Hello,
I read that the team's working on a way to punish abusive firing&hiring back of employees, either by making those firings definitive or by adding a "transfer" delay before they can be hire back.
(before the fired employees return from leave vacations).
On the other hand, the scientists and workers are unskilled and never gain experience, as for now. A such, if they die or if they're lost through firing, it's not a great matter because they can be easily replaced (only the cost in time and credits of a lost base does count).
In comparison, the definitive firing of veteran soldiers would hurt much more, because they gain experience and the late game need them.
On the last few hours, I've had a think about an easy way to have both: the more ancient the employees the more efficient and thus valuable, and the late game researches and items be next to impossible to handle by beginners, making it critical to not loose the veteran searchers and engineers (such as when a R&D or production base is stormed by the aliens).
I present here the basic ideas:
Workers and scientists proficiencies (skills):- Workers and scientists have now proficiency (or skill). This proficiency is used to compute how fast they perform as compared to the current (v2.5) production times (let's call them reference times).
- They use the same proficiency scale as the soldiers (0-100), starting in the 10s-20s, and increasing through action (production, research).
- Instead of having only one proficiency, it could be interesting to have several ones (i.e. 3 or 4). This way, it would still add some realism at a lesser cost and without cluttering the code nor adding too much of micro-management for such a tactical action game.
- Workers get 3 or 4 proficiencies:
1.Production: used to decrease the production times of all non-craft items, increased by producing non-craft items.
2.Assembly: used to decrease the production times of all crafts (aircrafts, UGVs), increased by producing crafts.
3.Disassembly: used to decrease the dismantling times of UFOs, increased by dismantling UFOs.
4.Prototyping: used to decrease the RESEARCH times of new terran items, increased by taking part in the final stage of any research on new items.
I know that the workers don't do research, but I figured a way to use them anyways. - Scientists get 3 or 4 proficiencies:
1.Reverse Engineering: used to decrease research times on alien technologies (new UFOs included) under Paul Navarre, increased by doing research in this field.
2.Xenobiology: used to decrease research times on autopsies, alien behavior and psy powers under Doc. Connor, increased by doing researh in this field.
3.Applied Physics: used to decrease research times on any new terran item/tech/craft under Paul Navarre, increased by doing research in this field.
4.Data Analysis: used to decrease research times on statistical data and to speed up memo output rates under Col. Falkland (Alien on Earth, etc.), increased by doing research in this field. - Workers and scientists gain experience through doing things. How then to replace lost veteran employees? Workers may always produce things even if they aren't needed and are sold. But scientists won't research again topics that have been already searched.
This is the reason for having the scientists able to train when they are idle: it's a very low daily rate and this models how the scientists study former researches in the PHALANX database. - As for the precise experience gain system, I let this to others. Perhaps it could draw inspiration from the soldiers' experience system.
There could be a very low gain on each day of being in base (training or researching a topic too much difficult), a low daily gain when researching, and a bunch of points gained when research is completed (e.g. 2-7 points on the 0-100 scale)
Now that workers and scientists get skills (or proficiencies), we can devise the principle of the system.
Production/research times:Currently, production and research times have fixed values in (hour x man) (as experienced with production times at least) ; this means that each assigned employee contributes equally to the actual production time.
For example, if an UFO has a dismantling time of 6000 (hour x man), assigning 50 workers on it will result in a 120 hours dismantling time.
In this case, each worker works 120 hours on this production. Let's call this the reference time.
The idea is that unexperienced workers could contribute for less than those 120 hours while veteran workers would contribute more.
How less? As low as 0 if the research or the production is too difficult.
How more? As much as 150% for instance (this a balance concern).
On to the maths:
Currently, the production (research?) time is computed by:
productionTime = referenceTime / manpowerwhere manpower = number of assigned employees x 1 <- 1 is the efficiency factor, the same for all the employees.
I propose to change this formula into:
productionTime = referenceTime / actualManpowerwhere actualManpower = sum of all the individual efficiency factors (on a 0-1.5 scale)
Quite obviously, we have 0 < actualManpower < 1.5xManpower, so that the referenceTime (currently used in game) might need some balance (or not).
In short, 50 workers would work as fast as 75 or as slow as... 1 (or even 0)! depending on the difficulty of the research/production as compared to their own skill.
The factor 1 would correspond to an employee whose skill matches the required proficiency score.
For instance, given that the employee have a score of 20 at the beginning of the campaign, those researches accessible from the start should have a proficiency of circa 20.
Last thing to do is to compute those individual proficiency factors (0-1.5)
Proficiency factor is computed given the employee's proficiency and the research/production reference proficiency:If we use a delayed exponential function, a simple formula any physicist is familiar with, which parameters are set so that a worker with same proficiency score as the difficulty score of the given research/item, we end with:
- the possibility to forbid a research or a production to an employee not proficient enough.
- the general result of having veteran employees performing more, but not on a linear curve, rather on an asymptotic one (exponential).
Conclusion:If this simple system (despite this wall of text) gets a chance to interest the team (either to implement it or to some other use), I can send you the formulas, a spreadsheet and the associated diagrams that illustrate what we'd get.
I'd have to work on them in the few next days, of course, but only if you are interested.
From the few tests I made on a pocket calculator, this should address the question.
Just give me an email or an address to upload files and wait a little.