This post contains some ideas for future development that we talked about in a recent stream. If you want to join an upcoming stream, check out https://www.twitch.tv/rihan_s_

The order of this topics does not indicate any prioritization. It will mostly come down to what's easier to build, more interesting to me, and what you folks most ask for.

New supply chains that use resources from vanilla Factorio

Work in progress - to be released with 0.4

Currently, the factories and cities from Tycoon only consume resources that come out of new primary industries (wheat farms, apple farms, and fisheries).
Construction material are an exception, but you need so little of it, that it can easily be handcrafted. We can consider increasing the amount of materials needed for construction.

When testing the mod it felt like you build two separate factory lines. Some for the vanilla game, and another one for Tycoon. I feel like it would be nicer to have both of them integrate a bit more. One example for this is milk bottles, where you need iron plates to build bottles which you then fill with milk.

Some new items that the citizens could need are for example
- cars,
- bicycles,
- batteries,
- electronic devices (smartphone, laptop, ...),
- kitchen utilities,
- candles,
- lights,
- gasoline,
- heating oil,
- plastic gloves.

We have excluded wood based items (like furniture) for now, because in vanilla Factorio there's no way to automate the creation of wood. Some mods like Krastorio2 have greenhouses that we could get inspiration from. Maybe there's a non-overhaul mod that helps with generating wood? Small mod dependencies are okay.

These new items will probably be provided through new city supply buildings, like gas stations (that you can build) or hospitals (that the city builds itself). I'm not sure yet on how that would influence the growth of a city. I'm still waiting a bit to let more people try out the recently updated growth mechanism and get more experience with it myself.

Let me know if you have more ideas for other items that originate from other Factorio items!

Building cost rebalance

The buildings like university, market, stable, etc. have a resource cost that's not balanced yet. Just 10 stone for something was good to get started, but I think now it's time to align the cost a bit more with the progression of the overall game in Factorio. That means we'll look at what time you probably need certain buildings (and in what quantities), and find another entity ingame (like the assembling machine 2) and require similar quantities of resources + crafting time for materials and final entity.

Faster universities

Added in 0.3.7

As you scale up your cities and supply them well, the currency they generate becomes quite a lot.

To help you better consume that currency and funnel it back into science, we may add module slots to universities (so that you can boost productivity/speed) or add a tech 2 variant.

Citizen science

This is probably a bigger impact change. An idea that's been a bit on the backburner was to introduce a new kind of science that you can only get from universities. This new science (let's call it citizen science) would be required in higher Tycoon tech (so you have to build and improve universities at least a bit), and may also replace the current city funding mechanism.

To fund new cities, you currently need to store currency in an urban planning center. As the cost for new cities scales up, you quickly need to build 2, 4, 8, ... new urban planning centers for EACH new city. There are other ways to address this issue, but I'd like to explore if we can use citizen science for "discovering" new cities. That would be an "infinite" technology up to a certain number of cities.

However we might not even need to fund new cities anymore (see next topic).

Map generation to include cities

We had reports that players were unsure when and where new cities would show up. The algorithm currently expects some unoccupied chart that is (1) far enough from any other city and (2) has no player built entities in a certain range (relatively small). The goal here was to have cities show up a bit further away, without having them pop up in existing factory areas.

I'll have to look into how map generation works. Some mods introduce new resource patches so there should be a way to tinker with it. If we find a way to place cities during map generation, we could use that mechanism to have them show up immediately as you discover new territory. Same for primary industries which currently show up shortly after you discovered a new chunk of the map.

I believe that such a change where cities just show up as you explore remove a lot of gameplay questions around the funding of new cities. That removes a bit of usage for the currency you produce, but my gut feeling is towards simplifying mechanisms.

Passenger balancing

To be released with 0.4

Currently cities produce passengers for all other cities based on the origin city size. It may not make a lot of sense to have 1000 passengers travel to an empty city.

Therefore we should balance passengers based on the origin AND destination city size.

Achievements

Mods can add achievements. We could add certain goals, like 100 citizens, 1000 transported passengers, or first passenger into space. You're welcome to contribute some and get it branded with your name!

Stuck towns

A big question mark to me is how we can make land-based problems with city growth visible to the player, and help them resolve the issues.

This problem mostly happens when your city is surrounded by things it can't expand into, like water, cliffs, resource patches, and player-place buildings. Sometimes the city also decides to build a right-turn when it could have built a crossing. The algorithm is too stupid to revisit those chance-based decisions.

Eventually the city can run out of places to grow into, and it may look to the player like that city is stuck and they can't do anything anymore, and need to move on to another city.

There's more work to be done to understand this problem, and help with guiding the player.

See some more context in this github issue: https://github.com/bahrmichael/factorio-tycoon/issues/186

Cities consuming electricity

Eventually cities should also consume electricity. It would be nice to have a real-life like duck-curve. However I don't want cities to consume so much electricity that your laser turret defenses don't work anymore.

Not sure what direction we should take here, and if power outages in just the city are a good approach. Also not much research done into the feasibility done yet.

Immersion - Sound

Added in 0.3.6

Cities feel quite empty right now. There are just houses, and during night some light.

When you move over the map in vanilla factorio while zoomed in, you can hear assembling machines as you move over them, or drilling areas, or busty roboports.

It would be nice to have cities emit sound as well. Same for other Tycoon entities like stables, universities, etc.

Immersion - Visual Activity

Another way to make cities feel more alive, would be people walking around, or vehicles moving around. Needs more research on how much computing power that needs and how it would be built.

Immersion - Decoration

Imagine walkways, gardens, street crossing, ashpalt streets, and much more! Or more decorative buildings like restaurants with outdoor seating.

New foods

There are already quite a few, but let's keep track of more ideas here:

• Sushi (so you can have sushi on a sushi belt - credits to That Dang Fox)

Passenger balancing

About that, there are cities like Venezia and Kyoto, which have a small population but get a lot of passengers. make a lot of money from tourist trains going to those cities with tourist resources, or even to build tourist cities themselves, like Las Vegas or Singapore, and collect money from passenger transport and from the cities themselves. Isn't that sounds very "Tycoon"?

Tourist attractions sounds very interesting! Not every city should have an attraction though. Any ideas on when and how they should appear?

Giving each city its own character would work.

The first cities have everything in average And commonplace townhall. Tourist cities have beautiful tourist attraction instead of townhalls and attract many passengers, but have a small range,so not suitable for contain many citizens. Academic cities give a small productivity bonus to the universities in the range, bedroom towns have a large population but will attract very few passengers there.Various other characters can be considered, such as rich cities that get a lot of taxes and financial cities that can invest and increase currency.

It would be fun for players to be able to choose which cities to establish/develop according to what we want.

That's a great idea yuyuyuxyu and it adds a lot of new nuance to the mod! Will probably be a while until we can start work on that, because I want the core mechanics to work really well first. And one thing that doesn't work well yet is cities getting stuck :D

One element to note is that towns and cities are often founded in the real world to fuel an industry. Yes they need food brought in from farms and things, but they can afford to do that because they export other commodities. I'm not very far into my playthrpugh rn, but at the moment it feels like the starting town spawned to be a city that eats apples. But in reality, a small farming community might begin somewhere to feed themselves, then decide they need access to more iron/copper/coal/etc so some people would splinter off and start a mining community.

The mining community survives due to the food from the farming community, and the farming community can produce more because of the materials they import.