I've heard advice that you should avoid smoothing walls and floors in your colony to minimize the total colony wealth in order to stave off worse raids. However, it is often necessary to provide beauty of SOME sort for your colonists.
How does the beauty gained by architecture compare to that produced by statues? If you dig rough rooms or have people live on dirt floors, but provide them with nice artwork, are you ahead of the game with respect to raids?
I have not tested this question specificly but lately I prefer sculptures. Smoothing floors increases wealth for sure and you cannot undo it like you can deconstruct stone floors of any kind. Smoothing walls is even worse, but at least you can check cost/performance ratio once you done smoothing job. Smoothed walls cost A LOT. When I need to lay wires in the walls in my mountain bases I just mine these walls off and build them anew from something cheap like sandstone.
The only need of constructed floors that cannot be avoided is steel-tiled floors in kitchen and sterile-tiled floors in your research room. The former reduce chance of food poisoning almost to zero even when kitchen gets some dirt in it. And the later notably increase research speed. Well, there is also surgery success chances, but you can always do this in your reseach room.
Also you can lay wooden floors in dining+recreation room. Wooden floors cost not that much but they increase beauty +1 and as this room should be as large as possible bonus stacks. Also you always should prefer to refine this common room first and sleeping rooms second (if at all) as dining+recreation room provides EVERY colonist with TWO mood bonuses.
Good advice, thanks. I hadn't thought to check the actual wealth numbers for walls, and the base value added by smoothed stone is shocking! Any way to view floor-wealth, or do you just have to check the colony building-wealth before and after?
I'll make some sculptures and see what their price to beauty ratio is.
Quote from: Hans Lemurson on June 03, 2019, 05:58:19 AMAny way to view floor-wealth, or do you just have to check the colony building-wealth before and after?
The only reasonable way to check floor wealth that I can think of is to use dev tools to create large field of single-type floor cells (like 100x100) and see on wealth tab how much gain you got. Then just calculate a single-cell wealth. It should be done for every floor type and placed somewhere for all to see. =)
Quote from: Hans Lemurson on June 03, 2019, 05:58:19 AMI'll make some sculptures and see what their price to beauty ratio is.
The interesting thing is that this ratio depends on sculpture quality and legendary is not the best one! From this data:
Quality: awfl/poor/norm/good/exc/mast/leg
Beauty: -50%/50%/100%/200%/300%/500%/800%
Price: 50%/75%/100%/125%/150%/250%/500%
...it's evident that the best ones are of excellent and masterwork quality.
With materials for sculptures it's a little easier. As stone blocks all have the same price and additional wealth value from their gigantic work-to-make is still negligible indisputable leader is marble (+1 to beauty and 135% beauty multiplier). But in regards to improving awesomeness of the rooms you shold not neglest wealth as room's awesomeness heavily depends on the worst stat (that is most likely cleanliness, though).
Beware; wooden floors *burn*.
Don't smooth walls or floors. 1 good or excellent sculpture per working room is enough to get impressive bonus buff and it's optimal choice.
Sculptures beat floors / walls by a massive margin and its not even close.
For most biomes its optimal never to build floors ever. This almost eliminates cleaning labor need as well. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/acz259/4_reasons_to_never_build_floors_and_a_practical/
sth additional, purely mathematical on the topic: should you ever decide to make smooth walls, make your rooms as large as possible and square shaped. this way you'll get the best ratio of [walls/usable area].
and it may not look great and seem even a bit dangerous, but a single pillar can hold up huge pieces of roofing. this technically has no limit either, you can make a fortress the size of your map (the edges have to be free obviously) and all you need to build are pillars every 12 tiles if i'm not mistaken.
this extreme isnt too practical considering that pawns dont like to share bedrooms and that you'd also be forced to have your storage be all-shelves to keep beauty up and you wouldnt have a fridge, but it checks out. so really, if you are one of those extreme late game players, just build a single huge fridge, a single huge rec/dining room and so on, no need for doubles anywhere.
i honestly dont know how practical this advice is for you, but there you go.