2018-07-24 Turrets, Sensors, World Building Limit

[Haxus]

One thing I observed about #2 is that the space per citizen is almost enough for them to have a small home (57) and a shop (91), total 148 cubic meters.

Habitable worlds are generally close to Earth size. It is probably a good idea to make them the basis.

I am a little concerned about the 5.7x size at ringworlds. I could artifically restrict them to 2.5x. That is slightly more than a sphere 12, which would be 2.25x.

Since I have no cities or spacecraft remaining to destroy, now is a good time to press onward with this change. Get the pain over with, in one go.

[Mr. Mortius]

One thing I observed about #2 is that the space per citizen is almost enough for them to have a small home (57) and a shop (91), total 148 cubic meters.

Wouldn't one shop per citizen be more or less the minimum for a functional and useful city? Option two seems to be the best. Whatever the limits turn out to be, I would aim for at least the ratio of the above, where each citizen can hold the job that takes the most allocated volume to complete. That's leaving out all other volume, such as commodity storage, batteries, generators, armor (A very large proportion of volume on any inhospitable world), life support...

[Haxus]

I went with option #2, except that ringworlds are 1/2 the calculated value, at 2.8x instead of 5.7x.

[Ikkir Isth]

When some of the dust settles, may be wise to make a combat trial system (like, say, on a ringworld I guess, or some custom system) with instant build times for cities in system + instant pop maxing, max ammo in any warehouses at any given time, and instant ship production, where we can schedule time to build and test max-size cities with various QL vs ships/fleets with various QL.

[Mr. Mortius]

The above would be a nice system to have so that different base layouts could be tested. Maybe an option to set up a base, then switch it over to an enemy team would allow single player testing.

[Haxus]

You can surrender cities to pirate empires.

[5crownik007]

Hello. My first city (newish empire) reached the 400 building limit about a week ago. I deleted some buildings, I'm something like 360 now. I have no morale penalty due to volume. I used blueprint exchange blueprints. Update on my second city when I hop off the phone.

[Vectorus]

An expanded arena mode would-be useful for this sort of thing. Especially with such long build/immigration times. I don't mind those times inthemselves, just difficult to test things.


I'm happy with Haxus' choice of (2). The slightly lower limit for ringworlds is fair enough. They have so many arcs anyway; defences can easily overlap.

We might also want to bear in mind any future productive capacity added to spacecraft. It would be strange if they could run as many processes as the largest possible planet. Solution 2 seems to make more sense of that.

[Mr. Mortius]

Are limits on population and volume per world, or amount of volume per added use in a building, about to change any time soon? I am about to start designing some new buildings for the system proposed earlier in this thread; I'd like to know if it'd be worth my time to start remaking each building type for different world diameters, and possibly for different environments. This will be the third or fourth time.

Edit:
Thanks to VhwatGoes for all his help finding the equations for volume requirements in new buildings. After making an optimizer for allocating volume in the new system and running through the different world sizes, the numbers seem reasonable.

Edit 2:
After some thought on the issue, I think the volume per world is an ideal solution. It prevents massively overpowered military installations while allowing cities to feel like cities, unlike with building limits. I do have two possible changes that might improve the usability of the system.

1. The ability to allocate volume to different uses after placing a building. Think of this as renovating existing structures. Maybe some labor cost could be associated with this work. Think refit for buildings.

2. A "Null" volume use. Adding volume to this would not increase building hitpoints or any other statistics. Instead, it would allow larger building designs to be efficiently used on smaller worlds. This would prevent the need to redesign buildings for every world diameter and environmental condition in order to have efficient cities. Volume added to this would essentially be ignored.

The main drawback of the system as it is now is that it requires different building designs for all combinations of world diameter, environmental conditions, and intended city use. This might help reduce that.

[Vectorus]

In the old days, buildings just added armour and life support for their environment and adjusted their cost as appropriate. Independent of stated volume.

Couldn't new ones do the same? You could still add those systems manually for redundancy/defence. Otherwise, just add the jobs you want. Game does the rest itself.


As long as the amount they add is transparent, you can still plan effectively.