GIGAFACTORIES

Suggestions for new DLC projects.
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eleaza
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Re: GIGAFACTORIES

Post by eleaza »

megapolis wrote: 1. Even now at a certain point we reach the moment when we don't have a place where to invest the money. Billions are just rotting on our bank accounts. There's just no need to optimize anything.
2. 3x3 or 10x10 - does not matter. Within a week we will have a perfect factory design for every product on the forum. Just copy it and save in layout plans library and the game is over.
3. There's a lot of games that are focused on factory planning. Big Pharma, for example. Or Factorio that I can only describe as a masterpiece.
For the first one I think it can be balanced out for expenditure point of view, more "floor tile" should not linearly translate like 10x10 tiles is just 100/9 times more expenses than a 3x3. And 10x10 production throughput isn't just 100/9 times as 3x3, also the adding of a single unit will be like buying production line machine cost way more than current level, than this will be a economy of scale problem. How to balance the longer-term average expense with production quantity and prices. Players will have to find the right throughput and layout not just using every tile possible, too much it's a burden of expenditures, too few you will not be able to sell enough goods, and become just a shadow compare to AI's much higher base production (essentially means the right scale for human players equivalent to current scale have to be at the far end in very large size not the smaller 3x3 size, in smaller scale players can not get nearly enough income to expend fast enough)

As to the second issue, that's not possible, you underestimate the possible permutation of such a combination. A 9 grids with 3 major different units have at least 3^9 permutation (obviously it's much more, since there isn't just 3 types of unit in a factory, and in fact if you consider empty tile as one, this is at least 4^9), and if limited to like only 1 to 3 of input types is permitted, at least 1 output is needed and every manufacturing unit is equal with no difference, as well as the rotation of 8 direction is also equal, and finally most of them are not functional and usable, this number will be reduced to around merely thousands, but even so there's no true optimize layout yet, sometimes two layout with different throughput has different advantage, or sometimes you need to mix with other products, hence even in this limited form, the optimization answer is still interesting enough for human to play as a mini-game. But for production chain like up to 10, and 100 tiles, the scale will be at least 10^100 per product (completely discarding other more permutation like how many different types of goods can be produced intermediately and products that can be shared in the same factory with similar intermediary products), even let's say 1 out of 1 trillion trillion (1/10^24) of them are usable and functional connections, it's still at the level of 10^76 possible combination. This is at the scale equivalent to the total number of atoms in the universe. And I can guarantee a lot lot of them will be roughly the same "effective" as each others. I doubt we will see the most optimize layout anytime soon. (This is also why I asked before how to make AI be able to play such a game, this is essentially impossible to solve dynamically and certainly impossible using libraries of default layouts)

As to comparison with other games, I think it's really comparing apple with orange, the appeal of this will be there is an established open world procedurally generated economic environment for players to base their layout for. Imagine if you can sell your products, and purchasing components in factorio not just have to build every one of them through production chain, and the price is not some fixed data generated from random function, but from the larger world outside that are basically many competition factorio AIs building their own "factories" in real time and supplying them to you or from you. That's what I was talking about worthy of a new game concept.
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megapolis
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Re: GIGAFACTORIES

Post by megapolis »

eleaza, you've made a nice but wrong analysis.

1. I don't mean that 10x10 factory will be more effective. Current factories are effective enough. Even in current 3x3 layout I don't even do training in my factories (I train only R&D and Farms). My point of view is that factory gives me profit and that's enough for me. From micromanagement point of view adding a factory is less time-consuming than optimizing existing factory. Even more. From macroeconomy point of view new factory provides workplaces and as a result gives more healthy economy. By the way if gigafactory will not be more effective than ordinary factory, no one will use them. Use Occam's Razor. No need to add entities beyond necessary.
Now back to my idea that I meant in point 1. I don't know what happens in your games but in my games I use to buy everything. All city property and all the competitors. After that there's basically no need for money. I have so much money that I cannot invest them. There's just basically nothing to buy after certain moment. And I can do it with level 1 factories. That's why I question the need of gigafactories. To sum it up: if gigafactory will not be more effective then there's no need in it; if it will be more effective then it will just make the game easier and I will buy everything in the game a lot earlier.

