LegacyWorlds Beta 6

While Beta 5 only featured three different types of buildings, we stated in an earlier post that Beta 6 will feature dozens. But that isn’t the only building-related change Beta 6 will introduce, far from it.

One of the worst defects in Beta 5 was the “optimal factories” computation - it relied on nothing but arbitrary values and had one big flaw: it was supposed to prevent older players from being too powerful compared to newer players by having a decreasing derivative (yes, as in maths). This had a completely reverse consequence - people would just “whore” the planets and go away, having high population wouldn’t give you enough of an advantage in the long run.

Beta 6’s buildings will be managed in a completely different way. Instead of using arbitrary formulas, the new system will rely on a more realistic computation based on the size of the workforce available on a planet, the amount of jobs the buildings provide and what we call “secondary jobs” - construction, maintenance, police…

Each planet will have a population composed of various species - or at least that’s how it can be. As we already stated earlier, each species has specific characteristics. The first important characteristic (when it comes to employment, anyway) is the activity ratio: individuals belonging to a species may (or may not) be willing to work more than others, or have a longer “efficient” lifespan… This allows us to compute the size of the available workforce on a planet.

But then, species have different abilities - some are frail, some are extremely robust; some are clever, some are brainless brutes… The available workforce is considered to have three characteristics: an efficiency indicator for manual work (manufacturing, mining, construction, etc.), another one for intellectual work (research, medicine…) and one for soldiering (police force, defense…). These indicators are computed from the species-specific indicators and the ratio each species represents relative to the total size of the workforce. A random example would be that, if you have two populations of equal size and with the same activity ratio, one species being awful at intellectual work and the other being extremely good at it, the final workforce will be average at it. While not strictly realistic (as the guys who are good at something would probably have priority for jobs related to this ability), it should work.

Now that we know how the workforce is constituted and characterised, let’s move on to employment itself.

There are two main types of jobs on a planet: primary jobs, which are provided by buildings, and secondary jobs. The latter include construction, maintenance, research, security and a few unrelated jobs (your local Kebab shop, no doubt).

As long as there are fewer jobs than workers, the workers man all available positions completely. However, when the amount of free jobs is greater, the population starts working overtime. To compute this, we consider that people slowly take up additional 8-hour shifts, within a limit of 2.2 shifts (that’s 18 hours a day per worker on average).

However, available positions are never completely filled when people are working extra shifts. In fact, the more jobs are available, the less efficient people are. While this can be profitable in the short term, “whoring” the planets won’t work, as the efficiency will decrease and, at some point, the loss will become greater than the gain (not to mention the hit on happiness, but that is something we’ll explain later). In addition, insufficiently manned buildings will cause more pollution than they normally do, since people are less careful with what they do when they’re overworked.

It is possible to modify the priority given to secondary jobs over primary jobs (or vice versa); if they have a low priority, secondary jobs will always be short on workforce, even if many workers are available. A high priority, on the contrary, will cause these jobs to be fully manned, even if more jobs are available from buildings. An intermediary setting will cause the workers to abandon secondary jobs in favour of primary jobs if many of them are available. While this allows empires to have a finer control on what their population is doing, it is a double-edged sword as the buildings will start degrading if the planet is short on maintenance workers. Changing this setting is not instantaneous either - people slowly convert from one type of job to another, so the larger the workforce, the longer the conversion takes.

Final point - a building’s efficiency is computed from the workforce’s abilities, and from the shifts that are actually being worked. Each building’s output depends on a combination of manual, intellectual and soldiering work.

Tags: buildings, employment, planets, population, species

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 8:11 am and is filed under Game design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.