[WIP] X Consumer Goods (XCG)

[leecarter]

Can't wait to see this, I love the economic part of the game.

You know what I thought would be cool that's along this same train of thought are tourist stations. So the inhabitants of the planets vacation out in space and enjoy the romantic views of the planet. Occasionally they get vaporized by xenon, but no vacation is perfect.

They would need everything from ships to all manner of specialized products, be very expensive to build, but very profitable. Way down the line maybe make some station models that look like huge disco balls or something, would add some bling to the sectors.

I know just rambling here, but I the game really needs a deeper economy. Glad to see you guys are doing this!

[atrayas]

i was thinking what if you took the useless connector pieces and turned them into things like luxury apartments, shopping/entertainment centers and similar some such. that use consumer goods to boost your stations attractiveness and increase the level at witch you gain workforce maybe even make you a couple credits.

It's a cool idea, but we don't want to touch existing modules in such a way. Besides, habitats already fulfill this function, which is why we decided to attach our new goods to habitats for now.

Can't wait to see this, I love the economic part of the game.

You know what I thought would be cool that's along this same train of thought are tourist stations. So the inhabitants of the planets vacation out in space and enjoy the romantic views of the planet. Occasionally they get vaporized by xenon, but no vacation is perfect.

They would need everything from ships to all manner of specialized products, be very expensive to build, but very profitable. Way down the line maybe make some station models that look like huge disco balls or something, would add some bling to the sectors.

I know just rambling here, but I the game really needs a deeper economy. Glad to see you guys are doing this!

Disco ball stations are a great idea, haha!

We've been thinking about hotels as a secondary resource sink for consumer wares. Only driving consumption through habitats might get costly for the player. We could increase workforce efficiency in turn, but that would mean overtuning all of the economy (including AI stations). We need to play test this once we have the basic functionality of our mod together, but hotels would essentially drain resources and give the hotel owner cash for it. This is similar to the original idea of shopping malls, which we dropped in favor of habitat consumption. I'd also really like to tie hotels to ship crew present in the sector (effectively allowing ship crew to take consumption-filled vacations!), but we don't know yet if that's technically feasible. Planetary tourists are a great idea (even if it's only implemented at a lore/design-level) to justify hotel consumption, so thanks for that! I honestly didn't think about it.

[ADMNtek]

i was thinking what if you took the useless connector pieces and turned them into things like luxury apartments, shopping/entertainment centers and similar some such. that use consumer goods to boost your stations attractiveness and increase the level at witch you gain workforce maybe even make you a couple credits.

It's a cool idea, but we don't want to touch existing modules in such a way. Besides, habitats already fulfill this function, which is why we decided to attach our new goods to habitats for now.

you could do it like you do with the production modules reuse the assets but add new functionality. and the main function would be to increase attractiveness so you gain workforce faster. i recently build out my PHQ and the rate workforce is building up is agonizing. but if you say habitats get a boost from having a better selection of wares that could also work.

[TR0LL]

If you haven't seen it yet, this may help you guys out, its a Ware Generator for X4 to help with xml population.
https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations ... escription

[atrayas]

you could do it like you do with the production modules reuse the assets but add new functionality. and the main function would be to increase attractiveness so you gain workforce faster. i recently build out my PHQ and the rate workforce is building up is agonizing. but if you say habitats get a boost from having a better selection of wares that could also work.

I'm not actually sure if we can mod in "attractiveness", because the game engine is very obscure regarding workforce (seems like a lot of it is simply hardcoded). In the game files, you can change workforce growth speed, but only across the board (not with more complex / targeted interactions).

If you haven't seen it yet, this may help you guys out, its a Ware Generator for X4 to help with xml population.
https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations ... escription

Hey, thanks! This is actually built by our team, though (specifically Matt aka SpaceCadet). We want to generate as much as we can, which will make updating and maintaining the mod so much easier!

[TR0LL]

awesome! I figured it may be but didnt know.

[verl1]

Hi there,

i justed wanted to ask how far you are from releasing your mod?

it looks like one of the most exciting ones around

[Adyn]

What about Citystations - they lived from rents and hove to supply the resident

[atrayas]

Hey guys! We're glad you're still interested! I wanted to give you a quick update.

We've been working towards generating as much of the XML files as possible. Right from the start, we set out to do this, and now I can present the center piece of this idea: Our xcg-wares.yaml file. This file will contain all the information about the wares we are adding, so that our generator has a single source of truth for any ware attributes. These include, for example, the price of a ware, its volume, how it is produced and the blueprint cost of the production module. If the toolchain works out as we have planned it, we only need to change this YAML file to adjust most of the values our mod touches. This will give us the ability to balance and maintain this mod easily. But that's not all! If you're a bit tech-savvy, it will be entirely possible for you to generate your own version of XCG. How far this adjustability reaches will have to be seen when the mod actually works and depends on how much we can generate and how much we have to hand-code (for example, one open question is whether we can generate NPC traders from our ware information or whether we have to do some things manually).

Inside xcg-wares.yaml, you will already find the most basic production and ware info, as well as some descriptions (you'll also notice we're adding lore flavors around a Mr. Zon, more on that later!). I've spent a LOT of time creating and analysing spreadsheets to arrive at the production values and prices. I started creating spreadsheets by hand in Google Sheets, but quickly realised that this would be too much manual work (our team hates manual work, hah!), so I wrote a tool in Scala which takes the xcg-wares.yaml and generates spreadsheets comparing our wares with various other wares. We balance our wares along the lines of existing wares (for example, Microchips or Silicon Wafers), but some wares have various advantages or disadvantages which sometimes affect profitability. I'm done with the basic pricing calculations. My next step is to analyse which existing X4 wares are used most by our XCG wares, so that we can "fill out some holes" if some basic goods are underused, since one of our goals was to integrate the existing economy. This might yet change the productions of some XCG wares, so the values in the YAML file are not finished.

I can't give you any timeline on our future work, but once all generator and design/configuration parts are in place, we will probably only need a few days to produce an alpha version of the mod. We want to generate the wares and associated production modules as soon as possible, so we can test our concept, even if NPCs won't yet build stations and trade the wares (additional configurations are needed for that). This might happen as early as next week. Once we're happy with the state of that limited testing environment, we will fill out the other required features with additional generations until we have a full alpha version of the mod.

What about Citystations - they lived from rents and hove to supply the resident

That's basically the hotel concept, which we are still considering.

[Adronyth]

so silent here still looking forward to your mod

[Panasonic]

so silent here still looking forward to your mod

Damnit, I have the alerts on, I thought there was something new xD

[albysmith]

Not that I dont see the joy of making a simple project complex. Why would you need tools to keep track of a wares diff?

[shealladh]

so silent here still looking forward to your mod

Damnit, I have the alerts on, I thought there was something new xD

OOOooooo a new post, OH denied. . . . .

[TR0LL]

Hate to say it but I think this one may be dead... However there is another econ mod on Nexus called "Better Economy" I guess Ill give that one a try.