REVISION 41E NOW IN THE EXPERIMENTAL BUILD

Exactly.

The whole purpose of finding if multiple small farms work better than a large farm, if Crop A is more effective than Crop B why that's the case and at which point that relationship may change, what works and doesn't work with immigration and prestige options etc isn't (for me at least) about min/maxing my play.

In fact after finding what does work and what seems to be best I'll then mostly avoid using that approach in other fresh starts instead giving different approaches a try to make sure that the game isn't balanced around a linear A-B-C process, which is something that can happen if feedback is strongly influenced by pre-existing habits of playing previous builds and reacting to changes somewhat driven by how compatible those changes are to said habits.

(E.G. The possibility of reacting to how wheat used to be abused to hell. Now that isn't possible to abuse it like it used to be, which somehow means farming needs to be 'fixed' so that utilisation of Wheat is possible again.

That kind of feedback IMO needs to be nipped in the bud before it builds momentum and further builds start getting reacted to based on how much of the existing status quo it is able to maintain)

But for the most part I'm just throwing my impressions and personal findings out there if others want to investigate, try to steer away from any potential habit orientated feedback and perhaps come to different conclusions. With the added bonus for any devs to read and go "hmmm that was never what we were going for with that change, is that really the case or is this guy just crazy and talking nonsense?" but at least potentially have that impression in the back of their mind when comparing wider feedback so it could be of some constructive use.


TL;DR version: It's not about establishing a single way to approach the game. It's about finding what works best, what works but not quite as well and what doesn't work. Then feeding that back as cleanly as possible whilst trying to filter out any old build habit bias. Then let the developers decide for themselves what actually needs changing and how based on feedback and personal accounts.

 

I'm not sure what the vision for kitchens are for the dev team, but on many occasions I have wanted to build a kitchen in a house, but the problem is you have to assign an overseer to make it work, and the house becomes a kitchen.
Is food always going to be like a mess hall or will it eventually get to a point where the owner of a house will use an insalled oven in their allocated house?

 

That's interesting, then folks would just buy the raw stuff and cook it up on demand?
I like it!

I would love it if every workshop kept a stock of what they use on site but...

Might requesting such fundamental changes drive the devs to drink?

 

Would be interesting if some items could be placed in non-workshop environments which are instead communal and when not working colonists could do activities on impulse similar to gossip, hugging etc but for things normally exclusive to workshops.

So if there are ovens in communal buildings then in their off time a colonist might decide "Hey I'm hungry and the kitchens are backlogged, I'll make myself some stew". Collect their foodstuff of choice, prepare it and then eat it as part of the same activity.

Not sure it's something that would be possible though, as if the production system is set up so that the BUILDING itself handles the process of consuming the raw resources and spawning in the produced good when completed, rather than that being handled by logic attached to the production object, then you would probably need a entirely new type of job definition to handle spontaneous actions that can remove and create items.

In other words, whilst a oven might be used to make stew. Depending on how it has been designed it might be the kitchen itself that makes the stew not the oven, and so for any other type of building to make stew using ovens it would probably need either:

* A entirely new building definition that has all the behaviours of every type of workshop for colonists to create their own production task adhoc as long as the prerequisite modules are present. But keeping all those production options masked from the player.

* Introducing new behaviour to modules that allow them to handle jobs in themselves rather than the building.

* Implementing a entirely new system from the ground up just for communal building activities.

Would probably need to create new activities to handle things like cooking something and eating it as a single activity as well rather than reusing existing cooking behaviour to avoid situations where a colonist would find kitchens are bottlenecked so they make their own food using a communal oven, haul it to stockpile then another colonist promptly nabs it and eats it.

Causing the first colonist to attempt to cook themselves another meal and hauling it to stockpile in a potentially infinite loop until no one nabs the food they cooked before they can then trigger the action to pick up and eat the food they just hauled to sate their need.

 

While I realize this is still EA, I would rather they listen to gripes now than when full systems have been implemented. Yeah were here to try different things and see if they work.

While cooking for self sounds cool, I don't want it turning into a sims game where your spending the time fulfilling basic needs rather than doing your job, unless it can be not too time consuming. Also storage would need to be a lot better than it currently is.
But there have been several settler type games where each home owner will stock their larder and do their own cooking, or stock it with pre cooked food from several places not just a communal kitchen. bread from baker, meat from butcher, produce from farmer.

