CityBuilder - share ideas/comments

[bowidl]

I played in the city builder when it is in developement and in this moment, the only required requisite to win are population in your town.

Now require Company Value(CV), and i think that this is un-necesary in a city builder, becouse the objetive in the game is grow the town, not the company.

If necesary, can elevate the population required to 10.000 or 15.000 or 25.000 if the server suport this. But eliminate other requisites, like CV or perfomace.

Only population in our town.

I think exactly the same.

With cv the game mode is no different from the all the others.

[YorVeX]

our problem was that we also wanted to integrate CB into our existing score system. that score system does know nothing about "population", so you could have won a CB game but if your CV wasn't good you would have gotten 0 points for it. hence the idea to also show CV in the goal so it is transparent to players that CV is also necessary if you want to get scores. we cannot just add population to the score algorithm, because nobody knows what would be fair equivalents of CV and population. would it be fair to give the same score for 5000 inhabitants than for 100 million euro CV? or rather for 10,000 inhabitants?
and even if you find two numbers that are matching: growth rate of CV and population are different and both are not linear. it would be nearly impossible to integrate it in a fair way, arguments would arise whether CB servers got an advantage for scoring or "normal" servers.

anyway, remember the server name is TEST and it was meant to find out exactly about things like this. and what we have learned is that
- the additional CV goal contradicts the whole CityBuilder idea too much and fades out the actual town growing idea
- there won't be a fair way to include population goals into the current score system

next step is to draw conclusions from it and come up with new ideas. on this thread lots of ideas were discussed how the score system could be changed. it seems it goes into the direction of having a separate score system for CB, including a separate highscore table and personal scores.
also we are thinking about changing the system to give scores (or maybe call it XP then and give players ranks/levels?) every quarter to resolve the unfortunate situation where people play 80% of the time on a server but aren't connected when the game is won, not getting any points for it. with points/XP every quarter players could even go to a long run server and only participate for one or two game hours, still getting some points.

[AlexAlex]

Well, thanks for the modification, that i see already have been make.

But i think that structurate a separated score system for CB with separate highscore table and personal score is a aditional work that i not see justified. Unless you think having a lot of servers in CB mode.

Creating a new score system and mantaining two system of scoring is the first step to later having three, or why not four or five.... I think that it is not correct.

The score system must have unique for all server and all games, i think. Of course, the scoring system must be modified to integrate all game modes, and if necesarie, compute diferent things in diferent servers to get an homogeneous score.

Your preocupation in relationate CV and population is excesive, although you say, they grow separately and is not related. You must get x points for x population, at equal you get x point for x CV.

[YorVeX]

and if necesarie, compute diferent things in diferent servers to get an homogeneous score.

your sentence points out the problem pretty well. did you notice you just said: "different + different = homogeneous"? it's full of variables that don't have anything to do with each other. how do you want to bring them together?
and yes, we do plan to run several CB servers, as this seems to be a very popular game mode. i don't see a reason to extrapolate when we are going from one score system to 2. if you're married for 1 year with your wife and have 1 child, i will tell you in 20 years you will have 20 children from 20 wives. do you think that's a correct interpretation of the tendency? 

Your preocupation in relationate CV and population is excesive, although you say, they grow separately and is not related. You must get x points for x population, at equal you get x point for x CV.

it doesn't work like this, CV grows faster than population and it doesn't grow in a linear way. you might have 10 million for 5,000 population. then you got 100 million while at 7,000 population. then you got 500 million at 9,000 population.
it will be more like f(x) = 2 * (x - 2)³ - 0,0005 * (x-2)² +2 or something.
tell me the formula how they are related and we can do it 

[solo]

Hello guys,

This is more a bug report for the CB server but didnt know where to put it;

Yesterday me and a friend were playing a bit on the citybuilder server trying to stresstest the private area around a town owned by a player.
We found a few things but one i saw already mentioned which was you can build a HQ inside another players town and leave it there.
The other ones:
-When you take a town where a traintrack was already build the train track doesnt disappear (which is correct imo), but when adding signals to the tracks the tracks get removed.
-If you are fast enough with building a depot and releasing an engine you can avoid the autoremove. After that the depot will stay there aswell as the tracks/roads the vehicle has traveled over. (I dont wanna tell the trolls but it has to be mentioned and i didnt see it yet).
-After a reset the signs (sometimes?) which give the area size stay there


Also i saw you discussing over a point system for cb compared to the CV games. Tbh theres only one good formula for it and thats using the expired gametime for your company to get to the goal for the main calculation. Also include competition (although the map is big enough), and the amount of people in company, starting year etc.

