information to discuss this properly. To me it seems there are two extremes:
- You're mostly throughput limited and want 100% uptime on operate factory. In this case 5 factories process 5x faster so just using one room wouldn't work. With locked factories operators are pretty closely tied to rooms, without locked factories they're free to move.
- You're mostly harvest limited and only need 1% uptime on operate factory. In this case locking works a lot better as you can move the operator to the right place, process in a bunch, then spend 99%+ of your time elsewhere.
Obviously there's every point between these two extremes. I don't know where on this spectrum the design is.
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@artch If you dedicate 5 PCs to a single room, that's a massive opportunity cost. Being able to operate a factory out of 1 room is surely the last of your worries in this case...
Fair point about how you could reconstruct a factory. Assuming they are expensive to build e.g. 100,000 energy, then this is something you might be prepared to do at most every few days. It's probably something that we can code around tbh, though it does add friction.
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@artch OK what exactly do you want to specialize the power creep or the factory?
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@wtfrank You don't dedicate 5 PCs to a single room, you rotate 5 rooms with 5 PCs through all levels simultaneously, effectively making all rooms identical with no specialization. Too simple, no coding challenge, no fun.
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@artch said in Draft: factories and commodities (new crafting/trading mechanic):
You don't dedicate 5 PCs to a single room, you rotate 5 rooms with 5 PCs through all levels simultaneously, effectively making all rooms identical with no specialization. Too simple, no coding challenge, no fun.
I'd argue it's simpler to lock your power creeps to rooms. I guess it's terminal transfer complexity vs power creep rotation complexity. Terminals seem easier.
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@tigga Not only terminals, but also market. If I have less than 5 rooms (or 10 for two chains, or 15 for three chains, etc), my only option to setup full production chain is to use market. If there was no locking, then it's possible to spend a bit more spare GPL (depending on how many rooms I'm missing) and implement the chain on my own. We want to encourage players to trade as much as possible here, with as fewer options to work alone as possible.
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TBH imo locking the factory to a lvl is the wrong way.
It would make much more sense to lock the to one of the five categories. (I count common as its own)You could also specialize your pc to those categories.
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@mrfaul There is no point in locking categories since they are "soft-locked" by regional resources already.
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is a higher lvl factory without a operator still inactive or able to process lvl 0 stuff without one?
They'll be able to process simple blueprints.
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@artch I still see a point in that, it makes choosing what you want to produce even more final, if you pc can only serve one category then you are unable to produce anything else with it.
After all you want to encourage trading, or not?
If that is the goal then you need to go full blocking.
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@artch said in Draft: factories and commodities (new crafting/trading mechanic):
@tigga Not only terminals, but also market. If I have less than 5 rooms (or 10 for two chains, or 15 for three chains, etc), my only option to setup full production chain is to use market. If there was no locking, then it's possible to spend a bit more spare GPL (depending on how many rooms I'm missing) and implement the chain on my own. We want to encourage players to trade as much as possible here, with as fewer options to work alone as possible.
Again, it depends on design details. You could design a system so that to get full throughput you need 5 level 1 factories for each level 5 factory, for example. Your example assumes you can get full throughput with one factory of each type.
I believe that if you need to optimize for throughput then locking isn't neccessary. If you have too few rooms you'll need to use the market as you just don't have enough factories to match your income.
