As I have been posting from the start of the otehr thread (and long before it) I firmly beleive that a PE would be best for this game.

Karma given for the recap thread.

I don't really like it at all. Especially the fact that warehouses store unlimited amounts and the fact that factories can convert unlimited amounts of Nr to Mr.

Good work on putting together a well thought out, detailed, and readable suggestion.

 Karma given

A few things that jumped out at me.

"2.    No Manufactured Resources (MR) is produced at Factory unless explicitly ordered by gamer" - It bugs me that my blacksmiths just sit around doing nothing unless I give them a direct order.

"3.    Factory (e.g. Blacksmith) converts unlimited amount of NR to MR, or MR to MR.  Conversion takes 1 day.
4.    Warehouse stores unlimited amount of MR or NR" - I am not a fan of unlimited, set limits and just build more buildings if they are not high enough.

Other then these items I am in favor of this.

Sammual

Funny thing about economics. all it really is is just a case of supply and demand and as a king, emperor, kzar or whatever you make the demand and wait for it get supplied.

Anyone who has played a city building sim like the caesar series knows about economics game. You want to build a legion unit but you can't just gett'em on a fly. first you gotta make an iron mine, convert that iron into arms and armor then tranport it to a barracks. simple you have to do is make the demand, commission the right building to get the demand met and watch flow of supplies.

Szadowsz,

You have almost perfectly described what I have been trying to describe in various posts. There are just a couple of nits I would like to pick (all in the 2nd section)

Upgrading of UPBs should increase the training level that they can provide, not increase the number of units they produce per turn. i.e. a level 1 building produces a unit with a given amount of xp, raw recruits, a level 2 provides more xp, creating average recruits, 3 skilled recruits, 4 highly skilled recruits, etc etc.

Point 4 do away with it. No reason for auto upgrade of all factories to level n at no cost, Otherwise, the player would jsut upgrade their highest level factory and drag all of his other factories, free of charge, up to level 5 (when the top factory was at 10). I have no idea why this idea was included, it makes ZERO sense to me.

5. same as point 4. Why should it be more expensive to build a new factory based on how many different factories you have? Again, seems just like a ridiculous idea that someone wants to coerce the player to make all of one factory type in a town. There is already limited building space, and there may or may not be benefits to specializing a town with few factory types. I fthere are benefits, let those provide the incentive to the player to do so, rather than making arbitrary silly rules just because you can.

Other than those few points, this is very much shaping up in the direction that I would like to see things go. But another part of me just wants to see what SD does and then feedback from there.

Szadowsz, you've hit the nail on the head. Your modification of Climber's suggestion is pretty much exactly what I'd like to see in the game.

I like that idea. Yeah, it means it probably isn't worthwhile to manually upgrade little-used factories until you've reached the highest factory level, but it also well represents the advantages of better understanding manufacturing/production techniques and tools. 'Upgrades' often don't require much of an infrastructure change, but the adoption of a new way of doing things. Having low-level factories improve in such a way can represent the spreading of technical know-how. The required differential for such an auto-upgrade to happen should be big enough that you're much better off manually upgrading your main factories, and only the auxiliary ones should really notice this effect.

Another thing is, in most games once you research the newer shinier version of a building that's about all you can build. It was like that in GC2 for the longest time before the gave us the ability to build lesser version of buildings for the sake of construction times. With this method, the default rank of a new factory could be 'n.' If you aren't intending to mass produce goods or units with it, that should be just fine. On the other hand if your intention is for it to be heavily used, you might invest the resources into straight-up building that n+5 factory. Basically, I want the game to take "just because you can doesn't mean you should" to heart in all facets of the game: from soldier quality to road quality to building quality to use of essence and magic and gold and champions and....

Nope.

I'd rather have a supply depot filled and not utilized than wait for supplies to arrive every time I change production somewhere.  Over the course of the game, one is going to be a minor delay, the other a constant irritation.  In particular, having to manually supply every at risk town with the necessary resources to reinforce my defenses as quickly as possible when I need to.

I don't get real excited over maximizing my resource utilization.  Having to expend more work than neccessary to create the prudent stockpiles is much more irritating a thought.

That said, I can live with one.

Your original post.  I don't like A, and B is a necessity for a pull economy to be of any value at all.  Not to imply that it makes a pull economy good, just something I'd use if I had to put up with one.

So my +2 potions are scattered all over creation, and when I go to use them they get carted across the empire first.

To fix this, we make the resources just sit there, then your +2 potions aren't scattered.  They still have to be carted across the empire first, along with everything else.  I see no benefit.

For one, the game should never automatically produce something like Icy Sword+2 if there is no/has been no demand for it. It would be ridiculous for all types of MR to be automatically produced without input from you or demand for them - that would be disastrous. In that respect, NR and MR are very different.

MR should be produced when there is demand for it, and also preemptively to prevent delays. The game can automatically preempt some things (and the rest you'd have to do yourself via global controls) - one easy way is to base it off of unit 'designs'. When you design and save a unit in the editor, your cities should automatically begin producing whatever MR is required for it. Production should cease once a decent amount of that MR is stockpiled, and should pick up again when demand kicks in. In addition you should be able to decommission unit designs, in which case the MR required for it will no longer be produced unless needed by something else. Basing automatic MR production off of unit designs is a great way to minimize waste, micro and maximize convenience.

