Suggestion for Better Room Value Calculation

[VastinArdaen]

So, for quite a long time the 'meta' for an overly efficient colony has been to cram all your storage and production into a giant-ass room and then simply negate the penalties of the room with a handful of high beauty, high value statues. Looks terrible, makes little sense in game or out, and kind of makes a mockery of the room rules altogether.

I have a relatively simple suggestion for making more sense of this:

1) For EACH tile with a negative penalty in the room, reduce the effective Beauty and Wealth of every object in the room by -N% (say -5%) cumulative.

2) Crowding a room with furniture over a given threshold has a similar effect. Lets call the crowding threshold 50%. Every Y% above that threshold inflicts a 2*Y% crowding penalty to beauty/wealth.

3) Now calculate the beauty and wealth values in the room by this cumulative multiplier.

4) Then apply the usual -X penalties for ugly items & tiles.

EG: A room has 2 statues worth 150 beauty each, and 20 floor tiles with a bonus of 2 each. Total beauty 340.

The 12 tiles of the 20 tile room are occupied (60%) by furniture/building objects. This exceeds the crowding threshold by 10% so an initial penalty ((crowded%-threshold%)*2) of -20% is applied to all positive beauty/wealth values found in the room.

Additionally, there are currently 6 tiles of dirt in the room, each of which in addition to their -5 beauty value (which also negates the tile bonus of +2), also apply a -5% mod to the beauty and wealth of the room, for another -30%.

The final effective beauty of the room is (150+150+28)*50% = 164 + (-5*6) = 134, down from its original 340.

Rather than mopping the blood off the floor, the colonists add another 150 pt statue to the room - but this occupies another tile, increasing the crowding to 65% and the penalty by another 10% (total -60% penalty now), so the value goes to ((150*3 + 28)*40%) - 30 = 191 beauty.

Adding a fourth statue would make the room crowded enough that its beauty would actually DROP, and it only gets worse from there - a completely crowded room can never benefit from beauty or wealth values, nor a warehouse full of junk and corpses.

Note that Colony wealth is not affected by this - just the value for purposes of calculating room wealth and impressiveness.

Also note that several negatives in a single square do NOT each count towards the beauty penalty multiplier, they still stack their usual flat negative penalties, but 20 stacks of blood in a single tile do not effectively annihilate the room's benefits - you'd need 20 tiles of blood spread thru the room to have that effect.

Artwork would generally be useless on a dirt floor or warehouse, due to the large number of negative mods present. Cooking dinner inside a meat-locker would be about as unpleasant as it sounds.

In order to make a room 'beautifiable' you'd generally need to floor it at a minimum - otherwise you're better off putting your artwork outside where people can actually appreciate it. In that case only the negative values within the artwork's effect radius will count against its beauty.

Because the beauty penalty multiplier for 'ugly' tiles is calculated in a flat manner regardless of the size of the room, excessively large rooms also become difficult to beautify, unless kept meticulously clean and clear of objects that trigger penalties, creating a better balance between size and function.