Engineers

[Kurt (OP)]

Okay, second try at my engineer post.  Steve and I talked about this off-line, and I told him I'd repost, but then I got distracted by work.  Go figure.  

I?ve been thinking about this area as I began thinking about the plot for a new campaign.  It occurred to me that I rarely actually use engineers, and so I set out to try to determine how useful they actually are.  

When I analyzed potential uses for the engineers, I realized there were only a couple of situations where it made sense to use them instead of construction factories.  If I missed something, anyone, let me know.  Basically, I decided engineer divisions (ED?s) were only useful to construct something that can?t be built and shipped from somewhere else, at a location where there are no construction factories.  The possibilities I came up with are:
Building PDC?s in locations where no population is possible, like an airless moon or asteroid; or
Building PDC?s on a frontier planet where the population is low and there aren?t going to be any construction factories anytime soon; or
Building Terraforming Installations (TI) on newly discovered planets or new colonies that don?t have factories.

I can?t really think of any other reasonable uses for ED?s, aside from maybe supplementing colonial construction capacity.  After all, almost anything else you might want on a colony or outpost, like a Deep Space Tracking Station, can be built at a central point and shipped to the desired location a lot easier than it would be to ship ED?s along with raw materials to the desired location and built whatever it is on site.  

Given the above I decided to look at how long it would be for a mid-to-low tech ED to build a PDC or TI.  The results were interesting.  For a somewhat standard PDC at 16,500 tons with armor and ten large missile launchers, it would take a single ED over one hundred and twenty years to build it.  For a stripped down PDC with no armor and single medium sized launcher (a colonial protection unit at 1,050 tons), an ED would take around twelve years to build it.  For a TI, the ED would take fifty years.  

Now, these times are all for one ED, and in almost any situation a player would deploy more.  But even for five or ten ED?s the time is still prohibitive, to the point that I?m not sure anyone is using them.  Ten ED?s could build my stripped down PDC in a little over a year, which isn?t too bad, but it is still just one, and it did take ten entire divisions to do it.  Ten ED?s would take five years to build a TI, which isn?t totally unreasonable, but again, it would just be the one, and there are better ways to do it, like terraforming ships.  

I think this is why I don?t really use ED?s, but admittedly I don?t know what everyone else?s preference is.  There is a solution, but it is opening a can of worms and may not be easy to program (I tend to raise issues that create a lot of work for Steve, I see it as a calling <G>).  Simply raising the productivity level of the ED?s isn?t a solution as it would conflict with the balance with construction factories.  The only solution that would make ED?s viable, IMO, is to create prefab?s.  Prefabbed installations would cost the same as regular installations but wouldn?t take as long to build, perhaps 60-75% of the time to build.  Prefabbed installations would take the same amount of space to transport as regular installations, but would have to be ?installed? at the destination before they would work.  Under this scheme the only unit that could install prefabbed installations would be ED?s.  Even active factories couldn?t do it, it would require an ED.  The time to install should be enough that it wouldn?t make sense to prefab an installation then install it with an ED and save time over the normal build process.  

Really, this is an area that has bugged me for a long time.  Currently in Aurora you can pick up and ship a mine or factory or research lab or infrastructure and it is working on day one after it reaches the target.  That isn?t really realistic, but I always figured that installation was included in the shipping and loading/offloading time.  If prefabbing is included in the game we could change things so that the only installations that can be shipped are those that are already in a prefabbed form, whether they were built that way or converted by ED?s.  This would be more realistic, and would make ED?s essential for any expanding power.  

Kurt

[schroeam]

Sounds reasonable.  Just a couple of questions...

-Can a preexisting structure be converted into prefab materials for shipment?
-Would a CF be required to covert the structure to prefab, or can a ED do the job (at a slower rate)?

I'm referring to the movement of Automated Mines around the asteroid belt and various moons where a CF would not be available to reprocess the mines into their prefab parts.

Adam.

[sloanjh]

It sounds like there are two issues here:

1)  Do people use engineers and for what?
2)  Should you really be able to use an installation immediately after its been shipped?

