#About the availability of building materials

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

heady holly
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Since in 0.9 it generally takes quite a lot longer to get large amounts of building material, if one wishes to build a lot they need quite a sizeable chunk of their colony dedicated to this task. Why is this an issue? To put it simply, it strongly disincentives building. Will that stop people building? Not at all. But it will make their lives a lot harder as a result, which seems wrong to me; I don’t feel like creative expression should have much impact on the balance of the game.

Outside of late game, the game becomes actively a lot harder while you’re mass producing blocks, and a lot easier while you’re not, which I think is a pretty crucial factor. You could double your guard force if you built minimalisticly. I’m not sure how much block production the game is balanced around, but it does become way easier if you don’t dedicate much to it.

modest sentinel
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I think it's just not communicated as well that throwing more colonists at problems isn't really punished and is (AFAIK) how you're supposed to solve those problems now

heady holly
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I suppose. Monsters are less dangerous from colonist amount scaling, but you do need more food and tool infrastructure so I’m inclined to think it sorta balances out

modest sentinel
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It doesn't, at least not like you're inclined to think.

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Even using berry farms at a 1 to 4 colonist ratio instead of fish at a much better ratio. Still won't really be a significant threat increase.

heady holly
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It’s not the threat increase that’s the problem, it’s the proportion of manpower it takes up that could be dedicated to other things

undone patio
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you can have multiple outposts working different things you know

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I have an outpost primarily dedicated to farming, but I still have 1 building in it that is just a bunch of crafting jobs

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And another outpost primarily dedicated to Forester's that also has a building dedicated to crafting

heady holly
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That doesn’t affect the issue at all, that’s just redistribution

undone patio
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yes, but the more colonists you have gathering materials and crafting them, the more resources you have, the whole game is basically redistribution of resources to get more resources

heady holly
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And in this redistribution, choosing not to build large things greatly increases your production of every other resource

heady holly
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yeah quite literally 50% of my colonists are employed for pure building material production, which as an optional thing has a massive impact on the game's balance

stoic moat
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50% of how many?

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oh 150 I see it in #general

heady holly
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To be fair I’m building really quickly

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I’m just thinking if I wasn’t, I would be able to invest in the food and guard power to support basically double the colony size

modest sentinel
heady holly
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Which naturally means the player’s personal preference for making things look nice massively affects how difficult the game is

And that actively disincentivises making things look nice

Which is the whole issue. It should be optional but not a choice with massive consequences. In the old version it was fine as you only needed a handful of colonists to make materials as fast as you could use them, so building a nice colony didn’t take up half your manpower. That made it actually a personal preference as you didn’t have to sacrifice a lot to do it.

heady holly
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Basically I think building materials in general should be significantly more efficient to make, and everything else should be less efficient to compensate. That would be tricky but it feels like such a severe issue.

modest sentinel
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It doesn't really impact the difficulty. There's nothing inherently difficult about "am I running out of blocks? If yes, plop another colonist".

I see it more from an "If you want to build grand, you need a proper infrastructure to support that" perspective, which is valid gameplay.

IIRC a big part of the changes to population threat and such were to try and incentivize going big with the colonist count and infrastructure.

The colonists exist to support the player - so if you can "go big" with a handful of colonists without much effort it kind of defeats the entire shift to larger populations.

The game's also pretty easily moddable though, so you can tailor it specifically to your personal desires. Pretty sure crafting times are now set in a json file, so you could probably lower them and/or increase the amount produced per craft pretty easily.

That's not to say some tweaking isn't ion order, I just think a massive reduction in infrastructure is probably a bit too far.

heady holly
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I generally agree with going big on colonist count and infrastructure. The issue I have is that you have to go very big on infrastructure that provides no functional benefit to the colony. Like, your colony ends up being built around something unrelated to its actual operation. It makes the game sorta a lot easier as a side effect, thinking about it

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I could quite literally lay off up to half of my workforce to increase production of anything else if it became low

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Having so much of your infrastructure as expendable kinda eliminates risk or the need to be careful with your supply chains

modest sentinel
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I also don't think you have to go as big as you do. I'm finding ~8 stonemasons and a couple of stone miners more than gives me enough for my massive stone wall build.

To be fair I've only got a rough outline of it planned out, and am doing some on the spot tweaking and designs that take a bit of my time, so it's not constant plopping blocks.

The only pain point I've had so far was with dirt when I was doing a massive terraforming project early game.

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I'm curious as to how you're going through blocks so quickly, like legitimately. It sounds like you know exactly what you want to build and are building it as quickly as you possibly can.

heady holly
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Well… more or less :3

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I am in multiplayer if that explains it

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Built most of this thing in one day

image.png
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I have a constant idea of what needs to go where

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Maybe it’s abnormally fast idk

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Colonist count went from ~85 to 200 in that day just to support the building

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This whole thing is an opinion piece based off my own experience in 0.9 really so it’s fair enough if it doesn’t reflect that of many other people’s

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0.8 felt a lot more challenging because no given major section of your workforce was an optional choice

modest sentinel
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Yeah that's abnormally fast

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slow down, your wrist muscles will thank you in another decade :p