Factory economy suggestions

[sdauwidhwa]

The player managed factories are interesting features, but I believe it could be improved in many way.

 

More complicated factory configuration mechanisms need to be implemented. Currently, production of a factory is halted when any product is full, as the capacity of a certain product is simply total cargo hold equally split among all products and materials. I believe this part would be better if

 

1. The cargo hold distributed to each good could be customized according to each station. For example, cargos with distributed space use that space, those without distributed space share the rest.

 

2. Manager could decide, for each product of a production, whether to stop production to save input or discard output reaching capacity limit and acquire more product of other types.

 

3. Provide methods to save, copy and paste configurations conveniently.

 

 

The cargo shuttle introduced in patch 0.15 is good idea to make factories more worth playing, but more improvement is needed:

 

1. Make sure cargo shuttles and their pilots stays in the station in which they are dispatched. Weather it is a feature or unexpected behavior, shuttles and pilots ending up in another station makes great difficulty for managing stations since crew quarters and hangers cannot be expanded automatically to meet the change.

 

2. Maybe implement transportation hub or player funded trading post that use shuttles to retrieve and send materials to stations as planned by managers. Going around and picking up products from many stations are tiring job; equally true for sending materials to each station, especially when piloting a giant cargo ship. It would be way better if one only need to dump all the cargo into one station.

 

        One possibility is that a transportation hub has many routes configured.

        Each route has a type of goods, a destination and maybe a priority.

        Periodically, the station will check for each route that weather one shuttle should be dispatched.

        It may depend on whether the station has enough cargo to be sent and whether the destination is full on that goods.

 

3. Increase the capacity and price of shuttles. Transporting enough cargo to keep one factory at full production needs many shuttles. A big number of shuttles would slow down the server. The simplest solution is to increase the capacity, speed and price of shuttles.

 

 

More miscellaneous matter could be simplifying crews of stations. The cost of crew in stations is greatly reduced but it is still a trouble to send crews to each station. One way would be removing the need of sergeants on stations (only sergeants or it would be oversimplified). The cost of the rest crew should be raised to compensate this cut down.

 

Another change would be simplifying switching between ships. Switching to another ship can only be done by flying to them, which is too slow and too troublesome. I question the necessity of a 0.5 km range of entering another ship.