Reward efficiency

Question

I like tweaking machines and logistics in an attempt to up the efficiency but there is no reward in place for doing so, other than you're OCD being kept in check.

I was thinking rewards could be motivational awards from Ficsit, posters, trophies to adorn the HUB room.  Maybe even McDonalds style star badges or Employee of the month plaques.

It could also be used to unlock progression, i.e. if you cannot run a basic assembler properly you don't get to fiddle the the manufacturer.

I've seen people say you cannot get efficiency up in early game, but this isnt true.  Even with mark 1 belts you can achieve high efficiency but throttling back the speed of the machine.  Tweaking!  I love tweaking.

Answer 1

This is pointless.

No matter how efficient you think you make things there will be timing glitches (which you can sometimes see as an empty spot on a belt. Which will upset things.

Add in the occasional splitter freeze.

AND the fact that everything grinds to a halt if a container is full (with everything upstream filling up).  And it will never get back to perfect efficiency because of that. If you empty the container.

I've made "perfect" constructions. Only to see the last machine(s) run at 98 or 99% because of all k8nd of issues outside of your control.

Feed your OCD I you have to (and never actually watch it all up close).

Rewarding this would be a horrible reward system.

Comments

Great idea. Stay Efficient and all that.

Maybe ScienceGuy works for them and cant be arsed to code it :D that or he cant run a factory

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I just wanted to comment about your post: "AND the fact that everything grinds to a halt if a container is full (with everything upstream filling up).  And it will never get back to perfect efficiency because of that. If you empty the container." - This is by design and how we're supposed to play the game. Containers are supposed to fill up, everything is supposed to back up and eventually the machines are supposed to idle down and stop using power until we need them.

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Exactly my point.
Once this has happened it'll never return to "perfect efficiency" well unless  you manually empty every single belt.

Especially if you make a huge facility a bin will fill up in minutes.

In my alu sheet factory (by far the biggest I have in operation atm) the three industrial bins fill up in 20ish minutes.  Kinda pointless to make this "perfect"

So I usually set up my production so the production of parts is slightly higher than the consumption of those parts.

The turbo motor facility I'm working on (using heatsink from the above alu plant) is 3 times as big as the aluminium facility

Answer 2

I somewhat like your post but...

1. Define efficiency: It can be: produce more with less or more with less energy or more in less time or more with a less environmental footprint, etc.

2. Efficience is its own reward (well, depends how you defined it)

Personally, I find game achievements pointless. I can get lot's of them, in special the exploration related ones in MMO, but I fail to see that rewarding in any manner. "Thanks, player! you just finished your thousand quests! Get you blue ribbon of adventuring".

But of course, that is a big deal for many.

Comments

Efficiency as in the efficiency of the machine in the game, which I believe is building versus running time.  If the machine goes idle for whatever reason the efficiency drops

And yes, questing is a pretty established element of most games.  Blissful productivity; when a person voluntarily accepts a task for reward. When that cycle is tight, the player feels satisfaction.  Jane McGonigal has done a lot of talks on game theory - check her out.

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Thanks for your feedback.

Questing is giving the player a goal. Game achievements... for example an achievement for production shut down due energy consumption getting bigger than production. That sort of thing is pointless. Almost all achievements are more a "social thing" "hey, look who got the PVP DPS achievement". But I digress.

Downtime doesn't look great as a metric for efficiency (not in this game context). My  HUB biomass burners are silent since I got coal. Sometimes I rebuild my factory or its "modules" getting some closed. Also, I like to plan and an entire "module": A miner, 16x smelters,  32 constructors, etc and power up everything at once. That can be horrible at your metric.

Maybe a good metric can be, in the context of this game, how many clicks you accumulated at the workbench at each unlock recipes time. Less clicks meaning more automation, meaning more effectivity.

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Err, but I did not create the concept of efficiency in the game or the metric for it.  The team at Coffee Stain did. So it's not my metric and already in the game.

All I was saying is, since it is there and it is giving a score already, reward it (otherwise why have it?)

And I disagree. Shutdown due to the players lack of ability to manage power should have consequences and the rewarding the reverse is not pointless as the point is to avoid that situation.  Pointless, is me responding again on this thread.