Woohoo, another wall of text!
Drury wrote:Made a test save with only trucks and 3 test towns. One got only water, one only rad food, one both. The two towns with partial service slowly shrunk, with only the one receiving both commodities grew shacks. Every other town on map with no service stagnated, which is what I'd also expect from towns receiving partial service, alas, that is not the case. It's a bit annoying as if you don't have both water and farm within reasonable distance of a town you might as well generate a new map since delivering only either will bite you later when the town shrinks so much it stops accepting stuff and you go bankrupt.
Drury wrote:As I mentioned, towns destroy buildings if you provide only one type of resource. I'm certain you kind of meant for them to remove buildings and at the same time build shacks as both food and water are provided, however, I'm not sure if that's also a correct approach from both aesthetics and gameplay standpoint. Not sure if it's possible to delay the building destruction, but if it is, it should happen only by the time that renewed buildings come to be so you don't come to the point that town is full of shacks and doesn't accept irradiated food anymore too soon. The clean food chain takes the right amount of effort and time, but by the time you get there the town will stagnate for a considerate amount of time. In addition, it makes little sense to destroy perfectly fine ruins to build your tiny corrugated metal shack. I'd imagine there'd be ruins in the center with shacks making up the suburbs.
What you describe here is a result of OpenTTD's town growth mechanism, not necessarily something I implemented on purpose. I'll do some investigating to see if I can delay town shrinkage when just one cargo is delivered, but I'm unsure if I can do that in a way without creating a sort of 'loophole' where towns
never shrink in that situation. It's a delicate balance, after all; I'm trying to do something the game wasn't really made for
As far as keeping ruins in a town instead of overbuilding them right away, that is certainly do-able. You make a good point about aesthetics, but I wonder if it would only exacerbate another issue you mentioned about houses becoming too spread apart?
Drury wrote:Also would have to share Dave's sentiment, seems there are too many road vehicles at the moment. There's a couple for each year and for the most part they're more of the same! Also a personal pet peeve, I'd hoped we'd have crazy Mad Max-esque battle truck designs, at least from the very start, although Fallout bus is very welcome.
Perhaps I can spread the introduction dates out and exaggerate the stats a little more to compensate? It would have the added bonus of stretching the existing vehicles past 100 years and also loosen the clutter.
As for the graphics...I know its pretty basic right now. Mad Max-like stuff is definitely in the pipeline, just takes time to make it
Drury wrote:Having both seeds and irradiated food seems redundant. The former becomes useless as soon as you develop all nearest towns past the stage that they accept irradiated food, the latter continues to be useful throughout the game. I'd remove seeds and use irradiated food in their place as a component for clean food (the food is likely to contain seeds that rad-free food can be grown from so it makes sense).
If you remember (it's on the website, on the industries page) there's a few additional industries I was considering adding (which I'm now 99% sure I'm going to add) which
would give irradiated food a little more purpose. It's a valid point though, I'll certainly consider it.
Drury wrote:I get the idea that when you deliver resources to an industry, they patch it up and start up production, but if you take time between deliveries the thing just falls apart again and it's really funny. It's like there were little peons holding up the roof who just gave up and went home with everyone else. I think it'd be cooler if the thing remained partly destroyed as it produces stuff initially, only patching itself up over time as you keep providing service (similar to self-upgrading power plants in ECS).
I like the idea, it sounds like the way I originally envisioned it, but the way I coded it was somewhat simple, and limited to only two months of service. I'll see if I can make something more complex, but I'm not the greatest coder
Drury wrote:Also, renewed offices are, as I understand, restored ruins, so if the townsfolk destroy all their ruins there's not much left to restore.
Well, I guess "renewed" might not be the best word since they're not technically supposed to be rebuilt ruins (at least in my eyes), but rather just more improved buildings than shacks which resemble pre-war buildings. Dunno if that makes sense, but I had a hard time thinking of a better word to describe it.
Drury wrote:Self-sustained offices also seem a bit too much of a leap at first. Self-sustained shops would be more fitting at first, maybe more post-apocalyptey still as they'd perhaps look more like military bunkers (even after decades of intense rebuilding, you can't trust the world to be perfectly civilized, and who knows what kind of weather conditions and mutated wildlife are out there?). Office blocks seem to me like far-off endgame stuff.
Remember: the buildings in place now are merely placeholders, not intended to fully represent the final product. There will be lots more variety eventually. Whether or not I can successfully implement such a succession of buildings within a class like you describe, we'll see.
Drury wrote:Town shrinkage is by design? Not sure if I like. Thought it was so older buildings get replaced, but that's not needed at such early stage. Although I have to say I honestly like the part where bringing stuff in via trains is useless, I just wish I were told earlier. Makes trains not rule the game nearly as much, if you really do wanna bring stuff in via train you better get inventive and transfer onto trucks for that steady flow and such. There should be a prompt somewhere in the game to tell you to deliver faster rather than more!
Like mentioned above, the town shrinkage is a result of OpenTTD's town growth algorithm, not mine. The only time when town shrinkage could be considered a feature is when you're siphoning off wastelanders from a town without supplying any cargoes in return. But again, that's merely a side-effect of the game's mechanics, not necessarily designed behavior (but that in particular is behavior I do like!).
As far as adding prompts to the game: it's been on my wishlist since I first envisioned this set to also have a GameScript to go with it that helps explain the general background and gameplay information. Alas, my brief adventure into GS coding ended miserably, so unless someone more able than I takes it up, it's unlikely to happen.
I like the ideas so far, it's definitely making me think of some improvements that can be made!
Same thing with AI's, but those I'm sure are broken, at least in terms of being useful...
