2019-11-13 Resources, Manufacturing, Skills

[Haxus]

Resources
Someone pointed out that you can make a 10k process mine on one rock of ore. You don't really have to find another one after that. In the past, mines were limited by the number of actual rocks on their site.

The process limit, based on rocks present, has been restored for mines, wells, and drilling rigs.

• When placing a mine, well, or drilling rig now, a list of icons appears with numbers next to them, to show resources present on the proposed site, and the number of each.
  
• On the Building page of the Building window, mines, wells and drilling rigs now show the resources present at their site, with the count of each.
  
• Existing buildings are not affected until you try to make any changes to their processes. Then they will impose limits.
  

Manufacturing
Deantwo referred me to a forum post with several recommended improvements to the manufacturing window.

Here is what changed:

• You can now add a process if all workshops are already assigned. The new process starts out with 0 workshops.
  
• Stock limit can now be assigned to manufacturing processes. The process will not run if the current stock of what it makes, stored at the building, equals or exceeds the stock limit. A stock limit of zero results in the current/old behavior of filling all available space in the building.
  
• When adding a new process, you can now specify the number of workshops, minimum production quality, and stock limit right away.
  
• Manufacture panel replaces workshop count and production quality with a single button. The button shows the current values. When pressed, a dialog appears to configure workshops, minimum production quality, and stock limit.
  

Skills
NPCs need to develop a preference for which station they operate in a ship.

This evolved into the replacement of simple experience points on NPCs and avatars with a table of skills, which amount to experience gained performing various activities. NPCs use this information when deciding which station to operate aboard a ship.

Skills appear on the Bio window and they are listed on the avatar stats pages on the web.

Skills were assigned to existing avatars based on information that could be gleaned from stats data accumulated. This is only fyi because skills don't actually have any effect on avatars, atm.

Avatar Stats
Avatar stats pages on the web site give away too much information.

Information on the avatar stats page on the web was reduced quite a lot.

[jakbruce2012]

I figured the rock limit would come back eventually, harvester ships are useful again.

[Deantwo]

I figured the rock limit would come back eventually, harvester ships are useful again.

Until some limit is implemented for that too yeah.
It doesn't sound unreasonable to limit the amount of resources that can be harvested from a world per day.
See: http://hazeron.com/mybb/showthread.php?t...12#pid4912

[Mr. Mortius]

Limiting jobs to the number of rocks is a terrible decision in the new system. I've personally never used more than maybe 20 nodes on a planet for harvesting under the old system that was limited, but let's look at this under the new system.

On a typical, average world (15,200 m diameter), a population of 360,000 citizens can be supported. Let's be very optimistic, and assume the city can use 50 "nodes" and there are ~6 rocks per node. This leads to 300 jobs total out of the 360,000 possible. If somehow 450 nodes were found (so that 450/500 allowed buildings are mines), this is still only 2,700 jobs. Did any thought go into this?

[Deantwo]

On a typical, average world (15,200 m diameter), a population of 360,000 citizens can be supported.

Then maybe the population limit need to be 100 times smaller again.

Let's be very optimistic, and assume the city can use 50 "nodes" and there are ~6 rocks per node. This leads to 300 jobs total out of the 360,000 possible. If somehow 450 nodes were found (so that 450/500 allowed buildings are mines), this is still only 2,700 jobs. Did any thought go into this?

As we were just talking about on Discord. It would be a lot more interesting if building blueprints could get harvester modules added to them. So a mine building blueprint can get an advanced mining module that adds a cost of Vulcium, but it can then add more jobs per rock. It would give a good new use for advanced resources and let us use technological advancement to increase mining yield.

[Mr. Mortius]

There are a number of constraints on cities. Number of buildings, world population limits, volume limits, morale, resource production relative to ship cost for reasonable supply, etc.

None of these match up with the others in terms of scale now, some by orders of magnitude.

[Vectorus]

Rock-based limits are a mistake, unfortunately. They are totally out of kilter with everything else in your cities - manufacturing potential, population, building size, ship requirements...and they bring back the least fun part of the game, tooling around slowly with dry eyes, waiting for the resource view to catch up, peering out for nodes, then desperately hoping the grading needed to put a building there doesn't destroy the resource.

Better implementation: allow a single node to yield as much resource as you like up to a world-limit based on abundance and surface area. A 10km world with 1% ore can have 1n ore-extraction processes. A 10km world with 5% abundance can have 5n. A 20km world with 5% abundance can have 20n processes. 

Sets sensible limits without adding frustrating busywork and makes that abundance figure in the scan actually useful: we've all encountered worlds with a supposedly good abundance where no actual nodes are visible, and torn our hair out accordingly.

[Haxus]

The rock based limit is essential. As several have pointed out, one way or another, without this limit there is nothing to impose any sensible limit to the size of things, except my arbitrary top-end sizes. Those are limits that are supposed to never be reached, preferably because of natural factors, such as the limit on mines tied to rocks. They weren't intended to be design goals. The limit on mines is exactly the right thing to do, because it is concretely connected to the game universe and not arbitrary.

[jakbruce2012]

Also don't forget, you can overlap buildings now too.

[Mr. Mortius]

Why would anyone design for something less than the best? The main issue here is how the cost of ships will scale relative to cities, but that could be a benefit that makes ships more valuable.