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Doctor Dread Administrator Posts: 1478
8/6/2017
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Its been a few weeks and while we are making a lot of progress, the orbitals aren't ready yet. Its taking a lot of changes to the system to handle them and any future MegaStructures such as Dyson Spheres and possibly city level structures. But there are certain things that are already in place on the development machine. The 4 orbital structures can all be created and deployed and they all have graphics. The Warp Gates are boosting your ships speed when used. The Starbase is a functioning Shipyard in space. The Spaceport is going to give a small boost to structures production for the whole planet.
I'm still toying with the exact effects of all the orbitals. I will probably get them into the game next week just for myself to try them out and then adjust them from there.
The Warp Gate is boosting sped when used. probably caost money to use that will go to the owner
The Orbital Guns are going to be a "defense" that shows up to any fight on the surface of the planet. Hit like big rail guns
The Spaceport is commerce based and will give a small boost to structure cost to everyone on the planet. The owner will make a small percentage of all sells on the entire planet.
The Starbase is a giant Shipyard in space that can build units 2x as fast to start and also might reduce the upkeep cost of anything stationed there. I'm exploring a blockade ability as suggested for starbases also
I've attached a picture of what they are looking like so far
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Aywanez Posts: 64
8/6/2017
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But if a warp gate costs 150k/turn to maintain (that's at level 1) and it only costs 1k/size to take a ride on it, I don't believe anyone is going to make money running one (you need 30 freigters to use it every single turn just to break even). Certainly not on any planet other than Earth. Why not let owners set the price, but limit changing it to once a week (1000 turns?)
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Doctor Dread Administrator Posts: 1478
8/7/2017
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Setting a price gets complicated if you also want to users to have a way to see the price or not use the gate if it gets to high. I might be able to do a price change every so often like you mention and the price can only change like 10% so you can't price bomb Earth with a gate after everyone's using it..
I'm still toying with the price. Maybe we up the price to use it, perhaps we knock a zero off the upkeep . I'm not sure yet. I want to get them in place and see how practical the prices are. They also don't necessarily need to be "profitable". Its not much different than dropping heavenly bounties on Sol
Also... There are 750 freighters in Sol system and 520 of them are currently on Earth right now.
edited by DrDread on 8/7/2017
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Hutton Posts: 276
8/10/2017
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If you want to apply a realistic logic (as opposed to game logic) to ports, they should be doing something to facilitate trade with a planet, not production on a planet. A port, wether a seaport, airport or spaceport is a conduit to move goods through.
If the real world evolved to look something like the Barons of the Galaxy, the reason we would want to built an orbital port is so that freighters could offload and load their cargo at one point and then get back underway between planets while local planetbound infrastructure took care of distribution.
I would argue that Spaceports should serve some similar function, making it easier for large corps to trade with planets at a macro scale and giving smaller corps an opportunity to profit locally by distributing products from the port to the highest demand cities. Make the spaceport able to buy and sell in large volume based on an average of planetary demand, and let corps buy from it with a markup set by the owner instead of the double rate set by cities.
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Doctor Dread Administrator Posts: 1478
8/10/2017
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Hutton wrote:
If you want to apply a realistic logic (as opposed to game logic) to ports, they should be doing something to facilitate trade with a planet, not production on a planet. A port, wether a seaport, airport or spaceport is a conduit to move goods through.
If the real world evolved to look something like the Barons of the Galaxy, the reason we would want to built an orbital port is so that freighters could offload and load their cargo at one point and then get back underway between planets while local planetbound infrastructure took care of distribution.
I would argue that Spaceports should serve some similar function, making it easier for large corps to trade with planets at a macro scale and giving smaller corps an opportunity to profit locally by distributing products from the port to the highest demand cities. Make the spaceport able to buy and sell in large volume based on an average of planetary demand, and let corps buy from it with a markup set by the owner instead of the double rate set by cities.
It has to be something easy and straightforward to implement. Dropping stuff off at the Port isn't easy to work out and doesn't really benefit the Planet at all, just the players visiting the port. Some kind of planet wide reduction in Demand when selling at the port seems like it would break the game or make half the game reduce to the spaceport. Making the spaceport act like a city, and has all its demand as an average but the volume is a total population? So you can bulk sell to the spaceport and not get the best price,literally the mean price but your volume is like 250k and you can essentially dump your cargo. I'm not sure why you would use the port over the extra turn to get to a better priced city unless you're seriously moving a lot of cargo. If its better in all ways to sell to the spaceport then no one would use the cities
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Aywanez Posts: 64
8/11/2017
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It sounds like you have issues with the name, Lord Mayor, not with the substance. Maybe it should be named something like Orbital Building Survey Service?
