Game Design Details: Electrical Substation

City Economic Simulation DLC for Capitalism Lab
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David
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Game Design Details: Electrical Substation

Post by David »

I have just got some new design details from the dev team regarding the power plants and would like to share with you guys. Any comments and/or suggestions are welcome.

New Firm Type: Electrical Substation

There are two purposes of a electrical substation:
1. Input electricity from power plants
2. Distribute electricity to customers.

The player can build a grid of electrical substation. Any electrical substation in the grid can be set to input electricity from a power plant. The game will automatically aggregate all electricity supplied to the grid and distribute them to customers, including residential and non-residential customers.

Functional Unit Types in the 3x3 layout:

Input unit
It links it to a power station to input electricity.

It may purchase electricity from the company’s own power plant or from third party power plants.

The power plant’s electricity cost is like the wholesale costs in factories, whereas the electrical substation’s cost is like the retail cost in a retail store.

e.g. An electrical substation buys from a power plant at a cost of $0.1 and sell them to customers for $0.2 per KWH.

The choices of power plants that you can input electricity from is limited by geographical coverage of the power plants. (In the power plant map mode, you will be able to see a circle representing the geographical coverage of each power plant.)

Distribution unit
This unit distributes electricity to customers.

Each electrical substation can cover a geographic area around its location. The customers located within the covered geographic area will be able to purchase electricity from the company. The geographic coverage can be viewed on the mini map.

Each Distribution Unit has a Utilization rate (like the Utilization rate in a Sale unit), which increases as more customers buy electricity from it. When the utilization rate reaches 100, the player will have to set up additional Distribution Unit within the same firm to increase the distribution capacity (like setting up more Sale unit in a retail store to serve an increasingly large number of customers.)


Unit Linkage
Input units should be linked to distribution units.


If there is more than one input units from electrical substation connected to a power plant, the power supply will be divided evenly among the client units.

(Perhaps on the Client List window of the Power Plant's output unit, there can be an interface for allocating different electricity outputs to different clients.)
Inarius
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Posts: 162
Joined: Fri Sep 23, 2011 8:38 am

Re: Game Design Details: Electrical Substation

Post by Inarius »

Is the consumption linked to something, or will it be the same between different cities ?
Mogul
Posts: 6
Joined: Sun Nov 30, 2014 10:50 pm

Re: Game Design Details: Electrical Substation

Post by Mogul »

David - I like how the team has created the substation and think it works well. I presume that it will have an "effective/influence area" around the substation? Also, will the price the substation can charge customers have a ceiling, mirroring the regulated nature of a utility, or will it be market based? Similarly, will the power plant have price caps (suggest it doesn't).
JohnSmith
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Posts: 19
Joined: Tue Dec 30, 2014 10:49 pm

Re: Game Design Details: Electrical Substation

Post by JohnSmith »

David wrote:I have just got some new design details from the dev team regarding the power plants and would like to share with you guys. Any comments and/or suggestions are welcome.

New Firm Type: Electrical Substation

There are two purposes of a electrical substation:
1. Input electricity from power plants
2. Distribute electricity to customers.

The player can build a grid of electrical substation. Any electrical substation in the grid can be set to input electricity from a power plant. The game will automatically aggregate all electricity supplied to the grid and distribute them to customers, including residential and non-residential customers.

Functional Unit Types in the 3x3 layout:

Input unit
It links it to a power station to input electricity.

It may purchase electricity from the company’s own power plant or from third party power plants.

The power plant’s electricity cost is like the wholesale costs in factories, whereas the electrical substation’s cost is like the retail cost in a retail store.

e.g. An electrical substation buys from a power plant at a cost of $0.1 and sell them to customers for $0.2 per KWH.

The choices of power plants that you can input electricity from is limited by geographical coverage of the power plants. (In the power plant map mode, you will be able to see a circle representing the geographical coverage of each power plant.)

Distribution unit
This unit distributes electricity to customers.

Each electrical substation can cover a geographic area around its location. The customers located within the covered geographic area will be able to purchase electricity from the company. The geographic coverage can be viewed on the mini map.

Each Distribution Unit has a Utilization rate (like the Utilization rate in a Sale unit), which increases as more customers buy electricity from it. When the utilization rate reaches 100, the player will have to set up additional Distribution Unit within the same firm to increase the distribution capacity (like setting up more Sale unit in a retail store to serve an increasingly large number of customers.)


Unit Linkage
Input units should be linked to distribution units.


If there is more than one input units from electrical substation connected to a power plant, the power supply will be divided evenly among the client units.

(Perhaps on the Client List window of the Power Plant's output unit, there can be an interface for allocating different electricity outputs to different clients.)

I like the idea, but how will it look like?
counting
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Re: Game Design Details: Electrical Substation

Post by counting »

For the most part, looks OK, I am only curious, it's easy to compare residential customers as normal retail customers, but who will be non-residential customers? Will factories need new liking button? Or will they be distributed via government system? Or commercial buildings/retail stores?
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