Slower building and some starting setup changes

[Stormfox]

Lets start with a simple statement:

Building stuff is too fast. This is especially true for buildings themselves.

Very often, a colony has built a nice, fully "finished" base with bedrooms, workshop, entertainment areas, kitchen, a greenhouse, defenses, a huge freezer, hospitals and even prisons before they have even researched more than a few basic things or crafted more than basic clothes and a few simple weapons. This kinda leaves the game with a very early case of "It kinda looks finished already", reducing motivation to play much further.


I suggest slowing down building times of all kinds by a lot. Something like double or triple, perhaps a bit more for walls and a bit less for furniture and appliances. Of course this would have severe effects on the early game balance.

To combat that, the general "low expectations" mood bonus could be enhanced and/or lengthened as well as starting ressources and equipment slightly buffed. Give us four or five emergency bedrolls that have similar stats to a shoddy quality bed that can be reinstalled wherever you want. Give us emergency canvas or something to build a big tent or two out of. Semi-Outdoor kitchens and similar stuff already work well, since a few "posts" to keep up a manually selected roof function well enough for a few months in decent climates.

Basically, the idea would be that building up your first basic colony house(s) would take a bit longer, with just enough bonus starting equipment thrown out that playing on the harsher map hexes is not completely impossible because of that. A side effect would be that building your "real base" afterwards would be a long-term project instead of something you whip up during one winter. It would also feel more realistic, especially compared to the speed with which new colony features (i.e. tech, trade and new guys) come in.

[doomdrvk]

I'm not really for this type of rework, most of this has had plenty of time to balance itself out and I don't see many people complaining about it.

[Dargaron]

Wouldn't this completely kill the ice sheet challenge? (sadface)

I don't think such a change would be beneficial atm. But for the sake of argument, maybe have different construction "modes" instead? So, frex, you could set your constructor to "Rapid," and he'd construct at the usual speed, but the items have a beauty/efficiency penalty. Set him to "Normal," and the new system is in place. If he's missing an eye, but still has high construction skill, swap him to "careful," so that his construction takes longer (based on how many penalties he has to manipulation/sight), but doesn't have the flat failure chance.

That way, when setting up the initial base, you're skimping on quality, and it looks like a settlement out of Fallout 3. Then (if you choose not to just rocketship out), you can go back and improve the space (maybe a tool like the smooth floor button? Highlight a particular section to be built "properly"?)

[Jibbles]

I really dread the idea of increasing build time (at least for buildings).  I used to plan my base then build.. I hate doing that now and this would force me to do just that.  Some players will redesign their base at times cause they don't like the way it looks and this just makes it tedious. It also messes with the whole combat side of things depending on your playstyle. Extending research for things such as this makes the game feel slow or stagnant at times for me.

Different construction modes just makes things more complicated than it needs to be IMO and may most likely overwhelm or confuse new players since this feature will probably buried somewhere in the UI.

[jamaicancastle]

If you want, you should be able to apply a global penalty to "construction speed" (or any other stat of your choice) in the scenario editor. When you go to add a scenario part, one of the options should be "stat modifier" or something to that effect. Then you just pick a stat, a multiplier, and voila.

You can also kick up your starting resources in the scenario, if you like.

As for the "low expectations" mood - that automatically scales itself based on your colony wealth. If your colony is developing more slowly, it will stick around longer of its own accord.

[patoka]

oh please no
you can always just rebuild your stuff in superior quality which is what i am doing right now
you can also make a mod for this but please dont force it down our throats
sea ice challenge is impossible like that (except MAYBE with a tribal start and high enough resources?)
also, i want to be able to change my base just like i am able to do that now and i honestly believe it takes long enough already for certain things. chess tables for example.

the only thing in that regard that i would really like to see added is taking away more of the things you can build from he start and add them as tech to research. maybe split them up more (so that you first have to research a gladius and then only longswords for example, otherwise noone in their right mind would use a gladius) and maybe lower the research costs across the board to compensate.

tech you'd need to research prior to being able to build them is beds (or else you only have sleeping spots), floorings, weapons, clothing/armor and so on