Warehouses can be done in two ways. One way (more complicated, more realistic, not necessarily better) is for every resource to take up a certain amount of space and for warehouses to have maximum capacity. If a sword takes up 1 unit of space and a breastplate takes up 4 units of space and your warehouse has 1000 units of space, it could hold 1000 swords or 250 breastplates or 600 swords and 100 breastplates and so on. This provides the most versatility but is also harder for an automated distribution system to deal with effectively. 

The other way is for warehouses to have separate capacities for every resource. So if your warehouse can store 1000 swords and you put 1000 swords there, it doesn't affect how many of any other resource it can hold. This is Colonization's way of doing it, and it works. This gives you less versatility but is much easier on the automation.

[quote who="Climber" reply="22" id="2241654"]

I hate this idea. There are much better ways of encouraging specialization. This is completely unintuitive and arbitrary. It'd be much better to give bonuses for specializing a city than penalties for not. I would actually also like to make it less efficient to spam the same building over and over again. It's all about synergy between different buildings. For example, let's say there are 5 different economic buildings, and banks are the best of the five. If we leave it at that, cities will eventually be full of banks and the other structures will fall by the wayside. Instead, implement synergies that makes it better to have one bank and one marketplace vs. having two banks (even though one bank is better than one marketplace). By not specializing, you forego these synergy bonuses and thus your empire won't be as efficient (but it will be very versatile - trade-offs = strategy).

Edit: I hating quoting on these forums.

I gave up pushing that "quote" button a while back.  And input field is slow in my Firefox.

It also means you'll get tons of Lightning Sword +2 at the towns you've your barrack.  The more barrack you've in that city, the more Lightning Sword+2 u have.  I don’t necessary want them when I produce my soldiers 15 turns later because the situation has just changed already.

If he says the UI allow you to order the Alchemy labs produce a specific number of Lightning Sword +2.  Then the gamer has to estimate that they'll be distributed according to the # of barracks at individual towns.  This is the best addition to Camp#3 has so far (but it is also some sort of PE).  Still it has micro at the factory level that is proportional worse as your empire can produce more & more type of MRs.   And gamer has to have a rough idea how many & where the stables, wizard school, barracks etc are.   PE is much more intuitive than the version of Camp#3 we know so far.

==
Probably there are many ways to warehouse, but someone has to tell me why it is fun.  The only function I can see is that when your warehouse is full (or almost), you've to manage it so your factory keeps producing.  One may say if it is strategic to manage warehouse capacity well, I'll say, well, the strategic value is very small then!  Unlimited capacity for NR/MR is the well to go.

I want specialization of an industry for an empire.  And I want specialization of a specific industry for a local area.  I don't want the one more factory is always better than one less, if u can.  If my empire makes the best magic shields (or be most efficient in making them), it’ll be harder for me be number one in another industry, & even harder to get a third number 1 and etc.

I did read & got your point.  But when I write the post above, I assume there the barrack is capable of building all types of soldier, some holding the Icy, some holding the Lightning Sword +2.  An UI is needed for gamer to disable those soldier designs holding the former sword.  So the point is moot, when you want to producing 1 type of soldier 15 turns later, you have to disable many other types to prevent unnecessary MR sent to the barrack.    So far we don’t know how many custom units we are allowed to build, but I assume there will be dozens+ as they allow custom units transferred from SD’s internet to gamers’ computer.

I am just trying to point out Camp#3 has its problem.   It is design balancing act of whether you’ve wasted/obsolete MR scattered around or increased micro of enabling/disabling production of some of the 110MR at the Factories.    Camp#3’s demand prediction is not as flexible as the just-in-time production suggested in the OP.  So far I like Camp#3 best, but an almost pure PE is better.

I do like the discussion of this pros & cons of Camp#3 though.

When your frontline city is vulnerable to attack, under the unlimited warehouse model, the gamer will chose to send less MR to that warehouse.  Under limited capacity warehouse model, the gamer builds a smaller warehouse & send less MR to that warehouse.  The reason of the decision is similar, so I prefer unlimited warehouse.  But at the end of day, I’ll say managing the commitment you’ve mentioned or managing warehouse aren’t the fun or strategic.  SD should provide better ways to spend our time than asking us to build warehouse.

When your empire is big, you can be number one in all industry.  I want check and balances to avoid that.  I want smaller empire still has an industry that beats bigger one.  Maybe the Point A4 and A5 is not the way to do it correctly, but lets think of it as a start.

OMG, quoting is deteriorating!!

You're good at finding the flaws, but you've got the wrong direction on the solutions.

Your super special badass sword.  Instead of disabling it in everything that can use it, which is a crazy way to do it, you work smart.  If you don't want it to propogate you disable propogation at the source, problem solved.  The more rare and hard to obtain an item is, the less work it will be to prevent propogation.  All you need is a toggle switch on production sources.  In combination with manual routing, you could even automate a specific destination for those resources.

Unmodified camp 3 with no customization at all, yeah, it's going to scatter everything all over creation.  It's not much work to fix it though.  I still don't see much of an advantage in having to wait for everything instead of just things that are low in supply though.