On 1, I use engineers all the time, to provide additional construction capacity to new colonies that does not require population to be shipped.  Because of mineral depletion, pretty much everyone will need to move a large quantity of regular mines off their homeworld to other populated colonies (or convert them to automated mines and ship them out anywhere).  This means that most lift capacity must be devoted to the exodus of mines from the homeworld, along with the population to support those mines.  If you calculate the lift capacity required to transport one mine or factory and the population to run it, you're probably looking at 100-150 HS (50 for the installation and ~50-100 for the pop, although I'm not sure about the latter numbers).  Contrast that to the 20 HS required to lift an engineer unit.  So engineers give you the ability to surge major construction capability to a colony, without impacting the background shipment of mines.  Note the use of the word "surge" - the actually shipping efficiency is much less than the naive 5-7.5x above, since most of the time my troop transports are sitting in orbit (due to a lack of engineers that need transporting).  This means that you're probably paying about the same for the shipping costs (or even more), but you have more flexibility since you don't need to move colonists around.

As for #2, yes, I agree it would probably be more realistic to have a time lag for factories to come back on line after being moved (maybe similar to the retooling time that Steve was batting around a few weeks ago).  I would MUCH rather manage it this way, however, rather than turn engineers into yet another critical resource that impedes shipment of industrial installations to the colonies.  Engineering capacity is VERY slow to build up, and so should not be made critical for core activities.

OTOH, if pre-fab were non-mandatory, and instead had shipping benefits (e.g. 50% shipping size savings), then I think that would be a good use for engineers - basically you send your engineers to colonies that you wish to have rapidly grow in industrial capacity.

John

PS - I would be less opposed to engineers being required/able to construct/tear down major installations like terraformers, spaceports, PDF, etc.  (note that none of these can be shipped now anyway).  The original intent of engineers IIRC was to build terraforming capacity without requiring a population; the reason this hasn't worked out is the play-balance issue of not turning engineers into super-factories.  Having them do the terraforming assembly would be a way around this.  From a game mechanics point of view, however, I think "reassembly" should still be a function that any factory unit can do, i.e. you don't need an engineer to assembly that spaceport that's being shipped in if you've already got sufficient industrial capacity.

[Kurt (OP)]

Sounds reasonable.  Just a couple of questions...

-Can a preexisting structure be converted into prefab materials for shipment?
-Would a CF be required to covert the structure to prefab, or can a ED do the job (at a slower rate)?

I'm referring to the movement of Automated Mines around the asteroid belt and various moons where a CF would not be available to reprocess the mines into their prefab parts.

Adam.

My first thought is that already operational installations have to be broken down into prefab form by engineers.  This will mean, as you point out above, that shuttling automated mines around comets and asteroid belts will be more difficult, but that is what asteroid mining modules are for, and a change along these lines will likely increase useage of those modules for that reason.  

Kurt

[SteveAlt]

I made the first significant change as a result of this post. I may make some more but probably not for v3.1.

You can now create prefabricated PDCs, ship the components and assemble them on a new planet. Creating a prefab PDC costs the same as building a normal one. When it is completed, a set of components will be created with the number of components equal to the size of the PDC/10. So a PDC of size 200 (10,000 tons) will have 20 components. Each component requires 5,000 cargo points, or one cargo hold.

Assembly of the components costs 10% of the normal cost. A PDC assembly task will appear in the list of planetary installations that may be constructed if there are sufficient components on the planet to build one PDC. There is a new list of prefab components to the right of the build queue for planetary installations (where Fuel production is now).

Once a PDC is built normally or assembled, it cannot be disassembled later. The only time you can have PDC components is if they are built from scratch as components. This because a PDC is assumed to be built into a mountain or underground.

Although both construction factories and engineers can assemble PDCs, engineers will be far more useful for the task. The vast majority of system bodies cannot support a population, most of the time because of the gravity of small planets, moons or asteroids but also because the colony cost may be excessive. Engineers will now allow you to build military installations such as missile bases, or PDCs with hangar space for FACs and fighters, on virtually any system body. With this prefab and assembly capability, any asteroid could be the home of a hostile PDC. Also because the assembly cost is only 10%, even a few engineers will be able to assemble a powerful PDC in an acceptable amount of time.

This will also benefit new colony worlds in need of defences and it will often be easier to ship in engineers than the construction factories, population and possibly infrastructure required. The main purpose of this rule though will be to greatly increase the ability of engineers to construct military installations in a wide variety of locations.

Steve

[sloanjh]

Cool!!

John

[Kurt (OP)]

I made the first significant change as a result of this post. I may make some more but probably not for v3.1.

<snip>

This will also benefit new colony worlds in need of defences and it will often be easier to ship in engineers than the construction factories, population and possibly infrastructure required. The main purpose of this rule though will be to greatly increase the ability of engineers to construct military installations in a wide variety of locations.

Steve

This is great, and resolves a lot of the problem I was originally looking at.  Thanks Steve!

Kurt