That would be ok if houses were a lot quicker to throw up and we could assign folks to them.

I think some farm shack as office, would at least allow us to assign a permanent farmer who would then oversee all the plots and distribute labor as he see's fit. no more No more would there be 4 overseers assigned to farming and juggling labor around depending on if their working a small field or large.

I don't know how easy hard that would be and would probably need to play with laborer count, but could it be possible to set labor limits per office? Metal smith only gets 1-2 , carpenter and other similar craftsman the same but maybe farming and cooking staff have an increased limit?

I don't know, but I do know that right now I half some of my farmers sleeping during the day and others working smaller fields than what I wanted them to, while others get spoiled crops because they cant handle the field their on in a timely fashion.

 

I actually started a thread up about "the Sims" question a few weeks back after the "colonists desires" update came out, and having to fulfill colonists basic desires/needs, so I know where you are coming from.

What I am suggesting is that when somebody is assigned a house, that they have the same abilities assigned to themselves as the cooks do in the kitchen, if an oven is present, then they use it, I think there was talk of boxes being used for storage in the same manner as stockpiles, in this case the homeowner would utilise the box instead of the stockpile, unless the box is devoid of food, in which case they replenish from the stockpile, so it would be set and forget.

The way I see the system now, it's more like a labour camp or military expedition with a mess hall which is how it would be, at least until individual housing is established in the colony.

 

In the area of "The Sims", to be honest I'm very much expecting the game to eventually to closer to a colonial Sims game than say a colony management game like Banished.

At the moment a lot of the colonist simulation is rather basic, but there was a dev post a month or two back over on the Steam forums that mentioned the reason for this is because they've intentionally disabled or scaled back most of it so that economy mechanics could be properly established before flipping it all on again and the player is faced with dealing with problems that require certain tools that may not be added quite yet.

But with colonists already having hunger and seemingly social needs, moods, personalities, memories, desires, morale, property, friends and enemies for something that is apparently regarded as "marginally interesting robots" at present and not reflective of the eventual simulation depth, I'd say expecting something closer to 'The Sims' focus as a core aspect of the game rather than micromanaging colonial building 'Settlers' like is a pretty safe bet.

I posted on the Steam forums awhile back pondering how many people bought CWE expecting a eventual game that is on the Settlers end of the scale and if they had thought that maybe what they might be buying is something that ends up being much closer to The Sims end of the scale, and if that's potentially impacted reactions and expectations from builds as things move from the current foundations to establishing the actual focal points of the game as more front end aspects are introduced, but it didn't get much response over there.

But will be interesting to watch reactions over time as development plays out and it becomes clear just where on the scale CWE will find itself.

Edit: Found that Steam forum post: http://steamcommunity.com/app/224740/discussions/0/537402115092428219/#c537402115092455865

 

My thoughts on crop balance are this: You don't want them to be all the same, but on the other hand, you don't want one crop to be the obvious choice all the time.

They should all have the same basic yield levels (e.g. 1 unit of food per 2 squares of farmland, regardless of orientation).

Some of them should have slightly different attributes that make them unique, but not overwhelmingly bad or overwhelmingly good compared to each other. For example:

-10% speed to maturity, +20% final yield (slightly delay harvest in exchange for a slightly larger harvest, good for established colonies)
+10% speed to maturity, -20% final yield (slightly quicker harvest in exchange for slightly smaller harvest, good for new colonies)
+20% resistance to spoilage or bugs, -20% final yield (more resistant to spoilage in exchange for slightly smaller harvest, good for new colonies)
-20% resistance to spoilage, +20% yield (more vulnerable to spoilage, but bigger harvest if you take have the manpower to take care of it properly, good for established colonies)
etc etc

Some crops will also be special/unique just because they are used in some recipes that produce dishes with special properties.

Anyway, at some point, certain crops will be a no brainer over other crops for a min/max player, especially once a colony gets established well, but that can also be balanced out in another way so that a player is encouraged to plant a variety. In the game Stronghold, the player was given happiness bonuses the greater a variety of food that he provided to the people, so that was incentive to make a variety, rather than have a factory churn out wheat and bread all day.

 

My only redcoat is like Rambo. When I assign all barracks towards an assault on a bandit camp he comes along, fires like one shot then decides the rest can handle it and walks away. On rare occasions when he actually fights and not only overseers the other he can withstand multiple shots without falling or running. I love that guy!