Is Woolen Mill just worse than Rabbit Shearer?

[Manxome]

Rabbit Shearer takes 2 actions to produce 1 wool per adjacent rabbit. Woolen Mill takes 2 actions to produce 1 wool per adjacent sheep.

Rabbits fit 3 per pen, so you can surround a Rabbit Shearer with up to 12 rabbits.

Sheep only fit 2 per pen. Also the Woolen Mill requires a clearing path to a dwelling, and sheep pens can't be built on clearing, so you can only surround it with a max of 3 pens. Thus it produces a max of 6.

Rabbit Shearer is also lower-tech, cheaper to build, and uses a more flexible profession (knifemaster vs shearer), trained with a basic tool instead of an advanced tool.

I'm not seeing any particular advantage to Woolen Mill to compensate for all those downsides?

[kaboom_1984]

Note that the Sheep pens allow for production of Raw Red Meat via Butchers Workshop, which is better than Raw White Meat (rabbits).

Regarding Wool Production, I think you are right, rabbit shearer needs to be nerfed. Maybe 1 wool + 1 wool per 3 adjacent rabbits (max 5 wool)?

Also, to add to your point, rabbits eat vegetables that generally are easier to produce (and also there are usually more than one vegetables resources available per game-meaning you can store a lot before winter), while sheep eat cereal that generally are harder to produce (and are needed for crucial production lines, such as bread).

[Manxome]

Originally posted by kaboom_1984:

Note that the Sheep pens allow for production of Raw Red Meat Production via Butchers Workshop, which is better than Raw White Meat (rabbits).

OK, that's a fair point. You plausibly could have a couple of sheep pens for red meat anyway, in which case the Woolen Mill sort-of gets free food for the sheep (although this limits max wool production due to the pens not being consistently full, unless you have the right boon).

[Catman]

Also, Rabbit Pen is not a guaranteed way to get wool, while if you get the Woolen Mill you are sure to also get the Sheep Pen. However, I agree, Sheep could use a buff on wool production.

[Manxome]

Originally posted by Catman:

Also, Rabbit Pen is not a guaranteed way to get wool, while if you get the Woolen Mill you are sure to also get the Sheep Pen.

I could see how that might be relevant if we were discussing the general balance of rabbit pen vs sheep pen, but I don't see how it's relevant to a discussion of Rabbit Shearer vs Woolen Mill?

[Catman]

They are connected: Rabbit Shearer appears only with Rabbit Pen, and Woolen Mill only with Sheep Pen

[Manxome]

Well sure, but presumably the power level of Rabbit Shearer only matters in games where it's available? "It's possible the game gives you Rabbit Pen but not Rabbit Shearer" doesn't seem like a reason to make Rabbit Shearer more powerful than it would otherwise be, in the games where it does appear?

[Catman]

I think there is merit in making options that do not appear with certainty stronger for a specific task, as it helps pushing the player to try different strategies by making some resources easier to obtain (especially in the case of non-main resources, such as wool, which has alternates anyway), and that is the reason (iirc) the Rabbit Shearer currently has the same output.

[Manxome]

Hm, that's an interesting point. I suppose it does make sense to try to make it so that different combinations of available techs lead to different buildings being optimal, and making rarer buildings stronger is one way to accomplish that.

[Catman]

Originally posted by Manxome:

Hm, that's an interesting point. I suppose it does make sense to try to make it so that different combinations of available techs lead to different buildings being optimal, and making rarer buildings stronger is one way to accomplish that.

Exactly, I'd like to steer more into that as I work on more buildings, altough it's hard to pull off correctly as there is the potential for players to feel like they got "the bad version", so it's to be carefully done to reinforce the game's overall "do lemonade with lemons" style

[Manxome]

Originally posted by Catman:

altough it's hard to pull off correctly as there is the potential for players to feel like they got "the bad version"

That's not just a perception problem; if some random tech options are more efficient than others, then the entire game actually DOES become easier or harder depending on which techs you roll.

[Catman]

Originally posted by Manxome:

Originally posted by Catman:

altough it's hard to pull off correctly as there is the potential for players to feel like they got "the bad version"

That's not just a perception problem; if some random tech options are more efficient than others, then the entire game actually DOES become easier or harder depending on which techs you roll.

