Another take on oil

[Jabie]

There is a feature in the game which only allows you to build a max number of National Units. Could this be used as a multiplier?

One take on oil would be to decide that each unit required a certain amount of oil, and that it could only be built if the requisite amount of oil resources had been obtained. Hence each oil resource might only allow 1 tank and 1 gunship. If a player owned 3 oil resources, they could field up to 3 tanks and 3 gunships.

The downside of this is that it pretty much removes the fuel guage system and the relevant fuel saving promotions, into which a lot of work has already been put. The upside is that it is intuitive and cuts out a lot of micromangement. Sure, there are still kinks (I can build get another tank, but can't get another gunship - why can't I use the petrol for the tank and have a gunship instead?!?) but it's relatively clear to any new player what the limitations are.

Thoughts?

 

[davidlallen]

Hence each oil resource might only allow 1 tank and 1 gunship. If a player owned 3 oil resources, they could field up to 3 tanks and 3 gunships.

Reducing the micromanagement is a key goal. But, I think creating and guarding fuel trucks is a big part of the theme. There is a quantitative resource thread floating around the forum and an existing unit fuel modcomp, both of which have had some discussion along the lines you are thinking. Both of those thread owners feel that fuel tankers is not the way they want to go, which is fine.

I'd like to keep the fuel trucks. In 0.6 and later, the rate at which fuel trucks spawn is directly proportional to the number of wells you have, since each well has a percent chance to spawn one.

I have thought about automating the fuel trucks more; but each scheme I come up with has some holes. For example, a stack contains a fuel truck and it is en route to a destination, and one of the units runs out. Perhaps the stack should burn the fuel truck and just keep going. But, what if the stack is small and en-route to a large empty stack? Maybe the small stack should eject the guy who ran out ("He fell behind" ... sorry, wrong movie) and continue to the big goal.

Maybe each tanker should have an "automated" flag, which would enable that behavior but you could turn it off for critical tankers. I don't know if that is possible or if it would even help.

 

[Refar]

If you can implement a auto-tank oprion that can be switched on and off, tat might be cool.

Another thing is - that came up somewhere already, but it does also have some impact on those automation options:

Making Truks have a certain number of shots, rather than just refuel everything with one truck. I was thinking of 5 shots per truck, so it could refuel up to 5 units.

(Depending on how difficult to implement and how much it will slow down the game - maybe 10 shots with each shot giving a half of the tank - so refuelling units whose tank is half full will use 1 shot whiel refuelling empty units will use 2.)

Other than the obvious - removing the oddness why you need just one truck to refuel a stack of 20 tanks and why you still need exactly one truck to refuell one tank that runout...

In the context of automation, gradual use of fuel trucks obviously takes out the dilemma you described above - you can refuell the on unit that run out, and still have 4 shots left in the truck to move on.

 

[davidlallen]

If you can implement a auto-tank oprion that can be switched on and off, tat might be cool.

I just thought of a way to make it work per unit that isn't too bad. Today each tanker has an action button to refuel. I could make one new promotion for "autofuel". Then each truck has an action button which toggles whether autofuel is on or off. The AI already performs this autofuel at the end of the turn, I just have to call it on the player trucks and check the promotion. That is a medium size chunk of work, I will put it on the list.

Making Truks have a certain number of shots, rather than just refuel everything with one truck. I was thinking of 5 shots per truck, so it could refuel up to 5 units.

(Depending on how difficult to implement and how much it will slow down the game - maybe 10 shots with each shot giving a half of the tank - so refuelling units whose tank is half full will use 1 shot whiel refuelling empty units will use 2.)

I was thinking of using the same fuel tank icon set for tankers, each refuel button click uses 1/4 tank. Each click would provide N number of 1/4-tank-increases to units in need. Suppose N=8, one click would completely refuel two units who are out of gas, or four units each at half full.

The tricky part of this is, suppose you click on a tanker which is stacked with a variety of units, with different fuel levels, and different priority to the player. "I really need those artilleries", for example. If the fuel gets allocated differently than the player wants, and there is no way to control it, it could be frustrating. This is similar to popping a Great General for XP; you have to take an extra step to move the GG and the right target units into their own square, which is sometimes inconvenient (eg when under siege).

In 0.7 I have started all units with 1/4 tank. When that comes out, if fuel micromanagement is still a key issue, I will put some work into the above.

 

[westamastaflash]

Fuel trucks don't pop as often as they should, IMHO (I only ever got the ones that show up when you build the refinery)...

There is code in place that essentially makes the chance go from 2.5% to 5% when you have more than 3 trucks on a square:

Line 292 of CvFuryRoadEvents.py
if already > 3: thresh = 50

The random check then says if a Random number between 1 and 1000 is greater than the threshold, do not create a truck, otherwise create one.

I ended up raising the threshold to 100. I'm going to play it with the 100 and hope there isn't too many trucks then.

 

[davidlallen]

There is code in place that essentially makes the chance go from 2.5% to 5% when you have more than 3 trucks on a square:

Line 292 of CvFuryRoadEvents.py
if already > 3: thresh = 50

My code you show there is not quite right. Originally it was:

thresh = 100
if already > 3: thresh = 50

I wanted to reduce the number of trucks so I changed the code:

thresh = 25
if already > 3: thresh = 50

As you can see this is not desirable since it *increases* the chance of popping a truck when there are > 3 trucks already there. What I wanted was:

if already > 3: thresh = thresh / 2

Perhaps this is the way you already changed it. That is the way I have it in the development version 0.7. Based on your feedback and also from one other player, I may increase the threshold a little. Please let me know how 100 works for you.

