fair@dual.UUCP (Erik E. Fair) (10/27/83)
Has anyone noticed that at some point, a country gets too large to manage
efficiently? I find that when my countries get above 50-100 sectors, it
takes a phenomenal effort to maintain the various necessary levels of food
for u, iron for k & l, light & heavy for h, g, i, etc. I think you get
the idea. Now, does anyone have a workable solution (automated country
manager?)? I would rather play the game from a strategic level, than a
logistical one. Moving stuff around all day is *boring*.
Erik E. Fair {ucbvax,amd70,zehntel,unisoft}!dual!fair
Dual Systems Corporationhammy@mit-eddie.UUCP (J. Scott Hamilton) (10/27/83)
I too, found logistics to be rather boring, and because of this, you might say I started to "research" the delivery system. A system of deliver routes to shuttle your goods around, plus careful forethought as to the placement of your sectors, can be a godsend. At one time I had the following completely automated: shell plant gun plant harbor warehouse urban area requisite mines requisite agribusinesses library radar station weather station (food supply) several forts The urban area was supplied with iron, and all other industries were well stocked. The object of the experiment was not to have goods pile up from lack of mobility. I found that this is possible with the single exception of food. This is okay, because when the delivery route maxes out, you contract the agribusiness, and since it delivers all the food it can before it sells the rest to the deity, this system wins. The guns and shells were sent to a warehouse, where I later hand distributed them to the harbor for arming the ships, and to the forts for defense. The only other thing I moved around was civilians from the urban area, to other lands to develop. Eventually, because of the food deliver route, almost all the sectors maxed out on civilians, and the regeon really cranked out the goods. Occasionally I had to tweak the thresholds to get everything moving smoothly. I am now working on developing a country from the ground up with this philosophy in mind. If anyone is interested, I can reply or post some of the tricks that I have learned. -- J. Scott Hamilton !genrad!mit-eddie!hammy
dudek@utcsrgv.UUCP (Gregory Dudek) (10/28/83)
I've also found that managing a large country can be a bit tedious. My approach has been to rely on a conbination of deliveries, and one or two execute files. What the deliveries don't handle, the command files can take care of. Of course, setting the whole mess up is tricky, and manual tweaking is still necessary. To top it off, if your country is that big, a little inefficiency of starvation if "backwoods" area doesn't seem to matter too much. Greg Dudek.
hammy@mit-eddie.UUCP (J. Scott Hamilton) (10/31/83)
>One thing that becomes absolutely ESSENTIAL on any good sized >country (note: I am used to playing 300 sector countries and >up) is a highway, completely encircling the country. I agree, and this strategy is also fundamental to my development. I found that with strategically placed roads, I could set up well developed delivery routes that saved on the mobility of my industries. The classic is to deliver raw materials into a sector via a road, and then deliver finished goods out onto the road, and then down the road to a warehouse. Thus, industries aren't wasting mobility by pushing around what they produce (or what their neighbors produce). Usually, the industries push around food to each other. Also, for sectors that max out on people because they are part of a food delivery route, I have them deliver civilians onto the road with a threshold of about 900. The road is responsible for delivering execess civilians to an urban area, where I can later move them to somewhere useful. Also, as far as delivery routes were concerned, I found that my logging in once a day was not smooth enough for the delivery routes. Therefore, I set up a self queueing batch system (using 'at') to log in about four times a day to do an update. This is especially useful for sectors with 999 civilians, since they max out on work in less than seven hours. -- J. Scott Hamilton !genrad!mit-eddie!hammy
zzz@mit-eddie.UUCP (Mike Konopik) (11/01/83)
For those as confused as I am about this, a question to those saying that it's okay to go into early-game debt. Surely you don't mean EVERY country can go into debt? Somebody has to stick around to bail out the others, eh? I went into debt in the first game and looked to see if there was any method of self-help -- I couldn't get the contracted sectors to do the work to sell the goods. So unless the diety is going to give you money, I wouldn't condone debt at all. There are enough painless ways to avoid it. -Mike genrad!mit-eddie!zzz (UUCP) ZZZ%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC (ARPA)
eric@aplvax.UUCP (11/01/83)
I also find well developed highways essential. But they do
lead to one problem, and maybe a suggestion for the next version.