Also, the scale is wrong for the kind of spaceport you are talking about- every city already has a space port, and depending on how long you think turns take possibly a massive one. An average Earth city has the capacity to process over 150 thousand units of goods, and easily half of that would come through the space port it already has.
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Hutton Posts: 276
8/11/2017
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But I think there should be something called a spaceport that facilitates trading on a macro scale, even if this isn't it.
There are the spaceports on the ground yes, but the purpose of an orbital spaceport should be to provide a central hub to facilitate trade and distribution. Dropping stuff off at the hub would benefit the planet because it encourages imports which will help growth.
Okay, here's another way to do it that might be simpler because it is handled as trade with the owner. What if, inside the interface of the spaceport, the owner can set a stack size limit for products. If they set it at 1,000,000, they get treated as having an active buy contract with every player that is deliverable to the station as long as their stack on the station is less than 1,000,000. They can set the price to be within 10% points of the planets average demand. Attempts to sell over the stack list get resolved the same as units selling over city volume.
Ideally there would be an inverse mechanic where corps could order units to buy from stacks sitting the spaceport, but maybe that would be too complicated to pull off. You could also just give the spaceports the ability to let the owner put specifically sized stacks up for sale in the spaceport instead of requiring that all the product in the square be sold as a single stack, but that would preclude the possibility of setting a loop to buy products from the station.
This would create a dynamic where only corps with very deep pockets could operate a port to it's full potential, (because they will need the cash reserves to buy large amounts of product from all comers), which seems appropriate. A bonus that would be required to make this venture work would be reducing or eliminating storage costs on the station for the owner.
One of the big advantages this will provide to corps trading and producing on the planet below is that it will give them a place to buy and sell to a more stable demand that won't be spiking or crashing as hard when they are offline.
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+1
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Doctor Dread Administrator Posts: 1478
8/11/2017
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So far the Spaceport is going to give a tech bonus to every structure on the planet in addition to giving the owner a small percentage of all the sells. The tech bonus is the level of the spaceport, which means 1 to 10% to everything for everyone on theplanet. Making 4 spaceports at lower level would give a bigger bonus cheaper if we do it this way,so I'm not sure about it.
The Warp gate is working with costing 1k times size times the warp factor (1x to 100x depending on level) The move order allows you to select the ma warp you want.
The orbital guns are going to be big Rail Guns that showup at all your fights. Not sure if its onthe attack yet, still playing with that.
The Starbase thats a giant shipyard in space was missing an interesting useful combat oriented ability.. So I'm thinking of making the Starbase give all your units on the planet location an attack bonus based on Star base Level. That means from 1% to 100% (double) all your units firepower when fighting on the planet. Perhaps we don't use the military multiplier and instead make it 10% per level, That would make having 4 level 1 starbases more efficient then a single level 4 one, so not sure about that.
The numbers we can play with, but I think the effects are starting to sound good.
The warp gate and Spaceport are more like planet bonuses that benefit everyone. The guns and Starbase or more of a military unit for yourself. However I'm looking at making them possible to at least extend to your Guild automatically, or more probably, orbital guns shows up to any fight you are in, and the starbase bonus is extended to any other units fighting alongside yours in a fight..Having a Star-base kind makes you the "support" class for the Kaiju =)
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Aywanez Posts: 64
8/12/2017
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I like NYCs idea of having a place to trade resources to a player in a more streamlined fashion (even if it is just 1 player.) The obtuseness of the trade system has been bugging me since forever. Can you implement that too? Maybe in the next update?
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Doctor Dread Administrator Posts: 1478
8/13/2017
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Aywanez wrote:
I like NYCs idea of having a place to trade resources to a player in a more streamlined fashion (even if it is just 1 player.) The obtuseness of the trade system has been bugging me since forever. Can you implement that too? Maybe in the next update?
The only more streamlined trading system I can make is allowing you to dump 100k of product at a location, a spaceport or market, with a price and let anyone buy as much or as little of it at that price. They can even buy it without a ship just take ownership of it. The contract already does something like that but we can make more of a marketplace style where you can check off a dozen things at your base that you want to sell and anyone can go to the "Board" and see all these products people are selling and just check off the ones they want with a quantity and it instantly changes ownership
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Aywanez Posts: 64
8/13/2017
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Yes, that would be awesome.
