So, I've been watching a whole lotta Revision 45 videos lately, and it seems to me that your colony grows too quickly (i.e. immigration events are far, far too frequent) for you to keep up. It takes days to get a single building up and running and yet by day 8 the game expects you to somehow have 2 or 3 bunkhouses, a lumber mill, a kitchen, a brewery, a textiles workshop, a chapel, 2-4 farms, a graveyard, and an airship mast. That's about 2 months' work of projects that you feel you need to have built in less than 10 days. It's also impossible to produce enough flax to build enough cots to sleep the 5-6 colonists that arrive every 2 days, and that's to say nothing of the massive amount of planks and stone it would require to build the massive-compared-to-any-other-building bunkhouses needed to actually house the roughly two dozen colonists you end with by day 12 or so. I have yet to see any playthroughs were the LPer made beds for more than 8-10 people, even then the colony is hitting 50+ population - and their population is only that "low" because you're guaranteed to lose a decent number of colonists during the various invasions. It seems to me the pace of the game's resource gathering, building, and production cycles assumes that you're getting a few new colonists every week or two, and yet in reality you're getting several per week on average. The actual speed at which the colonists walk and haul and gather and cook and produce is far too slow for the relatively rapid pace the game seems to want you to build, explore, and accept new immigrants at. Am I wrong here?
Much as I hate to criticise, I agree. I've taken to turning away most colonists and only accepting every third batch or so, but that leaves me with a lot of overseers for not many workers
It's a shame that the influx of Overseers isn't more under the player's control. Yes they're usefull for getting multiple jobs done, but sometimes (Especially very early in the game) I feel I want to demote a couple and asign them as workers to some othe poor guy who's strugeling to (say) shift twenty five logs to the site of my new bunkhouse. There's always work to do when you first start out, but it would be nice to have the option to prioritise a little more.
While I agree population quickly outstrips beds, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Conditions in the colony are supposed to be rough, and having enough beds for everyone should be a goal, rather than a base expectation. When you have enough food and beds and everyone's happy, your colony is doing well, but you had to work to get there.
I guess it's not so much the "not enough beds" that gets me, it's that - to use a StarCraft analogy - your colonists are moving at Normal speed but the game's events and full day length are moving at Fastest speed. There just seems to be a disparity or disconnect between how fast your little people perform their tasks vs. the speed of the entire world around them.
It's also worth pointing out that depending on your initial loadout, getting a flax farm going quickly is fairly simple. I always have one going within a week or so. Ironically, the trick is to spend prestige on immigration and nothing else—the extra laborers are critical to stabilizing your agricultural output, so you don't have to spend work crews on foraging and can have them on more productive tasks. (Also it helps ensure your defenses get up and running early.) Worth pointing out that this is going to change pretty sharply over the next month. With the introduction of trade depots, it might be possible to obtain cloth earlier; or, as workers become more important due to the upcoming module construction redesign ('unboxing'), a colony's cloth production might not kick into gear until later on. We'll have to see.
I suppose the central issue is really whether the time required for various jobs scale logically with one another. I don't personally think that scale is too far out of whack. For example, chopping down a tree takes around 20 seconds, and a chili plant can grow to fruition in approximately a day. At that scale, minor skirmishes seem to last vastly longer than they would in real like. Flax plants take several in-game days to grow, which does indeed make them incredibly time and labour-intensive. If I'm reading your post correctly, you're suggesting colonists should be working faster and being more productive to match the intrinsic pace of the game?
