For a introduction to resource management, see Article 22
The amount of resources that is produced every turn has to be set in the map editor when designing the map and is not affected by anything else. Any building can produce any amount of resources. The maximum storage capacity is defined in the building type file and should usually be extremely high, to be practically infinite.
The ASC Resource Mode is much more complex. There is no global pool for any resource. Every transfer between buildings has to be done with pipelines.
There are several different building functions that are resource related, which are defined for the building type:
It is not possible to combine several of these functions in one building type.
Solar power plants produce resources without consuming any other, usually (but not necessarily) energy. The amount of produced resources is the maxplus setting of the building multiplied with a factor for the weather. This factor is 100% for clear weather, 50% for rain, 25% for heavy rain, 75% for snow and 37.5% for much snow.
Wind power plants produce resources without consuming any other, usually (but not necessarily) energy. The amount of produced resources is the maxplus setting of the building multiplied with the power of the wind. At the max wind power of 255 it produces 100% of energy.
Mining stations extract resources from the ground around their entrance, field-by-field. Since only material and fuel can be stored in the ground only these can be extracted. With increasing distance from the entrance the amount of extracted resources per turn gets less and less. The bars on the left side of the mineral resources page in the buildings window shows this. The maximum distance to extract resources from is 10 fields.
Mining stations sometimes consume other resources in order to operate. The resources they consume is set in the mapeditor in the plus field as negative values. If this resource is unavailable, the station cannot fulfill its task. If the resource is available, but you want to conserve it, you can adjust resource consumption in the mining dialog. Of course, setting lower rate of consumption results in reduced output.
The efficiency ( = resources_stored * 1024 / extracted_resources ) is specified there also. The higher the efficiency, the less resources are extracted from the ground to produce a given output. Default value for effeciency should be 1024. You can find some additional notes about mining stations at the end of this text.
Matter converters use one kind of resources to produce another. You can build quite a variety of different converters. Power plants consume fuel to produce energy, a fusion power plant could use material for this. A refinery could convert material to fuel. It is also possible to produce two resources out of one, or vice versa cosume two resources to produce one.
Like mining stations the resources that are beeing produced are defined by using positive values in the various plus fields, while resources that are consumed are identified by negative values. The maxplus field of the building type defines the upper limits. In the mapeditor the limits for the buildings may be decreased by settings the maxplus fields there. The plus field defines the initial production rate which can be changed in the game on the appropriate page of the building window.
The relative amount of resources that is still in the ground is displayed in the right graph of the "mineral resources" page in the mining station. If every field of the ring that has a given distance contains the maximum possible resources, the bars have maximum height. Since there are more fields at a far distance, the absolute amount of resources in the greater distances is usually much greater. This is indicated by the single lines which display the absolute amount of resources. Note that the bars and the lines are differently scaled.
You can search mineral resources with some units, the radius for the search is specified in the vehicle type. There are two functions a unit can have: "drill for mineral resources manually" and "search for mineral resources automatically".
The mining stations can see the mineral resources to and at their current mining position too.
In the mapeditor the pull-down menu Global / Toggle Resource View toggles the way in which resources are displayed on the map:
Building type(defined in .asctxt file)
:
- ASC tank: the maximum storage capacity in ASC mode
- BI tank: the maximum storage capacity in BI mode
- maxplus: see above explanation
- efficiency material: only for mining stations, see above explanation
- efficiency fuel: only for mining stations, see above explanation
Building instance (set by mapeditor):
- plus: only used in ASC mode
- maxplus: only used in ASC mode
- current storage
- BI plus: only used in BI mode
Each field on the map:
- material
- fuel
- resources visible: the amount of resources that is displayed is not necessarily the amount of resources in the ground, it is the amount that was there when you checked the field the last time.
The map itself
- energy and fuel for each player in BI resource mode
Last change: Mon, 2003-01-27 14:04