[ex-15] Recalibrating industry consumption: final pass

[martin509]

Original thread here. My Github branch of Pak128.Britain-Ex with the according balance changes can be found here. You can download a build of the ex-15-industry-rebalance branch here.

This is a thread to hold remaining work needed to rebalance Simutrans' consumer industry consumption figures in light of the fact that the full industry generation rework (which spawns producers explicitly to feed demand, and spawns demand to consume excess production) is now confirmed for v15 of Extended. Merging at least the supermarket changes in is IMO essential, so I want to get it over with soon.

To recap, the reason for pakset-level changes was originally specifically because in later years (e.g. 1970 or so onwards), consumer industries became massively more demanding - the supermarket industry chain in particular demanded hundreds of crates each of many finished goods and caused an overabundance of agriculture industries to spawn compared with prior years. As a result this project started specifically with rebalancing supermarkets, which it succeeded at, then expanded in scope to other industries. The point of doing this isn't really to fully reach out and touch every single industry in Pak128-Ex, but more to root out specific problems that are unbalanced for the actual gameplay in a way that is unrealistic. Figuring out realistic numbers with open sources is very difficult and time consuming, reviewing it all is also time consuming, and in some cases it's just flat-out not feasible to figure out "the average throughput of tonnes per hour of a specific good in a specific kind of store in the UK, 1750-present" with much reliability.

I haven't put a PR up yet (as there are some things I'd like to complete first), but a summary is as follows:

Changes so far

- Vegetable yields increase according to actual historical yields (using potatoes as reference point), and thus accurately capture the scale of the Green Revolution. Grain yields and apple orchard yields are also completely recalibrated (with 19th century apple orchards being nerfed substantially).
- Car dealerships generally sell many more cars, especially in earlier years (currently they start out with literally 1-2 cars/month, which makes no sense), and are balanced more by distribution weight than productivity since generally car dealerships don't get more productive but just more numerous as car sales increase over time.
- Major pass on the Supermarket1960 and Supermarket1980 chains massively reducing consumption. Also add milk to the list of items they consume.
- Redone calculations on consumption for builders' yards with an eye to increasing their consumption substantially and also having a rough estimate on the proportions of different materials used in construction in the UK.
- Dairies previously had a note that at some point in the modern era they would begin outputting packaged food to represent them producing cheese instead of just delivering milk. Since this note predated the existence of canned_food (aka packaged food) in-game, I have added this.
- Fishmongers, grocers and markets have had their consumption adjusted to add up to approximately similar consumption put together as supermarkets.
- Fish and chip shops have had their ingredient ratios adjusted to reflect actual recipes and had their consumption recalculated.
- Forests have changed in size to have more tiles (and therefore more output) in general, especially later game.

Todo list before putting up a PR

- Port in all of the notes I have kept on this to the relevant .dat files.
- Add paper consumption to modern dairy industry (it's a cheese factory, cheese comes wrapped in paper).
- Generally rebalance department stores, as they consume >100 crates per store of a bunch of different finished goods in a similar way to how supermarkets are.
- Specifically rebalance clothing shops, as they are a very important consumer good and also historically important to the Industrial Revolution setting, and seem generally underpopulated currently.
- Not the focus but could benefit from being looked at: newsagents, bookshops, furniture stores, hardware stores.
- Add a late-game ClothingShop variant (e.g. ClothingShop1980) with the same sprites and etc but more consumption, since ClothingShop1945 currently carries on into the 2000s and people definitely buy more clothing now than in the 1950s.

Things to specifically review

- Should we go ahead with having dairies switch from being consumers to manufacturers mid-game? Other options would be to have them stay as consumers-only and not produce packaged food, or to have the consumer-only dairies be unable to upgrade directly to the manufacturers.
- The entire department store rebalance when it is done, as well as clothing stores.
- Should we touch livestock at all? This was a point of contention previously since realistic per-tile yields for cattle and sheep farms are so astronomically low the values in game are actually pinned to a floor that is much higher. I've left out any livestock changes for now.

Thanks!

- Martin509