Proposal for a Complete Infrastructure Model

[axi]

I don't know Mark, I don't have a clue as to how you're doing stuff in your code. How do you handle preferences? According to my model, if you create an infraclass only when you want to make a military unit, then the people won't be able to build TF elements by themselves.

What do you think about my post in the new economy thread? Any more facts and issues to be added? It is surely incomplete but maybe I should cross-post some stuff over here. It is an infrastructure discussion you have there, you see...

------------------
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell

[alms66]

This is an old one eh?
Look here too, for the OO discussion thread, and here for the latest economy discussion.

This is something that I recently remembered from my EIT design. It has potentially large impacts to the economy and infrastructure models, though until I got somewhat into typing it, I didn’t realize how large the effect to the economy model was, I was thinking it would only impact the infrastructure model. Seeing that this was buried 10 pages in and the economy model thread was only 2 pages in, I bumped this one instead of the economy model.

Land Cover

Land cover describes the physical aspect of Infrastructure’s encroachment on uninhabited land. Every piece of land that I’ve ever known can only hold so much infrastructure (housing, roads, etc.) before it is filled, and the same should hold true for Clash.

At its most basic, I’m talking about adding a new property to tiles (which defines Unusable Land, Covered Land, Unused Land and Used Land), and a new property to infrastructure (which defines % of land used per unit – higher technology allows infrastructure that takes up less space for equal or more gain, to a point).

Unusable Land – As it implies, unusable by civilization.
Covered Land – This is covered by jungle or forest, and unusable by civilization, except for logging.
Unused Land – This is not yet used by civilization, yet not covered.
Used Land – This is the amount of land filled with infrastructure.

So what use is all of this?
1. This will help aid in determining what tiles are ‘cities’ and which aren’t. Larger land coverage usually indicates a more rural tile (farms take up a lot of space), while large portions of unusable land will severely limit development of the region.
2. This will aid in population control for rugged areas. For example, given a mountain tile and a flat tile of the same tech level, the mountain tile can physically hold less people than the flat simply because there is so much unusable land.
3. This is scalable to the size of the tile.

As I’m writing this I realize that, in essence, this is a more detailed and sophisticated version of the ‘Farms, Resources, Services’ that is currently used by the economy model. Since I’ve already pushed for a near-total rewrite of the military model, and I’ve come to realize that this would require a large rewrite of the economy model, I’ll just let this post stand as is, until comments are made, except to say one last thing. We’ve been needing to refactor the economic code for some time now, assuming it isn’t done, perhaps posting this now isn’t such a bad thing.

[yellowdaddy]

I'm guessing that you could convert some Covered land, and perhaps even some Unusable land to Usable land at a cost?

I'm thinking of:

- logging to clear land.
- land reclamation from sea/lake (desert?!) and draining swamps
- mining into a mountain terrain square to increase usable land?!

and if there's environmental effects, I suppose the reverse could happen?!

you might have to allow for some funny nomads - like forest tribespeople who live up trees or in villages; tent-dwelling nomads, and igloo-builders. Some people even live on floating villages in lakes! (or is this too much detail : )

[alms66]

Originally posted by yellowdaddy
I'm guessing that you could convert some Covered land, and perhaps even some Unusable land to Usable land at a cost?

I'm thinking of:

- logging to clear land.
- land reclamation from sea/lake (desert?!) and draining swamps
- mining into a mountain terrain square to increase usable land?!

and if there's environmental effects, I suppose the reverse could happen?!

That's part of the reason I designed it this way. Another major factor was a detailed commodity-based economy, which is very different from the abstract model Clash has.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Does this represent surface land use or total land use. FE if a tile had a city built almost entirely underground, but with very little of the above surface used, how would it be represented?

[alms66]

It models surface area.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Ok, but then how would you represent such an occurance? Seriously a signifigant amount of infrusture is built underground. True, not an entire city, but its not without the realm of plausability

[alms66]

I didn't. For the most part, I made the assumption that the space underground is unlimited. That may seem absurd, but when you compare the infrastructure built above ground to infra built underground, it's obvious that the above ground infra takes up a lot more space, and is therefore at a much greater premium than underground space. Plus, theres very little underground infra compared to above ground infra comparitively speaking. To model the "high-rising" effect leading to skyscrapers, I simply reduced the percentage of land area that infrastructure occupied with technology. For example, if a unit of housing infra took up .1% of land, over time, technology would reduce that to .01% of land, allowing you to build more units in less space.

If you're getting at some sort of fantasy or fictional scenario, I'll save you some time by telling you I never took them into account.

[Max Sinister]

But during history, in the same way as prosperity grew, so did the houses, didn't they?

[Lord God Jinnai]

If you're getting at some sort of fantasy or fictional scenario, I'll save you some time by telling you I never took them into account.

In the extreme manner i was, but considering is plausible even most of the extreme cases, it should be considered.