[Uh-user] Building upgrades

[Christoph Egger]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 11:21:00PM +0100, Andreas wrote:
> Hey team,
> 
> we finally discussed this issue on our meeting today (Nov 12th 09).
> And - believe it or not - we came up with some decision which can be
> found in our wiki:
> http://wiki.unknown-horizons.org/index.php/DD/Buildings/Building_upgrades
> 
> For completeness quoted here:
> 
> > There are currently 3 kinds of buildings upgrades we agreed on:
> >
> > MANUAL UPGRADES - Buildings like branch office and warehouse
> > can/need to be upgraded manually at a cost of certain resources.
> > Such upgrades will improve the buildings in some way and may also
> > affect the building graphics.
> >
> > AUTOMATIC UPGRADES W/ COSTS - Residents will always upgrade
> > automatically at a cost of certain resources. The upgrade will
> > always affect capacities (max. amount of inhabitants) and the
> > resident graphics while the amount of resources available for the
> > upgrade can be specified by the player. This kind of updates is
> > limited to residents.
> >
> > AUTOMATIC UPGRADES W/O COSTS - Service and production buildings
> > will upgrade automatically without the cost of additional
> > resources. This upgrade affects building graphics only.
> > CAPACITY UPGRADES - For service and production buildings
> > additional capacity upgrades (production speed, collector count,
> > and so on) can be purchased. (Those upgrades are a whole new
> > feature and need further discussion!)
> 
> Because the player should have the opportunity to not only have his
> service and production building graphics updated, but should also
> have some "real" upgrades affecting building capacities, we came up
> with the - rather old - idea of introducing capacity upgrades as
> known from other RTS games. Being a whole new feature this of course
> means further discussions. (Btw. this issue is also important for
> our decision on fisherman behaviour!)
> 
> The main problem we are facing is the question how to make this
> feature available in a usable way for the player. Currently there
> are two suggestions:
> 
> 1. Capacity upgrades have to be purchased for each building individually.
> 
> 2. Capacity upgrades have to be purchased once for all buildings of
> the same type.
> 
> The first means a lot of micro managment which could be handled by
> providing a nice overview dialogue with some filter options to
> handle all those upgrades at once and maybe even assign certain
> upgrades for buildings being purchased automatically on build.
> The second in the meantime is much more simple, but maybe a bit to
> simple from a gameplay point of view.

	I think the amount of micromanagement is best kept low by making
sure noone needs tenth of luberjacks (as a example) but can work
perfectly well with something like 5-10 at most. Having selective
upgrades also means one can upgrade step-by-step and upgrading 2 ljs
dosn't cost the same as upgrading 10.

	IMHO for simulation games like Unknown Horizons a certain ability
to do micromanagement is really vital and should be included in the
stock game.

Regards

	Christoph

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http://www.christoph-egger.org/
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