BETA 53 BETA 53: A JUNCTURE MOST UNNATURAL

It's a very good point. I found a way to work around it though. Make a mine where there are no minerals and you'll churn out only sand, concrete and clay. Should be more than enough for your brick a bracket and upkeep items.

I do however completely agree that a workshop is now full on repair trunks production; for me it's been the ceramics workshop.

 

I guess the upkeep needs to be evaluated as a gameplay component and what purpose it's supposed to serve. As a means of imitating repairs needed, it doesn't work as shops that are unused wear away at the same rate as my carpenter who is churning out repair trunks and actually useful items constantly.

Is it meant to be a drain on resources and a type of balance for the larger colonies? It's too effective for that. I can't and refuse to play on any non-heavily forested map because the demand for resources is too high. You have to either grow bamboo or the mine trick, which I was unaware of as a possibility until someone mentioned it here.

Is it meant to be an interesting gameplay feature? For me, and probably a few others, interesting in a simulation colony builder usually involves interesting choices. This feature does the exact opposite of "interesting choices." I actually have less choices because I must dedicate at least 1 workshop and a full crew to gathering a renewable resource and then chain together the production of that to the trunks. Essentially I'm having to focus my entire gameplay plan around this one feature. This feature is that all consuming and the demand is that high, that I have no idea how anyone could get a sustainable colony to 150 colonists, without spending RL weeks building it with multiple saves to fix supply chain issues.

On a different more buggy note: landscaping seems to have problems with already built buildings and stockpiles. I have a barracks that's partly underground now and I can't see the floor but the doors and cots still work.

 

I've managed 70 in my latest game, but you are indeed correct this took a long time and the colony no longer seems to be able to keep up with repair trunk demand (perhaps i built too much furniture etc), at this point repairs not being done for whatever reason tends to be catastrophic, which is a pisser after hours of gameplay.

I don't mind the upkeep system as an idea, and it does give the game much more length (I regularly hit 100 colonist limit before the upkeep system and had little more to do), but its current implementation needs "tweaking" as it is dominating game play too much as evidenced by all the complaints.. Clearly the game needs to have some challenge or it won't have any replayability, but something a little more forgiving would be better....

Additionally, perhaps this could be a pre-game option to control difficulty (i.e. sandbox requires no repairs, medium every 5 days, hard every 2 days)

 

Reminds me of the old farming & cooking system...

 

Just to add (and I am sorry to go on about it - I am very appreciative of all the thought and work that is going in to this excellent game, and the ability to blather about it here) it is explicitly designed to be a kind of drag on the colony:

this calls for the player to be using commodities constantly, not merely when they want to build something new ... You may ask yourself: ‘Won’t this make it harder for me to keep my huge colony running?’ Yes! You’ll have to worry about supply lines, maintaining resources, and not overbuilding – GAMEPLAY! These numbers are all still to be tuned, and I have some plans in mind as regards module and building construction costs, as well as military upkeep but we’ll talk about those later.​

So philosophically that makes perfect sense to me - there needs to be some kind of upkeep system running in the background consuming resources, because that's both simulation and gameplay. I just am not sure that this is the correct implementation of the idea? It's very rigid (I need this many trunks of three different kinds per week) and becomes almost comical in the spam of quantised repair futures clogging up my stockpiles, because I always want twice the weekly requirement on hand. Plus the renewable wood problem (or can you make novice trunks from bric-a-brac? Dunno, but that's still about four jobs dedicated to it..)

I think the previous system was nicely unobtrusive - you needed to spend wood and stone etc to fix stuff, and a free worker for each job. It meant you needed to have comfortably padded stockpiles and an unassigned gang of peeps at all times lest something break down. Now I need to dedicate several work crews and supply chains simply to feeding relatively unexciting trunks into the maw of the economy, which seems rather less flavourful than deciding to feed chilli stew and whisky into the maws of the peeps themselves.

Adding to the drag on the colony is the fact that the immigration system changed. I dig the new immigration system - it's nice to get new villagers by building nice houses for them, rather than ghastly huge bunkhouses - but it means I run low on overseers for a long time until things like ceramics and metalworks and mining are up and running. So having to dedicate several overseers purely to servicing the upkeep economy means that things are very slow to begin with, even with the 2x speed button on (for which, much thanks, by the way.)

Perhaps a repair trunk could be an item that reduces the cost of repairs, which otherwise would consume (more) raw resources? It's fun that they exist and I like the idea of someone wandering about with a toolbelt fixing stuff, but it feels like the main part of the economy now.

 

You can make basic trunks from stone and artisan trunks from bricks in the ceramics workshop.

 

It seems like a lot of players are relying too much on timber.

 

Dang that fixes my issue lol, that means I won't have to worry about freeing up workers to repair and buildings get repaired automatically, thanks!

One question though, will the buildings still use trunks if they aren't being used? Will we still have crews take care of repairing buildings that don't have workers in them like houses?

 

This is the only way to survive in desert maps lol. I also buy all the timber I can from the traders.

That in mind, any chance we'll ever be able to turn goods into currency, and maybe adjust the currency value from the foreign office?

 

Yes! That's exactly what I've wanted. It just makes so much sense.

 

Yeah, but even then it feels so repetitive. Upkeep isn't a problem once you get the process down(using dedicated benches in your ceramics/metalworks etc.) The main issue for me is that I get tired of setting it up every game. It isn't a challenge, it's work.

 

That +calling up the raw materials merchant repeatedly. Can get you pretty far, but certainly not enough if you are set on using wood for repairs.

I started being careful about wood after playing on desert maps, but it seems the other response is instead to just never play on maps without *tons* of wood...

 

I do, because I can easily mine it like crazy with multiple shafts.

 

I honestly did not know I could. I feel like an idiot.

 

I'm pretty sure there's a few factors here

• You always start with carpentry and probably make your first chests from wood so everyone continues with that
• 1 tree gives several logs, while a mine gives you stone only a fraction of the time...
• pretty sure a lot of people still only put mines on golden pips...

 

I don't, because timber is pretty common in all biomes but the steppe and the carpentry workbenches are rarely doing anything anyways, so I just make level 1s to not have my workers idle.
Ceramics workbenches are better used in making level 2 trunks anyways, since there is no way to make many planks in one job in the early game and you always construct the brick ceramics kiln for glass anyways. Bricks are far less labour intensive than planks, so the meta is to have carpentry workshops make level 1s and ceramics workshops make level 2s.
And I usually get a fourth of the level 1 upkeep trunks I need from trading anyways.

Using stone to make level 1 trunks is more like a backup option.