[Suggestion] Expanding the use of wood/knowledge/chips and expanding beyond happiness

[Wraith_Magus]

So I spent way too long playing what's supposed to be a demo...
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2141240586

(And I've got another city past the "end game", as well...)

Also, I should point out that even at 3,500 population, the game wasn't lagging. In fact, I was using only a tiny fraction of the CPU. (At least, unless this game isn't multi-threaded, in which case the game was fully using up one core...) This may be in part due to my heavy use of hyper elevators and teleporters to keep pathfinding short, however.

Anyway, I realize that there are other ideas you have for what to add to the game that aren't being shared at this point, however, I still wanted to share some points about how the current game/demo feels...

First, wood is a base resource you need to be fairly strongly concerned with early on, but no factory consumes wood (besides a single unique as an option, but that's vanishingly trivial), so it's mainly used for construction, but as you get up the tech tree, almost nothing continues to use wood. You do need some for late-game buildings, but those are from the hippie or society missions that have a requirement for producing 1,000 wood in a day and a 100,000 wood building before you then never have to use wood ever again except the optional music celebration, which only uses population wood once a week, so you'd need 7,000 population to match the 1,000 wood a day production... There really should be something more you can spend your wood upon.

A similar problem exists for knowledge (which I referred to in my previous thread on the fossil detector), which you need tons of for single-burst uses, but then becomes utterly worthless because you can't spend knowledge on anything. Knowledge is effectively treated exactly like a resource like wood with labs as factories. When you get to the late game, it'd be nice if there were something I could do with labs besides tear them all down or just use them as decorations because they're a bright purple. (I'd laugh if there were some sort of knowledge installation machine that instantly upgrades education by spending knowledge.)

Finally, computer chips are in the same position - you need all you can get when you still are building your first teleporters, or trying to upgrade stone mines, but most of your chip needs are one-time expenses while you have a limitless supply of chips coming in.

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Beyond that, I was thinking that the technology level in Final Earth 2 is really weird. You start off like Minecraft with wooden pickaxes to break rocks that you use to upgrade to stone pickaxes, make a factory to carve them into (stone?) gears, and then apparently build UFO ferries and asteroid teleporters with stoneage tech.

What's more, there's no real upkeep for anything except food for citizens. (Plus, even if you run out, they just get angry and protest, not starve!) Right now, there's basically no failure state other than not building a stone teleporter before running out of stone on your initial island.

Beyond simply accruing more resources you can spend on accruing more resources, the only factors in the game are happiness and education. Happiness is a tremendous factor in terms of the number of buildings dedicated to maintaining high happiness, but its actual effect is rather small. At first, I had no idea how happiness worked and failed to satisfy it... and there wasn't any real consequence for that failure. I eventually figured it out and managed to generally maintain ":D", but aside from getting a good "score" or lack of anything better to do than to paint parks just to see them, there's little in-game reason to bother. This is especially since the main impetus for action in the game tends to be either running out of housing for your current population or else having to arbitrarily create more factories just to appease that "sense of purpose" happiness factor from having unemployed.

(In fact, I found that the music festival, which effectively just adds .5 to the work speed multiplier actually winds up hurting overall productivity because the productivity boost doesn't make up for the productivity loss that happens on the day of the festival...)

One thing you might want to do is include some other factors players need to balance beyond simply having housing and happiness.

For example, as you advance through the different stages of the game (the main bottlenecks are the points where you start collecting new resources, I.E. the jump to machine parts, refined materials, and computer chips), you might include additional challenges to the player to keep things interesting. One way to do this might be to include power plants and a need to fuel them (maybe with wood just to kill two birds with one stone) to generate a constant flow of power that some of the technology relies upon. Thereafter, you could have to feed a certain number of power plants wood constantly to maintain a power level for certain buildings that require it, such as hospitals, advanced/upgraded houses, or basically anything that uses computer chips.

