View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0016615 | Stars Beyond Reach | Suggestion | May 8, 2015 10:20 am | May 31, 2015 8:26 pm | |
| Reporter | ptarth | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Severity | minor | ||||
| Status | resolved | Resolution | fixed | ||
| Product Version | 0.814 | ||||
| Fixed in Version | 0.870 (Yellowshirts and the Giant Revision) | ||||
| Summary | 0016615: City Expansion Cheese | ||||
| Description | Right now, you can start construction of a line of building extending out in some direction. Then bulldoze all of the buildings except the farthest one, cancelling the construction. This allows you to effectively build without adjacency and expand as quickly as you won't. I haven't abused it when I play due to self-imposed restrictions, but I could have. I think the solution is to force each building to check to see if it can make an adjacency check all the way back to a civic center. If it does, then it also gets access to water & power. If it doesn't then, the building shuts off and it doesn't count for building adjacency purposes. Some buildings would be independent of the grid (e.g., helipad, Air Cargo Pad, Civic Center, and Extractors). | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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How would that interact with buildings being destroyed while construction is connected to them? |
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It wouldn't. But it you make it so they would be useless once they were built and prevent further buildings from being built from them. Additionally, construction could be calculated to prevent buildings not within cargo transport range would not continue construction. |
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Ah. Makes sense. |
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Leave it to ptarth to rain on my holy construction brigade. ;-) |
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It could solve the problem if set the maximum range of your buildings(betweencity centre and that building) to ... like... 30 hex , even transport cant override that range limit |
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As of 0.841, when that comes out later today, I'll be very interested in the thoughts on this. I think that it's a mostly non-issue now, because: 1. Using teleporter depots is much easier. 2. There are crime penalties for having a bunch of irrelevant buildings, although you are saying you're demolishing them anyhow. Anyway, I don't want to get too complicated with this. Prior to the public beta we had a system where buildings would get cut off and stop functioning or function more poorly (it varied) based on not having connection to the main city center or to a helipad or seaport that had a continuous connection to it. That's stuff we can definitely calculate, but it's kind of... I don't know. We still have the code for that, but I'm not sure the complexity is worth the prevention of something that I don't think really gives you an advantage anyway. |
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Reading the patch notes I have mixed feelings. I really like the idea of districts that really addresses many of the city issues. However, I don't like the building crime limitation. I really want to see that dropped. Replace it with a restriction of only building within air transport distance of your civic center and remove the civic center district limit. Buildings that have transport ranges provide a single bonus to the civic center transport range, this gives an organically increasing transport range distance from the civic center. So if you build a helipad it would give you +1 range to transport distance from civic center. However, building 10 more won't change it. Furthermore, the distance calculation is easy, because it is a straight calculation, it doesn't rely on counting out via buildings. The one-per city buildings can be converted to have large ranges instead of global/city effects. So the Molecular Security Control would have a radius 5 crime reduction effect. That way they are still really useful, but not build once and then forget. If the global effect is still desired, add it as an effect of researching the technology. |
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"However, I don't like the building crime limitation. I really want to see that dropped. Replace it with a restriction of only building within air transport distance of your civic center and remove the civic center district limit. Buildings that have transport ranges provide a single bonus to the civic center transport range, this gives an organically increasing transport range distance from the civic center. So if you build a helipad it would give you +1 range to transport distance from civic center. However, building 10 more won't change it. Furthermore, the distance calculation is easy, because it is a straight calculation, it doesn't rely on counting out via buildings." I prefer the current approach, but that's just me. Having ginormous cities was never a goal. It was supposed to be planet rage that stopped you, but I never did get to balancing that right. And planet rage is really made redundant by crime. We're getting back to where my original intent was, which is cities that have incremental costs to be larger. Each building you place past a certain point has a cost to you, though there is no hard cap. Playing around with the new version, this feels like exactly what I envisioned a long while ago. It's not the experience from the early beta, for