Unmaintained decorations cause massive exposure death.

[miksell]

Regretfully, I'm putting this game away for now. Maintenance is a disaster. I just posted a screenshot showing my concern. First, individual maintenance on each individual building, regardless of type is overwhelming. By year 70, I'm spending 90%+ of my time discovering building requiring maintenance. Clicking on all these buildings destroys my train of thought on what I was about to do. Buildings, for the most part show when the need to be maintained and when they are schedule for maintenance. Wells show when they need to be maintained, but don't show when they have been scheduled. Parks and gardens show neither when they need maintenance, nor when they have been scheduled. This creates the problem. You don't know that a park or a garden needs maintenance until after it has been condemned. Since it is condemned, it no longer gives its desirability benefit. Since it no longer gives its desirability benefit, the buildings receiving the benefits have their desirability reduced. Since the desirability is reduced, Manors, Houses, etc., become abandon creating a large housing shortage. Which then causes mass homelessness and then mass casualties due to exposure in the winter even though there are dozens of well maintained, but abandoned manors and houses. This is how my last two games ended. The other thing is that there seems to be no way of telling is what resources are used and in what quantities to do maintenance. Once maintenance started taking over, I always maintained more builders than recommended, but they couldn't keep up. I really gotten into this game, and really enjoy it, but I've hit a brick wall with the overhead that maintenance requires.

[Zantai]

It does look like the structural integrity widgets do not appear over decorations, we'll want to address that for v0.9.7.

If you hover over that widget (ex. over a shelter), or over the structural integrity bar in the selected building's window, it lists out the materials that are needed. If you have a lot of builders assigned and they're not overworked with too many build tasks, then the other reason buildings are not getting automatically repaired is because your town lacks the materials needed.

As long as those two factors are fulfilled (sufficient available builders and available resources in storage), then maintenance does not require any additional input or keeping track of individual buildings.

[lowend873]

Originally posted by Zantai:

It does look like the structural integrity widgets do not appear over decorations, we'll want to address that for v0.9.7.

If you hover over that widget (ex. over a shelter), or over the structural integrity bar in the selected building's window, it lists out the materials that are needed. If you have a lot of builders assigned and they're not overworked with too many build tasks, then the other reason buildings are not getting automatically repaired is because your town lacks the materials needed.

As long as those two factors are fulfilled (sufficient available builders and available resources in storage), then maintenance does not require any additional input or keeping track of individual buildings.

I just want to say I appreciate how active you are on the forums. The advice and your willingness to investigate issues that pop up in awesome.

[A.NooB]

You need more stone.

Originally posted by miksell:

...

[Mistaravim]

you need more people>more people equal more dead...hehehe

[miksell]

Originally posted by lowend873:

Originally posted by Zantai:

It does look like the structural integrity widgets do not appear over decorations, we'll want to address that for v0.9.7.

If you hover over that widget (ex. over a shelter), or over the structural integrity bar in the selected building's window, it lists out the materials that are needed. If you have a lot of builders assigned and they're not overworked with too many build tasks, then the other reason buildings are not getting automatically repaired is because your town lacks the materials needed.

As long as those two factors are fulfilled (sufficient available builders and available resources in storage), then maintenance does not require any additional input or keeping track of individual buildings.

I just want to say I appreciate how active you are on the forums. The advice and your willingness to investigate issues that pop up in awesome.

Many thanks for your reply. It has allowed me to rethink my strategy. In current games, I set a number of build sites proactively regardless of resources available at the time knowing that they will eventually be built. I'll prioritize a number of them so they will be built in the order I'd like them to be built more or less. But now I see there is this additional ongoing cost that, to me, is someone hidden from the player. So it seems I need to have resources on hand before initiating a new build; and then some to come maintenance. Despite what I wrote yesterday, I'm going to fire up another game and try a different strategy. A couple of question, if I may: Is maintenance a higher priority than a new build for builders, so will builders build new before maintenance, or is maintenance the higher priority normally? Maintenance appears it can be an ongoing automatic process if resources and builders are available, and that one may never see a condemned widget if managed properly, true? If a dwelling has, for example a desirability rating of 78 and a contributing decoration becomes condemned and the dwelling loses it's benefit, if the benefit reduces the desirability rating to only 75, will the dwelling be abandoned or does the desirability rating need to go below 60 to the lower dwelling before it becomes abandoned? Again, great game and thanks for the feedback.

[miksell]

Originally posted by A.NooB:

You need more stone.

Originally posted by miksell:

...

Don't we all.

[miksell]

Originally posted by Zantai:

It does look like the structural integrity widgets do not appear over decorations, we'll want to address that for v0.9.7.

