Auction house trading, and land buying

jokoon · Post by **jokoon** » Sun May 24, 2020 1:50 pm

Ok so first, I want to say I find vanilla multiplayer pretty uninteresting and chaotic:

trolls can remove entities/belts/etc
it's very difficult or impossible to agree on how to organize a base (I mean with 20 players it becomes difficult: who does what? where's the main bus? etc)

I have about 1200 hours of factorio and so far the solo mode has become boring, the only new things to do are about SPM or RPM records, and I personally don't find it exciting.

So my main idea was to make a mod to:

allow ownership of entities in a multiplayer context, so that a base belong to the player who built it. Apparently Factorio already manage "forces", but I don't necessarily want players to fight.
possibly, allow ownership of land areas, basically to prevent trolling by building just to annoy other players.
an auction house/auction chests/trading post, where players set a price for the items they're selling/buying, and what quantity or unit/min throughput they're asking for

The broad goal and concept is to make Factorio a multiplayer experience, where cooperation is recommended or mandatory, through item trade. The goal would still be about launching rockets.

I'm sort of planning to make this mod, I already know how to write python/C++ but not lua, and I yet have to learn how to write a mod and read the Factorio LUA doc to explore what is doable.

I've yet to think about several problems:

For land allotment, the price should be high enough to prevent abuse. Resource available in a land area should increase the price of that area. I would guess "selecting" an area might be a little difficult to do with a mod, so maybe the zones would just be rectangles generated before the game starts.
Ideally I would prefer items to not teleport between players, so basically items would just be inserted in special chests (like Black Market does), as long as it satisfy an auction purchase order. Resources traded should be between players and not centralized.
It would be assumed that a large rail network would already exist when the game start, with each player being given a locomotive, to jump start the item trade circulation between players.
While the server keeps running, the bases would still run if players are disconnected. If inventory size is limited (to limit accumulation after not playing for more than one week, for example), and resource availability and costs are adapted, it could encourage player to play shorter sessions, and come back later. Problem is, I'm not sure if it's possible for a player to disconnect and rejoin a server and keeping its buildings, so that should be looked up.
In such a setting, it's a little difficult to really know what would be the limit of players or world size, although this question might be answered by looking at Factorio MMO sessions. Although enabling a system of trade would obviously be a better way to optimize MMO game sessions.