sure, and I know that some redshirts and so forth will have gotten attached to that. But the cities that you guys were often building were just ridiculous by the standards of my original goals. Same with what the AI was doing. There are some buildings that will likely need to be changed up some in how they are balanced, to allow for smaller numbers of those buildings still having a major effect. This is probably the worst thing about being a redshirt: when something is working Really Wrong in terms of the original design, but you like it, and then it changes dramatically and the designer is happy, you're going to have a sour taste for sure. The new method of playing requires completely different strategies on your part, so it's like learning the entire game again. Well, not "like" -- it is. "The one-per city buildings can be converted to have large ranges instead of global/city effects. So the Molecular Security Control would have a radius 5 crime reduction effect. That way they are still really useful, but not build once and then forget." That could be done, and in some cases is. "If the global effect is still desired, add it as an effect of researching the technology." For something that is 100% positive, that's what we do. For things that have pros and cons, then a building is needed so that you can turn it off sometimes. Or if a vulnerability is desired, such as an AI striking this control building and then your city goes mad with crime (bwa ha ha), then that also requires a building. |
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Given I have no experience with 0.841, that I'm just a random guy on the internet, and I don't understand your vision, I present the following: I don't believe your changes are achieving what you are aiming for. I've attached an updated version of my .806 game with 50k people. I've twiddled around with it a little to mostly stabilize the crime situation. The city has 1245 buildings, it loses approximately 10 buildings a turn to grials that I haven't bothered killing, but I can build 40 buildings a turn. I think this is the ginormous city you are don't want. But I can still build it in .806. I haven't, because it is tedious. But this should be sufficient to demonstrate it is possible AND stable. It just takes a a 2 space riot police spacing, with a little more of them where you have crime buildings. This isn't even optimal, I have the 2 space riot police spacing even where I don't need it. I mostly liked the earlier version of crime, they were reasonable, it made crime (besides the mall riots) a city wide problem. Now, you have a few buildings that have 2k crime and most have 0 crime. Honestly, only the building count modifier matters when it comes to crime. The rest is rounding error levels. Changing it so every building has that amount of crime won't really change anything either. That means I just need to use 2 space riot police spacing everywhere. Or, if things get worse, convert to 1 space riot policing. Given that the desire is to keep cities at some set size, then just use that as the limit. Pick some arbitrary number of buildings to limit the size of a district. Then increase the limit when some level of social or technology development is reached. Also allow new district placements to effectively expand your total empire building limit. Then crime can go back to being an individual district issue and stay within reasonable limits. Then we can use police is low crime areas and riot police in the higher crime areas, instead of just piling more and more riot police into an area to stabilize it. |
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It's definitely a possibility that that will have to happen, and I don't think of you as "just some random guy on the internet." Hard caps are definitely sometimes unavoidable. That said, they tend to shrink the sandbox, if that makes sense? Being ABLE to do the really crazy pattern is different from that being an optimal way to play. Aka, in a normal game, if you spent that much on riot police there should be some other major drawbacks, where the AIs are getting ahead of you a lot and whatever. The best example I have is how AI Progress works in AI War. It's a flexible system like crime here. You have a lot of players who play kind of middle of the road, like I expected. But then you have some players who try to play by taking almost no planets, and they do these crazy long raids and so forth in order to win. It's amazing to see them do it, because I never would have thought to. It lets them really play up on the highest difficulties. On the other end of the spectrum, there were some guys who set the AI difficulty on the lower-middle end, and then proceeded to disregard the normal rules and take ALL 100 PLANETS, which was just insane. It took them around 200 realtime hours, and 8+ months of time. It was an incredibly hard-won victory when they won that way, but they painted the whole galaxy theirs. Because of the way that they played, they had really unusual challenges the whole time, and the lower AI difficulty was a good thing because their game was a freaking challenge to begin with. All of that is to say, the fact that you can do something out of the ordinary and "get around the regular playstyle" is something that excites me and that I love, not something that bothers me. The places where that becomes a problem are, specifically: 1. If that provides such an undue advantage that everyone who has much experience with the game is "forced" to play with that strategy, and it's an un-fun strategy. People will pick the most "optimal" strategy even if it's less fun, then complain it's less fun, and that's a vicious cycle. So if that happens, then other measures have to be taken. 