I wanted to start a discussion on pollution and energy laws within White Tiger. We saw from this current cycle that with v10, major changes are coming to pollution levels and energy generation and usage. With these changes, our current EP law and lack of any other power related laws forced us into a bit of a crisis mode for a few days. During that time, I received recommendations from dozens of people on how we could revise or replace the EP law and other law ideas around power. We implemented a few new laws to ban certain machines, which seemed to help with the gridlock, but also made many people upset.
Lets take all of the ideas we had over the cycle and put them in one place, and try to formulate a potential "Perfect" pollution and energy law. I am not suggesting that we even think about implementing it this cycle, and I wouldn't consider implementing it in future cycles without rigorous testing. Just want to get a discussion going.
#Rework to Pollution and Energy Laws
inland holly
Ill start by listing several things I heard this cycle:
-EPs should be rewritten entirely, not revised piece by piece
-Pollution laws should be easy to read and revise, not complex and fragile
-Pollution laws should be more on demand, so that it is never 'wasting' available pollution
-You should be able to purchase additional EPs / pollution credits in addition to getting free allocation
-Pollution laws should use custom stats instead of transactions
-Pollution laws should reserve pollution for certain things (government owned power generators for example)
-Power laws should pay people for putting power into the grid
-Power laws should tax people for using power
My personal goal is to take whatever discussion comes out of this and prototype a new law/set of laws to be tested during the off-season of WT
mental rover
My take away from this cycle is that the use and generation of electrical power needs to be much more regulated by the government, the approach of letting everyone self limit no longer works as quite a few tried to run 3-4 combustion generators when in the past they would have just used 1 each.
I'm impressed with how well the global grid worked this cycle, I've never been a fan of doing them too early simply because of self limiting no longer happening once one is built.
Two options that I see are only letting everyone have one combustion generator or have power generated by government and limit how many of each electrical item each person can place.
wheat dagger
but with one combustion generator you cant even run a jaw crusher and a floatation cell at he same time. also the water the floatation cell needs now almost forces you to use electric pumps (2 minimum) so without micromanagement the combustion g. runs all the time (till you get a wind turbine). maybe the power production and consumption needs more balancing
mental rover
By time you have those I would exspect the combustion generators to have been replaced with a global grid running a mix of Industrial Generators and green power
And much of the limits to be removed
wheat dagger
which didnt work out for me this time ^^
upbeat thicket
Ill start by listing several things I heard this cycle:
-EPs should be rewritten...
Do you know why we would want custom stats instead of transactions?
inland holly
A couple reasons. Most of them are technical. But it was something Thomas suggested and something I thought when I was messing with it last cycle.
inland holly
My take away from this cycle is that the use and generation of electrical power ...
Limiting the number of CGs per person probably just means you have 32 people with 1 CG each instead of 8 people with 4CGs each. Same pollution and bottlenecking, but potentially less efficient use of generators.
And locking power down to gov was more or less the approach it ended up going this cycle, and while it has mostly worked, it definitely has its inefficiencies and caused a lot of extra work for gov. It also means shutting down individual autonomy, which I think is important to keep in mind
upbeat thicket
The main reason to prefer transactions is so that the Currency Exchange can be used; if we aren’t doing that then whatever
long hound
Currency exchange doesn't get used anyway
upbeat thicket
Right
inland holly
Oh you mean if we use custom stats we can't sell people EP? There's ways to do it still
upbeat thicket
Well yes, just when it is currency, it is easier to use pre-coded mechanics like currency exchange.
inland holly
Well yes, just when it is currency, it is easier to use pre-coded mechanics like...
Well, you either have someone physically buy the currency, then build a way in the algorithm to regulate the currency sold at the exchange
Or you have someone buy a placeholder currency at the exchange that gets automatically tracked by stats upon purchase and worked in that way.
Either way you have a currency exchange AND a law system that handles how that purchased EP gets used by the algorithm
upbeat thicket
ah i see
inland holly
The main difference end users would see is tax card tracking and bank account tracking VS custom stat tracking
Oh - I also think the time intervals for pollution laws should be adjusted
Delivering them every hour is arbitrary and could go to 15 minutes or however long
upbeat thicket
Well anyway, if we rewrite the law, I recommend that it be rewritten into two laws, one that is highly technical and one that is newbie- friendly and easily editable (think of the easily-editable one as a config file). So like if the rewritten law reserves some percentage of EPs for gov, some percentage of EPs to be purchased by Euros, and some percentage to be allocated like we do now, then those parameters should be set in a separate, easily editable law that doesn't force newbies to dig into the details to make policy changes.
inland holly
Yeah, right now we kinda just use bank accounts for configuration (see road payouts law and bank account). I wish there were an easy way for a user to set a custom stat without having to use a law, but that might be the way to go
One law to process and one law to set the custom stats needed for configuration
Probably just a law that says "On message !setConfig if user has PM title, then set each set to X,Y,Z"
So you adjust the law, pass it, and run the command