 

[Avahz Darkwood]

I would suggest that oil using units not run out of gas if they are stationed in a player city who has access to an oil resource. I understand some would be on patrol, but others would be just sitting their until they are needed. Not only that but wouldn't it be understood that city units are being supplied by some other transport means?

 

[davidlallen]

That is already the case, because units which are not moving do not use gas. Even if they are defending against attackers.

I had thought about units automatically refueling when they move into friendly territory. That is possible; but it really gets rid of the "precious fuel" mechanic I am trying to achieve. It is not just the fact that the fuel transport is vulnerable, it is also that fuel is highly limited. So if a huge army just drove up into friendly territory, there wouldn't be enough gas to refuel them all.

There are a couple of threads about quantifiable resources floating around at civfanatics. I guess the WWII fans don't care so much about fuel tankers, so they have talked about mechanics that work the way you suggest.

Do you find the micromanagement of fuel trucks gets in the way? I need more feedback on that; I have tuned it a few times to reduce. I want it to be a little painful, but not so painful that fuel totally dominates the game.

 

[Avahz Darkwood]

humm I have had units run out of gas in a city (maybe it was their last turn with a tank of gas... and it showed up the next turn as empty...)

About the tankers. I like the idea that you have to be stingy with your resources and this is/seems the best way to do it. I haven't play on anything higher than noble or larger than small maps so the micromanagement isn't an issue for me. But I did have warmonger game where I had problems fueling my war machine, lucky though I had tank girl to handle the situation until I got some tankers there. You might want to give the AI/Player the ability to build some of their trucks at a really high cost. That will give the human an the AI some ability to manage a shortage of oil wells. I would also give the tanker at least 3 str points (their could still be units sitting on the truck as in Road Warrior -I did lose one to a scorpion once-. Either that was one big mother or my driver drove off the road to avoid it.

 

[davidlallen]

It may be a good idea to give some way for the player to have more oil production in an emergency. I'm not sure I would want it to be just spending hammers; if you don't have oil, there isn't much you can do. You can get more fuel-efficient units with the "Less Fuel" promotion family under Engines. Of course you can make more of a land grab for oil wells. I have thought of a late game tech "Purifying" that automatically gives all your units Less Fuel 1. Apart from pure hammers, what else could we do for emergency production?

Regarding tankers with strength, you have to think of a tanker like a worker or missionary: they have no strength, on purpose. They surrender to everything. You should put guards, maybe utes or cavalries, on your tanker convoys so they don't get lost or hijacked.

It may be interesting to add a late game "armored tanker" or something with a strongpoint on top. The big battle at the end of the Road Warrior movie had that, of course it didn't do them much good It would have to have at least strength 6 to hold off the lowest level punks.

 

[Refar]

To emergency tankers... Maybe ressurect your "Bio-Fuel" idea - some tech could allow building of Bio-Fuel tanker in the cities.
They wuld consume Hammers and Food (like Settlers and Workers) si the city would halt growth while building them.

 

[davidlallen]

Thanks for the reminder. If I get more consistent feedback that there are too few tankers, I can add that. I was hoping to tie biofuel into "city power". But there is nothing useful I can do with that in xml/python except give production bonuses.

 

[Rasma]

So you could not take the way oil tankers are spawned and give it to that building, or perhaps you could set it up where you can make bio diesel plants as tile improvements that do that and also take away food, but the ai may not use them if that is the case.

 

[davidlallen]

I could certainly make oil tankers spawn in a biofuel building. However, if that is all it's doing, I could accomplish the same purpose by making tankers spawn faster in oil wells.

The idea of a tile improvement is an interesting one. That forces the player to directly choose between food and fuel. I guess you could build that on any tile and the rate at which it spawns tankers would depend on how much food production it had: faster for cows and pigs, not very fast on a pure plains tile. I'll have to think about that some more. As you point out, the AI would not know about that. I could give it some kind of weight, but really it's situation dependent: if you have plenty of oil, or few gas powered vehicles, you don't need it that much.

 

[Rasma]

Well what I meant was not spawn based on the food of the tile but actually subtract food from the tile, like to balance mabey -5 food and a chance of spawning a truck for each tile it is on in the cities range so long as they are being worked on.
So that you can not spam them, because if you just take away the food, you could make a city and just make nothing but the bio diesel plants and get plenty and keep the city.
But, if you take let's say 5 food from the tile, then if you make too many you will starve the city to death.

 

[davidlallen]

Sorry, that is what I meant: if you build the biofuel improvement on a tile, you get zero food income for that tile. Instead you get a chance to spawn fuel trucks. It would be like putting a junkyard on a plains hills; you go from 2 hammers to 3, but with zero food income for the tile, the city better have some good farms somewhere else.

 

[Rasma]

I thought civ allowed negative variables on tiles, here is a simple example because I think I am doing a bad job at explaining it.
+3 from one farm -5 from one ethonal plant
if you have 2 farms you can support 1 plant with out starving but if you have 2 plants being worked you will have a net loss of food and will starve the city Because, 2 farms = 6 food 2 plants = -10 food so net loss of 4.
I thought that Civ 4 allowed for negative tile variables though, so I still could be wrong.

 

[davidlallen]

I understand your proposal. I am not sure if the civ engine allows it. I had proposed something slightly different: a biofuel plant on a tile takes 100% of the food production from that tile. If the tile produces 3 food, the biofuel plant uses 3 food. If the tile produces 5 food, the biofuel plant uses 5 food (and produces gas trucks faster).

You have proposed that the biofuel plant takes 5 food, regardless of what is produced by its tile. In case the tile would normally produce 3 food, it means the biofuel plant sucks up food from somewhere else.

That seems pretty harsh. Possible, but harsh. I would probably prefer to say that a biofuel plant on a less productive tile, produces gas trucks slower.