2. If that secondary way absolutely breaks the game in some fashion and makes victory trivial, then that's an exploit, on the other end of things. So then that needs to be reined in, too. Players with mountains in Skyward Collapse early after 1.0 were a good example of that, for instance. Whenever possible, my goal is always to leave as much player freedom as possible so long as 1 and 2 above are not violated. If players are able to do some nutty stuff or circumvent what they're "supposed" to do, I just love that, so long as it violates neither 1 or 2. Both of those cases lead to a broken game, but any other case just leads to more opportunities for players to express their own creativity. So I try to start open, and then keep that door open for as long as possible, and then only clamp on hard limits if it turns out to be truly needed. We shall see. In the end you might be right. And if you are, it's easy code to do what you're describing. But right now I'd like to see if the more difficult, more flexible for the player, approach can work. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't -- I never am sure until lots of players get their hands on it, which is why I like large betas. Everyone does such different things, and the more people who play in abnormal ways, the better. Hopefully that gives you some insight into my mindset -- I'm not blowing you off or dismissing your opinion, and you make quite valid points. Ultimately you may be right. But I like to try the open approach first, before going for the clamps. |
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If the cap on Civic Centers is released (which I think it should), there is no limit on total empire size. Whereas with the current system, there is a cap, although it is hard to reach. You can only have 7 districts (6 civic centers max, + 1 starting lander), there is a maximum police protection density (it is pretty high, 36? Riot Police for each other building) to be reached. I doubt even I would do something like that. One of the big objections I have is that the current methods requires razing and rebuilding your cities. Once you hit a crime threshold, you have to destroy and build police in various locations. You can't have a low crime district, unless you have a low population district, and with only 7 districts total, it is hard to justify that. Alternatively, you plan ahead at the beginning of the game of exactly how many buildings you can have, and build the appropriate density of Police. For a new player, they won't have that knowledge, and so this is one of the reasons we see so many beta reports with death by crime spirals. Which they are now trying to fix by building more buildings, which results in more crime. Amusingly, if you don't plan ahead, adding a police station actually causes more crime than it reduces. Further, with the focus on essential buildings only, the lower variants of the buildings should be almost always be replaced by the more effective ones. This makes my cities feel less personal to me. I don't get to keep those fields of farms around my city, I need to raze them and put in hydroponics. I miss my "old town". Well, actually, I've been using 2 space Riot Police since late .7xx, so that's not exactly true. Alternatively, with the building cap method, you'll be researching enough to to encourage you to start districts, but to still have some space available in your existing cities The limitations on building range makes it sensible to start next districts to get new resources, so you'll also be branching out that way. You can raze and upgrade, but you don't need to, there is always space to make NewDistrict, with all its fancy buildings. |
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Okay, that is a really good point actually -- you've sold me. Err... that was easy? ;) |
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Yeah. Yeah. Easy. Piece of Cake. ;p |
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Piece of cake. Piece of crumb cake! :) |
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Most of it: * The rules for building placement for the AI are not much different from the prior version, with a few exceptions: ** AIs no longer have to worry about resource transport ranges, instead being able to capture resources that are within 5 of their buildings. This is on average actually going to be slightly more restrictive than before, but it varies. This does save some CPU processing time for something that is completely invisible to the player anyway, though. * The rules for building placement for the player, on the other hand, are now about as different as they could possibly be: ** First of all, at least for the time being, there is no building count restriction on how many buildings you can have, and as noted previously there is no longer any sort of crime increase as you get more buildings. ** Instead there is now a radius around district centers in which you can place buildings. If you don't have a district center within range of a building that needs to be in a district (which is almost all of them), then that building will cease to function with an "out of range of city" message. This would typically happen if a district center got blown up. ** There are a very few buildings -- teleporters, civic centers, and the three remaining resource gathering buildings -- which are "non-district buildings." They don't get assigned to a district even