Given one of the inspirations behind CE is arguably Dwarf Fortress ("losing is fun!"), this is probably to be expected. In an interview just as earliest access began, Gaslamp said a design goal was (paraphrased) to have colony management be like trying to keep multiple plates spinning simultaneously, until Glorious Failure results and you collect your medals. Or, the colony's story is the result of not only random events, but the player's choice for policies (fishpeople, bandits, etc) and the areas they choose to prioritise/neglect. From this perspective, having there be more that should be done versus what can be done makes sense to me; the nature of the overworld game will influence this, as to whether the Colonial Ministry outright expects everyone they send to die and failure is an excellent move for career advancement, or accomplishing specific goals before everyone turns to occult murder gives additional long game prestige, etc. As far as movement speed goes, it does feel like walking could be slightly faster (or better, not a constant for all humans -- why should the upper classes hurry? Traits and Afflictions could also modify this...) and running moreso, but that would need to be checked against the intended shape of combat on the frontier.
Yes, exactly! It feels like the colonists should either be sped up, or the days should be a bit longer (as you put it, slow the intrinsic pace of the game down a bit) to better match colonist movement/animation speeds. In either case, the game sends you far more immigrants than you can ever reasonably house given the time it takes to procure the materials for said housing. And that's before factoring in stuff that makes it even more difficult, like "can I spare a work crew to farm flax?" and "do you have enough space near your stockpile(s) for that flax farm?" and "do you have a ton of surface stone nearby or are you going to add a Mine to that huge list of stuff you're already feeling pressured to build?" Of course, Wolg also makes a good point that maybe this is deliberate so that your colonists' needs are never fully met in order to ensure that the (presumably desired) failure/death spiral is guaranteed to happen sooner rather than later. edit: clarity, wording in initial paragraph
If you stagger the sleep schedules, then you can fulfill the sleep needs of a population with less beds.
I think an easy way to fix the bed problem is implementing two grades of sleeping bags (Low and Mid class) that folks will use to atleast sleep civilly in place of a bed. Sure this does nothing to actually make beds but at least folks can be properly equipped for homelessness.
The pacing has gotten faar better than what it used to be, but it still feels like i'm always a couple steps behind where i'd really like to be. Like this last playthrough where they kept yelling at me to build a church during the entire 10+ days it took to build it, (I made it large enough for about 20-30 colonists to comfortably fit inside) and i'm thinking "I'm trying, if you'd just kindly HURRY UP AND BUILD IT." I know pathing and distance of materials can cause delays, but holy crap it can be a nightmare once you've got more than a handful of buildings they have to walk around, and you've got materials laying around randomly because you don't have time for them to take everything to the stockpile because its already night time. Its like you need an around the clock team JUST for hauling crap to the stockpile. ...and that usually ends up being where my colony starts to starve. By the time the kitchen crew walks all the way out to the forest to grab the gathered food, (which I REALLY wish the gatherers would bring back with them) then walk all the way back to the kitchen, it gets eaten as soon as they set it down. Its frustrating, but thankfully it seems like its getting a little less painful with every build.
The sleeping on the floor thing doesn't bother me. The nag about building a Church does though. If the game can see that I don't have a Ceramics Workshop yet, then it at least shouldn't nag me again until that's built. Then if it nags me once that's built, then it should stop nagging once a floor plan for a Church has been placed. If I say I'll build a Church right away after I have a Ceramics Workshop, and I never place a church floor plan, then it should continue as is.
The nags are really the colonists' simulated psyches going "they said we'd get a church... Why aren't they keeping their promises?" For me, it makes less sense that they would accept an answer then not wonder at the lack of progress towards it. It would be nice if the subsequent eventing would add things to the text like saying they want to know why the colony can't even produce bricks yet. In the past this was a job for prison gangs. May still be, but I haven't got to play with foreign offices yet.
Given one of the inspirations behind CE is arguably Dwarf Fortress ("losing is fun!"), this is probably to be expected. Now in the beginning of Dwarf Fortress it can be hard to get enough beds. You are right though; after just a couple of games or migrant waves it doesn't take long to construct things like rooms and enough beds in a shorter amount of time in DF while Empires seems to stay slow. It's Alpha so balance is by no means final or perfect, but you are correct in that even if you have dozens of people it doesn't seem to speed up the construction process any as resources required outstrips your increase in labor, as well as building things leaves you two bad decisions. Either have everyone build so that it gets done a bit faster, but their skill will never increase significantly. Or you could just have dedicated building teams but they can be quickly overwhelmed. However, it is my hope that the module system that is being implemented will help make it feel that construction is actually progressing as you will be able to store things as well as giving say the carpenters shop a lot more stuff to build so they can practice and increase their building skill more.
