Multiple Bays per Factory

I'm consistently baffled by this community's propensity towards making everything into an upgrade, regardless of logic or reason.

I'm trying to put together in my head how simply more physical factory floorspace constitutes a costly 'upgrade'.

Hmm, if added as a upgrade i would prefear it to be a automatic upgrade included in the tiers of a factory (tier 1 = 1 building pad, tier 2 = 2 building pads).

It would fit the concept of a more advanced factory.

Well. That's because it doesn't.

The idea proposed aims to fix a simple gameplay issue with an overly complex mechanic, and to "balance" it with costs and tech levels and... no. Just stop.

When a unit is finished, don't wait for it to leave. Kick it out. Problem solved.

I'd definitely love it if the factories emptied out the units in the direction that the waypoint was given. In TA it was a pain how units got stuck in factories or had to come out at the south to go north. So if the waypoint is given north, the factory should "pivot" to that direction (or simply have "ramps" facing every direction). Or there shouldn't be any single-facing building types. Just one big platform or something.

I'm suddenly reminded of Water games in TA and watching all of my shipyards bog down.

Wut?

All I suggested was factories have adjacent spots to construct on to avoid waiting for the previous unit to get out of the way. Hardly overly complex.

Wait...was this directed towards me?

How about, instead of commenting that Air factories were superior to ground factories due to zero roll-off time...

Introduce roll-off time to air factories? Give them a runway, or maybe have the planes take a few moments to power on their engines, etc?

Or... Just leave it as it was and balance it that way...

There seem to be two arguments about this topic.

The first assumes the factory system will remain more of less unchanged from FA, and has turned into an argument about balance and engineer assists. Which, people seem to have concluded, the topic is relevant to, but is not a massively important factor. Hence the opposition to the idea.

On the other hand, if engineer/factory build rates are tweaked (but here is not the place to argue that, I know; try this thread) and the two-bay idea is not important for balancing, we end up with two arguments. On one hand, it's pretty irrelevant to the gameplay, except for speeding up unit production as a whole. On the other, it may be quite cool, in the sense that:

Personally, I think there are more effective ways of balancing production and that two-bay factories would be harmless, if a little pointless.

Every last person who takes, in their head, Supcom / TA / whatever, applies the idea in a forum post, and then shouts "BUT IT WONT BE BALANCED", needs a smack upside the head with trout.

Seriously people.

It's about identifying problem areas in previous games and coming up with solutions for those problems. Balance comes way after, and anyone trying to argue balance at this point is wasting their time.

This idea has nothing to do with balance. NOTHING. It's a mechanic that identifies a previous problem (complex roll-off times affecting build speed) and fixes the problem by separating the time-to-start-next-build from the rolloff time.

This is a Brilliant idea!

Particularly because even if you have 25 factories each producing 100 bots, and you seperate all of the factories evenly to provide pruduction pathways, and all of the factories set to a waypoint off in the horizon... you can still have a congested production line.
perhaps because of pathing.
perhaps by design.
i dunno.
...but this was resolved when they introduced the unit cannons =D

If you have multiple bays, how about using them at the same time? Would be kind of stupid to have two and only use one at a time.
An idea which comes to my mind is:
T1 factory: can produce one T1 unit at a time
T2 factory: can produce two T1 units or one T2 unit at a time.

That sounds far more interesting than introducing a second bay to get rid of minimal build times. (Which in my opinion are not a bad thing. Nothing can be infinitely improved upon.)

From an immersive standpoint, adding an extra bay doesn't add extra factory equipment. Using the same machinery power to construct two units at the same time just makes each one build twice as slowly.

I feel everyone suggesting to integrate this into tiers or some upgrade system are missing the point.

Perhaps I'm being naive, but if you want two bay, why not build two factories ?

i like the OP's implementation of this idea. I also prefer it to some kind of pushing mechanism (pushing tanks out of road feels wrong)

But I favour factories starting like this (i.e. teir 1). I guess you could slow up the build time of the units if your worried about balance? Hmm.

Also keen for more tanks and destruction, the more the better :geek:

The OP is trying to solve an AI/gameplay issue with a graphical solution. This issue being that the factory cannot construct a new unit when an existing unit is physically in the way. Problems with the proposed solution, ignoring the streaming/assist argument:

- Multiple bays are only effective if the unit doesn't move off in a direction that intersects any other bay. Otherwise you are back to square one. Sure, you could set it so that the unit always comes out in one direction but that results in the biggest part of the waiting issue (the units turning on the spot) gone. Problem solved!
- As tier levels increase so generally do the size of the units. These bays are going to be pretty large to support the largest possible unit producible from the factory, otherwise the unit will overlap with the other bay(s) and cancel out any benefit. Not a problem? Well combine it with modded units and you have a match made in hell.....
- .... UNLESS you make the construction ignore collision, but then that makes this whole idea redundant.

If you really want to never turn off those nano lathes then perhaps this solution would work:

Have units produced on an elevated platform. When they are complete, the platform gives way (think turning off a force field or a trap door), the unit lands on the ground under the factory and simply walks out while the factory continues.

The problem isn't rolloff times, it's the fact that they tended to vary between units and factions, and as pointed out, even by waypoint location.

Whatever happens to remove that unit from the factory, it needs to be uniform. The 2 bay option doesn't solve this at all if buildspeed gets so great both bays are filled.

I propose a simpler solution - a short-range teleport that removes units from the factory; this can easily be balanced then by adding a delay that is uniform for all units and factories, to give the desired effect. This also gets around the issue of what way a factory is facing (not being able to rotate buildings in FA was quite a disadvantage in some situations).

Thankyou for ignoring what I said.

I like the idea of pushing it away as well. Either with a piston, or a giant crane, or even just putting it on a conveyor belt which simply rolls the unit out. The whole congestion thing does look pretty stupid, especially considering this is supposed to be the ultimate efficient warmachine. Bogging everything down because they haven't figured out how to push tank #19345328734 out of the way quick enough to start building tank #19345328735 immediately after seems... off.

This, or a crane/conveyor belt would solve the problem quite nicely ihmo.
Plus it would give a controlled balance tool with explicit exit time instead of some random exit time due to pathfinding/unit size/factory direction etc..