Mod: Syox's Logistics, Economy and Usage(Maybe) Mod

As some of you may or may not know.
I tend to do a mod, for PA.

It will change the economy, introduce logistics and maybe add cost requirements for unit actions.

As of now:

How it works:
Engineers, Commanders, Factories, Mexes and p-gens have an internal storage of Mass and Energy.
(As long as no cost requirements are introduced only engineers and Commanders,)

The storage capacity for Engineers and Commanders is limited, the one for buildings (factories, mexes, p-gens) not.

Mexes and p-gens generate their ressources at given rates which adds to the internal counter.

Similar to the buildrate Engineers and Commanders get a extract and infuse rate for each ressource.

With this they extract mass and energy from the internal counter of other units or buildings, or infuse them.

There is no global storage!

If a factory or engineer needs Mass and Energy to produce stuff, these are subtracted from the internal counter. If the internal storage is enough the project will be finished else not. At least until internal storages are filled up or other units are supporting.

A player should be able to order units to automatically transport ressources from A to B or even in generall, or to do fixed routes per hand.

For this i plan to use flowfields, if they support multiple goals.

Propably we add 1 to 3 or more transport units.

pros:
+no stall has a global effect.
+no prorating of Energy- or Massexpenditure needed.
+though its discrete on little scale, globaly it works like flow economy
+fixes the global vs. planetwise eco problem
+system supports both playstyles, flow with expenditure before income and discrete with expenditure after.
+system may be more intuitive (because closer to real world behavior)

cons:
-no global Storage
-time for transporting ressources has to be kept in mind
-losing a engineer or factory can result in a even bigger lose in mass and energy
-adds more complexity to the game
-maybe more micro needed


requirements to PA
Disabling global economy.

Adding constants values to buildings and units:
(max energy storage, max mass storage, energy extraction rate, mass extraction rate, energy infuse rate, mass infuse rate)

Adding variable values to buildings and units:
(current energy count, current mass count)

Adding two boolean to units and buidlings:
*can_be_filled (f.i. mexes, pgens not)
*can_take_from (engineers shouldnt be able to take ressources out of other engineers to prevent fill up or take out chains, except if a engineer is building currently or assisting -> maybe the need for more bollean but this should be in the code imo)

Maybe a hack of or something costfield like, to have ant communication like marks on the ground, for better distribution or "road" like stuff (marking movent directions, help to preven collisions).

Flow and cost fields supporting multiple goals with different values.

Changing costs generated by units to distribute them(Engineers) where they need to be automatically.

Maybe adding some transport units.

not decided yet, up to testing
Mexes are indestructable, and prebuild (like mines in warcraft 2)

Units do need internal ressources for actions.

Maybe keep the Global counter but not as actual distribution, only for better overview.

Maybe also/only prebuild indestrutable but captureable factories (Planetary Island 3 anyone? )

possible helping
*BulletMagnet (coding)
*hyrdofoil (coding)
*cheeseless (coding, cleaning, debugging)

Sign me up as a code monkey.

How exactly does a structure give resources to other structures or other units? Is it just a magical works within x feet from target, or is there something more complex?

Also, I have ideas on getting engineers to move resources for you. Not going to spoil the surprise because it relies on something I expect to be ingame, but haven't yet had confirmed.

You are welcome .

Well i though of something similar to reclaim or reversed building.
Also only units should be able to actually transport ressources

You shall have a place among my videos if the mod doesn't suck

Once you get the first version done I'll give you my thoughts and all that stuff

It's an okay design document. I hope you have the coding skills for it.

I can understand why you need units to transport metal, but I think energy would make more sense if it was transmitted through power lines or something similar. You can look at RTS called Perimeter (the first one, second is not good) with its connection mechanics for example. They are used for a different purpose there, through.

Hauling resources over for construction is a very dwarfy thing to do. There will be micro.

Uhh. Flow fields have nothing to do with a flow based economy.