It seems to me the biggest part of building is hauling all the stuff to the location. As I tend to build small where possible (two major buildings being the kitchen and bunkhouse) it doesn't seem that bad. But I have noticed feeling like the game is flooding you with lower-class colonists, I've started just refusing them, I want more overseers as a lot of workshops only need/can use 1 person. I have been shifting things so my lower-class all are attached to unassigned overseers and then go chop down forests etc, while I have like one or two overseers who just move through the workshops to get some small jobs done. Micromanagey perhaps but the things I constantly need produced in workshops (besides food obviously) is probably planks. Noticed I also need some cloth now and then for the cots. As these workshops are pretty close to the stockpile, one person can fulfill all the going needs with plenty of time to spare. The interesting thing is as you forage more, it becomes more and more "costly" (have to walk further etc). Whereas the more you farm, it becomes better, if anything (in that the overseer improves in skill - also when you are using wheat/sugarcane your efficiency is the best). By running ahead and having large farms next to a stockpile with a kitchen literally built against the stockpile, it's easy to end up producing tons of food (thankfully it all stacks, I have a stack of 100 food - this is only 2 days worth though...). Farming and cooking are probably the ones I think are most important. My kitchen crew does do the "wander into forest" thing, but that's because they are FAR too efficient at converting the stuff in the stockpile to cooked food. Because I didn't forage, I actually was left with a small forest of coconut trees just outside, so when I made a big forage order all the free colonists went and ripped it apart. When I next took a look all the coconuts were gone and I couldn't see them anywhere - probably because they all got turned into generic Stew by the rediculous kitchen. It uses stone ovens, too (5 of them)
I very often leave beds until I've got a musket production line sorted out. They often seem to be un-necessary unless madness is setting in. Sleeping on the floor gives bad memories but colonists seem to largely have enough positive experiences in a day to make this not particularly important. Although thinking about it, I have started prioritising them more since boxed beds now contribute to getting overseers.
Since a single bed can theoretically let 8 people sleep in it each day, I don't find having enough beds to be an issue, I usually get caught on farmers, as I need a beg for each 2 farmers.
The issue being that by over-optimizing the colony like this, you lose the suspension of disbelief. You end up not running a colony with "living" citizens that go about there life, but herding drones in super strict schedule so that you can keep up with the game's pace and your limited resources. It should certainly be a valid way to play, but not the way you're expected to play from the beginning. So that the learning curve of the game remains manageable, the game should be a bit slower paced at the beginning. Right now between the impossible food production chain, the sleeping place conundrum, the military part and the old prestige bonuses now being locked behind the foreign office, means it's really hard to keep up with what the game expects you to do. In dwarf fortress, when you embark with your 7 dwarves, you have ample time to get things going for those 7 dwarves and prepare for the influx of new dwarves before the latter start to arrive. Then the pace increase dramatically from there. In Clockwork empires, i don't even have housing for the first colonists (unless i plonk cots in workshops) that more are coming. And by the time i have the first 6 or so cots in place, my population already doubled or tripled
Eh, well it never actually occurred to me. I think someone noted that a bed usually is used by 2 people each night (actually the game gives a standard 3 shifts off...) so it's generally set and forget. There's actually some slack, if my 30-man colony has about 10+2 farmers, it suggests a minimum of 6 cots (4 won't do) but I usually have a 9 or 12-cot thing going by the time I get past 15... though it takes a while to fill up obviously. Well you could control it by refusing immigration, in fact there isn't a prestige cost like there was some time back. Seems, though, that people just let them sleep on floors and eat raw food which is odd... I never did mostly because it didn't occur to me to check how bad the penalties were.
