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I can see a need for different construction bots for different build types, but perhaps an ability to upgrade them might be beneficial, ie builder bots upgrade to advanced with tech, drones to turbo etc, but what about a dedicated cargo bot, that can be upgraded to greater carrying capacities with tech, to transport resources?

Following the thoughts

I would like if rovers remained as well.

We could work out a few simplifying rules such as:

• beyondwudge said:make rovers only travel over roads, bridges or other surfaces specifically designed for transporting them

• only one rover can be assignated to one construction
• rovers have a huge capacity and are expensive so you wont build dozens

I like the idea of the construction rover transporting resources from a storage to the construction site.

We can get rid of the harvesting bots, but we would need rovers to transport from the mining facility (which has low storage) to a storage point, which does not reduce rovers usage.

I'm not a big rover fan, i very like the game stage in MC1, when human can start to build structure allowing to remove mining bot.

But i don't like "instant" building.

Instead to have "infinite" building rover, or infinite harvesting rover, if you use the future rover like the bus/ambulance?

I like the idea to have only 1-2 bots type, just for moving resources, and having "ghost" rovers just for graphic. Maybe the building velocity can have other variables, like tech, or better "bots".

For starters, I’m assuming the region concept will be used in mc2. If that is incorrect, then most of these ideas should still apply as long as we get the ability to have a multi-mapped city.

What if each building starts as a construction site that requires workers.

You would need one construction site for each building footprint size. For instance, to make a bank, you would need a medium square construction site(2x2).

The site will be in charge of upgrading itself to the building of your choosing, but it can only upgrade to buildings that have it’s same footprint size. It also needs workers to progress toward completion and would complete the build at the end of it’s worker round, at which time it will also release its workers to go work somewhere else.

Different building choices can require different worker round times And worker amounts, and some of the more advanced buildings could require certain unique things like A constant supply of robots, alien arts, ether, oil, or water during construction on top of the base resources required for construction.

Using this method, you can plan out your city’s layout with these sites and then upgrade some of them to official buildings when the need arises.

As for resource collection. I have an idea there as well:

This is kind of going off basts idea to have resources underground. My idea is going to be simple to implement yet challenging to play with.

First, I think it would be simple if resource deposits were procedurally generated in layers and overlapped several cities in a region, just like water does now. To view these deposits you would use a filter(kind of like sim city filters for water, power, etc.). Not every map would have every kind of resource, in fact, there’s no guarantee that a given map with contain any deposits. Instead, the player will have to build their cities based on where resources are on a planet/region. However, to find said deposits, you need to survey for them. They won’t ever show up in the minerals filter until you do.

Queue the idea of surveying: For starters, the lander should be equipped with basic surveying equipment so that when it enters a map, it can survey that map for ore or regolith deposits. This allows a player to start on any map and Then search for ore or regolith. It cannot survey for any other resources however. It also takes some time to survey each map, and as we know, in early-game you need that time to build your food and water sources ASAP.

In later phases, there will need to be better survey buildings to survey for more advanced resources and in wider areas around the map they are in. For instance, an ancient alien survey tower could survey all resources and reveal deposits in one map every 10 minutes in a radius of 10 grid tiles around it’s home map. If it’s in a medium map, the top-most square could count as the center-point.

Consequences of this type of system:
This system will cause ore and regolith extraction buildings to no longer produce resources indefinitely. Instead, you would have to constantly rebuild extractors in new places to continue to get those resources as previous locations are depleted. While this wouldn’t be too much micromanagement as long as the deposits deplete slow enough, the player will never reach a state of full automation like we can get to with mc1. Therefore we should consider adding additional buildings that can produce those resources indefinitely that the player can get later on in their game. For example, the insectoid’s core mine could be buffed and become the ultimate continuous source of raw resources for them while consuming rare resources. For humans, an asteroid collector could consume starships and yet produce a continuous supply of raw resources. And reptilians have to technology to just warp in all the resources that they need in exchange for money and other valuable resources.

Idk, what do y’all think?

