Rust, Wear and Decay (game mode)

[Troubledove]

New gamemode / difficulty level where items and stuff has limited lifetime. Player is not fighting only against alien horde or building his machines, but also trying to upkeep his decaying system and decayed parts also create problems for the players - be that conveyor belts that drop their cargo sometimes when they are in bad shape - or your acid-factory simply blowing up spilling its contents around because you neglected it for a long time. You probably cannot keep whole infrastructure pristine - so you'd have to choose what to patch and what to replace and what to drive until they break and also brace for the problems this wear and decay causes.

Every item would have two new values: quality and durability. Hitpoints would be measure against "Is this thing damaged", quality is straightforward measure how fast or slow something detoriates, durability would be the longterm lifespan of product, slowly falling.

Relation between these things would be that equipment with lost HP would lose its durability faster than undamaged items, so repairing stuff would be important, more important than it currently is. Low quality items lose their durability faster. The usage level of machines, belts and anything "active" would also affect the durability loss; if you drive the system at 100% constantly you need high quality parts for them to last for a long time. Low quality items will be worn out fast when in "professional use". Machines on light use would not lose their durability as easily.

Quality would be something that is decided while creating stuff - Quality parts would take considerably longer to create, need more advanced parts, more parts and lots more time to create, so quality products is not automatic "right choice", sometimes you'd pick inferior quality because it is fix for some temporary structure, it would not need to last long - low quality parts are fast to create and they cost less resources.

Fixing durability would be a bit more costly than repairing the hitpoints, also, you could not repair all the lost durability ever; when you repair durability you lose maximium durability, the lower the quality the more maximum durability you lose per fix. Fixing durability would require resources that were used to create the item, picked in random from the recipe. OFC you could craft maintaince bots later that could take part of the maintaince work stress away.

I think performance wise its not issue, durability can be updated at slow interval since its kind of creeping effect, once per game-minute would be more than sufficient I think.

This also strongly correlates to several other ideas that add some kind of disaster or source of potential durability/HP damage to structures, creating wonderful synergy. With enough "enviromental issues" the time-based durability might actually be unneccesary since acid rains and dust storms will do the same eventually, in more chaotic way. Here's some ideas that can go hand in hand nicely with rust, wear and decay.
Events (Environmental Disasters and Weather) - viewtopic.php?f=80&t=342
Events (“Againts all odds”. Free-play, global task.) - viewtopic.php?f=80&t=183

All these combined would/could create "hardmode" game where you are constantly backtracking and fixing sources of problems and needing to allocate time and resources to that side too and plan the "durability/catastrophy" issue in mind too.

[ssilk]

Added to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=24090 Collection of End-Game-Ideas / Enhancing Endgame

[Ghoulish]

OFC you could craft maintaince bots later that could take part of the maintaince work stress away.

Wouldn't getting bots totally negate this though? 'Cos they'd do it all for you surely?

[Troubledove]

OFC you could craft maintaince bots later that could take part of the maintaince work stress away.

Wouldn't getting bots totally negate this though? 'Cos they'd do it all for you surely?

With cost of lots of resources (and the neccesity to provide the resources because each upkeep-bot requires access to LOTS of different resources, they would ocassionally need stuff like advanced electronics to repair equipment that is made of those etc.), some energy and the unability to micromanage the repairs or decide what is important and what is not; the operational area of upkeep-bot is also limited, so you'd need to create whole infrastructure to automate the upkeeps - which makes infrastructure overall bigger in size and resource cost to build, more resoruce-hungry, harder to optimize etc...

Also upkeep-bots automate the work, but they do not make equipment last forever. When upkeep-bot repairs the durability damage, it lowers the maximimum durability accordingly. Eventually everything will still break, low quality stuff sooner, high quality stuff later but everything will eventually break. Realistically you would create upkeep-bots to your main factory and maybe side factories or any long-running "permanent core" structures.If this is not enough tradeoff then maybe make upkeep-bots create temporary halt to the area they are repairing (they wont repair running machines). So upkeep-bot works like medium range EMP when it goes repair-mode, making everything in the area stop for a moment, creating wonderful hiccups.

[Troubledove]

Added to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=24090 Collection of End-Game-Ideas / Enhancing Endgame

Well, its not only for the endgame, but rather constant thing that happens. Ofc. you would not run into durability problems on early game (unless you leave some structure heavily HP-damaged) but on midgame yes, especially if you were running bad quality stuff from early on. So its more like whole game mechanic-twist than just endgame stuff. But its most pronounced in lategame due everything starting eventually to fall apart

[ssilk]

Well, its not only for the endgame, but rather constant thing that happens.

I need to mention, that Ghoulish brought the right point; we already had similar ideas with the solar panels for example (see in the balancing board the big solar panel "fight" search.php?keywords=repair&t=18613 and search for "repair" etc. ). Such kind of "maintenance" doesn't add much game-play. You just need "more" of anything. That's basically it (or I've overseen it).

I didn't say it's a worthless idea, it would add some very nice atmosphere... but... once a player understand it, he will do this with high priority and ... well... you said yourself it's a "constant thing that happens".