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Shannon V. OKeets -> RE: MWIF Game Interface Design (8/9/2010 7:51:23 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: paulderynck
I agree routing resources to specific factories seems like overkill. It may be alright for the land-based powers since you might establish the default and only have to change it infrequently. But for the CW, the usual case is dependent on the number of convoys working to the UK and you don't care which oil/resource goes to which factory, except to use up resources first and oil last. A "happy time" turn for axis subs will mean reconfiguring that turn and (hopefully) the next as well.
As others have noted, since the AI will have to do an excellent job on this, one would expect the player-aid version to be almost painless. Something like: "either reduce production to save more oil or click OK".
Well, it's overkill until you need that capability.[;)]
For instance, if Sealion has been partially successful and cut the UK east-west, taking out Liverpool, well then, you might want to control whether a resource goes to a factory in the north of the UK or to one in the south. There are other possibilities of the Axis occupying parts of the UK, where treating the entire UK as a single destination won't work.
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If things are well in the realm of routing resources, then the program will route resources to specific factories without the player having to do anything. I'll use the first pass by the program at routing resources to define the 'default' factories for each resource. [The way this works is that if a resource has no default factory/destination, then I'll give it the first one that is chosen by the program.] You might want to tweak those choices slightly, but only if the convoy routes are sub-optimal. As you said, which factory is the destination doesn't matter when things are going well.
When the convoys get messed up, for any of a number of reasons, that is when the player is likely to want to change destinations. Sending oil to cities to be saved and non-oil to local factories (e.g., in Canada instead of overseas to the UK), could be done on a factory by factory basis - without changing the default factories for the resource. The program will attempt to send the resource to the default factory, and failing that, send it to the last destination. So, if there is a interim where the convoy routes are messed up, a temporary routing scheme could be put in place by the player without affecting the default factory destinations. Once the convoy lines are reestablished, the default routing would be reused.
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I have no interest in trying to optimize convoy routes for players. I am doing it for the AIO, but I do not want to have long arguments with players about what is 'optimal'. I do know it is not a binary decision, but one of subtle trade-offs between risk and reward.
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