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factor between end consumer spawning and industry_increase_every

Started by Leartin, July 27, 2019, 10:38:55 AM

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Leartin

industry_increase_every = x means whenever a city reaches  x*2^n citizens, a new end consumer spawns. It does not matter which end consumer that is. If you are lucky, a 10-factory-chain spawns at once. If you are unlucky, it's just a wind turbine doing nothing. Both take up one 'industry-increase-slot'.

I wonder if it would be feasable to add a parameter to end consumers that allows them to take up fractions of an industry-increase-slot, such that two or four smaller chains could spawn at the same time.

Basically, when a city reaches x*2^n citizens, the whole "build an industry" thingy fires. Nothing changes about that process, except once it's completed, it looks at the end consumer it just buildt. If that end consumer only accounts for eg. half an industry-increase-slot, the same "build an industry" routine starts over, except the pool of potential end consumers is limited to those who account for only half a slot or less, etc.

This would allow for smaller end consumers to be more viable in the game, rather than a disappointment. While a single Mom-and-pop corner store that needs a truckload of goods every other month is just incomparable to a large car dealership with a huge steel- and plastic industry behind it, if you can get several of them it's not so bad.

To keep it simple, powers of 2 should be enough - so half, quarter and an eight; maybe 2 could be implemented by storing a token that reminds to skips the next spawn round.
Note that this is completely independent of how industry_increase_every actually works. I know there were some talks/complains once about it being linked to population of individual cities rather than global population, but any changes in that regard would not interfere with the proposed concept.

DrSuperGood

I proposed this a while ago. The difference was that each industry in a chain has a cost associated with it. This would allow chain suppliers to be expanded gradually rather than all at once when a new consumer opens. It could also be used to rebuild suppliers if they are deleted or destroyed.

makie

I think there should be a new parameter "build_time" in factory dats as it is for city curiousity buildings.
If the city grows to the given number of inhabitants the factory that contain that parameter should be build.
Example a tiny city should contain a market.
a bigger city get a supermarket and a big city get a car market.

Unfortunately, megacities get only very few factories due to the exponential factor and it is nothing pak manager can do for getting more factorys in big citys

Ters

What Leartin and makie proposes is similar to what I rather wanted in the discussion I think DrSuperGood is referring to. Cities should have a demand for shops, which then spawn the remaining chain as usual. The smaller the shops, the more of them it takes to satisfy the demand.

Unfortunately, one might end up getting a bunch of small markets rather than bigger supermarkets that way. And it doesn't work for garbage, which is produced by towns and should be shipped away from it. Power plants are also a bit different, since they can serve multiple smaller towns, and should also realistically be demanded by other industries. (Hypermarkets and shopping centers can also serve multiple smaller towns.)

Leartin

Well, I agree with all the responses so far and would also love to see more elaborated systems like that. I suggested this version because it seems a bit easier to do, does not change existing balance, and would not contradict any of the other suggestions.