Vehicle choice

[TQ]

I'm not sure if this should have been in suggestions for new vehicles but technically I'm not suggesting a new vehicle so here goes...
I think building a vehicle would be a lot better if it revolved around some sort of flow chart mechanism. When you try to build a vehcle it might say: How big do you want this vehicle to be? e.g. small, medium large. In essence this would determine how much resources a the vehicle would carry but it would not be specific. You would then be taken to a page which asks How fast fo you want this vehicle to be?. Again no specifics but maybe a slow, medium fast or somthing? This would all be with the spirit of the game because if someone wants a vehicle to transport a huge amounts of resources but is not really concerned with speed then they would know to build a huge vehicle which would naturally be slower anyway due to its size. Implementing this feature would improve gameplay simply because it would stop people building vehicles which do not do what you want them too. It would also be easy to implement because all you would need is a simple "flow chart system" e.g. click on one bit you go to one page, a another one to another page etc... The vehicles would still be the same but you would be trying to build the exact vehicle you want.

[SekoETC]

Sounds very reasonable.

[TQ]

I just think that if you're building something yourself you would build exactly what you want. I was going to suggest custom vehicles e.g you have to comprimise weight carrying for speed and vice versa. When I thought about it, it seeme it would be a lot easier to inplement the flow chart thing.

[SekoETC]

Sounds like those things website hosts keep to help you choose your membership plan. Except that no matter what you always take the free one, even if you would be needing more space and bandwith, cause hell no we won't pay! Oh... this was about boats. Well... you would see if it's gonna need iron and steel before the project is actually started, so if you're lacking one then you could make a crappier boat.

[TQ]

I was talking about cars, bikes etc... rather than boats but it would work either way.

[SekoETC]

Funny thing since I kept thinking about ships from the start. There ain't many different bikes or cars but it's the ships where you can change the speed and capacity by adjusting the structure and size.

[TQ]

Its just because I'm relatively new and I don't know a lot about land vehicles or boats. It would be simple to implement the system for both.

[nitefyre]

For someone reason, I don't think they'll go out of their way to implement this. However, I like the concept

I think it'd work well for cars...there's already several different types already out there (so why not attach each of those to the classifications TQ provided?). And plus, there's only 2 values (Speed, Size) that need to be dealt with, for land vehicles. After you plug in the values you want (on that big, medium, small scale) , you could be supplied one of the names of the old vehicles/values. Of course, some of the mechanics of the vehicle might need to be tweaked ever slightly for balance (or not?).

For boats though, I think it's okay how they have them already. Plus, considering the overwhelming amount of boats out there, it'll probably be hard to go back and do.

[TQ]

All you would need is hyperlinks which took you to a specific page depending on which link you clicked. e.g click fast then small and you get the response sportscar

[Anthony Roberts]

Maybe not implement it that way. It would need programming, and surely it's not a necessity.

HOWEVER, it is entirely possible to add new vehicle types in the vehicle listing, as such:

- bike (small / quick)
- bike (medium / moderate)
- bike (large / slow)
- passenger car (small / quick)
- passenger car (medium / moderate)
- passenger car (large / slow)
etc.

It would seem illogical to allow you to build a large vehicle with high speed. That would just, you know, destroy some laws of physics or something. Unless we had afterburners or something, I dunno.

Point being, the vehicles listing would become three times as large, and it would be more efficient to have it programmed.

But, depends. If Programming decides to do it, cool. If they don't, maybe I'll ask if we can do it this way? It's a bit of work for me, but I have to do work anyway. That's my... well... job...

[julie2]

Just for now, some more informative descriptions would be handy, and require virtually no programming, surely?

The same arguments apply to buildings (yeah , I know that buildings only ever travel at one speed- 0%, but they also have capacity)

Capacity is the most important spec. to make explicit, in my view. It's crazy that whn a character builds something they don't know how big it's going to be. C'mon if you were designing a car or a bus ,you would know exactly how many pasengers it's going to hold. If you were building a van or a warehouse, you'd have a pretty good notion of it's capacity too.
Craziest of all, once the damned thing is built, you still can't see how big it is, not without cramming it full. Are Cantrians supposed to be blind?

It was suggested to one of my characters that she go round looking at the buildings in the town before she made up her mind what material to build with. Sensible, and she did. And she couldn't tell a damned thing about them. She couldn't even tell which were stone buildings and which were wood, let alone what kind of difference that made (if any)

[Doodle_Jack]

It would be nice that in the vehicle list it would be mentioned what the weight and speed capacity is. Weight could simply be represented in grams, speed could be represented as the comparitive to walking speed.

For example:

Bike (15000 grams / 1.5 x speed)

or


Bike (15000 grams / 150% speed)

I don't know how this speed-thing would work with tiredness. Is a car driving slower if the driver is tired?

Anyway, I bet this doesn't take a lot of programming. The small-medium-large representation probably takes more programming. On the other hand, these specifics might be to specific for a Cantrian to know.


PS I don't know and I even doubt whether these specifics of the bike are true. It's possible, but not necessarily true.

[The Industriallist]

It would be good to know what the difference between wood and stone would be. I don't really see why you would know it's exact capacity...that's not something obvious from thinking about a way to put something together, or even from looking at it. (doubt me? Tell me the volume of your bedroom. In cubic meters. Without measuring tools)

Also...I don't think anyone knows exactly how many passengers a car will hold untill they've tried packing friends into it...cantr cars don't even have seats (as far as I can tell), so there's no particular indication of how many bodies are meant to be crammed in.

And for knowing speed and such...modern engineers can't tell you the exact capabilities of a device without building and studying it first. Cantrians shouldn't be better off.

[Schme]

Industry man is right.

But I think it would be fun to have a vague specification system, all the same.

[Spectrus_Wolfus]

ok so instead of having things saying it can hold xxxgr would people be happy with "it can hold a vast amount" or "it only has a limited amount of space" ??