Likewise, there are housing types such as communes and "House the rich" penthouses and villas, but no actual distinction of social classes in the game. (Superior education citizens in a flower penthouse will get jobs as miners.) In the game City Life, for example, the game divided people into six social categories in a hexagon where populations on one corner disliked the populations that were not adjacent to their own. (This was based on a very simplistic political and economic divide, with (poorer right-wing) "Blue Collar" hating the (wealthy leftist) "Radical Chic", or (ultra-wealthy) "Elites" hating (desperately poor) "Have-nots" and wanting to live as far away from them as possible. Different buildings required specific cliques to fill different positions. For example, a school needs Radical Chic teachers, but also Have-nots for janitors.
Blue Collars are used for agriculture and factory jobs, while (wealthy right-wing) White Collar are used for tech jobs.) The Sierra city-builders like Pharaoh or Emperor also had a simpler version, with wealthy nobles demanding larger buildings and many more services and far higher desirability (created by building beutification factors like parks and statues while staying away from ugly factories) while not providing any labor, and yet providing far more in taxes to the player/ruler than the working class. Since this game is overwhelmingly focused upon developing city layouts, having the ability to attract or create distinct social tiers and needing to satisfy different needs for them, possibly including something like a "neighborhood desirability" function could be good ways to make players' decision-making process more complex than "oh, running low on houses, better slap down a dozen more wherever."

Adding multiple complications gradually as the player's city becomes more developed and able to afford more demands on their resources keeps the game from being a trivialized game of waiting for resources to pile up past the point where you have computer chip factories. (I could seriously leave the game running while eating dinner after I hit the population cap and no longer needed to worry about having to build any further.) For example, if you want to use the "rich don't work but pay taxes" idea, you might make money and taxes not exist, having a community that works for free until the society is established enough to enable an economy.

[Florian van Strien]

Nice city! I hope you have enjoyed playing.

And thanks for your feedback and expansion ideas! I'm definitively considering more ways to spend your resources (especially wood and knowledge) beyond one-time uses.

I also totally get your point about challenge and complications. I want to keep this a relaxed game, as I feel (and I've often heard) this is something people really enjoy. Therefore, adding failure states is not something I'm looking for. However, that definitively does not mean there can't be some extra, potentially optional, challenges beyond the early game.

For example, I feel adding electricity too early on would not work well, as I know many people are still struggling with providing enough food and housing at that point. However, it could work as a resource for the Refined Metals Factory and beyond, or potentially just to boost production there.

I feel a classes system is not a good fit for this game. Education should be more impactful though, and higher-educated citizens should choose better jobs (right now, they don't really). There could also be other types of education or citizens with certain preferences to make the citizens more diverse.

I'll also need to include some extra ways to employ people in the end game. Extra late-game resources will provide that, but I could also add things related to money (offices and such). If you have any other ideas for that, they are welcome too!

[Wraith_Magus]

Dwarf Fortress (yes, I play DF, it's partly why nothing can ever be too complicated) used to have an economy system that kicked in only after you had a certain population and measure of success with a fortress. Before that, it was assumed the dwarves were all living communally purely towards survival, while getting a community of a certain size makes that more difficult. (Incidentally, DF's economy was taken out until stacking could be reworked because coins couldn't be restacked once split due to the obsessive need to have details on every minting of a coin, leaving thousands of individual coins littering the fortress floor for lack of boxes to hold single, individual coins.)

Consider making some elements of the game not exist or count against the player until they hit a certain portion of the game (the same way the power plants are being suggested to work). For example, there's no way to fulfill the gaming entertainment desire until you get chips and the arcade in the current game. (Although maybe you could make a board game factory that consumes wood to entertain people... In fact, consuming wood for paper factories to fuel libraries (and maybe book stores) is a good idea for consuming wood, in addition to power plants.)

Making money a complication that pops up when enough people show up that there's not a hippy commune vibe anymore (although the existence of hippy communes is what makes me think of the class, or at least philosophical stratification system in the first place).

Similarly, you might want to have other end-game entertainment types that can employ lots of people in a sort of service industry. Maybe have spas that employ masseuses? Or else "longevity centers" that have exercise and medicine that further bump up life expectancy to those who are supplied the labor-intensive therapy?

Or, just having money and then adding in banks or stock markets and having speculators that make tons of it (for themselves) without generally producing anything of value to the rest of the community can also exist as a labor sink. Adding in more resources or other systems to manage means you don't have to force every new building you want to add to have to apply to the same happiness mechanic or longevity.