How about letting delivery routes for a given commodity and given
sector include percentages. Thus, on a highway sector, 10% of the
{food,people,etc} could leave the road, and the rest advance on down.
The alternative are some very fragile delivery routes that are very
inefficient.
--
eric
...!seismo!umcp-cs!aplvax!ericrobison@eosp1.UUCP (11/02/83)
Allow me to add my plea for the ability to deliver PART of a load from a sector, so tha delivery routes can be more rational. While we are on the subject of highways, I would like Empire to give me some roguelike assitance while moving along a highway. For example, in addition to typing "ea"yugjbnhv to move, I'd like to type "YUGJBN", meaning: Start moving in that direction on a highway square, and continue on highway squares until the road forks. I'd also like to type "+", meaning move to The one adjacent highway sector, not including any highway sector that I have been on during this Move command. Empire would respond by moving if there is only one highway sector next to the current sector which this move has not already covered. - Keremath, care of: Robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1 or: allegra!eosp1
hamilton@uiucuxc.UUCP (11/09/83)
#R:dual:-13200:uiucuxc:16400009:000:927
uiucuxc!hamilton Nov 8 03:57:00 1983
ditto the remarks from hammy (no relation?) and alb regarding roads and
deliveries. we are running a 128x128(64 really) world, and my country
is 1100+ sectors, of which 200+ are roads/bridges/bridgeheads. that's
roughly 1 road sector for every 4 other sectors (including the unproductive
mountains i'm populating). i haven't actually calculated it, but i suspect
my mean-distance-to-road is about 3. i have one large ring road roughly
parallel to my shoreline (a pear shape), with several cross connections
to feed outward produce from the interior. the ring circulates c/f/d/o/l/h
around&around, with thresholded taps into 10 warehouses. feeding into the
ring from outside are 2 spurs that jump the 1- and 2- sector straits that
seperate my mainland from nearby islands (i'm working on an around-the-world
highway right now -- just a couple more bridges to go!).
wayne ({decvax,ucbvax}!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uiucuxc!)hamiltonrobison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (11/10/83)
If you have 200+ road sectors in a 1100+ sector countyr, with a mean distance-to-road of 3 sectors, your road is not well planned. For 20 to 25% roadway, the mean distance should be about 1.2 sectors. - Keremath, care of: Robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1 or: allegra!eosp1
hamilton@uiucuxc.UUCP (11/12/83)
#R:dual:-13200:uiucuxc:16400012:000:1376
uiucuxc!hamilton Nov 11 22:53:00 1983
yeah, that makes sense. i was just guessing. a LOT of sectors are
adjacent to a road, but many are as far as 7 or 8, so i just split
the difference. my heartland is better-developed than the territory
i have inherited from discouraged neighbors; in those cases i have
only a single road bisecting a 2-300 sector landmass. latest stats:
#: 30 ): 6 *: 3 +: 249 -: 1 =: 37 ^: 177 a: 684
c: 4 d: 5 f: 117 g: 24 h: 33 i: 5 j: 25 k: 23
m: 22 n: 4 o: 75 r: 14 t: 10 u: 14 w: 11
total: 1573
the above doesn't count the many wasteland sectors i got from a
neighbor who fought a nuclear war. i've been playing a very pacifist
game here, and the other players have pretty much left me alone, or
even helped. that means most of my BTUs have been spent adjusting
deliveries, etc. i couldn't have managed so much land nearly as well
if i had to spend a significant amount of time in combat. i propose
that BTU accumulation should be at least partially a function of the
number of sectors one owns; perhaps one should be allowed a BTU-producing
capital for every 2-300 sectors, on the assumption that a large country
would delegate administrative functions to provincial capitals.
btw, i finished my round-the-world road, tho i haven't had much use
for it (yet?).
wayne ({decvax,ucbvax}!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uiucuxc!)hamilton