2. Sorry, but that is ridiculous. It won't take eternity to make a perfect design for a 10x10 factory. It does not require brute force, just some Algebra 101 knowledge. Also I can say that it is not needed. In current game even the inefficient design with say 3 inputs, 1 production and 1 sales unit will make profit despite high running costs. And this design is only about 40% as efficient as perfect design for 3 inputs (Sorry, not interested in exact percentage number, first estimation is enough here). I can say that with gigafactory I will make 80% efficient design in no time and without any brain activity. To be honest it will be enough to win the game in reasonable time and I won't even bother looking at the forum for more efficient design. By the way, AI will use some pre-defined designs here and I will just copy them without even thinking about their efficiency. Just because the game does not require me to be more efficient that AI in factory design to win.
By the way to save you large part of eternity spent on perfect design I already made you an efficient enough for 1 input. It did not require any brain activity, just some Paint mad skillz.
10x10 design.jpg
10x10 design.jpg (182.02 KiB) Viewed 4372 times
3. That's why I mentioned Factorio. Cap Lab is not like Factorio. It is about something completely different. This game is about macroeconomy, not about building a perfect production line. For a perfect production line I will play Factorio, not Cap Lab. Factorio is already better than any effort made by Cap Lab in this direction.
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eleaza
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Re: GIGAFACTORIES

Post by eleaza »

megapolis wrote: 1. I don't mean that 10x10 factory will be more effective. Current factories are effective enough. Even in current 3x3 layout I don't even do training in my factories (I train only R&D and Farms). My point of view is that factory gives me profit and that's enough for me. From micromanagement point of view adding a factory is less time-consuming than optimizing existing factory. Even more. From macroeconomy point of view new factory provides workplaces and as a result gives more healthy economy. By the way if gigafactory will not be more effective than ordinary factory, no one will use them. Use Occam's Razor. No need to add entities beyond necessary.
Now back to my idea that I meant in point 1. I don't know what happens in your games but in my games I use to buy everything. All city property and all the competitors. After that there's basically no need for money. I have so much money that I cannot invest them. There's just basically nothing to buy after certain moment. And I can do it with level 1 factories. That's why I question the need of gigafactories. To sum it up: if gigafactory will not be more effective then there's no need in it; if it will be more effective then it will just make the game easier and I will buy everything in the game a lot earlier.
That's my point, the layout randomly through in will NOT be effective at all, it probably even not able to make money at all, but losses, if you don't plan it right. This is linking to the second issue, so I'll leave the question about layout just here. Another issue you said about not "effective" than "ordinary factory" that's just a misunderstanding, the gigafactory will be more efficient to run but will be more expensive to set up, and obvious have much more throughput. This is the basic fixed cost and varied cost problem, you can make small cheap home bakery to produce bread, but you can not compete with factory production line of various pastries, you can cheapy setup up 5 different small kitchens to produce 5 type of pastries, but they will be wasteful and not able to scale up easily. A factory can share intermedia ingredients, like making dough, with different pasta, etc, and combined into hundreds of different finishing goods with much higher space efficiency, however the setup of machines and production lines are much expensive. However on average the longer term average cost can upset the initial investment. So the question is not a simple more effective or not than smaller counterpart, but they represent a very different capital structure and business strategies as well as gameplay. Like larger factory can quickly shift to different end product easily and don't need to change the intermediate steps, and you need to completely rework the input link and manufacturing for small basic ones. And to rebuff you last sentence, if gigafactory is more efficient than massive spamming smaller ones, what you earn may not be simply goes to expand quickly, since the higher initial cost will force players to leverage and borrowed money to get to build gigafactory in the first place, so the profit will need be pay back the loans, or do players choose to leverage even higher and build up the risk of debt even higher? Where one recession or raise of interest will likely make the constant interest payment very costly.
megapolis wrote: 2. Sorry, but that is ridiculous. It won't take eternity to make a perfect design for a 10x10 factory. It does not require brute force, just some Algebra 101 knowledge. Also I can say that it is not needed. In current game even the inefficient design with say 3 inputs, 1 production and 1 sales unit will make profit despite high running costs. And this design is only about 40% as efficient as perfect design for 3 inputs (Sorry, not interested in exact percentage number, first estimation is enough here). I can say that with gigafactory I will make 80% efficient design in no time and without any brain activity. To be honest it will be enough to win the game in reasonable time and I won't even bother looking at the forum for more efficient design. By the way, AI will use some pre-defined designs here and I will just copy them without even thinking about their efficiency. Just because the game does not require me to be more efficient that AI in factory design to win.
By the way to save you large part of eternity spent on perfect design I already made you an efficient enough for 1 input. It did not require any brain activity, just some Paint mad skillz.
You are wrong about making assumption based on just one sample of this layout. First, there won't be just 1 intermediary product of input-manufacturing-output pair in such a large layout, give me a 10 different components semi-step to the finishing product layout and tell me you can simply come up with it on the fly. Even if it's just current CPU production, this is no way the best efficient, since you need to include the previous step of using silica to produce silicon, which silica's input can support at least 4 manufacturing of silicon, and 1 silicon production can support 2 CPU, and 2 manufacturing required 1 output. Show us you can come up with a design that can maximize this ratio in a 10x10 layout (1-4-8-4). And you exactly describe the difficulty of designing existing layout for an AI factory, now if there's not possible for AI to have a default layout, and they just maintain a tunable efficiency like the current no-peaking setup where you can not see AI's factory, so you can not simply copy it or load from library, then there won't be any problem turning this into a layout management oriented game mechanics.
megapolis wrote: 3. That's why I mentioned Factorio. Cap Lab is not like Factorio. It is about something completely different. This game is about macroeconomy, not about building a perfect production line. For a perfect production line I will play Factorio, not Cap Lab. Factorio is already better than any effort made by Cap Lab in this direction.
That's what I said, the combination will be worth as a completely new game concept, and I originally said this might be better as a new mechanic for a new game, not DLC, it's just way too different than the base Cap Lab.
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Re: GIGAFACTORIES

