16B Patch

[Meridian]

OK, I'll think about adding some/all of this to the Wishlist.

Wait a moment... the Wishlist can grow? 

[Solarius Scorch]

Wait a moment... the Wishlist can grow? 

I'm afraid it's inevitable.

But it'll take a while for Dioxine and I to digest the whole recent meal.

[Starving Poet]

You're right, direct limitation of industry is a bad solution. What I stressed was that the existing gameplay model breaks apart at some point; problems visible with 8 bases will be even more pronounced with 16. To handle this, some change of the model is needed. Solutions to these problems, as I see them:
- Administrative limitations. Limits on the number of personnel (exceedable only at a huge cost). This isn't a hard limit, and it's a natural limit: how many people can you command directly?
- Security limitations: More aggressive enemy, more enemy actions when your business gets too big (sabotage of various kinds, security problems).
- Market limitations: Some kind of market model, limiting the amount of goods you can sell monthly and/or changing prices.  Related: limits on how many people you can hire monthly.

You can't really keep adding new bases without adressing these problems IMO; moving from small organization simulator to a state simulator can't be done without adding statehood mechanics.

Taxes / bribe money - it takes a lot of money to grease a lot of palms - but instead of flat out cost increase - have an ever increasing cost at the end of the month that increases with your number of main bases.  It's been too long since I've done derivations to give you some good numbers, but something along the lines of first base free - second base means you lose 15% net income, next base would be 28%, etc.   

Small radar bases wouldn't incur this cost because they are too small to be noticed.

[Dioxine]

That's one way to incur administrative costs I spoke of earlier.
It should be like, some quadratic function with argument x=(a+b)-2, a = number of bases, b = number of personnel (in some multiples, like 20?); this function could impart additional maintenance costs. So you can have 1 base with 20 personnel w/o any extra costs, but the costs start to rise after that. With 16 bases and 600 people, you'd have x=44. If, say, increase was 1.05^x (cumulative 5% per level), your maintenance would be, in this case, about 8.5x nominal. Okay maybe that's a bit too steep but you can see where this game is going .

This is quite fun formula as you can keep strong force of soldiers and many bases, yet don't suffer much, since most of the manpower are always the workers. Eg.: 50 soldiers + 30 scientists + 80 workers = 150, with 16 bases that makes x=21, and the maint. cost increase 2.8x nominal.

[Surrealistik]

Taxes/bribe money on secret bases?

Man, with all those Star God/Faction spies running around these Govts sure have some solid confidentiality protocols in place.

That said, what mad man needs 16 bases? The economy is already more than broken at 8 while having effectively global hyperwave coverage though I am pretty Runt heavy (240+ for every base other than HQ).

[Star_Treasure]

I'm not sure what purpose this would serve; is the intent narrative or gameplay related? In the case of the latter as an attempt to curb income from bootlegging, all this will practically do is further increase the player's wealth (if he has prepared any kind of adequate defense).

Mostly narrative really.