a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Problem: progress is hard to see.
An experienced player could look for specific high-tech items. The well is the best sign in the current meta. But for a new player a chaotic bell town and a pine village look the same. It's not obvious that progress is actually possible.
Solution: tiered tech.
Each type of object that is easy to notice should have a different look for each tier.
Upgrading should always be a good idea economically. So that it doesn't make sense to keep a mud hut when concrete is available.
The most noticeable objects are common objects and big and stationary objects.
1. Walls and floors
2. Clothes
3. Containers
4. Food
5. Wells, forges and other stationary tools
A problem with food is that the current yum rules encourage the village to have all of the possible food types, so getting rid of low-tech food won't make much sense.
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Another problem with food is that the majority of higher tier foods are a waste of time and resources, compared with simpler alternatives. They do not provide enough food value to justify the production costs.
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Can you provide examples of such for clarification purposes Destiny?
Danish Clinch.
Longtime tutorial player.
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I've talked about this often enough with you and other people, I could probably necro a couple threads full of examples, if you like.
As a simple example, consider the cost of making ketchup. Now compare that to eating french fires without the ketchup. Plain fries are significantly less expensive to produce, both in terms of time, labor, water costs, and resource usage. The small pip increase is not enough to make up for the higher production cost. So why make ketchup?
And the answer is not "because yum", since you could have made three better yum foods in the time you wasted making the ketchup.
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What tech? The only tech that really matters is wells, engines, and oil stuff.
1: Walls and floors don't really matter, they just look nice.
2: low tier clothings are still the best ones for warmth. Higher tech clothing already distinguishes itself by looking nicer.
3: container effectiveness is self-explanatory.
4: food efficiency is not correlated much with tech level, if anything there's an inverse relationship.
5: I already addressed, there's only a few that could be considered advanced tech that also actually matter. Things like kilns and ovens are built so early that they're basically omnipresent.
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What would this tiered tech add to the game? Honestly town stages are super easy to see. Is there a deep well, newcommen well, or diesel well? Is there a basic forge or a newcommen engine with all its parts? Is there an oil pump? Seeing whats there and whats lacking instantly tells me where the town is in terms of progression.
Im tired of pseudo updates that do nothing for the game and jason wastes his precious time implementing and balancing. Stuff like the hierarchy bs.. a whole week spend on creating that and the sprites for it. What has it added to the game really?
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Saolin, I'm not sure what exactly you're disagreeing with.
I'm saying that:
1. Highly visible items should be split into tech levels
2. They should also be rebalanced so that it always makes sense to use the last tech level over any of the previous ones
This is kind of a lot of work, yes.
What would this tiered tech add to the game? Honestly town stages are super easy to see. Is there a deep well, newcommen well, or diesel well?
Again, these questions are something only an experienced player can ask.
Last edited by Kinrany (2019-12-20 20:48:28)
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I have to disagree for the most part. When i try to remember the old days when i was jsut starting and still used vanilla client, it still wasn't that hard to tell the level of progress of a city. those were different times, ok, but most stuff still stays.
- If it's an eve camp, most people are naked, there are no floors around, no carts, no boxes, no buildings, no sheep. No food. The farm is small, the forge only has one klin and the "bakery" is just an oven with a few pies and rabbits dropped around it. No well.
- If it's a small villege, most people have backpacks and at least loicons, we got a small shep pen, the forge has two or three klins, the oven has a work-in-progress flooring and maybe a box or two, one or two guys have handcarts, the farm is bigger, trees are being cut to make more space for it. Shallow well. Still no newcommen stuff.
- If it's a medium-big villege, most people are fairly clothed, we got a clear bakery (maybe in a building, maybe just with enough slotboxes near the oven), the forge has 2-3 klins and a newcommen made or in progress. Fairly big farm, probably with at least partial flooring. Deep well, maybe nearly empty
- If it's a town, it got newcommen tech, bakery building, organized forge, maybe a nursery, maybe some pads, you start seeing some fancy clothing around, maybe some horsecarts, maybe a cow. An organized farm or a disorganized one but it's big. The newcommen pump is clearly noticeble.
- If it's an end game city, you get lots of greifing, murder, people roleplaying around, nothing being done, but the whole place stands tall 'cause there's so much foor, iron, everything that there really is no more need to work.
Of course, the transition from one tier to the other isn't crystal clear. You can have a newcommen forge with lots of iron and huge flooring, but trashy bakery or the other way around.. but it all shows progress of a town in different areas.
I feel like clothing has a good tier level atm: in a villege you go from seeing everyone always naked, to most people partially clothed, to most people fully clothed, to fancy clothes. And since the latter are permanent, they make sense to make over fur clothing.
The well, as you pointed out, also has a good tier system. The water meccanic makes no sense, but the tier system is there.
The buildings got a tier system too: no building -> primitive floor -> pine building -> stone/adobe building.
You can see the progress in bakery as it becomes more of a building and gets more boxes and plates, pies, even without a tier system for single things.
You can see the progress in forge as it become smore organized, with more iron and steel and newcommen stuff, even without a tier system for single things.
You can see the progress in sheep pen as it becomes more capient, permanent and built closer to bakery. And gets a cow in it.
I agree with you on the food part. The food feels always the same.
I also agree with you on the rebalancing part. It makes no sense that the endgame food that takes so many steps to prepare is the worst food in the game (tacos with salsa, eww), while omelettes that are eaten in the eve camps are the best food in the game. (I mean, they're literally free. that's better than even milk)
Also i feel like clothing could do better. Late game you basically choose between permanent clothing or warmest, renewable clothing. Feels weird not to have lather options with the best of both worlds.
Youtube guide to Oil and Kerosene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKSZHPiUK6A
Youtube guide to Diesel Engine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sMX_GlwgbA&t=5s
World is not black and white
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Saolin, I'm not sure what exactly you're disagreeing with.
I'm saying that:
1. Highly visible items should be split into tech levels
2. They should also be rebalanced so that it always makes sense to use the last tech level over any of the previous onesThis is kind of a lot of work, yes.
Toxolotl wrote:What would this tiered tech add to the game? Honestly town stages are super easy to see. Is there a deep well, newcommen well, or diesel well?
Again, these questions are something only an experienced player can ask.
What I'm saying is with the current tech stages this would't be much more than a pointless reskin. New players might not know the names of the wells, but it's self-explanatory that a coherent, complicated tangle of shiny metal bits is pretty advanced; and that a stack of stone and wood that takes considerably more (immediately apparent) effort to operate to achieve the same result is not as good.
If your suggestion is to add multiple levels to existing facets of tech in the game with each one better than the last, especially if it was used as a way of prolonging advancement in tech instead of imposing more restrictions and limitations on what a player can do, than that would be good.
In most facets of the game currently low-mid level tech is the strongest. Only newcomen well, newcomen tools, diesel engine, and oil rig & refinery enable improvement on previous stages of tech, and it's visually obvious that they're relatively advanced.
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If your suggestion is to add multiple levels to existing facets of tech in the game with each one better than the last, especially if it was used as a way of prolonging advancement in tech instead of imposing more restrictions and limitations on what a player can do, than that would be good.
Yep, this!
In some cases we already have multiple types of the same item, like walls. They just need to be rebalanced so that low tech options become obsolete.
Jason also mentioned that we're not replaying history, so it doesn't make sense to start with crude variants when we already know how the perfect version will look like.
But this doesn't mean that nothing will become obsolete in the process. If you're starting from scratch in the wilderness, you'll probably use a clay glass first even if glass or plastic is cheaper in an advanced society. Because the costs change depending on the tech level even if the knowledge level is the same.
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