when they are in one. However, these buildings must either be within a district, or within range of a teleporter, to be valid for placement. *** This lets you spread your resource gathering out further with teleporters, and without the need for districts to handle that. And it lets you use teleporters to go make a new district, of course. * For players and AIs, there are also no more "personnel transport ranges" or "resource transport ranges" or any of that stuff. If a resource extractor exists, it's working at full capacity. You only need the district or the teleporters in order to get the resource extractor set up in the first place. * It's also worth noting that now players don't have to build their buildings in a contiguous fashion. This is useful in a lot of ways, so nobody is ever tempted to build a string of cemeteries over to an area just so they can build some other building and then destroy the cemeteries, etc. You have your entire district area to build in, and you can immediately build in it however you want to plan, and then you build another district later on and keep going from there. Much more fluid. |
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* Oh, also: players can now build buildings next to the buildings of other players at will. The AI is still restricted on that in most cases, but the player does not have that restriction anymore. That was annoying with flying saucers, among other things. |
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Mmmmmm. Sounds like we've gone from city cheese to a nice mature brie. :-) |
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All right, that's it for now: * The number of districts that you can have is no longer simply 6. It is now one plus another 1 for every 2 government social progress levels you gain. ** More may be done with this in future releases in terms of adding ways to gain more districts via other means -- perhaps through the tech tree -- but for now this seems like a good start. I feel like if this discussion needs to continue after this release, it probably needs to be a different issue so that it doesn't have so much stale and unwieldy text about past models before the relevant bits. I'm sure there will be more discussion, but in my own testing this feels incredibly better already -- and that's without even factoring in how this changes crime. It may allow for too many buildings with too little cost to the player, but we'll see. |
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Changed my mind on one thing: * The "building count" based crime is still present after all, but it is now 100x weaker until you hit 300 buildings, after which it is 10x weaker from there on (just on the buildings above 300). ** This makes it so that there is a sense of some cost to building upwards, but not remotely so much as before. This is a good cost vector in terms of crime, but the numbers may need to be tuned down even more, we'll see. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 8, 2015 10:20 am | ptarth | New Issue | |
| May 8, 2015 10:32 am | ptarth | Description Updated | |
| May 8, 2015 10:41 am | jerith | Note Added: 0040601 | |
| May 8, 2015 11:07 am | ptarth | Note Added: 0040603 | |
| May 8, 2015 11:08 am | jerith | Note Added: 0040604 | |
| May 8, 2015 5:12 pm | tbrass | Note Added: 0040613 | |
| May 8, 2015 7:36 pm | timfortress | Note Added: 0040624 | |
| May 8, 2015 7:37 pm | timfortress | Note Edited: 0040624 | |
| May 26, 2015 2:00 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0041220 | |
| May 26, 2015 2:00 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| May 26, 2015 2:00 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => feedback |
| May 26, 2015 2:15 pm | ptarth | Note Added: 0041226 | |
| May 26, 2015 2:15 pm | ptarth | Status | feedback => assigned |
| May 26, 2015 2:50 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0041237 | |
| May 26, 2015 2:50 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark => |
| May 26, 2015 2:50 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | assigned => feedback |
| May 26, 2015 6:57 pm | ptarth | Note Added: 0041261 | |
| May 26, 2015 6:57 pm | ptarth | Status | feedback => new |
| May 26, 2015 6:58 pm | ptarth | File Added: 806 to 840 1245 buildings.save | |
| May 26, 2015 6:58 pm | ptarth | Note Edited: 0041261 | |
| May 26, 2015 7:37 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0041263 | |
| May 26, 2015 11:44 pm | ptarth | Note Added: 0041267 | |
| May 27, 2015 10:05 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0041270 | |
| May 27, 2015 10:53 am | ptarth | Note Added: 0041271 | |
| May 27, 2015 10:55 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0041272 | |
| May 27, 2015 10:55 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| May 27, 2015 10:55 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => assigned |
| May 31, 2015 5:30 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0041493 | |
| May 31, 2015 5:31 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0041494 | |
| May 31, 2015 6:30 pm | jerith | Note Added: 0041495 | |
| May 31, 2015 8:13 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0041497 | |
| May 31, 2015 8:13 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | assigned => resolved |
| May 31, 2015 8:13 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Fixed in Version | => 0.870 (Yellowshirts and the Giant Revision) |
| May 31, 2015 8:13 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => fixed |
| May 31, 2015 8:26 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0041498 |
