It’s finally here! After months of work and cleanup the layout editor is usable enough to put into production, and while it could be prettier it definitely works. There’s a how-to at the bottom of the features page, and in addition next week I’ll see if I can get a 60 second video tutorial up as well. The layout editor isn’t the only improvement either; there’s a new options panel and numerous tweaks and performance enhancements as well thanks to Venkman’s Javascript profiler.
First, I have to give kudos to MindstormsKid, whose many exceptional contributions have been a great boon to this project. The new options panel was designed by him, as well as many of the internal code refactorings, interface improvements, and general ideas and enthusiasm all of which I am grateful for. He’s set the bar pretty high, but if you think you can hack it contact me here.
The last version (1.3.7) holds the title for longest continuous time as the latest stable version. While it was up, it was downloaded 1300+ times, making it the most downloaded version of CNx.
Even though we test things pretty extensively, there’s always things that are missed. If you come across a bug, report it!. Our turnaround is usually in hours or days, and you’ll be updated with the status of our progress as we fix it.
We’ve got ideas! Whether it’s existing features that need improvement, new features that you want, or you just want to give us feedback, we want to hear from you. We don’t have time to do everything we want, so feedback helps us prioritize.
There are almost always a slew of bugs after major releases like this, but within a week I expect we’ll have most of those worked out so expect a few more updates coming down the pipeline soon.
March 4th, 2009 at 12:52 am
Thanks much!
BTW, your email link doesn’t work…
March 4th, 2009 at 1:04 am
Good catch!
March 31st, 2009 at 4:57 am
We love CNExtend, a suggestion though, is it possible to add in the ability to see how much a wonder is going to give you, without it being your wonder day? For planning ahead?
April 1st, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Heh, someone has already requested that! We are working on it.
April 9th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Is it possible to add something to the improvement calculator?
I was thinking something that will calculate how many days it takes for the building to pay for itself. This way you could buy the optimum improvements without having to keep a spread sheet and pump bot the improvement costs and how much each will give you per day to figure it out. Maybe a separate table would work better, so you could see all of the improvements at once?
April 9th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
First of all, we really do appreciate it when people take the time to offer suggestions for improving the extension. We always want to improve it, and the most popular feature ideas have not come from me but from other users. As for your request, we could definitely implement something like that, however I think it’s not necessarily the best way to pick improvements.
Consider the following thought experiment: I’ve got a choice of two improvements for my nation. My nation only has 100 citizens for the purposes of this experiment.
Penny Pinball machine
Cost: 1$
Income per citizen per day: $.01
Total daily income: 1$
Pays for itself in: 1 day! Sweet!
Car dealership
Cost: 1000$
Income per citizen per day: $4
Total daily income: $400
Pays for itself in: 3 days! Horrible!
Using this method, the car dealership is a terrible idea. It’s three times as bad! For the first three days at least, pinball buyer is looking pretty good. However, after that they aren’t looking so good:
Day 0
Pinball purchaser: 1000 in the bank
Car buyer : 1000 in the bank
Day 1: (buy improvements and collect)
Pinball purchaser: 1000 in the bank
Car buyer : 400 in the bank
Day 2:
Pinball purchaser: 1001 in the bank
Car buyer : 800 in the bank
Day 3:
Pinball purchaser: 1002 in the bank
Car buyer : 1200 in the bank
Day 4:
Pinball purchaser: 1003 in the bank
Car buyer : 1600 in the bank
etc, etc.
Even if instead of saving the money these two nations plowed all their extra cash into infra, car buyer comes out ahead because his extra purchasing power multiplies far more as population increases than pinball purchaser. Every extra citizen gives car buyer 400 times as much in extra income than pinball guy!
Conversely, you could argue that this is an unfair example because the disparity between the income of the two improvements is so great. And you could also come up with an example where an improvement costs 10 million and only gives you 10k and am I saying THAT’s the best improvement to buy?(no, I’m not). I am saying that the solution to the problem of which improvement is the best one to buy is not possible for any calculator, spreadsheet,improvement order, or simple formula to say. What works best for one nation changes radically depending on whether they are receiving alliance aid, selling tech, buying infra every day, sledding, getting in wars, random events, global radiation levels, their trades, and a whole host of other factors.
So why not include it anyways? Well, I don’t personally feel like it’s a useful metric. As your nation grows, the cost of improvements becomes trivial compared to how much they make you. It doesn’t take into account the fact that not only do population improvements make you more money, but they also get you closer to getting your next improvement. That right there has a value at least equal to the cost of the infrastructure you would have to buy to get you to the same population point (a lot more than any improvement), plus the value of getting you more population for your infra… and you can see where I’m going with this.
So yeah. I would love to see a reasonably accurate, day by day simulator that you could throw random trades, events, aid, etc at and see how different improvement buying strategies affected their growth and so on. Heck, I would totally include that in CNExtend if I could. But until then, and this may not strike you as a satisfactory explanation and I apologize if it’s not, I don’t want to include anything that would even hint at a “best improvement”.