Currently the main penalties of having raw food is that the food consumption is higher as a result, because contrary to cooked food, hunger isn't reset to 0 by raw food. This has a direct effect on colony management because if the kitchen can't produce enough cooked food for the colonists, you enter a raw food spiral, where the hungry colonists eat raw food as soon as it's stockpiled and the kitchen has less and less raw food available to produce cooked food. The main penalties on sleeping on cots or bad building is increased bad memories which then affect the mood of the colonist, ie madness etc. the effect on colony management are difficult to notice really. but i assume that's an unfinished part of the game. When i play CWE, i try to think ahead and play as i think i'm supposed to play the game. For instance with the bed thing, when ownership and claiming will actually be in, it will certainly add more drawbacks to have 6 colonists share one cot. So i assume the way i'm supposed to play the game is by having to deal with colonists wanting to have their own bed.
Is that how you most enjoy playing? In my experience, the "correct" way to play is the way that I enjoy the most. This is entertainment, after all. I know myself well enough that I know that I really enjoy playing in an optimal way, which is doing whatever I can to gain the most benefit. I guess you can call it min/maxing. I tend to find that playing sub-optimally in a way according one's preconceived notion of what the gameplay is "supposed" to be, oftentimes leads to frustration and confusion. Especially if you're playing suboptimally because of what you "think" the game is "supposed" to be in a future state. The future is still uncertain, and I think (for myself, anyway) that I like to deal with what I have been given. It also allows me to give relevant feedback on the game as it currently is. Of course, there is the whole "immersion" part of the game, and that can be a big factor. As you said, staggered sleep schedules can be perceived as unnatural, but in the real world we do have jobs that require both day and night shifts as well. No reason we can't extend that same line of thinking to Clockwork Empires too.
This isn't actually true, I think it was mentioned colonist can survive on 1 raw food a day. If possible, they will try to eat 1 cooked food every day, it isn't as though they will go hungry one day and then refill. Eg: If hunger is 0, 1, 2. Then with cooked food, they go from 2->1 and eat cooked food , back to 2. Raw food, they won't eat at 1, but at 0 -> eat raw food -> back to 1. That's actually why increasing the food value of the cooked food didn't affect the balancing overall, in that it's still 1 food per day per colonist. The issue before the change was that on say day 2, some colonists would grab 2 cooked food earlier, leaving some with nothing. What you describe isn't particularly a spiral, people do just fine with a deliberate all-raw strategy, and actually you can see how your "spiral" is basically a transition from an all-cooked 1perday to an all-raw 1perday. A possible example: I have 50 colonists I make 60 raw food a day I have only 20 cooked food, no production Starting: 50 colonists are full End of day 1, 50 hungry colonists. 20 of them grab a cooked food and the other 30 eat nothing. we have 60 raw food left End of day 2. We have 20 hungry colonists and 30 very hungry colonists. We have 120 raw food. the 30 very hungry eat a raw food and the rest don't. we now have 90 raw food End of day3. we have 50 very hungry colonists and 150 raw food. everyone eats a raw food and goes to hungry. they won't eat raw food anymore now. stock is down to 100 End of day4. we have 50 very hungry colonists and 160 raw food. they eat 50 and go back to hungry. stock is now 110 raw You can actually get MORE out of your cooked food if there isn't enough of it, as sometimes people will eat, go hungry and eat. Which is great. As long as you have extra raw production, no one will starve. Now the real issue is that if you have 30 colonists and produce 20 cooked food a day, you might somehow be able to get by. Imagine if everyone went hungry every other day, then you'd only need 30 cooked food every 2 days. But it's not safe, you can't actually ration it out. You should be producing at least 1 raw food per colonist per day. If you produced 30 raw food and then cooked 10 of it every day it would be fine. As people have noted though, cooking food is probably the best scaling method of production (ie: what gets you more overseers). As farms are probably the most convenient method of raw material collection. This is a perfectly good reason to aim for a solid 1 cooked food per colonist per day.
