I understand that this is just one part of the balancing act that is being made... but in the short term it sure looks like it makes things quite a bit harder, much like getting smaller stockpiles before containers worked.
I am also interested in knowing what point in the current game is considered mid-game... I know with the pace that I build a colony the food changes feel really scary. The blog mentions optional buildings... Which ones are considered optional? The only ones I'd label that was are the Laboratory and Upper-Class Housing...
Like the "lower class people are stealing all the middle class beds**", it will be interesting to see if there's a way to stop people eating your special or trade-food. Ironically, bed claiming is worse than the current hilarity, if it is 1 middle-class bed per overseer instead of 1 middle class bed for 6 colonists etc
Starting out with 6 middle class and 1 lower class immediately puts us in a situation where we will have unhappy colonists given the resources needed to make middle-class food.
It would also be good to be able to control the inflow of overseers. Right now I've been refusing immigration for so long (heh sounds familar) that I have a lot of overseers with just 1 or 0 lower-class people. I have like 20+ overseers in a population of 50. Something like 4 overseers are working 20 of the 30 lower class... While amusing, it's also a little problematic if these people are going to demand more but do... the same or less (because I can't stack these overseers to take advantage of skilled earlier people). Even worse with upper class, but you can avoid them. ========================================================= Compared with food, a major input-->output flow thing, it makes sense to consider alternatives which scale better. The first is obviously maxing out their happiness from sleeping (you make large investments but the maintenance doesn't seem to increase much. #1 is getting +6 building quality and #2 is possibly switching to middle class beds. But because of the way sleeping works, you sorta have to have enough to cover everyone otherwise the people sleeping in the not great cot will of course be your important overseers... Currently, overseer in a wonderful building: Cot: "X feels well-rested." Practical Single Bed: "What a restful experience!" While you can't stop lower class people from grabbing the beds, leaving cots to unfortunate overseers (short of having 100% beds in wonderful buildings), you can superhotbunk the beds... Chapel is probably second thought, especially since some will ask for it. I don't know about public house, as ... is it still bugged?
In case someone has tried it out already, does Sugarcane have a dedicated recipe like Wheat=>Bread? If it's just cook basic food, it will be annoying to try and make Farmer's Stew because your basic food recipe will also suck up the ingredients. (And farmer's stew can't use sugarcane)
