Draft: factories and commodities (new crafting/trading mechanic)
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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.
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@xenofix said in Draft: factories and commodities (new crafting/trading mechanic):
What still bugs me is, that the output is always one item
I already answered to this in your post above:
Produce amount is not necessarily equal to 1.
We're still debating whether it should be adjustable amount or not, but it's definitely not one item per run for most low level items. The table in the first post only shows the needed components for one item, not the reaction itself.
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Factories, the map dependent resources and production chains all looks really interesting and fun to implement, I just wish there was another use than to sell to NPC terminals for credits. Credits just dont seem that rewarding to me. Perhaps the produced items could be consumed for some bonus effects also instead of only sold to NPC's?
The map diversity they add also seem pretty minimal, you would just produce whatever chain you are currently located in, not really seeing much incentive to contest any areas if there are no real benefits of one type of the new resources above another.
I think both points can be improved if the products can be consumed for varying degrees of bonuses, maybe even account based bonuses. Would probably be pretty hard to get the balance right (if each production chain has a unique theme of bonus effects), but you could imagine the Biological chain could be consumed to be an Invader repellent (invasion free SK rooms?), Mechanical chain used to mine minerals faster etc. Just to add another layer of use for the end products to make them rewarding to produce and really have a competitive use.
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@artch just an afterthought, wouldn't it be much more interesting if the reactions require products from a different category?
That would for sure boost market activity and makes actual trade routes a interesting thing.
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The root post has been updated.
Added information about producing amount and cooldown for all reactions.
As usual, we tried to balance it to not have a single best strategy but instead let you try different strategies with own pros and cons each and choose what suits your gameplay style the best.
If you see something broken/unfair/inconsistent/whatever, please feel free to voice your concerns here.
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I think having the credits returned on order expiration might make sense. You're basically placing a down payment, but if no one takes the offer you get it back. You can't use those credits till then.
Otherwise it'll be even more punishing to make orders for lesser traded resources.
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Expiring orders that have 0 Remaining should not return any credits. Those orders could also have a shorter expire time since they are filled. Expiring orders that still have some remaining should return a portion of the credit cost but also take longer to expire so that they can possibly be filled.
I like what I see on the resource compression mechanics. With the cooldown be the same to decompress as it is to compress?
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With the cooldown be the same to decompress as it is to compress?
Yes, and costs the same amount of energy.
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@davaned the counter-argument would be that getting your money back at expiry means that people don't set competitive prices and the market has wider spreads and is less useful. It's annoying losing money but it's an interesting problem adjust your order prices from time to time in order to minimise loss.