@Amorphus

Your first idea about the construction sites is interesting. Are you saying a "construction site" is just a building employing workers, and you can transform it whenever you want ? Or would it be some special "entity" that you can transform to a building (of the same size), and then it starts employing workers and fill out some progress bar?
I mean can you describe a bit more the gameplay process? How would the resources be routed?

You should also check out this thread it is exactly about what you discuss in your second idea (resource collection).

Thanks, didn’t realize someone had a similar idea,

I think they should be buildings. Once a building is chosen From their build screen. They will take on the attributes assigned to them by that selection. For example, if in order to build a pub you need 10 construction workers and it takes 10 seconds to complete with full workforce, the construction site will mirror that. At the end of the worker round(The progress bar shown under most buildings in mc1) it’ll turn into the selected building.

If you don’t want to place the site first and Then select a build, you could just select a building from the main build menu and it would automatically start out as the correct construction site and start the build process. It should work well even if multiple buildings are placed. I just think the manual two step process should still be available for layout planning, since the sites would remain inactive until the player wants them to build something. Another thing you could do is make it so that you can select a building from the main menu and drag over sites with it to start their build processes for that building, provided they are the same blueprint and the resource needs are met.

The resources would be deducted directly from colony storage as soon as a selection is chosen and could be redeemed if the build is canceled before completion, at which the building will return to it’s inactive state and await another selection.

This build system makes employment more challenging because you’d need workers to actually build your city. This means you’d need at least one of your two initial workers to be a builder from the start. However, some more advanced buildings could just regularly sip robots from your storage instead of requiring workers. Or instead of that you could upgrade your normal construction site into a robot construction site, which would use robots to build all buildings with the same footprint.

Reptilians can warp things in easily, so they could start with normal site and end with warp sites, which would take something like ether or uranium to build things. Just try not to make it too protossian...

Zolarg would need to have some other sort of technology to eliminate the need of workers to build. Perhaps antaura can be used to conjure tri-antanium golems to do the building? Whoa, that could be a good war method as well, tri-antanium war golems used as artillery batteries and battering rams. that would be quite a sight in 3d.

Anyway, hope that answers your question.

Yes I see better now, need to see what the others think but I find it quite good.

Amorphus said:This means you’d need at least one of your two initial workers to be a builder from the start.

We don't have to have 2 people on the lander at the start, actually I find that very low. A colonization crew should be formed with ~10 people, for example:

• 3 builders
• 4 engineers
• 1 pilot
• 2 botanists/scientists

The usage of these different skills would need to be managed. As your population grows, you start to get people with more skills who can work on new things (example archaeologists). (I digressed from the original topic)

Amorphus said:you could upgrade your normal construction site into a robot construction site, which would use robots to build all buildings with the same footprint.

Yeah this would be a more expensive construction site as well and consume power but very useful if all your builders are used on other projects!

Amorphus said:Reptilians [...] Zolarg

They are not likely to be a thing in MC2. "my plan is to just have Earth/Human." - bast


Well, the initial topic here was to see if we get rid of rovers or not... using this I guess resources are just drained and workers are simulated to be working around the construction sites, so that's one solution to the original problem.

Ok great. I was just going off of mc1. Surely we can have more colonists at the start.

The fact that only one race is used is better because it means bast can focus all attention to them instead or splitting it between 3 or 4 races. I still hope he keeps adding content for mc1 though.

Glad I could bring another option to the table.

wormjon said:I would prefer having rovers at least for building purposes, it gives a sense of accomplishment which instant construction doesn't offer.

This is true. In MC1 you can just put a resource stockpile next to an ore deposit and your rovers will mine it to depletion in a hurry. It feels rather cheap. Adding time costs to things does increase the sense of accomplishment. In fact, I think the player would get a bigger sense of accomplishment if all resources needed to be transported from source to sink, as in colony games such as Rise to Ruins or Surviving Mars.

Another quick suggestion about rovers, resource producers like water pumps store items until they are full, but youcant use them yet until transport rovers have to bring them back to deposits for use