Yes, but it is relative, as if only one building does this, then you are right, but if many buildings have different strengths, then it averages out and it becomes more of a "skew" towards a strategy. I.e. if you have five slots with a choice of two buildings and in both cases there is a "strictly better" option, then you will get runs where some of these appear, and some where they don't, and it's rare for all of them to be better or worse. I do prefer having "situationally better" options, however, if possible, as that plays better since it reinforces the skew towards a strategy instead.

[Manxome]

If you have 5 tech slots with a better option and a worse option, then 1 in 32 players will get all good options, and 1 in 32 players will get all bad options. You have a lot more than 32 players, so many of them will get all-good or all-bad at the first opportunity, and that will just be their impression of your game.

IMO you need to make sure that all-good and all-bad result in fun, winnable games, you can't just brush them off as "rare". (My personal rule-of-thumb for when a designer can brush something off as too rare to worry about is somewhere between "1 in a thousand games" and "1 in a million games", depending on how many players you have and just how bad an experience it will create when it does happen.)

You could add a rule that specifically prevents all-good and all-bad outcomes, by changing the randomizer to place limits on how many "good" or "bad" tech options it can generate per game.


There's a fancy, pie-in-the-sky option where you could have the randomizer change the efficiency of a bunch of buildings on a per-run basis, but in a way where you carefully calculate the modified costs of all the resources the player needs to produce to win the entire game and create a combination of positive and negative modifiers that keeps the overall difficulty constant. So the player randomly finds that e.g. hemp is really expensive to produce the game, but fabric requires less hemp so the total cost of fabric is normal-ish, and there are bonuses to some other side things that approximately make up for the other uses of hemp. And maybe all health is more expensive to produce this game but all hope is cheaper to keep the overall threat costs the same.

That would force players to rediscover the most efficient ways of doing things every game.

The math to actually make that produce balanced outcomes would be pretty gnarly, though--you'd need to take into account the time-adjusted value of goods depending on when they're produced (e.g. you can't produce all your food on the last turn, you need to eat as you go), and when goods are substitutable and when they're not, and probably some other difficult stuff as well.

[Catman]

Originally posted by Manxome:

If you have 5 tech slots with a better option and a worse option, then 1 in 32 players will get all good options, and 1 in 32 players will get all bad options. You have a lot more than 32 players, so many of them will get all-good or all-bad at the first opportunity, and that will just be their impression of your game.

IMO you need to make sure that all-good and all-bad result in fun, winnable games, you can't just brush them off as "rare". (My personal rule-of-thumb for when a designer can brush something off as too rare to worry about is somewhere between "1 in a thousand games" and "1 in a million games", depending on how many players you have and just how bad an experience it will create when it does happen.)

Fair point. The game currently does not have this kind of unbalance in its buildings, but as I work more on adding new resources and expand the game, I'd like to push the limits further, so this is something to consider.

Originally posted by Manxome:

You could add a rule that specifically prevents all-good and all-bad outcomes, by changing the randomizer to place limits on how many "good" or "bad" tech options it can generate per game.

This was my first thought as well, as currently all resource slots have uniform chances, and would be simple and effective.

Originally posted by Manxome:

There's a fancy, pie-in-the-sky option where you could have the randomizer change the efficiency of a bunch of buildings on a per-run basis, but in a way where you carefully calculate the modified costs of all the resources the player needs to produce to win the entire game and create a combination of positive and negative modifiers that keeps the overall difficulty constant. So the player randomly finds that e.g. hemp is really expensive to produce the game, but fabric requires less hemp so the total cost of fabric is normal-ish, and there are bonuses to some other side things that approximately make up for the other uses of hemp. And maybe all health is more expensive to produce this game but all hope is cheaper to keep the overall threat costs the same.

That would force players to rediscover the most efficient ways of doing things every game.

The math to actually make that produce balanced outcomes would be pretty gnarly, though--you'd need to take into account the time-adjusted value of goods depending on when they're produced (e.g. you can't produce all your food on the last turn, you need to eat as you go), and when goods are substitutable and when they're not, and probably some other difficult stuff as well.

This is similar to something I'd like to explore further (and Delirium mode was a step towards that direction): having modifiers to runs. I would probably not try and find the exact math for this, as there is some leeway and it would probably be overly complex an overkill to boot, but I am gathering a lot of insights from the new tools I am building (incidentally, one of the features of the new tools is to be able to tell me the chance for a resource to be produced, which is very useful to add new resources without creating unwinnable scenarios!)