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Hutton Posts: 276
8/14/2017
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Yeah, that would make it a port. It would also add a lot of badly needed liquidity to the economy. Why don't you let the owner take their percentage off of that.
I'm not sure I understand where you are saying the owner of the spaceport takes their profit from. Are you saying they get a percentage of all the sales on the planet? That means the station is a perpetual supervirus. Everyone who does bussiness on the planet will be trying to blow it up and exterminate the owner. The bonus will provide a small bonus to corps that live on the planet but it will just encourage importers to steer clear.
The tech bonus isn't a bad thing per se, but intuitively it doesn't seem clear to me how an orbital structure would reduce mainenance costs of planetwide buildings. Your suggestion for letting players dump product to be sold off the station justifies an orbital structure all by itself adding additional features. The question is how would level and capacity be handled?
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Doctor Dread Administrator Posts: 1478
8/14/2017
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Hutton wrote:
Yeah, that would make it a port. It would also add a lot of badly needed liquidity to the economy. Why don't you let the owner take their percentage off of that.
I'm not sure I understand where you are saying the owner of the spaceport takes their profit from. Are you saying they get a percentage of all the sales on the planet? That means the station is a perpetual supervirus. Everyone who does bussiness on the planet will be trying to blow it up and exterminate the owner. The bonus will provide a small bonus to corps that live on the planet but it will just encourage importers to steer clear.
The tech bonus isn't a bad thing per se, but intuitively it doesn't seem clear to me how an orbital structure would reduce mainenance costs of planetwide buildings. Your suggestion for letting players dump product to be sold off the station justifies an orbital structure all by itself adding additional features. The question is how would level and capacity be handled?
The spaceport doesn't take away from the sells, you just earn credits based on how much is being sold. Similar to rulership and population. Its just a "free money" structure, well not really, you need significant sells happening before it becomes profitable but once it is profitable leveling it up means more money. They even stack (you can put 4 in a planet) but I could make it "share" instead so you might want to blow up the other guys port so you can take a bigger share. I like that idea.
I agree and I do want to spaceport to have some sort of utility, I just haven't found a good mechanic yet that can scale with level of the port. The best idea so far is to treat it like a city where you can buy and sell on "average" demand for the planet but in large quantities that scale with its level? Or perhaps you can dump 10 million qty on a level 1 port if you want, the scale of the port gives you a better deal on the average price you're getting, the demand across the planet goes down as if you sold it evenly. The port makes it so you dont have to "wait" to dump past volume of cities and instead can just drop off and run.
But that kind of removes the cities from the game and aggregates all of them into "A planet" through the spaceport. Unless the port is never going to give you that great of an average price even at level 10. And what would multiple spaceports accomplish in this regard, if the higher level one is always better and at most 1 more turn away to get to?
edited by DrDread on 8/14/2017
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Hutton Posts: 276
8/14/2017
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I like the Idea you described above, which seems like the same as what I had first suggested but you thought wasn't simple to implement. If implementation isn't the obstacle than I think what will happen is that local corps will buy and sell from the station (if they are allowed to pay a lower markup than they do in the cities) and be able to make a profit while they equalize demand between the cities and take advantage of the higher volume at the station. Corps mining in the frontier will be able to make a better go of importing raw material to the core world because they will be able to dump that Raw Material in one turn without micromanaging what city they sell to and getting stuck there for turns and turns while they compete to sell in the cities with the best prices. The Port shouldn't give you an extreme price either way as long as the entire planet isn't having a big boom or bust, (in which case corps should start or stop shipping to that planet accordingly), but will be providing an advantage of large volume at a less volatile price point. It moves some players up a level where they are looking at planets like we used to look at cities, but leaves the players that are invested in their planets to keep playing the way they are now except with the added sale point of their Spaceport.
However, your other suggestion where players can dump product into a pool that is availible a la carte for a set price to all comers could work just as well or better.
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Aywanez Posts: 64
8/14/2017
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I like the idea where the owner of the spaceport gets to set his own buy/sell prices (10%-1000% demand) and people only trade with her. The level would represent maximum volume of trade (like in a city) from 100 at level 1 to 12000 at level 10 (like a giant distribution center) or maybe up that a bit. Plus free storage for the owners stacks.
Note that unlike the warp gate this is just a convenience building (there are always cities and contracts to sell to instead) so the owner is not likely to get away with unexpected price hikes more than once, thus I am willing to trust them with setting their own prices (between 0.1x and 10x)
edited by Aywanez on 8/14/2017
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