I've been processing a lot of possibilities for the "stress-based" base construction game. The idea is that you almost never have a specific amount of anything: instead, everything is measured in terms of how much stress you're putting on the supply.
Let me pitch you a tutorial stage: a shipwreck. You wash up on land with a few survivors and all you can do is try to gather supplies from the beach and the tropical jungle.
To do this, you create a stockpile and assign folks to it.
silverwizard
in reply to Craig P • •Craig P
in reply to Craig P • • •They don't find individual things. Instead, the stockpile steadily "fills up", in terms of a percentage.
And the stock is listed as categories of things. Primary thing? Scrap wood. Secondary? Gathered foods. Tertiary? Damaged furniture washed up on shore.
Here's the deal: if you want to build a house using the scrap wood, it puts a load on that stockpile. This steadily reduces the overall fullness as it is built, and can reorder things so scrap wood is secondary or even tertiary.
Craig P
in reply to Craig P • • •Trying to take secondary or tertiary goods puts a much higher strain on the stockpile and is much more likely to drop them off the list entirely.
IE, a shack built of scrap wood might take 10% of a full stockpile over the course of two days if the scrap wood is primary.
But if scrap wood is secondary, it takes 20%. Tertiary? Even more. And since that's such a big percentage of the stockpile, you're likely to knock those down to tertiary or off the list entirely.
Craig P
in reply to Craig P • • •This might sound complex, but that's because it's literally the most complex example I could think of.
99% of the time it's things like: is this train station trying to run too much cargo? If so, everything that needs cargo from the train station has that excess stress added to it.
Is someone working too hard? Every place they work has that much stress added to it.
And so on. Basics.
But I needed to crack "what about ACTUAL LIMITED SUPPLIES".
Craig P
in reply to Craig P • • •But this also offers a lot of fun possibilities.
For example, you can nurse your limited supplies along really neatly if you chain your depots.
That raw depot full of scrap wood and furniture and food?
If you want to, you can create a focused stockpile that only takes, say, scrap wood, and pulls from the first stockpile.
This reduces the first stockpile... if balanced correctly, you can even leave wood as primary, if the drain isn't so bad. But what happens in the second stockpile?
Craig P
in reply to Craig P • • •Primary: scrap wood. Secondary... what?
Well, variations on scrap wood!
Fuel wood, good wood, driftwood, whatever.
And you can, if you choose, draw on those other kinds of wood to drop them off the table and "reroll" the category.
Then nurse those by drawing scrap wood off until it drops down, leaving them on top...
Essentially you're filtering and refining using nothing but stockpile sorting, at least in theory.
All the while, remember whatever's primary gets drawn more efficiently.
Craig P
in reply to Craig P • • •Well, all that is just nonsense "hard mode" shit.
Normally you'd create a workshop to convert scrap wood into the other kinds of wood, and that workshop then can provide those woods-
Which, of course, puts stress on the workshop, which, of course, puts stress on the stockpile...
Stress all the way down. The only real numbers are stress numbers. And fullness numbers, I guess, but those are basically stress numbers.
Shane Celis
in reply to Craig P • • •I love this idea. Reminds me in a way of an rpg I read where money was not quantified. It was a difficulty. Depending on your character’s wealth you rolled a different die. To buy something, you do a wealth check. Kind of blew my mind that you could model money and goods like that.
Back to your idea. My fear for this idea is that it invites a ton more art assets.
Craig P
in reply to Shane Celis • • •silverwizard
in reply to Craig P • •@Craig P My brain quantifies this in terms of boswars or Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, TAK has a mana bar with consumption and production, boswars has ore and energy, and buildings which give ongoing value and resources you can consume for temp value.
Basically, in each, you're splitting your production between all builds, and it's fine until consumption exceeds production
Craig P
in reply to silverwizard • • •silverwizard likes this.
silverwizard
in reply to Craig P • •@Craig P yeah, basically TAK would have each job have a maximum draw, and you'd spend equally on all jobs up to maximum.
So if you had:
Job1 5 mana
Job2 3 mana
Job3 10 mana
and had an income of 20, you'd be going at full capacity. If you had an income of 15 only Job3 would be degraded, if you had 6 all jobs would be spending 2 per turn.
And yeah, this is easily my favourite model
Craig P
in reply to silverwizard • • •@silverwizard Yup, with the addition that the stress propagates over time.
For example, if your rail stop supplies a local store, but then your rail stop rises to 200% capacity-
Over the course of a few days, the shop's stress level will steadily rise as well.
When it gets over 100%, that propagates to the customers of the shop...
silverwizard likes this.
silverwizard
in reply to Craig P • •