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On the topic of making citizens more diverse, one of the things I thought you might do is create a weighted choice system for the citizens. Meaning, maybe one guy loves nature and art, so they have a 70 in both of those, likes reading, so libraries get a 40, and they don't care for noisy night clubs or games, so they have a 1 and 4 in those, and are comfortable in a restaurant, so that gets a 20. When deciding, you add up all those weighted chances (205), and roll a random number between 1 and 205 to decide what that character is going to do for leisure that day. Something like that isn't noticeably more processor-intensive than blind random visiting of different facilities, but it can make individual citizens have preferences for things that make them feel less generic. When a player follows a citizen, then, they can see either a number for their weighted preferences, or perhaps a descriptive text. ("loathes" for 1, "hates" for 2-3, "avoids" for 4-7, "doesn't care for" for 8-15, "sometimes pursues" for 16-31, "often enjoys" for 32-63, "loves" for 64-127, and "can't get enough of" for 128+ - note that ranges need to be larger the higher they go, since comparing a 1 to a 2 versus an 11 to a 12 isn't just "one more", it's "100% more and 9% more", so you basically need to double the size of every category to make each one evenly spaced. Similarly, you need to weight the assignment to new citizens so that "can't get enough of" isn't vastly more likely to show up than "loathes")

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As a final suggestion (at least, in this post), the game features scenarios where you hop from one map to another, but there really should be things that differentiate one map from another. In Cities XL and the EA SimCity reboot, one thing they tried to do was make it so that each city couldn't build everything, and there would be some kind of specific type of resource that a given city could provide (like one city being a college town that can export graduates, while another has a specialized economy of scale industry that makes cars or something).

Final Earth 2 could set up something where you have a trading ship landing pad and some late-game desire for diverse resources or luxury goods or something that can't all be produced in one location. (Or maybe you need to create a Dyson Sphere using multiple cities, so you need multiple cities all specializing in particular parts to contribute to a megaproject.) The way that this gets abstracted in games like Cities XL is that when you are playing a city, you can set up how much of a given product you don't have you're willing to pay for (a good use for money), and how much you're willing to export (perhaps set weekly in Final Earth 2?), and when you load/start a new city on another planet, that data about "there's this other city that buys X materials and sells Y other materials per week" is carried over, and you can trade with that city.

It doesn't need to be terribly complicated, you can just set aside seven colors of goo where each map has one or maybe two, and players will want to set up multiple goo-mining facilities and trade to make a goo rainbow. That said, part of the point is that you want to make the demands of each one's industry actually be different enough that playing a red goo extraction city will genuinely feel different from a purple goo extraction city. (Maybe one takes tons of wood while another takes tons of computer chips? Maybe one has different kinds of unique housing that become available? Maybe one dramatically skews your entertainment needs?)

Similarly, just setting up multiple kinds of "mission giving uniques" like the Society or Hackers or Hippies, or just having a broader variety of alien tech so that you don't always get all of them (in my freeplay map above, I had one too many alien ruin, so it gave literally nothing as there were no other discoveries to make) that can randomly appear in different missions will make them feel at least a bit unique. If alien houses are cheaper alternatives that are as good as more expensive houses, then there's a good reason to paint your town with slimy living, while a city that never unlocks that will feel different, even if they have alien nightclubs.

[Florian van Strien]

I'm afraid I'm not going to get near the complexity of Dwarf Fortress, but I think you'll understand that. :) And thanks for all your ideas! I might not reply to every one here, but I have read them all and I will certainly consider them all.

Yeah, making some elements unlock later on is definitively an option and it's also how I would probably do new happiness things in the future. I think the system where you can only get to :D once you have computer chips is fine though - gives you something to work towards. But it's also pretty logical that people would demand more later on.

Making a way to get extra life expectancy with workers is a nice idea!

I feel like if I make money it has to have some use, but there are various options for that, e.g. trading with other cities or motivating people to work harder.

That weighted choice system idea is actually really great - good way to differentiate citizens without influencing performance or taking a huge amount of time to implement. I'd probably implement it slightly differently, but likely going to do this. Thank you! :)

Sending resources to other cities is something I'm going to do!

And I agree that cities could use some more differentiation. I'd have to be a bit careful as I know a lot of people want to be able to build each building in each city, but that would still be possible with trading things between cities.