(Experimental) Instead of adjacent dwellings

[Manxome]

Lots of buildings on the experimental branch that used to get a bonus for each dwelling within 1 have been changed to various other things. I know Catman has said that they didn't like the checkerboard of empty dwellings this encouraged and wanted to change it.

But it looks like most of the buildings that were changed also became (in my estimation) quite a lot weaker.

In order to offer more targeted feedback, I want to check whether that's intended or not. Is this a case of "I don't like everything being based on adjacent dwellings, AND a lot of these seem overpowered, so let's change them and nerf them at the same time"? Or is the nerfing an accidental side-effect?

[Catman]

The nerfing was intentional, yes. Two birds with one stone. Note that after some playtesting this change is one of those I am most unsure of as having so many "for each" plays a lot harder and some will probably become simpler requirements. Interested to hear your thoughts!

[Manxome]

The one that jumps out at me is Bathhouse. Before the change, I thought it was a noticeably subpar endgame building--most expensive input and lowest output of anything at its tech level--and I basically treated it as an emergency fallback for generating cold if I couldn't get ice for ice houses. I did not think it needed a nerf. The new version I basically can't imagine using under any circumstance.



But really, everything that's based on active leisure seems very problematic.

The only leisure buildings I've seen are shared table/peace tent, festival, and pub.

The first problem is that, except for Pub, the leisure buildings all look bad next to Performer's Stall. I routinely skip past shared table/peace tent and go straight to Performer's Stall, which is only one tech higher and around twice as efficient. Then Festival is higher tech than Performer's Stall, but you need to work hard optimizing it to make it just barely better than Performer's Stall, so I normally don't bother with that and jump straight to Pub. (Maybe this is actually a problem with Performer's Stall?)

Pub is an excellent endgame building that I'm happy to use, but I only need 2 or 3 of them; using 4 to surround another building is implausible, and using the ~8 needed to surround 3 copies of another building is right out. Plus, Pubs have their own incompatible adjacency bonuses! Like, theater gets +5 hope for each adjacent active pub...but pub gets +5 hope for each adjacent dwelling, and I have to give up a dwelling slot to make it be next to the theater, which basically defeats the purpose.

Shared table and peace tent are early-game buildings that are VERY inefficient by the standards of endgame. There's no way I would WANT to use them by the time I've got the buildings that need adjacent active leisure, so I'd be running them JUST for the bonus, which drags down the average efficiency of the whole operation. Even if you assume that the main building is going to operate anyway and think of the adjacency bonus as applying to the nearby leisure building, using those leisure buildings still seems pretty bad; e.g. a Shared Table buffed with +5 hope is still not even as efficient as Performer's Stalls. Endgame buildings should be way better than this.

Festival has both problems, although not quite as bad. Like pub, it wants to be surrounded by specific buildings; like the others, it's not an endgame-quality building even after you do that.


If you really like the idea of basing things off active leisure buildings, I suggest you give a large bonus for having ONE active leisure building, instead of scaling based on the number of them. That way you can actually use pubs or festivals because you only need 1 or 2 of them to trigger the bonus. (Maybe also give a small scaling bonus for something else, so that they still need to be surrounded by something to be optimal.)

I'd also recommend modifying festival and pub so that they get bonuses for themselves when they enhance another building in this way (e.g. if you want players to build them next to theater, maybe give them a bonus for adjacent arts). Sacrificing their own effectiveness, even if you balance it to be worthwhile, just feels bad, and may mislead new players about how to place them effectively.

If you REALLY want the player to use massed shared tables, the bonus needs to be WAY bigger. Like maybe +20 per adjacent active leisure. I am not joking. The bonus needs to be so big that you are happy to assign 2 pips to that shared table, at a tech level where you have bourgeoisie. (Shared table is especially bad for this sort of thing because it requires 2 pips; peace tent might only need +13 or something.)



The change to temples to make them intensifiers has the same general issue, although not as bad. Previously, you could surround them with level 1 shrines and then NOT use the shrines. Now you either have to use all the shrines (which are bad by endgame standards) or try to build a bunch of temples in a box formation so that they buff each other, and then only use the centermost ones. Though since all the temples require impassable terrain to build, I guess that second option probably only really works for the Captain. (And it takes a staggering number of planks.)

I noticed that a water shrine (lower tech) surrounded by water temples actually seems to have better action-efficiency than a water temple surrounded by water temples. (Though if you use shrines you need more total temples and more space, so this isn't necessarily a good plan.)

[Lactose Intolerant Volcano God]

I can't provide feedback on the changes, as I didn't play enough before they were implemented.

