From: roholdr@ccu.umanitoba.ca (R Ross Holder Jr)
Newsgroups: rec.games.empire
Subject: WAREHOUSES SUCK!
Date: 6 Nov 92 22:30:29 GMT
Article-I.D.: ccu.BxBFuu.Frp
Organization: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada

I'm still involved in the Tyro I game being held at ccu.umanitoba.ca and,
as a novice, have learned a great deal about the game across the last
month of playing.  I've learned enough, particularly recently, to say
that warehouses suck!

They suck because when using the "distribute" command, there is this push/
pull and order aspect that isn't documented very well; either within the
game or any of the external documentation written by experienced players.
What happens is that, once a threshold is established in a sector, the
commodities travelling from the warehouse to the sector all use warehouse
mobility.  That sounds like a good thing - and it is.  However, when goods
travel from a sector to the warehouse, the game deducts mobility from the
sector out of which a commodity is shipped.  Hence food, when shipped out
of an agribusiness can cost nothing to ship (provided it is being shiped
across 100% highways) until it reaches the warehouse sector - then it
can only move a maximum of 300 food into the warehouse sector.  Given that
I had a distribution network with 16 to 18 secotrs living off the warehouse,
I quickly found myself starving when it came time to feed my civilians
because all my food was sitting in my agribuisness instead of being distributed
properly by the warehouse.  Every turn the warehouse ended up having 0 food
and the agribusiness over 500!
Then there was the order of distribution which also screwed things up.  What
appeared to be happening was the warehouse was distributing all of its food
_then_ the agribusiness would give food to the warehouse.  (I had more than
one warehouse, so this doesn't conflict with what I've written above.)  Both
problems apparently haven't been corrected in any versions of empire to date.
In <1992Nov5.205918.25023@fs7.ece.cmu.edu> akuo@mazda.ece.cmu.edu (Augie Kuo) writes:
>5.  Warehouses are good - even on a small island, you should have a warehouse
>    if you have a lot of industries going and especially if you plan to be 
>    away a lot.
Don't listen to him!  Your warehouse _may_ work depending on where it is
in relation to other key sectors (like your agribusinesses), but eventually
it will break down - once you need more than 300 food to supply a group of
sectors, you begin to starve.

>    Learn how to distribute things and set threshold levels, food
>    and other materials can then be moved automatically.  Also a neat feature
>    is that you can move 9 units of food/iron/lcms, etc. for no mobility cost
>    with a warehouse.
"Pushing" things out of a warehouse does work rather well.  However, the
warehouse hardly ever does this - it's good for manual "pushing" of commodities
around only.  The solution here is not to build warehouses (which should act
more like a highway where input to the warehouse is concerned), rather it is
to build 100% highways which don't cost _anything_ to move into or out of
(provided you've got 100% highways immediately adjacent).

The only good application of warehouses is for selling things on the market
and being able to move guns/shells/mil quickly forward to the front in a
war situation.

I wish someone out there would take a _serious_ look at distribution and
produce some code that would correct this gaping flaw in Empire.
-- 
R. Ross Holder, Jr.    INTERNET: roholdr@ccu.umanitoba.ca   (Winnipeg, Manitoba)
         Department of Philosophy     -     The University of Manitoba
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DISCLAIMER: The views I express are not neccessarily those of the U of Manitoba.
Newsgroups: rec.games.empire