Hello,
I think that the research tech tree is a bit simple. Factories are constantly optimizing there production line. In this game it is just research every upgrade and then buy every upgrade. There is no choice to made. But I have an idea. Have you heard of the game “game dev tycoon” greenheartgames.com/app/game-dev-tycoon/
It is a good example of how to make a tech tree. I will explain it in short. First of you have the new technologies which you can just buy. But you can’t begin making new games with the researched technologies. You first need to make a game engine. Making a new game engine cost a lot of money. This will force the player to be strategic with making a new game engine. Am I going to make a game engine now or am i going to do just a bit more research?
Oke this is all great but how should it be implemented in production line? Well that is a good question.
We should replace the game engine with an assemble machine. I will explain in a bit more detail.
You keep the efficiency and extra features upgrade. But you can’t just upgrade the assemble machine. You first need to redesign the assemble machine. The player has a lot of choices with the assemble machine. They could make a new assemble machine for each task but that would cost a lot of money. Having to much tasks in one assemble machine will give the machine a time penalty because machine isn’t able to optimism as good.
The player could design a new assemble machine for the extra features but it would cost 100k to design a new assemble machine. They player should wait until he has a lot of new features. There is also an option of how big the footprint is aloud to be. The shape will be semi randomly generated.
Well that is the general idea. I still have a couple thing to say.
-After designing the assemble machine the player still needs to buy the machine. But this shouldn’t be expansive. 20k or something.
-Have an upgrade extra storage.
-This idea is probably already on your mind. A car doesn’t sell indefinably. I think that it should first sell with a really high premium. But after a while it should decline. The player could change the factory to a different car but that would mean redesigning all the assemble machines.
-Able to move an assemble machine
Well that is a lot of text. Please tell me what you think of it. If you would like I could write this with a little more detail. But I first would like to know whether you like the basic of the idea