This suggestion has likely been suggested before, but I think now that we have education, maybe we could take a crack at these and see if these ideas stick.
Bast wants to model My colony to be like Sim city, which is very apparent in many ways. For instance, like sim city, we have to manage utilities like water, power, trash, and also air pollution to an extent, all of which are factors that cim city employs. In addition to those needs, the player also needs to have fire protection coverage by placing fire departments at certain intervals to ensure that all of the city is protected, and law enforcement by spacing police stations around the city. Crime and fires are both very realistic factors in any given city and should not be an exception in mc.
The implications of fire feature would be very simple. All structures already take damage over time in mc, so it would be nothing to add a factor that increases the chance for a fire to occur in a structure as it's health gets closer to zero. The fires could be entities that appear around a structure when triggered.. If a fire is left at full health for enough time, it will spawn one or two other fires around adjacent buildings that weren't burning before. Those fires would spawn more fires if left a full health.This creates a sort of hydra effect. If a fire is damaged but then left alone, it will quickly replenish it's health and spawn more fires after remaining at max health for a few moments. Of course, when a structure's health drops to 0, it will explode as it does normally now in mc, except it should leave an ash pile that cannot be bulldozed and would require workers to decrease it's health and eventually cause it to explode and leave a space that can be used again.
In order to combat this, the player needs to make sure that this build fire stations at regular intervals so that the entire map is covered. The fire station will only trigger if it senses a fire within it's range of effectiveness, and more advanced fire stations will have larger ranges. The station carries a certain number of fire bots that are built with the station. The bots remain in the station until the station is triggered, upon which they are filled with water from the colony reserves and released from the station to go and fight the fire before it spreads. The fire station itself should provide a certain number of living spaces and consume food, wheels, lots of water, and rum. This is because some stations have living spaces where firefighters can spend a couple nights while they are on patrol. The station would direct the fire bots, once release, would path find on their own to the nearest fire, then once they've killed the fire, they pathfind to another nearest fire. If no other fires are in range of the station, the bots return. Another cool feature would be if when fire bots ran out of water, they had to return to the station to be refilled and then relased to go back to the fire they were fighting.
As for police and crime, there may be several ways to implement this feature, but here are two:
The first way is to simply cause unhappiness in colonists that walk through areas outside the ranges of any police station, which would motivate the player to space the stations appropriately.
The second way, which is a more interactive way, would be to implement robberies in mc, and decrease the likelihood of those happening in areas inside the range of police stations. Where the ranges of the multiple stations overlap, the reducing of the likelihood of robberies should stack. Whenever a robbery happens inside a certain building, everyone passing through that building for a time should become unhappy because of crime, and crime should be added to the pie of unhappiness reasons. After a while, the building should stop making people unhappy. In order for a robbery to happen, a working colonist will randomly become a robber and randomly pick a building to rob. Police bots would be stored in the police station and would be dispatched of a robbery happens in the range of a station. The bots will chase the robber and only have a certain window to catch the robber before he gets out of the stations range. If the robber is able to flee to an area out of range of any stations, he recieves a large amount of the colonies money reserve and turns back into a regular colonist and find work again. If the robber is caught, his occupation will become prisoner, and he will have to live in jail cells for a certain amount of time and then be released to find another job.Unhappy colonists should have a more likelihood to become a robber, so the player should definitely place multiple police stations around the capital to prevent a protesting colonist turned robber from getting away with the robbery. Banks and money producing buildings should be the most likely target for a robbery, with factories, sweatshops, power plants, food and water producing buildings being among the least likely. The robber should be able to take a larger amount of money depending on how many people are working, touring, living, being entertained in the structure at that time, so gaurd your arcologies heavily.
Prisons: these structures would have a value of jail cells, which prisoners would occupy. The prison would consume food, water, and steel, and some higher teir prisons would consume cloth, rum, and money as well. When you are out of Jail cells to put the prisoners in, then police stations will let the robber go, but without the money they tried to steal. If you want, you could implement some policies on what to do with robbers to give the player the choice on what to do with them. You could deport them, execute them on the spot, have them fight to the death in arenas(which would probably help out antiquitas since Romans used to force their criminals to fight to the death in arenas). Each option may need other buildings to designed for the purpose of doing your choice of punishment to the robbers.
Finally, yes, I know that robberies aren't the only form of crime. There's fraud, smuggling, drug dealing, prostitution, murder, and the list goes on. But for this game's needs, I think that robbery would be enough crime on it's own motivate a player to work towards protecting their colonies with law enforcement.
Thanks for reading my ramblings. And again, please don't comment saying that these ideas have already been suggested. I know, I'm just adding to those Ideas with my own little twist. I truly like my colony and I want to come up with ideas that can help improve it. I just don't want to have someone give me a two bit comment that this has been suggested before and my ideas go unconsidered, especially after all of the work that i put into making these ideas so descriptive.
I voted no but changed my mind. This seems like a cool idea!
maybe the crime rate could go up 10 fold if a revolution happens, ( if revolutions get implemented in the game, see my post about revolutions to get an idea of what a revolution would be like in my colony)
username said:maybe the crime rate could go up 10 fold if a revolution happens, ( if revolutions get implemented in the game, see my post about revolutions to get an idea of what a revolution would be like in my colony)
I was thinking about suggesting riots, but revolution, riot, potato pototo.. Sim city had riots that caused massive damage to buildings and roads.
Wait, structures take damage over time? Where are these stats?
Well they used to. I can't find it anymore. But you used to have to pay repair costs because each building would lose a percentage of it's health over time and then eventually explode when that percentage reached 0. Fires would take advantage of that.