Suggestion: Change Fire - Event mechanics (if possible)
Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2012 2:59 pm
At vthe moment, fire is the main reason for me, to turn off random events on my next game.
Not because it is crippling for my company (although it can be, if it happens early in my game), but rather, because it is extremly annoying later in the game.
To mention the IMHO 3 most annoying things with the current fire mechanics:
Lets say the fire broke out in an department store in a dense city ... the only thing the dialog box says is, that a fire broke out in a store in city x ...
but unfortunately you don´t know exactly where, as there is no "GoTo"-Button ... meaning that you have to manually search the city (which might be a problem, if your city has lots of high rise buildings, as the destroyed store might be hidden behind them.
Lets say you have a large company with lots of producers and semi producers. Now a fire breaks out in a farm or a facrtory which produces semi products that are used by lots of other factories. Now you not only have to rebuild the factory (ideally with a similar floor plan [which of course is helped by your floor plan library] but you first have to remember, which things this factory/farm produced and from which other factories/farms it got its input ... quite a hard thing to do.
But the single most annoying case:
Lets say the fire breaks out in a warehouse that distributes a product toi all of your stores worldwide. As sooin as a fire destroys this store, you have a huge number of broken links for this supply chain. Now, after rebuilding the warehouse (and waiting a few days till it has the product in its output) you have to singlehandedly visit each store on the whole world which received input from this warehouse and choose the "new" rebuilt warehouse as target for their purchase departments.
It might take me 5 minutes to rebuild the warehouse and its input links ... and it might cost so few money that I can pay it out of my petty cash ... but rebuilding the broken links of the stores that were serviced by this warehouse might take me 20+ minutes.
Unfortunately the Batch-Linker doesn´t seem to work in this case (probably because a broken link is handled differently from a working link by the game.
IMHO the best mechanism for fires (if you are able to do such changes) would be:
The factory/warehouse or whatever is in a "destroyed" state after the fire. That is, all links between this firm and others still are present, but the departments in the "destroyed" firm don´t do any work (that is, purchase departments don´t purchase, sales departments don´t sell, manufaturing departments don´t produce (and of course all stored content (products/rawl materials etc.) is destroyed).
By paying the price for [Building cost] + [Department costs] the manager is able to restore the firm into working order (with probably having the level of its departments reduced by 1-2 levels, reflecting the loss of skilled workers due to the fire [which also seems to be more realistic than to have to start by level 1 anew ... as it is at the moment])
And of course, the addition of a "GoTo"-Button would be nice (not only for fires, but generally for events)
Not because it is crippling for my company (although it can be, if it happens early in my game), but rather, because it is extremly annoying later in the game.
To mention the IMHO 3 most annoying things with the current fire mechanics:
Lets say the fire broke out in an department store in a dense city ... the only thing the dialog box says is, that a fire broke out in a store in city x ...
but unfortunately you don´t know exactly where, as there is no "GoTo"-Button ... meaning that you have to manually search the city (which might be a problem, if your city has lots of high rise buildings, as the destroyed store might be hidden behind them.
Lets say you have a large company with lots of producers and semi producers. Now a fire breaks out in a farm or a facrtory which produces semi products that are used by lots of other factories. Now you not only have to rebuild the factory (ideally with a similar floor plan [which of course is helped by your floor plan library] but you first have to remember, which things this factory/farm produced and from which other factories/farms it got its input ... quite a hard thing to do.
But the single most annoying case:
Lets say the fire breaks out in a warehouse that distributes a product toi all of your stores worldwide. As sooin as a fire destroys this store, you have a huge number of broken links for this supply chain. Now, after rebuilding the warehouse (and waiting a few days till it has the product in its output) you have to singlehandedly visit each store on the whole world which received input from this warehouse and choose the "new" rebuilt warehouse as target for their purchase departments.
It might take me 5 minutes to rebuild the warehouse and its input links ... and it might cost so few money that I can pay it out of my petty cash ... but rebuilding the broken links of the stores that were serviced by this warehouse might take me 20+ minutes.
Unfortunately the Batch-Linker doesn´t seem to work in this case (probably because a broken link is handled differently from a working link by the game.
IMHO the best mechanism for fires (if you are able to do such changes) would be:
The factory/warehouse or whatever is in a "destroyed" state after the fire. That is, all links between this firm and others still are present, but the departments in the "destroyed" firm don´t do any work (that is, purchase departments don´t purchase, sales departments don´t sell, manufaturing departments don´t produce (and of course all stored content (products/rawl materials etc.) is destroyed).
By paying the price for [Building cost] + [Department costs] the manager is able to restore the firm into working order (with probably having the level of its departments reduced by 1-2 levels, reflecting the loss of skilled workers due to the fire [which also seems to be more realistic than to have to start by level 1 anew ... as it is at the moment])
And of course, the addition of a "GoTo"-Button would be nice (not only for fires, but generally for events)