games for building support

On 5/2/14 5:39 PM, Al Globus wrote:

> I think that such a game should consider have attracting settlers as a
> core. SimCity sort of assumes that there is a pool of people who will
> show up. This is less certain for early settlements as the cost of
> transport to the settlement is high.

I would agree. I'm currently imagining two axes for classifying people
in the settlement:

1. Residence: Permanent Resident, Temporary Resident, Visitor
2. Employment: Public Employee, Private Employee, Unemployed

So, for example, tourists would be Unemployed Visitors, park staff would
be mostly Permanent Resident Public Employees, and (hopefully) the bulk
of your population would be Permanent Resident Private Employees.

But if you build a habitat with no gravity over (say) 0.1G, almost
nobody is going to want to live there permanently. So almost everyone
would be Temporary Residents or Visitors. Temp residents who are public
employees effectively cost you a lot more, because you end up paying for
their transport to/from the colony. So you better have some good source
of income (such as really attractive tourist facilities) to offset that.
And yeah, tourism too is going to be highly dependent on transport costs.

Transport costs in turn will be determined mainly by (1) the orbit you
choose, and (2) "background" developments in the game. If your hab
relies largely on tourism or temp workers, you might want to build it in
LEO (though you have to worry about reboost cost there). But as you
build successful colonies, a background simulation will build up other
infrastructure & economy in the neighboring areas. So, over time,
you'll find both materials and people becoming progressively more
available on orbit, on the Moon, on and around NEAs, etc.

So it would be a constant balance between "build it and they will come"
and "build where they already are."

I'm pretty excited about this prospect at the moment. One thing I'd
like to include is a fairly complete model of all the major bodies in
the solar system. So if, say, you're really interested in making a
thriving Jovian community, you can push that by building a small hab
orbiting Europa or whatever. That first colony will probably struggle,
and may be a net drain on the rest of your empire... but it will also
encourage development of that area, making the next colony easier.
Pretty soon you could have dozens or colonies thriving around the
various moons (as well as Jupiter itself).

But one problem with this whole-solar-system model is, of course, that
it's so darn BIG. It could easily seem overwhelming to the player.
Maybe we only include objects over 400 km radius -- there are about 35
of these I believe. That leaves out an awful lot of very useful stuff,
but I guess it includes just about everything you could easily orbit around.

Anyone who's still with me after all this, perhaps you'd consider
joining a technical advisory board? I'm getting fairly serious about
pursuing this project (though I have a couple of other projects I need
to wrap up first). I think it could be a great help in spreading the
idea of space settlement. I would welcome input from technical-minded
folks, to help ensure I'm not screwing up the physics or missing some
important angle.

If this is interesting to you, let me know (off-list if you like) and
I'll set up some collaboration tools as the project starts to take shape.

Thanks,
- Joe