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Destragon -> RE: The logistic System is a gigantic mess (6/10/2020 9:06:26 PM)
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I'm a little late on this, looking at how this is already page 4, but I want to say that I absolutely agree with the original complaint. The issue isn't necessarily the supply system itself, it's specifically just the traffic lights. The traffic lights are probably the one thing that I don't like about this game.
Here are what I think are the problems:
1: The reason you need to fiddle around with these traffic lights is because otherwise your logistics straight up get wasted. The more optimally you want to play, the more fiddling is required. This is probably the only area in the game where that is the case. Everywhere else, the game does a pretty good job in disincentivising min-maxing. I don't agree with the "you don't NEED to do it" argument, because, well sometimes you really do need to do it, but besides that, this is a game with a victory condition, and if you want to win, you are kinda expected to play optimally. Especially if you play multiplayer. Playing optimally should NEVER be tedious. Tediousness is not how you disincentivise min-maxing.
2: The settings that you have access to to limit the flow of logistics are only percentages. This makes it really confusing to set up a supply route to a destination where you know how many logistics points you're gonna need. For example, if you have a mine that wants 100 logistics points, you need to calculate what kinda percentage you should be blocking instead of just saying "let 100 points through". It turns the process into a bit of trial and error guesswork to achieve what you actually intend to do.
3: When a building is upgraded, either by you or by civilians, it will require more logistical points, meaning you need to go back to problem 2 and again calculate how many points are needed and manually update your traffic lights.
4: When civilians decide to build a building somewhere, which attaches onto an existing road, they now suddenly caused half the supplies that were heading along that road to be diverted. Without ANY notification of it happening, as far as I know. This is a huge deal. The civilians might have just cut the supply that your front line troops depended on in half, while the new building is getting WAY more supplies than it's ever gonna need. If you don't notice this early, you're gonna lose some soldiers.
5: If you want to limit the productivity of a building, you have to do it two-fold right now. You have to reduce its actual productivity, and then you have to set up traffic lights to prevent those freed up logistics from being wasted.
My suggestion off of the top of my head would be something like this:
If a new building is built or an existing building upgraded, and there is no traffic light yet, then the game should automatically set up a traffic light on the road leading to the location tile, and this traffic light should be set so that it only lets exactly as many logistics points through as are needed by all the buildings on the tile/road. If there already was a traffic light, then that traffic light should automatically be adjusted to the new logistics demand. The traffic light should also get updated when you change the productivity of a building.
The game would have to be able to figure out the origin of the logistics that are headed for the building and then find the location of the closest (to the building) fork in the road where a traffic light could be placed.
If this only gets checked when buildings are built or when productivity is updated, then I don't think it would be a performance problem.
It might be best if these automatic traffic lights were separate from the player's own traffic lights in some way. What I mean with that is, if the game sets up an automatic traffic light to let 100 logistics points reach a building, then the player should still have the ability to pump additional logistics down that road, without affecting the automatic traffic light. The automatic traffic light in that case would ensure that at least as many supplies get through that road as the buildings need.
An alternative solution would be to let players manually sync up traffic lights to certain tiles, and then those sync'd lights would automatically let as many logistics through as the buildings in those selected tiles need.
Also, note that I don't mention anything about automating the traffic lights for units. My problems are entirely about the logistics used by buildings.
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