Post by David »

It is always good to hear opinions from different perspectives, as one of the purpose of this forum is to help us critically review the game concepts presented here and filter out those really good ones that are worthy of the dev team's time and resources for implementation.

BTW, I spent some time playing Big Pharma today and I really had a hard time remembering those cures and side effects and those gameplay rules for reducing or increasing the concentration. I meant when one has to deal with all those different types of drugs and their technical terms, it is really not that interesting if one is not interested in drugs and related medical topics. On the other hand, Capitalism's production methods are related to daily consumer products and sound a lot more intuitive to me.

I am not criticizing Big Pharma. I am just saying that the game appeals to certain groups of people and there are people like me who do not find the game very appealing because of the scope is limited to medicine.

As for Factorio, I only played it very briefly and will play more before I will comment in details. But it seems to me that its economic aspect is not very strong. (No strong concepts of profits and losses, right?) So it is not an economic simulation game, but a building/construction game more like Minecraft in 2D with lots of crafting, right? So, there should be a market for an economic game that contains a decent simulation of logistics even though the logistics simulation is not as strong as Factorio. What are your viewpoints?
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eleaza
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Re: GIGAFACTORIES

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David wrote: BTW, I spent some time playing Big Pharma today and I really had a hard time remembering those cures and side effects and those gameplay rules for reducing or increasing the concentration. I meant when one has to deal with all those different types of drugs and their technical terms, it is really not that interesting if one is not interested in drugs and related medical topics. On the other hand, Capitalism's production methods are related to daily consumer products and sound a lot more intuitive to me.

I am not criticizing Big Pharma. I am just saying that the game appeals to certain groups of people and there are people like me who do not find the game very appealing because of the scope is limited to medicine.

As for Factorio, I only played it very briefly and will play more before I will comment in details. But it seems to me that its economic aspect is not very strong. (No strong concepts of profits and losses, right?) So it is not an economic simulation game, but a building/construction game more like Minecraft in 2D with lots of crafting, right? So, there should be a market for an economic game that contains a decent simulation of logistics even though the logistics simulation is not as strong as Factorio. What are your viewpoints?
There is another production layout management game called Production Line http://www.positech.co.uk/productionline/, and it's on a massive scale of producing every single detail component in a car factory. And somehow it's quite intuitive for most of their parts. It easier to start with probably because it breaks down stages within stages, so players don't end up with information overload right from the beginning. Or maybe it's a choice or words and functionality that makes certain type of good production line game more appealing, and most often the sucessful one seems to follow very specific themes than a general all purpose factory management.

