Worker Speed

[Celerium Games]

Hi,

The workers have been a corner piece of the game since day 1, but over course of the development I have gone back and forth on how to tweak them.

To be specific: workers have two characteristics:

- speed: how fast they move
- strength: how much can they lift

Combined those two stats will largely determine how fast everything gets built. The goal of the game is that you should rarely be actually waiting on the workers but rather looking towards the next thing while they go about their work.

Given some of the feedback that I have seen though, I see some frustration on their efficacy.

The feedback (I assume) concerns the human workers, it is trivial to tweak their stats, but if they were to move at lightning speed or carry incredible loads, it would quickly become rather unrealistic.

There is actually a second type of worker that you can unlock through the recipes: the cart. It moves a bit slower, but it can carry about 5 times as much.

So I was wondering what you guys think about the workers (both human and cart)?

[Bokonon]

I think the only way to make everyone happy would be to make it configurable. I don't know the extent of your available UI elements but a slider for each would probably suffice.

In general I'd think you're going to have both extremes, those who want a tough challenge and others will want a sandbox. It's not going to be easy to please both ...

Personally, I'm not a speedrunner, I don't mind taking the game as the developer intends it, I want to play YOUR game, not the communities :) But I also don't have any numbers to look at, I don't know how many people own the game versus how many are complaining. If it was me, and it was a small percentage, I'd ignore them and do whatever feels right. If it's a big percentage, then you have an indication something needs tweaking.

So I'd suggest making everything configurable. Everything, worker stats, starting money, unlock tiers, make raw material costs adjustable (0%, 50%, 100%, 150%, 200%), everything. Then on start the player can adjust to taste, those wanting a harder challenge are covered along with the sandboxers, and leave your preference as the defaults. This is really the only way you'll come close to pleasing everyone.

[moormaster]

It might be an idea to group these kind of configurable parameters together and introduce difficulty levels each representing a set of parameter values?

There could be a 'custom' difficulty level for users who want to set each parameter individually.

[Celerium Games]

This has been addressed in the last update: you can now upgrade your workers. I tried to balance the realism with the usefulness.