Yes... but the decor system allows you to compensate for the cots with decor (and vice versa) but currently the implimentation of decor and building quality leans towards using decor. As far as I can tell from the feedback in game (ie: memories) an overseer in a cot in a wonderful building reports being "well rested" while the same overseer in a middle-class bed in the same wonderful building is still only "well rested". Ironically, lower class people in a cot in a great or wonderful building report "feeling a twinge of fear at experiencing such lavish comfort" which actually does add to their fear. But a lot more happiness so whatever works for them heh. The other thing is effect of building size, actually right now it's pretty much optimal to make small buildings and cleverly stick in modules and decor appropriately. The best decor in my mind is definitely the Open Wooden Window and Closed Wooden Window (1 plank for 1 decor), but I only use them to neutralize effect of modules (N-1 windows makes an N module workshop "typical") or bumping sleeping bunkhouse to wonderful (M beds needs M+6 windows to be Wonderful) I actually like finding the amusing edge cases, the ultracrammed ultrahotbunked Heaven of Hell bunkhouse is one of them. It's boring if that's the solution and that's it. So it's good that the systems will probably change, then we can find the new solution, it might be horribly gimmicky or not, who knows... in the future a 21cot-27window hellbunkhouse (think it would be 4x21 large, and probably be sufficient for 100 colonists in shifts) would make no sense anymore. It's worse when you realize the game lets you place modules slightly on top of one another (like cots) and they still seem to work just fine... you can cram two 1x3 cots into a 1x5 or maybe even a 1x4 grid... I thought I had miscounted by bunkhouse until I realized at some point I had accidentally stacked cots, then I watched the colonists happily using them and was rather amused. (my current layout can't actually take advantage of this bug, so I'd have to delete the overlapping cot as it wouldn't be accessible anymore when I filled up the building) Currently colonists don't mind working in odd shifts as long as they get their 2 shifts off to sleep and eat, they hate sleeping on floors and don't notice at all how used a cot is (but note, the cots break faster as you expect, your long-run costs in terms of maintenance planks/cloth doesn't change). I look forward to how the colonists change. Hmm, maybe I should detail how to make a bunkhouse of pleasureable hell. It's funny to think how far a 6cot bunkhouse can go, also a kitchen that's nearly on top of the raw food stockpile. Also, apparently you can build farms on top of stockpiles, and seems like the plants work just fine, pretty crazy stuff
Testing edge-cases and trying to "break" the game or push it into absurd scenarios is fine, and is expected when you test an unfinished game in alpha, and it helps find issues and balance the game. But the game shouldn't be balanced by making these edge scenarios the norm and the way it's meant to be played. If the "One best way" to play the game (and in turn, the "only valid way") is to have your colony be an absurd mess with 8 colonist sharing a bed that somehow is in a middle of a church, being on 8 different schedules and eating raw food straight from the fields, then the game stop making sense. The players become alienated because they can't relate to this being a "proper colony". And who the hell would want to live in such a colony anyways ? Not to mention a lot of features would become useless or hindering the player (for instance if having the colonists eat raw food or having people sleep in workshops is more efficient and more "valid" than building a kitchen and some houses, why the hell would anyone use the kitchen and the house anymore except for RP ?) Back to my point, earlier, this is not just about the way i'm personally playing/enjoying the game. We know that bed ownership will be a thing (unless somehow GLG cut this feature), so for me it kinda makes sense to expect the game to be balanced around that feature, rather than the current mess. So what i'm trying to say, is that if the game expects us to build a kitchen to cook food and build houses for our colonists this is how i'll try to play the game and see if it works or not.
That's why i think the bed and house quality are not properly balanced yet. There are still missing features before we can even think about balancing it. Right now i think the devs are much more concerned about if new features of the game introduced on each patch are working at all than trying to balance a game that is missing most of its features.
It should not, that's why I am clear about how/why I am doing these odd things. Some parts are just efficiency (eg: kitchen near stockpile, farms near stockpile) while others are just crazy (8-time hotbunking, windowland). But I just don't feel like making a thread dedicated to doing that, it's natural to discuss it in places where people are already discussing it. Dredmor had some amusing things that were fixed/patched etc, but a couple were there when I played and it's too late now~ I shall get my full of enjoing CE though I don't really know what "the game" expects, I know what it presents to us as challenges. Really, cooking food is something standard I do anyway, now the house thing, it doesn't seem to me too bad to get to some point (say 30 colonists) and then do a pivot to large flax farming and then get tons of beds. As it is right now I'm clearing forests for no real reason, and you'd be surprised what the next big prestige project is.... a massive Wonderful quality Middle-class** house crammed with Practical Single Beds. Yep. **I experimented with Upper Class mansions, but building that will make Upper Class show up and they do nothing useful now so haha no. There's definitely ways that changing the mechanics can quickly annihilate the "hotbunkhouse of hellish pleasure" but I don't like playing against myself which is what constantly trying to break my own optimal solutions sounds like. Also, the aesthetic of small buildings crammed with machinery (modules) etc or the bunkhouses actually somewhat amuses me. Making all these somehow a Wonderful paradise the colonists love is even better and amuses me even more, somehow. Currently the standard 3-shift off which the game tends to give means that you will by default have 3-bunking (or more, as some jobs default to giving a different set of 3 shifts off). It was the observation that giving people the minimum 2 shifts off resulting in 2-bunking that made me realize you could mess around with sleeping schedule that much. Really, while I have cooked food for everyone on day2, it's reasonable to imagine that by say a month in you would be able to have a bed for everyone (granted you would have to be refusing immigration probably) and that the first couple weeks would be a short-term sort of hotbunking cots.
Can someone confirm that cooking contributes to getting overseers? My understanding is that food production is excluded from the calculation.
From what I can see the code only looks for production of items of various tiers. And raw/cooked food, like logs etc are indeed assigned a tier of 0. They don't contribute that much (half per raw food, another half if you cook it) but it seems to match up well in cases where you are basically just feeding yourself and no producing much in comparison. ----------------------- After a while, I've realized colonists seem to spend one shift sleeping and then idle about etc. This is because apparently shift #6 (of 8) is the universal one used for eating. Even if they are assigned to work then, they will run over and eat apparently. As a result, it might make sense to have everyone working on shift 6 and then just break up the sleeping to one shift each, among the other 7 shifts, as such: Farmers: Either shift 7 or 8 People far away (eg: working a mine): shift 5** Everyone else: shifts 1-4 **This ensures they go back to town and sleep, then eat, then go back to work immediately. Otherwise they go back to sleep during their break, return to work, then go back to town just to eat (while supposedly on the job)
