The recent change to increase crop growth stage times has, I think, been good; spoilage in general is reduced and farms don't leech an excessive amount of work crew time. The unfortunate side effect has been alcohol production can't keep pace with demand. I know in general the economics of this type of game flow from large quantities of low-value plentiful resources to progressively more scarce and valuable resources, either through combining them, refinement time, or both. However, there may be grounds here for adjusting the >=1:1 ratio for inputs to outputs. Specifically, let's have one bag of wheat produce, say, three beer bottles. As well as allowing for consumption drain between the brewed and distilled phases of the booze progression, it looks a bit odd to get so little from such an apparently large bag... (Similarly, perhaps we can get more than just the one pie out of a bag of wheat and basket of berries, since food value is no longer a thing?) The other aspect of such a change would be for processes to be able to produce undesirable by-products as well as useful ones; anything from the slag of ore refinement through to Inexplicable Glowing Orbs that just seem to appear when Smugly Brazencrimble operates the oven in his cult overseer's corrupted kitchen (which may eventually coalesce into a manifest form for Geometer Intrusion if too many of them are left too close together for too long...).
This is a good point, there's never enough alcohol for our substance abusing peons... Might I suggest to expand on this that perhaps more advanced machinery is more efficient and as such produces more from each unit of input? This could be across the board as well, making expensive modules more attractive!
We've been having thoughts along these lines, plus talk of how to implement variations of commodity stacking. The thought being, hauling is too large a portion of worker-time for even basic tasks. I mean, fixing stockpile logic should help, but we need to make the actual production process take the most time so that upgrading machines/character skills is a meaningful mechanic... I am, by the way, playing with alcohol production/consumption time in particular this week (as it relates to madness & cults). ... anyway, yeah. We've been discussing how to move forward with such ideas internally and are definitely open to suggestion.
Surely the answer is vacuum tubes?! Not entirely serious, not at least for the early game, but dammit I want vacuum pipes snaking though my colony haphazardly! Alternatively implement some kind of shipping crate that stays in the workshop and only gets shoved to the stockpile when full, which would reduce the time spent shoving stuff around. Incidentally, a larger variant would make the shipping doors meaningful if they don't fit though basic doors. Since you could conceivably use the carpentry shop to pump them out at low resource cost, it'd be a simple to rapidly improve a colony's early efficiency, before moving onto the perfect and Perfectly Safe vacuum tubes. And obviously, better road surfaces = faster movement. Engrave them
+1 this entire post. Also with regards hauling efficiencies - why not add certain tools that allow multiple commodities to be hauled at once such as a wheelbarrow for example? Surely this would help cut down the amount of time colonists spend hauling? Roads and vacuum tubes are good too XD. One thing I really wish colonists did was automatically haul a good they have just gathered to the stockpile. How many times have I seen colonists forage and walk back to base leaving all that delicious fungus open to the elements/nefarious creatures!
I want transport pipes, and I want to see them fail catastrophically through wear and tear, Fishman vandalism, and ammo explosions.
Everything here is great. roads, wheelbarrows, transport tubes. I want advanced machinery to yield less waste and/or byproducts. I want a teamsters workshop what has advanced steam buggies that go around collecting things. I want local storage at the workshops. Food should go into the bunkhouse, not the storage yard. Or the bunkhouse has an owner crew and their factory related jobs are maintaining stocks of food, candles, oil, etc.
I like the idea of being able to dedicate work crews to hauling. That could lead to efficiencies with vehicles once they are introduced too and give some meaning to the big roller doors.... why do the big roller doors exist again?
How about some kind of small steam engine going round a track which our settlers can drop stuff in and it automatically drops off goods it has into adjacent stockpiles? There could be stops in front of workshops and it could go round continuously, or it could work in a calling system (ie press button and it comes to you). If it could carry multiple goods that would be ideal too of course, and extra carriages could mean more storage at their building cost! Maybe more carriages need more powerful engines? Tracks and engines could have individual costs representing its efficiency so it could be effective early to late game? Thoughts?
Back on the topic of output.. A simple change in line with the theme of the game would be to make better modules do things faster and have more output. Using the beer example, a basic vat would give 2 bottles for every 1 wheat. But if you upgrade to the mechanical vat, you get 4 instead, doubling your output and speed. It encourages people to 'tech up' to better modules, because of the efficiency, and you can implement whatever occult shennanigans that could come with working with odd machinery. It also helps work with the constant gossip spam that keeps people from working, but thats another problem..
I think item stacking should be a thing, for sure. It would allow much easier hauling and more nuanced industry. Multiple item outputs would be simplified to design as well. A loaf of bread would actually be a stack of four "bread" items, which the colonists can eat and use. It would require a lot more models to show the different levels of stacking, but I think it would be worth it.
If anyone remembers this one, Pharaoh has a really good implementation of this approach. They have 30 - 50 commodities / resources tied into a vast web of interconnected production chains (approaching DF levels), with a single object representing various amounts of the resource (mostly vaired by the physical size of the thing stored). Even though that should make it completely unmanageable, the stacking abstraction makes so hauling and and production move reasonably fast, and the storage / distribution tools are rock solid. Its from the 90's and its still the best production management simulator I've ever seen in a game.
yeah, I need to stack some items... I'm starting to smelt ores just to consume some coal and have a bit more space in the stockpiles...
