Both halves of the ticket, in the shape vessels have used since gas bombers
and laser ships: a definition carries an ore figure and, when it wants more
than ore, a dictionary that IS the price. `building_costs()` and
`skill_costs()` answer it the way `product_costs()` already did, so there is
one question with one answer whatever is being bought, and every payment
path now goes through `spend_resources` rather than `spend`.
Seven of ten structures and thirteen of seventeen doctrines now want gas,
energy or dark matter alongside their rocks, and the totals climb with tree
depth - structures 16/31/58/62/96 by depth, doctrines 15/30/73/96/143/258/530.
The constraint that shaped the table is REACHABILITY, and it is the reason
some prices stayed ore-only. Energy exists only where a gas burner stands,
and a gas burner needs Power Systems - so nothing at or before that depth
may be priced in energy, or it is a wall with no way through. Dark matter is
rarer still and appears once, on the deepest node in the game. The extractor
stays rocks-only despite its depth allowing gas, because the quest chain
reaches it before it has sent the player for any.
test_progressive_costs checks those as properties rather than transcribing
the numbers, so rebalancing a price costs nothing while breaking the shape
fails: nothing unreachable at its own depth, prices rising with depth, the
ore field agreeing with the dictionary (repairs quote the field alone, since
a repair drone carries ore and nothing else), and the quest chain never
asking for a structure it has not funded.
Two things cleaned up on the way:
- The per-building cost constants in GameState are gone. Nothing but tests
used them, and they were a second copy of a number the definitions already
hold - exactly what would drift once a price gained a resource.
- research_for_building() returns a display NAME, and the id-keyed half of
the tree wants an id. That mix-up is silent - skill_depth() of a name finds
no node and answers 0, so a deep structure reads as an ungated one, which
is how the first draft of the test let an unreachable price through.
research_node_for_building() is the id, and the name is expressed from it.
PriceTag no longer rebuilds its labels when re-told the same price; it
refreshes the held figures instead. The craft menu re-states prices every
frame and the build menu now does too, so that was a dozen Labels being torn
down and rebuilt sixty times a second.
Modelled on the transport hub, deliberately and closely: drones belong to a
workshop rather than to the player, are provisioned when it is built, are
never a production order, and are upgraded at a ship lab like any other
vessel. Anything that already knows how hub transporters behave knows how
these do, and Drone Bays raises the count at workshops already standing -
the same shape as Freight Yards and Garrison Bays.
What a repair COSTS is the one new idea. It is a share of the building's own
price, in proportion to how much of its health is gone: levelling a crafter
and rebuilding it costs its full price, and patching one up after a wave
costs a fraction, the fraction being the damage. The ore is spent when a
drone LEAVES, so two drones cannot be sent to the same wall and spend twice
for one load of repair, and a building demolished in transit sends its load
home rather than swallowing it.
"Required resources are sent to the spacial workshop": the workshop asks hub
logistics for the ore its outstanding repairs will need, exactly as a gas
burner asks for gas, because building_logistics_deficit now takes the larger
of the definition's static buffer and what the world actually demands. There
is a ceiling on that, so one badly-mauled base cannot pull the whole bank
into a single workshop and starve everything else.
Worst first: the structure closest to coming down is the one a repair is
worth most on.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
