Here i am again , smoking a cigarette and thinking about the meaning of life whilst developing my little colony ; and i thought to myself, why in god's name do i have 4 dedicated maps (region) for bandwidth alone? why do i have 5 dedicated to starports? isn't there a better way?
Regional gameplay was developed to allow massive development for players, and it works like a charm
BUT
In the meantime the ''bot stacking'' concept was introduced, which allowed us all to build massive robot armies to do our bidding super fast, and best of all, now we can move them between our maps :)
So, i thought to myself, why not have the same option for buildings?
I don't know the coding it takes, but would it be possible to introduce building leveling? Like for example instead of having 1000 microchip factories on 500 maps, have ONE single one factory on a map that i could level up?
Think about how much computational resources that would save just like the bot stacking did? And instead of having 200 maps/cities on a region we could have but a few ?
I for one think that a building leveling system would improve game performance on all platforms, and especially mobile. When i discovered my colony it was through the google play store and i switched to pc after a few hours because the shear size of what i was developing was hard to sustain on a simple phone.
I know my colony V2.0/3D is being debated right now, but realistically speaking, that will take a lot of time.
In the meantime i personally feel that building leveling would be one of the greatest improvements to the game that you can bring to the table right now. It would cut down massively on computational resources, reduce the hustle of having to build tens of cities dedicated to the same resource, and would make the game a bit more mobile/tablet friendly because it would make it possible to reach end-game on a single large city/map.
These are my thoughts for the day. As you might have noticed, every now and then i like to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
Few side notes before i sign off:
1) The leveling system should come with a penalty - something like 2% production reduction . So a lvl 2 building will make 2% less than two lvl1 buildings
2) If such a system were to be implemented, everyone should start from scratch. Start a new season of the game if you will and see who reaches the to 10 fastest and manages to stay there . I know many players have worked on the colonies for years , but a fresh start isn't going to kill anyone and could be fun
3) Maybe put a level cap on buildings (like lvl 100 or something) , to encourage further development of cities and not have all production in a 50x50 square :)
THIS is what i mean.
Instead of having this, i could have 1 maybe two of each building instead , but leveled up...
Java/Scroll2d is heavy on resources. Such an option could help a lot
maybe have it so it still takes up the space on the map for balancing, but only the one building does any production?
you could have it so that there are different sub buildings that instead of doing any actual production, just boost the efficiency or output of the main building
although i think this system should be implemented alongside the normal system, have it be a bit more powerful and take up less space, but also cost a lot more to build and need a certain building on the map its built in, or have a specific building built in distance intervals maybe?
either way, great concept that could work really well if implemented properly!
I really need this for my regions map to be honest.
I had to necropost because this has been on my mind forever, but I didn't see it until now.