What's the deal with Venturers balance?

[Harris]

I was testing how servants feel in the new patch the other day, and I realized something interesting about the Venturers ability.

Basically 11 bit has been tweaking it multiple times ever since the game released, but you won't find info about it in any of the patch notes. There have been at least 3 iterations to how the ability works:

1) You pay 100 heatstamps and get permanent guard squads in return
2) You get permanent guard squads for free
3) You get temporary guard squads for free

#1 and #2 is what they alternated between multple times over the patches, and #3 is what we've got right now. So how do we feel about it? To me, it seems all 3 implementations have their own problems.

1 - 100 heatstamps is too much of an investment in the early game to be relevant
2 - getting free guard squads early game (+ even more squads through rallies) enables early demand funds => trivializes the economy
3 - temporary nature of guard squads makes venturers useless exactly for the purpose you'd want to use them for - namely, the playstyle where you amass a ton of servants and need plenty of guards for them at all times.

How do you currently feel about Venturers, are they in a good spot? And if they're not, how do we make them great again?

[adrien_perleflamme]

I'd say some kind of guard squad's increased productivity (you need less of them for the same effect, for instance) while bonus is active, without cost beyond the need to be in good terms with them. Bonus would be a toggle, like it's done for overwork, automatically deactivated once relations worsen below a given threshold.

Another way to tweak faction bonuses would be to provide a bonus tied to specific buildings instead of global bonuses. Like Venturers could increased productivity of guard towers, for instance.

[Harris]

Playing with Icebloods I realized they no longer give you a constant food boost, they now only give a tiny one upon Devoted. And that's actually a huge deal, because back in the day I wrote a guide post where I stated abusing Icebloods is the easiest way to get an achievement where you don't interact with Frostlands. 11 bit took that one down, which surely raises some eyebrows.

I mean, what they're clearly doing (without mentioning it anywhere) is nerfing factions to the point they are just portraits, forgettable and interchangeable. Strats where you would plan your early laws around getting this or that faction are no longer impactful Because of that, the Order ending of civil war is now a no-brainer.

Another trend I noticed is they've been adding more and more events that essentially have only one goal - to stop you from being able to have both factions happy and avoid civil war entirely.

[HardNRG]

Merit factions are supposed to be bad.

Play the real heroes of the game, the Technocrats.

[Harris]

Originally posted by HardNRG:

Merit factions are supposed to be bad.

I want to love Overseers since aligning with them gives you The Last Autumn Engineers experience. However, Merit indeed tends to be weaker in my games, for the following reasons:

1) Accept All Outsiders gives bigger population growth at the time where population is the bottleneck to how fast you can expand
2) Early Equality laws have some immediately useful things like Trust to offset some early deaths on Captain difficulty, and head demand from Heatpipe Watch
3) I normally can't fit Pleasure Clubs into my districts, as they heavily compete for slots with guard towers, hospitals, research etc.
4) Servants require too much investment into guard squads for what they give you, and they also arrive late.

But the most important one, is that Equality caters to a playstyle where you fulfill a need by not fulfilling it. Like, to gain value from Merit you need to build industrial districts, you need to build factories, you need to build extraction to have materials to support that kind of thing. It's a ton of investment which is not feasible early on. Meanwhile with Equality you just spam Food Hoarding Inspectorate in the housing districts you are building plenty anyways, money is trivial ever since you pass state-run alcohol shops, and Levlling gives you goods without a need to build any factories. Meanwhile Traditions' Recovery Hospitals take care of the injured by Levelling and boost population growth at the same time.