Factorio is probably on the more general production simulation side in this sense, with completely fictional production lines. But this seems to make "exploring" what kind of production can be made with which input sort of fun. I think the reason isn't just purely on how player optimize the layout, but the "end products" actually work toward something, and have observable function in the fictional world. The munitions/weapons can be used to fight aliens(or natives depends on perspective), different transportations make moving around easier, even lighting make view the screen easier at a meta level function. Even robots to assist make and managing building new facilities. Making the players engaging into care what they make and really saw the effect I feel is a very crucial point we wish to put complex mechanics into factory production design. Like the selling of cars actually makes cars shown on the street increase/changes, even see the brand of cars are actually from player's own creation is a great reward. Or a very wide idea that players can walk-in a store and bought the products for themselves, and use/decorate them in their home. Or players can click on a house/buildings and pop up a window shows other "citizen's place" and see their brand actually "taken over" NPC's virtual lives, instead of an abstract market share pie chart. The presentation matters I feel.

Also I think in the past there are games combined economic simulation with factory logistics, even detailed interior layout. One of the less successful one is Car Tycoon, the factory line is very simple, and lots of bugs, but it has the basic source material to factory to retail mechanics and some kind of basic supply/demand mechanics, however the most interesting aspect is that you actually see cars roll out of the factory, and drive all the way to the auto retail and be sold to customers who drove your cars on the street (even creating unintended traffic jam). It's somehow mesmerizing to see your work "in action". Another one is a Taiwanese game "King of Entrepreneurs 創業王", I don't think it was ever translated into English. But it truly was like a more manufacturing layout focused Capitalism Lab, with less "accurate" economic simulation. And players even need to managing the transportation route to retail store. (even retail store can have customized massive layout, or even just mixed factory with retail, I think it's simulating at a lower level than Capitalism lab, where each buildings is like a small map to freely customize, and the city map is analog to the world map in Capitalism)
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megapolis
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Re: GIGAFACTORIES

Post by megapolis »

David, thank you for your input. I just wanted to stress the point that there's no need to reinvent the bicycle.
Cap Lab is about macroeconomy and it is good at it.
For factory micromanagement there's a lot of other games and they are good at it.
My point is that Cap Lab does not need factories micromanagement. When you have 1000 factories you have enough micromanagement just to check their prices, inputs and utilization. In fact when you have 1000 firms in your company you should be focused on what are your next 100 factories and where should you place them and you should not bother about "is unit in cell (5,6) of your 10x10 gigafactory #735 effective enough".
Just one current example. In my current game I have 200 apartments. My last issue was should I go for mayor on elections that has just started or should I build 200 more apartments. After 10 minutes of thinking I decided to go for 200 new apartments instead of going for a mayorship. And that was in year 2009 of a game. Do you really think that I will ever will be bothered about any particular cell in any factory? That's why in previous discussions several months ago I offered to drop 3x3 design in favour of single factory design for each product.
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Re: GIGAFACTORIES

Post by David »

Nice posts. And good thinking exercises from the game design point of view.

I would suggest anybody who has a slight interest in the field of game design to participate in any discussions on this forum too.

We can just keep the discussions going while the dev team is busy working on the Digital Age DLC. When we finally come into some conclusions of a really good and solid DLC design, I will present it to the dev team for consideration.
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Re: GIGAFACTORIES

Post by Rusty Gamer »

Speaking of car factory lines, does anyone remember the game "Detroit"?
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Re: GIGAFACTORIES

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Rusty Gamer wrote:Speaking of car factory lines, does anyone remember the game "Detroit"?
Yes, I remember it.

Do you think of any kind of gameplay that you are really interested in that can potentially be created as a DLC of Capitalism Lab and you do not see any game of such kind on the market. In other words, do you see any underserved market segments of sim games that a CapLab DLC may be created to cater to those needs?
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Re: GIGAFACTORIES

Post by Rusty Gamer »

I've always wanted a good television management game. I think it is possible to get something like that from this game.

All the products would be TV shows.
Product classes would be genres.
Demand would be the ratings.
Stores would be the television stations.
Farms/factories could be the studios.

Research would be used to create better quality shows. Also, improved TV technology could be researched. You could start with only B&W technology, then color, later widescreen HD, cable, satellite etc.

There would have to be some tweaking of stores/stations to have time slots instead maybe. Perhaps each of the nine boxes represents a particular time slot. The ratings/demand against rival stations could be slot against slot rather than general competition.

Products could be allowed to have customised names so that we name our own shows plus, when shows get cancelled, we can create another show with the same product.

There is already enough modding ability in place to at least achieve some of these things without a DLC.
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