Draft: factories and commodities (new crafting/trading mechanic)
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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.
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Your example assumes you can get full throughput with one factory of each type.
It feels about right.
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This is how new resources will look in the Market (click to enlarge):
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@artch I love the symmetrical look. Would it be possible to add the avg recent market price for resources to this screen for the "at a glance" information? I don't actually care that much how many buy/sell orders are open as long as there are a few, but what the price is definitely matters to me.
EDIT: Tbh I don't care at all what the actual number of orders is. I'd rather have a low/med/high for volume and the average price it's going for.
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@tigga said in Draft: factories and commodities (new crafting/trading mechanic):
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.
That's a very good point from Tigga which is still not answered. I analyzed how many resources and factory reactions are needed to create a level 5 item to answer this question and I'm pretty sure that level 4 and 5 are mostly unused, because there is just 1 reaction needed for one item. So that's very production limited. level 2 and 3 are region dependent but also mostly production limited. with only 127 to 165 reactions in Level 2/3 for one L5-item. level 1 is very region dependent, ranges from 73 reactions to 256 reactions for one level 5 item. Looks unfair, but maybe it will be balanced with cooldown. To bring this in relation: The total reactions for one level 5 item is region dependent between 6083 and 6289 reactions.
In the end it all depends on the cooldown to see how much time a powercreep is locked on such factories.
Between 93% and 97% (regional dependent) of the reactions are used on level 0. This doesn't lock any power creep. And since the price is 5x higher now, maybe it's also not throughput limited. That depends on how much of such regional resources can be harvested.
What still bugs me is, that the output is always one item. I hope that this will be changed to n*output items for one reaction with n*input items at Level 0, maybe with a n times higher cooldown to keep the same throughput, otherwise the cpu cost for compression and decompression is just pretty high. e.g. 10 Battery for 100 energy, 10 Purifier for 50 Catalyst, etc.
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I really REALLY like the idea of bulk reactions! It seems like an interesting trade off game play wise. Smaller reaction amounts with easier set up plus ability to change as needed vs Large reaction that lock a lab/factory into a resource type until the cooldown is over.
This offers a CPU savings for players AND it would lessen the intent burden in the processor. One of few cases where what's good for players is also good for the servers.