[TechNoir]

My impressions after playing:

1) Station-walking not working on first server. It should be turned on. I cant imagine playing on CB without it. I also wanted to mention only 5 length of station but I understand that you want to have balance between goal and resources, and as a result time of play.
2) Server k1 was very laggy. Many times I was disconnected due to this.
3) There are too many cities! It would be far more better to make 20 cities with 4-5k inhabitants than 200 or more like it is now. As far as i know competition in cities is allowed so there will be pax for everyone. I am proposing this cause there is very limited space although map is big. Imagine 10 players and every needs to do network of different cargors (pax,mail,water,food,goods). Instead of big number of towns I would slighlty increase number of industries. But slightly.
4) I would add diamonds needed for city grow. Lets say from 3500.
5) and last but not least, points. I won the the game but I didnt get any points. I dont remember what was the reason of it but I was really ... disspointed? (to say the least) 2-3 hours of exciting play and 0 pts gained. 

[Knogle]

Hey solo,

Thanks for your feedback, the private area thing is still in development, so your feedback is appreciated.
We will add this to our list of issues, Thanks again.

Hello guys,

This is more a bug report for the CB server but didnt know where to put it;

*snip*

[Knogle]

Hey TechNoir,

Thanks for all your info, I only chose to respond to some of them, as the rest is about server settings, these doesn't need responses and will be taken into consideration as for the server settings.

1) Station-walking not working on first server. It should be turned on. I cant imagine playing on CB without it. I also wanted to mention only 5 length of station but I understand that you want to have balance between goal and resources, and as a result time of play.

Actually, station-walking should not be allowed at all, this means you can actually deliver water to a different town than your own and it still counts; if you're really talking about satellite stations, the current rules doesn't allow them, and frankly we don't know yet if we are going to allow them on CB servers eventually.

4) I would add diamonds needed for city grow. Lets say from 3500.

It is not possible to add diamonds or any other cargo using GS (game scripts), this would require a patched server, and we want to make a gamescript CB, so we're limited by the features GS supports.. keep in mind that GS is a fairly new in ottd and things might develop over time.

5) and last but not least, points. I won the the game but I didnt get any points. I dont remember what was the reason of it but I was really ... disspointed? (to say the least) 2-3 hours of exciting play and 0 pts gained. 

See YorVeX's post above, keep in mind that it *IS* a test server

[TechNoir]

Ok I understand

What is the minimum to get at least 1 point?

[Andreas]

What is the minimum to get at least 1 point?

have a higher CV

[TechNoir]

Ok but if the goal is 5000 people and I will get it , what my cv should be?

[YorVeX]

since we set the CV goal to 0 i don't think it is possible at all. the current score algorithm does not consider CV higher than the goal CV, hence your CV is always treated as being 0 and you never get scores. check for your additional points thread for ideas about a new score system, until something like that is in place there probably won't be any scoring on CB servers.

[riessie]

I noticed at the citybuilder server its possible to make multiple industries at each city.
So it's quite easy to make a wood train crossing the map where you make 10 wood cutters (dont remember the name atm) at the start to a factory to the other side of the map. Then you easily get 10 million a year and can build mass food production then its way to easy to finish the map.
So imo it should not be possible to exploit multiple industries at each town that provide transportation goods.

[Geert]

hey i found a bug (dont know if someone else said it before)

i wanted to build a line and i got the message ''sorry, you cannot build in an area that someone else has claimed''

i made a screenie its obvious no had claimed the area at that time (maybe earlier but he resetme and left i guess)

[alex879ro]

Understood your point of view...i`ll make some experiments with the server tomorrow...and see what results i can come up with...