SDN World 3 Construction Queue Discussion

[Steve]

Then go ahead and reflect that in your queue.

[Thanas]

No, some of mine are in the 5% cost after 2 years sea trials shakedown period. The others are being paid for in full. Unless I have misunderstood and fitting out doesn't happen at reduced cost.

Wait...5%? I thought it was 25%.

Any answer on this yet, Steve?

[Steve]

Thought I did? 5%.

[loomer]

Updated again with actual force maintenance costs and fort locations, and stripped out most of the unnecessary items.

[Steve]

Baerne, Siege, Raj, Coyote, I'm seeing a distinct lack of allocation of IBPs to military maintenance. Please fix this?

Norade, what's with the "points in a year" thing? Didn't I explain already that IBPs are not a currency and you wouldn't get "2100 a year"? You have 525 IBPs. That means the total of your national projects cannot exceed that amount or you get delays to things.

[Coyote]

Baerne, Siege, Raj, Coyote, I'm seeing a distinct lack of allocation of IBPs to military maintenance. Please fix this?

Okay, I feel like this now?:



I thought once the units were built we didn't need to pay maintenance costs on them anymore?

[Steve]

That's up in limbo.

BTW, for that pic? I am so going to give you a negative RP event....

[Coyote]

Not a South Park fan I take it? If we stick with maintenance points, they need to be clearly displayed in the unit costs, then.

[Steve]

I recognize the animation style as South Park, but that image is... ugggggh.

[Raj Ahten]

Frankly I'm going to wait until its 100% decided that we need to pay maintenance costs before I change around my production plan as it is a major pain in the ass and many people don't have anything up yet at all.

My position is I'm against having to pay maintenance costs out of IBP's as I've seen this score as an abstraction of one's military procurement budget who's main purpose was simply so people don't pull 15 battleships out of thin air. It seems to be morphing into a generalized government budget (mainly through the funding of transit projects) which may not be a good thing. I don't want to eventually have to pull my education and pensions budget out of my IBP's for instance.

[Steve]

You wouldn't have to.

IBPs are meant to reflect the capacity of your nation's industries to support various government orders. That's why they increase in wartime, to reflect direct government control of sections of the Economy.

[CmdrWilkens]

You wouldn't have to.

IBPs are meant to reflect the capacity of your nation's industries to support various government orders. That's why they increase in wartime, to reflect direct government control of sections of the Economy.

However to one of his points it might be worth stating that while for startup its probably understandable that folks are slowly adding to their Queues (I just really finalized mine though I may need to tweak a half dozen points) there needs to be some sort of hard cut line when you can no longer "back-date" orders or otherwise claim production started previously. In other words I'd say we should all grant each other leeway in getting data up but probably by time we get to Q3 1925 I think it needs to be a hard cut for posting queues.

[loomer]

Cancelled the economic improvements - I know its a bit late to do so, so I thought I'd penalize myself for it by only freeing up 25 of the 50 expended points and have the rest as pure wasted funds and manhours, unless anyone objects particularly strongly.

[Steve]

That's not how it works. You cancel the project and the IBPs are freed up. If anything, give yourself a quarter-long penalty of 25% to reflect that the wasted expenditures have reduced what your government can order from the national industrial base for the short-term.

[Siege]

Baerne, Siege, Raj, Coyote, I'm seeing a distinct lack of allocation of IBPs to military maintenance. Please fix this?

Oh for fuck's sake, when did we decide on this? I'll assign a random number of points from my industrial investments, because I'm sure as hell not going to figure out how many tons of ship I own.

[Steve]

Ignore it. Did you miss the part where I said maintenance costs were out for now?

[Thanas]

Siege, mainenance costs are scrapped for now (or at least Steve told me so).

[Ryan Thunder]

Is that the final answer?

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Ignore it. Did you miss the part where I said maintenance costs were out for now?

....

Oh for crying out loud.. could the rule page be updated please?

[Siege]

Ignore it. Did you miss the part where I said maintenance costs were out for now?

No, I just went off my rocker because I thought it'd be good fun. Of course I missed it. Now could we please stop changing, modifying or tweaking the rules every time the wind changes direction?

[Steve]

Bah, this is the first game where we're trying to use such systems to solve little problems from the last game like "OMG YOU SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO BUILD THAT!". Naturally there will be... hiccups as the rules are played with for the first time and require... fine-tuning.

[Siege]

If "fine-tuning" is what you're doing perhaps you should be more hesitant to demand players comply with your rules until they're actually fine-tuned and ready for implementation.

[Steve]

And if nobody's following the rules how can we determine what rules need alteration to work better?

As it is I think we should have maintenance costs, but as I didn't think of them until post-game start a number of players had already set up long, elaborate multi-year construction plans that the maintenance costs would have completely ruined. So for now we have none, unless it becomes clearly necessary to regular out of control troop creation.

[Siege]

If nobody is following the rules, and nobody is clamouring for them, then shouldn't that send a pretty clear message about people's lack of a desire for additional rules? For the love of God, what is it about this game that instils this obsessive need to quantify and regulate everything? Barring one or two hiccups the previous game did exceedingly well for months with the absolute barest minimum of rules and no moderation at all, and yet here we are trying to quantify everything from slipway tonnage down to troop maintenance costs, the number of IBPs per kilometer of railway, the number of logistics personnel per division... Who came up with the daft idea that this was a good plan? Hell, you yourself pointed out that it's insanity to pursue quite a number of these. Why do you draw a line at literacy rates but not at maintenance costs? Is it really so important to regulate this before anyone goes on the out of control troop creation binge you speak of? You're the moderator, why not smack it down when it comes to pass, rather than force people to unnecessarily jump through hoops for weeks or months before the moment of mod-hammering arrives?

Anyway I have to run and be off, but I think you get my point (after all it's not like I haven't said anything about this before): In my opinion less is more, and whilst I'm not inherently opposed to some regulation I continue to believe we're simply overdoing the rule creation thing here.

[Steve]

Yes, I do, but it also puts less stress on me and the other mods if someone comes to us, asks "is this reasonable", and we can point him to the rules and say "your answer is there". So some quantification in the ruleset is desirable, just not an obsessive amount.

And seriously, nobody except Coyote considered "kilometers of railway per IBP". I explicitly rejected that one too because I knew this would be the response.