If you hover over that widget (ex. over a shelter), or over the structural integrity bar in the selected building's window, it lists out the materials that are needed. If you have a lot of builders assigned and they're not overworked with too many build tasks, then the other reason buildings are not getting automatically repaired is because your town lacks the materials needed.

As long as those two factors are fulfilled (sufficient available builders and available resources in storage), then maintenance does not require any additional input or keeping track of individual buildings.

If I hover over the structural integrity bar in the selected building's window, it only reiterates the % shown in the bar itself. It does not list out the materials that are needed.

[asapa]

Originally posted by miksell:

Originally posted by Zantai:

It does look like the structural integrity widgets do not appear over decorations, we'll want to address that for v0.9.7.

If you hover over that widget (ex. over a shelter), or over the structural integrity bar in the selected building's window, it lists out the materials that are needed. If you have a lot of builders assigned and they're not overworked with too many build tasks, then the other reason buildings are not getting automatically repaired is because your town lacks the materials needed.

As long as those two factors are fulfilled (sufficient available builders and available resources in storage), then maintenance does not require any additional input or keeping track of individual buildings.

If I hover over the structural integrity bar in the selected building's window, it only reiterates the % shown in the bar itself. It does not list out the materials that are needed.

My dude, if you're having issues with repairing( or exposure deaths) and such(the automated system works fine, if you let it), please do the following:


Around each market / "city center hub" area, build 1 of each storage type building. Then, individually go through each storage building and set storage limits for resources that make sense, Only enable what each "city hub" needs. Make sure you enable gold currency, stone, wood, lumber boards, that kind of stuff that is used for repairs. Make sure you check the box, but also set the resources min / max(I would suggest in the 100-250 range for most resources).

What this does is cause a centralized area with storage of everything that is needed by the houses and buildings radiating outwards. Laborers will mass move the resources, and then builders can then be more effective at maintenance.

I think one of the issues you might be encountering, is that if you don't regulate and manage the storage in game, you will end up with; for example:

"stone" resource(or any resource) being mostly located in specific storage areas, which might be very far away distance wise to your buildings that need repairs.

There is an issue with this game, with how repairs and queue happens with laborers / builders - if the building is too far away from storage, it will get stuck on an endless loop and never truly be "repaired" by the automated system unless you hard manually force immediate repairs on it(and even then, it can struggle).

If you want an easy way to test this example, have gold storage only in 1 part of your town and continue to expand far away from it. You will see the buildings and builders get stuck in an endless loop where:

Building requires 1 gold 1 wood to repair -> Builder gets queued, picks up materials, gets sent to repair -> distance is so far away that during this time, the building requires an additional 1 gold 1 wood to repair -> endless loop happens, as the automated system wont over compensate builders unless manually triggered(and even then, will struggle if distance is too far).

What this does then once the endless loop happens, is that the "health" bar of the building never gets replenished, continues to drain, and then you get condemned buildings or whatever it is called.


***edit***

about exposure deaths, they can be related to the above, but they can also be related to not having enough temporary shelters, water wells, and random fruit trees scattered across your settlement / roads heading to other settlements.

Basically as your population grows, and the distance of everything grows, you want to allow as much quick access as possible to the required resources, this way your people get back to their homes faster and die less to exposure.

[asapa]

Originally posted by Zantai:

It does look like the structural integrity widgets do not appear over decorations, we'll want to address that for v0.9.7.

If you hover over that widget (ex. over a shelter), or over the structural integrity bar in the selected building's window, it lists out the materials that are needed. If you have a lot of builders assigned and they're not overworked with too many build tasks, then the other reason buildings are not getting automatically repaired is because your town lacks the materials needed.

As long as those two factors are fulfilled (sufficient available builders and available resources in storage), then maintenance does not require any additional input or keeping track of individual buildings.

Hi Zantai, this is mostly true but I posted an example where it is not in my comment above.

Obviously this "endless loop" can be corrected by the user, but wondering if maybe it wouldn't be beneficial to somehow flag an "endless loop" like this and just have the automated system spam say, 2-3 additional workers carrying the same required materials to said destination?

If you try my example above with the "gold" storage and the distance, you will see market places more than often get stuck in this endless loop and then condemn themselves(or whatever it's called).

I know it is an endless loop caused by the automated system(even though it is, user error essentially) in my example, because you can have unlimited(or hundreds, or whatever) builders enabled, have all of the resources needed(surplus even), and if you watch the ratio of active : inactive builders, you can see the endless loop happening.

Anyways, after 1,400 hours in this game, I can faithfully say it is the best city builder around.