Suggestion for City Reports (Or 3rd party tool)

[SailorJerrys]

Howdy folks,

I brought this up in galactic chat the other day, but I think it could be useful for city builders!

Basically, for anyone who's played Factorio, I'm talking about the production charts, where you get information on the rate of production of components and commodities, so you know if you have bottlenecks or if you're making a gain or loss of product. I.E: Metal +5k, Fruit +500, Gas -25 etc. Not just the change from one report to the next, but what the trend currently is. Then you could decide if you needed to up production or cut back to redirect labour elsewhere.

I'm not skilled or knowledgeable enough to write code, and the reports seem to occur often enough that you could compile some relatively accurate data out of the storage reports themselves, but I would imagine that the calculations of all of the data for every city in the universe might end up being hard on the servers. Maybe it could be a localized script that could be run on command? Or a third party program if someones brave enough to write one up.

Before I go too far into this though, this was just an idea and suggestion I had at random when I noticed I had massive stockpiles of some products and barely any for others.

Anyways, let me know what you think!

Cheers,
SJ

[danthemanisme95]

Maybe what might work better is have an avatar assign a "Flag" to a specific resource on a specific planet that would a appear in a production log with an end of the day "production report" that would update at one complete day night cycle for the given planet. The production log could have a fixed number of trackable items as a method of managing the "math load"

[SailorJerrys]

Maybe what might work better is have an avatar assign a "Flag" to a specific resource on a specific planet that would a appear in a production log with an end of the day "production report" that would update at one complete day night cycle for the given planet. The production log could have a fixed number of trackable items as a method of managing the "math load"

Oooh! I actually like that idea, limit it so that you can only have maybe... 5 commodities being monitored at a time. Cause five would be enough for you to determine any issues you'd likely be having. Three would probably be enough, too. It's not too hard to see where you have a shortage or surplus, so being able to determine by how much would make it much easier to redirect your workforce to balance out the difference.

Good idea!

[Deantwo]

Commonly it isn't advised to attempt to optimize production in Hazeron too much. If you have a shortage, simply increase production. Since resource sources are infinite and there is no issue with storage, you are only ever worried about production in relation to time.

I was updating HazeronAdviser to be able to do something like this back in the day. But when city reports were changed to not automatically arrive via the in-game mail, it kind of put a stop to any meaningful statistics overview.

This is not to say that I disagree with your idea. I would love to see some form of API for querying city statuses for third-party applications.

[SailorJerrys]

Yeah I kinda figured that was the case, Deantwo, lol. Given that I didn't see any suggestions similar to this in the last few pages of the forums I kinda figured that was the consensus of most players.

But I figured some people might like the idea of being able to balance things out better. I guess that is probably a better manner of dealing with production shortages. I suppose having the API to output telemetry like that could make a lot more possible with external programs, though.

I just know that I was curious, since I usually ended up having more product, or more components! And my OCD was pestering me about that, lol.