Yeah i know

If i may add my two pence worth... I think having the player deal totaly with logistics by assigning bots and such to deliver supplies may be a tad bit over board on the micro scale. If you want to really have things transported over land sea or air may i suggest having automated bots produced by your logistics building that arnt directly player controlled but are automated to deliver goods within a field.

This could lead to you allowing the players to set up supply lines that the automated bots then follow and push supplies along the chain. these then being able to be raided and so on.

a possible idea for you guys, id offer my services as a code monkey as well but as i dont know what the modding language will be and i doubt ill have any experience in it even if i knew ill hold off on that for now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMCWVvuza_s

Kinda like this?

Obviously the units won't be carrying building blocks around.

It would be cool if there were fuel cells visibly on the units that filled up with the resources.

So engies carry the resources from the mex to the factory?

Well like with everything in PA i think aiming for as less micro as possible is good. Without preventing it generally.

Well as much as i can say: yes Kinda
But only 2 ressources, no blockwise building of buildings, and workes can carry more then one instance of each ressource.

Yes you could build a powergrid. But imo thats to much simcity .
Also in the back of my head i like to have the possibility to use internal energy storage for action of units (moving, shooting). So for future compatibility and for the ease of it, using the same system for both is good enough for me.

I am interested in how this will turn out. You should keep in mind that adding logistics is going to require a wholesale redesign of how units work to account for their logistical properties.

I also think having both metal and energy internal storage is unnecessarily complicated. Unless you can think of a good reason why a divergent state is interesting, it seems like you're mostly going to have the same amount of storage of both and drain both to build.

Well we see.
And i hope you are wrong with the complete redesign.
BTW: You inspired me to this :mrgreen:

You could probably get away with implementing the new economy and then just testing to see if costs need to be adjusted. After such a huge change as a complete economy rework, it is unlikely unit interactions will be unaffected. Looking at it the other way, this means you get to do all kinds of interesting things by reworking units to make them different in new ways.

This also opens up a lot of new possibilities for new unit roles. For example, resource transports. Perhaps even structures that transport huge quantities of resources, like a power line/pipeline combined. And if you want to go down the road of having fuel/ammo logistics then you can do even more with support roles.

As I said before, separating metal and energy seems unnecessary since they are practically always going to be together. Something needs to differentiate the two resources logistically in order for having both be stored to be superior to just having a single resource represent both.

I think your mod should turn out quite well, especially for playing PA on very large maps.

Mmm yeah colour me interested too.

A bigger project than what's been outlined however is the larger scale aspect - how to tackle storage and resources and supplies in a way that lets you manage multiple planets.

I'd also like to +1 the idea of making the resource movement visible - it makes things a lot more intuitive imho if you see a big project getting built and tons of resources are streaming towards it.

To those worried about micro and rubbish like that; stop and think.

Resources move from sources to sinks. Every sink is moveable. Half the sources are moveable. There's only one type of source that isn't (metal, duh).

• Why don't you just build all your sinks next to your sources, so you don't have any micro to worry about?

Nobody ever forces you to build your factories miles away from your powerplants: you do that voluntarily.


The only 'gotchas' with that are; mobile factories, and expansion. When expanding to somewhere, you just build economy first. Then build everything else. Mobile factories are probably dead in the water though.

After some thinking. I think it really would be best to add a(some) seperate transport unit(s). This will work out better with the engineers.

So at least 1 new unit is needed maybe 3 (land, air, water) maybe more.

So model and textur artist are welcome

Let's not jump the gun on what is possible to mod just yet. I'm sure it will be quite extensive but you can't really know until you see it.

Hm, add me as a code writer/cleaner/debugger monkey, I'm better at maintenance than implementation. I'll also make vids of this if it's any good.

This sounds interesting, looking forward to it. What do you think about NOTA style air?

NOTA Footage:
http://youtu.be/3qVRCVt8oTo?t=2m45s

Actual application of this could be staging facilities or enabling factories to stage/repair/rearm.