Useless vineyards

[Ando]

Ciao tutti!
Glad to see the new patch out. I was very optimistic after seeing the following patch note:

BALANCED cheapest vines are more suitable for chardonnay and nebbiolo in endless mode

That was the imbalance that had been keeping me away from the game.

Unfortunately, after booting up a few new endless games, I am seeing the same issue as before: there are a good proportion (half, if not more) of the vineyards you can purchase that have red characteristics for all the grape varieties (including starting vineyards such as Principe). Which as far as I can tell means that no top quality wine can be produced on them...

Am I missing something? Is it okay to have the soil have some aspects highlighted red (clay, loam?), as long as the altitude and pH are orange/green? Or conversely, is it okay to have the pH be in the red, say, as long as the soil has the right balance?

Would appreciate some feedback on this as I feel I don't want to start a new game if there will be plots of land that aren't worth the investment because they don't fit any of the existing grape varieties.

Grazie!

[ulzgoroth]

I'm hoping the developers' intent is that you simply don't buy and use all of the possible fields.

I think you can get solid wine with some characteristics being unfavorable, but those presumably need to be outweighed (in some hidden metric) by others being favorable.

[Ando]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

I'm hoping the developers' intent is that you simply don't buy and use all of the possible fields.

But....but.... what about my wine EMPIRE!? 🍷

[ulzgoroth]

It would be challenging to sell that much wine anyway! Max level warehouse 'only' handles 25 orders per turn.

For some very rough estimates, say that breaks down as 5 supermarket orders for 500 bottles each, 5 restaurant orders for 100 bottles each, and 15 private orders for 50 biottles each. Total 3750 bottles per day, x20 days comes to 75,000 bottles per year. Pretty sure I've got a single field that exceeds 20,000 bottles of Chardonney per year. With maximally aggressive pruning. Granted that's a productive grape and it's not a very small field, but there are about nine fields...

[Ando]

Agreed. My empire will require more storage.

MOAR. STOARGE.

[yveshohler]

Our intent is that the player adapt with what nature give them, like in the real life, BUT i explain a little better how color works:

Red: bad range, small bonus of quality

Orange: good range, bonus of quality

Green: Perfect range, bigger bonus of quality

You do not need all green parameters to make a decent wine, you can do it also on a very mixed terrain

We are looking in to it to explain better this part in the new patch

[Ando]

Okay, thank you very much for the clarification. I understand the design decision, that's totally fine.

However, I do agree with you that a UI rethink is in order for this part of the game because I found the orange / red scheme pretty off-putting and, without the information you've just given, I didn't feel excited to invest in any of these plots.

Good luck with further patching!

[yveshohler]

i agree, the problem is that we choose the white/orange theme at the beginning of the game development, when we wanted to do a full hard core simulator

[Ando]

Interesting, thanks for that insight!
I look forward to jumping back in in easy-going, seasons-admiring winemaker mode, not hardcore chemist wine nut mode. :)

[yveshohler]

AhHAHAH i can understand, this is why we are working on a sandbox option in patch 1.1.0

[Shearedsheep]

i was just searching through the tech unlocks and cant find anything where you can change the PH of the soil, i thought this is something that can be done. maybe this is something that could be considered. same goes with Sand content. this is something that can be changed by interacting. Isnt it??

Also the fields in the game, are displayed in a way to show altitude increase/decline, but a field that is lower on my display, is actually marked as higher on Info tab.