So… This has come up a few times and I’m starting to wonder if its a big enough issue that I should consider bumping other features to implement it. I’d like to know what people think.
Right now the game has two systems: The conveyor belt that the cars move along (lets call it the conveyor system) and the conveyor system for overhead resource delivery (lets call that the resource conveyors).
The conveyor system places down lines in such a way that the player can have two parallel lines along two rows or columns of tiles that do not meet. If the player wants a junction on the conveyor system they need to actively click and drag to make that junction exist. By contrast, the resource conveyors are simply in a tile or not, and any tile in the resource conveyor that has a conveyor in any adjacent tile automatically forms a junction with it, leading to a more jumbled grid system, but one that is arguable easier to place down.
The problem with this is it prevents the player from running two parallel conveyors without them becoming jumbled together. If you have two resource importers close to each other, you may wish to dedicate one line for certain resources, and another to go top different destinations, but if they get within 1 tile of each other, they autojoin.
Should we change the resource conveyors to prevent auto-joining and junction creation so as to fix this?
Would the extra complexity and having to force-create (by dragging) junctions be worse than the freedom it would create to allow for more control over when junctions meet?
it would also make the layouts look quite a bit cleaner, with probably a vast reduction in the number of 3 or 4 way resource network joins.
In my opinion you should not change the current conveyor system.
I think people will end up with a lot of not connecte tiles if the resource conyevor is not auto-joining or will need a lot of clicks to join the resource conveyor.
If the people what to have more options for micro management, I think it would be nice if you can select the origin of resources (resource import) at each production/manufacturion slot individually.
Just to clarify upfront, I’m not missing an option for prioritizing and/or selecting what each resource importer can bring in right? Want to make sure I’m not missing an existing feature. I think your point is that you’d only hook certain resource importers up to certain production slots and this is harder to do currently since they auto-join.
The more customization in layout a game like this has, the better IMHO. It makes tweaking and trying new designs and complication (or simplicity) that much more fun and keeps you playing. Therefore, I’d support this change.
I’ll flag my post here while we’re discussing this though. If you going to force the player to design junctions, I think you should take into account when the player is charged funds.
Yup I only mean in terms of when the player arranges things to have dedicated lines, there is no finer control at the moment.
Re:the charge on re-laying, its on my todo list.
Definitely ran into this with a couple of the included layouts. In a few maps, the import tiles are so close together its difficult to bring them out to dedicated sections of the line. At a high level, splitting the load seems to be important since if you just connect all importers to a grid through your whole factory, the load doesn’t get split well and you end up with overloaded importers.
Well its possible to code that, but I think this may become horrible fiddly with huge layouts surely? Especially when you want loads of resources to use the same lines, but have some lines dedicated to a specific bunch of resources (bits for door panels, for example)?