GGO16 - Day 20

Yesterday money began flowing into mega corporation accounts from the new advanced economics in the city blocks they controlled. Today I balanced it out by putting in place some mechanisms to take money away again.

Outcomes

I started off by fixing the issues left over from yesterday:

• Tweaked city generation to produce a mix of quality for the city blocks with better ones closer to the centre of the city.
• Tweaked income from Poor city blocks to be a bit higher (and richer blocks are proportionally increased).

Then I had a choice between working on the happiness system or working on some initial ways to take money out of the system again. Since I’m a bit uncertain how to proceed with the happiness system the expenses work won.

So I added a couple of ways that money gets spent:

• Squads cost maintenance - the initial implementation is basic, but can get much more complicated in time:
  • $ 500 per squad member.
  • Increased by 25% per block of distance away from the player’s HQ (those Cyborg bodies are hard to maintain).
  • In future this cost will be based on the modifications installed in the agents.
• CHIP mission costs a $ 1000 to initiate:
  • The mission increases chip adoption by (1.0f - chipAdoption) * 0.1f - so returns are somewhat diminishing - especially in poor areas.

Here’s what the updated UI looks like:

After thinking about the happiness system a bit today I’m convinced that I can’t really tackle it without first implementing a combat system (THE combat system is definitely not going to fit into this jam, so a simplified version will have to do for now).

This might be too much, but here’s some basics:

• Agent:
  • Health, Armour & cybernetic mods to improve them.
  • Inventory with some basic weapons and med kits.
  • Death.
• Squad:
  • Search & destroy mission.
  • Destruction.
  • Recruitment.
• Weapons:
  • Pistol
  • Shotgun
  • SMG
  • Assault Rifle
• Battles:
  • Some round based resolution system with sufficient output to see what happened (even if it’s just a text log for now).
  • Civilian casualties (that will cause a reduction in happiness).
• Local forces:
  • Police: May get involved in battles between corporations.
  • Gangs: May oppose CHIP missions in their area or ambush squads entering their territory.

That is quite likely more than I can accomplish in what’s left of the jam given that I’m in Pretoria playing board games next weekend, so I’ll cut it down as much as possible.