Originally posted by Manxome:

The one that jumps out at me is Bathhouse. Before the change, I thought it was a noticeably subpar endgame building

The nice thing about the Public Baths is you can use it year-round. I think it's the only building in the game that can provide heat or cold. If it's a choice between building both the Ice House and the Hearth, or building two Public Baths, I thought two Public Baths would be better?

Originally posted by Manxome:

The only leisure buildings I've seen are shared table/peace tent, festival, and pub.

There's also the Brothel, but I think the research tree rolls either the Pub or the Brothel. The Brothel is easier to place as most of its output is not dependant on proximity bonuses. (Unlike the Pub's "10X + 10", its output is calculated as "45 + 4X".) However, the Brothel has three negatives over the Pub: it can't cure depression, it produces sickness, and it attracts two types of negative events (whereas the Pub only attracts one type).



Is one of the contributing factors that few Hope buildings are upgradeable? For all the other domains, the early-game and mid-game buildings have upgrades. Hope is a bit unique in that apart from the Grave and the Wrestling Arena, you can't upgrade anything. So there is not much synergy or cohesion between the early- and late-game buildings.

The placement of hope buildings is perhaps also complicated by the fact that Hope is split into Arts, Beauty, Leisure and Social.

[Manxome]

Originally posted by Lactose Intolerant Volcano God:

The nice thing about the Public Baths is you can use it year-round. I think it's the only building in the game that can provide heat or cold. If it's a choice between building both the Ice House and the Hearth, or building two Public Baths, I thought two Public Baths would be better?

Baths max out at 30, while ice house and hearth both max out at 50, so if you ignore efficiency and just look at max output then two baths is slightly better. But a single bath costs strictly more to operate than a hearth, for only slightly more than half the output. (And that was before this latest nerf.)

There might be an argument for baths if you are primarily space-constrained, rather than manpower-constrained? But if you count up the support buildings needed to fuel them then I'm not sure it's actually more efficient even in terms of space; blankets take a lot of infrastructure. Also, don't neglect the option of building hearths temporarily and then demolishing them for space when the apocalypse gets close.

Of course, what I actually do, at least in my recent games, is that I never use any high-end heat building at all--neither baths nor hearths nor even a cloak-maker. I get through the first winter mostly by the heat produced as a side effect from smelting metal (with minor support from tier 2 heat buildings, such as scrub pyre), and then that's the last time I see the cold domain because I build a doomsday tower to summon the apocalypse before I get to the second autumn.

Originally posted by Lactose Intolerant Volcano God:

There's also the Brothel

One of the few memories I haven't unlocked yet.

Originally posted by Lactose Intolerant Volcano God:

Is one of the contributing factors that few Hope buildings are upgradeable?

I don't think that's a helpful way of looking at it. For instance, if you could upgrade Shared Table into Festival, that wouldn't help; at the end of the day, you'd still need to be using one or the other.

If you assume "making hope buildings be upgradeable" somehow implies the creation of new leisure-category buildings that are better for adjacency bonuses than any of the currently-existing leisure buildings, then maybe.

[Catman]

Thanks for the input! Baths have been nerfed as, due to their flexibility, they produced so much that they made both Hearth and the Ice buildings useless. I'd rather Baths be used as a fallback, or a conscious choice to sacrifice efficiency for flexibility. They are especially useful at lower difficulties, at the moment, instead of being the optimal choice.

For what concerns active buildings, that is the current change I am most wary of, also due to UX issues. I am thinking indeed of changing most "for each" to single building requirements to make the placement still strategic, but not feeling like you need to surround with bad buildings just to get a bonus.

[Manxome]

I have realized I probably should have been more explicit about a key part of my reasoning:

I consider pip-efficiency to be the primary concern in judging how good a building is, and space-efficiency to be a minor secondary concern. This is because I frequently encounter situations where I wish I could do more things at once, and only rarely find that I want to build something but can't find any place to put it.

That said, I can understand nerfing something for reasons of "it is too easy for newbies to just mass this, and it's good enough to get by on easier difficulties" even when it's not competitive from the perspective of expert players.



(My current game is the first time since my very first game that I actually decided NOT to build something significant, purely do to space reasons. I think this is partly due to variation in the map (i.e. that my current map and my first map each started with less accessible space than usual), although it's surely also due to those being the only two games where I got thinking post. Even then, the thing that I chose not to build was "even more research" when I already had ~15 pips dedicated to research: 8 thinking post, 4 scriptorium + supports.)

[Catman]

Latest patches has some changes on the buildings that are the worst to play with with the new changes: i.e. Festival, Theater, and Public Bath. Still open to modifying them again, but getting rid of the 'for each' for them should lessen their frustration considerably