Megafactory logistics DLC

[Max]

I always felt that the economies of scale in the game were sort of lacking. When I discovered that one unit manufactuing textiles can feed 2 units manufacturing stuffed toys, it was really cool. unfortunately, there isn't a way to make many other pretty ratios in the game. No matter how you organized your factories, around half the space inside of them were actually used for buying and selling, when even a slightly bigger grid to work with would eliminate this problem. I propose a few minor tweaks and one major one to make a more in-depth logistic system that will turn production into an interesting puzzle.

The biggest tweak is that any building that performs some action on a resource can share resources. Each building can, in theory, link to as many as 4 different buildings for sharing resources, 1 on each cardinal direction . In order to share resources, they have to do it on the same floor (For example, the second story of a warehouse can only connect with the second story of a furniture store.) In addition, a building can only form 1 link per side. If it touches 2 buildings on 1 side, it simply vanishes.

Think about how cool this would be. Even a really efficient layout for a simple factory uses only 55% of its actual space for manufacturing, the rest going to selling and buying slots, and the buying and selling slots are hardly used at their capacity. For manufacturing more complex product, it isn't uncommon for the most efficient layout to use only 33% of the space. If players were given more flexibility, imagine how efficiently they could use this space. A 3X3 grid of adjacent factories would give you essentially a sudoku grid's worth of Manufactuing slots to play with. Think about how cool it would be if there was a giant network of factories huddled together with warehouses that take in silica, raw ore, coal, and oil, and assembles these raw products into a car, all inside one massive industrial complex, then pumping them into an auto dealer.

When I say any building can link to any other building, I 100% mean any building as long as they in some way work with physical products. Mines to factories, warehouses to farms, retail stores directly to farms, or any other combination that you can imagine. There are obviously some practical reasons why in most circumstances, you wouldn't have a good use case for those, but the point is to open up supply chain creativity.

Simply this alone for a DLC will add a mind-boggling amount of complexity to the game. But I feel like there are a couple more tweaks to enhance the experience of playing a DLC with an emphasis on supply chains economies of scale is the emphasis.


Smaller tweaks:

-Manufacturers guide QOL improvementThe manufacturers guide shows you how much a small, medium, and large manufacturing slot will produce monthly if operating at 100% capacity, and how that changes at different levels. This will allow the player to have an easier time balancing their multi-building supply chains.

-Tweaked road mechanicsOnly the buildings with a buy or sell slot need to be built next to the road. If the player attempts to build a factory not next to the road, a warning might pop up, but the game won't stop them. However, if the player uses a layout with any buy or sell slots, or attempts to create one manually, the game will stop them.

-SkybridgesFor massive networks of side-by-side factories, the player (and AI) will need a way to work around road networks without controlling the government. In addition, players probably need a way to fit together buildings of different sizes in a neat grid. Any 2 buildings can have a skybridge between them. A skybridge can be built on top of any road, and you do not have to buy the land it travels over if the land is government owned. It's a 1X1 building that costs 10,000$ and 100$ to maintain that can only be built if it is a.) Only touching 1 building (Including another skybridge) or b.) Touching 2 buildings on opposite sides, either north and south, or east and west. (Including another skybridge). It allows you to connect the only 2 buildings it links as if they were touching each other.

-Warehouse shipping cost reductionAny item sold between 2 warehouses has a 75% shipping cost discount. This mechanic is to allow for even bulky items to be shipped between two cities affordably with the right infrastructure, which encourages the player to construct 1 gigafactory instead of many smaller factories. This effect doesn't work if items are sold between a non-warehouse and a warehouse, only 2 warehouses. ( I also think this would be a good base game feature)

-Megafactory navigationThere are 4 arrows attached to the side of each building's floorplans. Clicking them will take you to the building they are connected to in that direction. When the building doesn't connect to anything, these arrows are grayed out, and don't do anything.

-AI AdjustmentsAI have a couple of hand-built presets for mega factories. If where they place it intersects with a road, they attempt to add skybridges between the factories and try again. In addition, behind the scenes, all difficulty is raised so that there is a generally higher level of price aggressiveness to encourage the player to exploit economies of scale.

-Factory Analysis View tweak I know that the "Factory Analysis" view can handle multi-step supply chains. It should be reworked to cope with inter-building supply chains.


-Livestock possessing tweaklivestock can be directly sold as is. they can then be processed into livestock products inside of factories in Manufactuing units. Any livestock processed in this way is done so at 200% speed (on a per-worker basis.) I'm imagining the factory can essentially act like a specialized slaughterhouse.

-ability to set Manufactuing slots before materials go to them This is self-explanatory. If a manufacturing slot is connected to another manufacturing slot with a set recipe, it will assume the set recipe must be some input and show all possible manufacturing processes given the inputs it has.

-CTR+ Click cycles through the types of diagonal linkages. Self explanatory. This should be in the base game.


-Radical RND economies of scale In the spirit of crazy economies of scale, radical RnD should be given more advantage. Just like how longer research projects give you disproportionally more tech points, radical RnD should give you disproportionately more expected tech points, so that the expected value of tech points goes up the riskier your approach.

[mdemircan2]

good idea,

[Max]

good idea,

Yeah. I would whip up some concept art, but I got some exams.

[David]

Thanks for your suggestions.

I would recommend that you create a poll for your suggestion to gauge the community's interest in it. There would be a higher chance that the dev team will implement them if the interest level is high.

You could see some examples of the polls in the Suggestions forum at http://www.capitalism2.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=14

For more info about new feature requests evaluation process, please see: http://www.capitalism2.com/forum/viewto ... =14&t=7052

[David]

Yeah. I would whip up some concept art, but I got some exams.

Look forward to the concept art. And good luck with your exams.

I've forwarded your suggestion to the dev team. I hope they will consider it as I think it is a good design.

[David]

I posted a poll on X.com (formerly Twitter.com) about this suggestion of the Megafactory logistics DLC.

Please vote at https://twitter.com/CapitalismLab/statu ... 0720970865

If this poll at x.com turns out to get more responses than CapLab forum (because it is more common to have registered x.com accounts than registered CapLab forum accounts), I will post new polls there regularly.

Subsequently, I also posted the same poll on reddit.com to collect more feedback: https://www.reddit.com/r/capitalismlab/ ... uggestion/