Lumberjack Camp Expansion is not worth it?!

[lembos-hauser]

I really like the idea that I am now able to expand my lumberjack camp for more storage or workers, but:

besides the looks it is not worth it, is it?

A new camp gives you 50 storage and 3 workplaces for like 2 tools, right?

But even if I fully upgrade the workplaces of my lumberjack camp through add on buildings, I will have 12 additional workers, but for the price of 45 logs, 13 tools, 25 linen and 15 planks - not to mention the coins.

BUT to get 12 additonal workers by just building new camps, I just need 4 new camps, which cost 8 tools.

So, in general, 15 lumberjacks will cost you 10 tools or 45 logs, 15 tools, 25 linen and 15 planks. Its not even cheaper according to the tools (which are hard to aquire or expensive to buy)

So, expanding your camp through those add ons just looks nice, but is more costly than just simple EA camps-pamming.

A bit disappointing.

[Minotorious]

Understandable, but there is really no other way to balance it to keep the base camp cheap enough for the start of the game short of making the upgrades free of cost.

Resources in Foundation are anyway infinite so building anything is only a matter of playtime.

So yes you are basically paying more for better looks instead of spamming the same base camp everywhere.

PS: There are options for early game tools production in the full version, see the iron nodes scattered across the map that can be set-up as early as with 50-60 villagers.

[lembos-hauser]

Originally posted by Minotorious:

Understandable, but there is really no other way to balance it to keep the base camp cheap enough for the start of the game short of making the upgrades free of cost.

Resources in Foundation are anyway infinite so building anything is only a matter of playtime.

So yes you are basically paying more for better looks instead of spamming the same base camp everywhere.

PS: There are options for early game tools production in the full version, see the iron nodes scattered across the map that can be set-up as early as with 50-60 villagers.

Understandable. But:

Buildings of the same type could scale up in cost to encourage you to expand existing buildings.
Building expansions could give you buffs like 10% faster production rate or 10% more happiness.
Building expansions could give you pomposity (I dont know the english word you use for it)

Or:

You start with way more tools in the beginning, and the lumberjack camp just costs like 10 or 15 tools. That way it is better to invest some regrowable logs and planks and some tools instead of using so much of the (in the early game) expensive tools.

[Minotorious]

Originally posted by lembos-hauser:

Buildings of the same type could scale up in cost to encourage you to expand existing buildings.

That could be done, though would need a completely new mechanic and would be kinda counter-intuitive as to why in a city-building game the same building would cost more the more times you place it.

Originally posted by lembos-hauser:

Building expansions could give you buffs like 10% faster production rate or 10% more happiness.

This is extremely cheesable for maxing out happiness even if you were to reduce the bonus to 0.1% people would just spam these to counteract any negative happiness penalties the game would throw at them.

As for the production rate buff, Foundation doesn't work with rates, but distances and walking times. It's not like Anno or Satisfactory where you can just slap a 10% on any building and it multiplies it's output directly like in a spreadsheet. This is also the reason min-maxing just doesn't work in Foundation, if that is what you are after it simply can't happen.

Originally posted by lembos-hauser:

Building expansions could give you pomposity (I dont know the english word you use for it)

I assume you mean splendour, yes that could be done, but as you will see in the full release the amount of parts that give you splendour are so many that a bit more from there as a "reason to build expansions" is moot.

Originally posted by lembos-hauser:

You start with way more tools in the beginning, and the lumberjack camp just costs like 10 or 15 tools. That way it is better to invest some regrowable logs and planks and some tools instead of using so much of the (in the early game) expensive tools.

That is something that could be done tbh for the main hut to cost 5 tools where all expansions cost 1-3, I will pass this on to the devs as feedback :)

[Overread]

Another option which a few games use to get around this is just to give a few key buildings a starting settlement discount. Representing the new settlement having a leg-up in getting started.

So first lumbercamp might be way cheaper than normal and that's only valid one time. After that any further ones cost more resources so that they scale better with their upgrades.

At that point upgrading becomes beneficial over building more and more camps because you can price additional lumber yards at a higher cost than the upgrades. With the benefit being that they can harvest from a new area and thus help expand the settlement and streamline resource flow - which when someone is at that stage they should have more resources coming in anyway that its not a barrier to gameplay .

[lembos-hauser]

Originally posted by Overread:

Another option which a few games use to get around this is just to give a few key buildings a starting settlement discount. Representing the new settlement having a leg-up in getting started.

So first lumbercamp might be way cheaper than normal and that's only valid one time. After that any further ones cost more resources so that they scale better with their upgrades.

At that point upgrading becomes beneficial over building more and more camps because you can price additional lumber yards at a higher cost than the upgrades. With the benefit being that they can harvest from a new area and thus help expand the settlement and streamline resource flow - which when someone is at that stage they should have more resources coming in anyway that its not a barrier to gameplay .

That's what I kind of meant by scaling costs, but your way to put it is simpler therefore easier to understand.

@Minotorius:
Foundation uses rates indeed: there is a specific time that every lumberjack spends at the tree swinging is axe until he gets the resource. This could be the point where yih could get a speed buff.

According to the happiness buffs: exploit is always a problem, but it is a question of balancing. Make it 3% happieness buff, make it happiness buff just for the workers in the camp, make it with a max cap of this buff. Those three adjustments could decrease exploit in a effective way, especially the "buff cap and only affects lumberjack themselves"

[glass zebra]

You are cutting down on storage worker transportation time with stacking the wood production in one place instead of in many. They only need to do one trip to get all the wood instead of e.g. 3 trips

Initial resource cost of a building does not matter that much in the long run, but efficiency does, especially with walking times the bigger your settlement gets. That matters less if you stack the wood production, refinement and storage facilities one place though. For the most part is gives you more option on how to build your city, which I think is one of the biggest points in this game.

For very early game, getting multiple camps is very much the better choice, especially you probably also want to cut away some trees in different parts of the map to get some space, but that might not be relevant forever.

[lembos-hauser]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

You are cutting down on storage worker transportation time with stacking the wood production in one place instead of in many. They only need to do one trip to get all the wood instead of e.g. 3 trips

Initial resource cost of a building does not matter that much in the long run, but efficiency does, especially with walking times the bigger your settlement gets. That matters less if you stack the wood production, refinement and storage facilities one place though. For the most part is gives you more option on how to build your city, which I think is one of the biggest points in this game.

For very early game, getting multiple camps is very much the better choice, especially you probably also want to cut away some trees in different parts of the map to get some space, but that might not be relevant forever.

Interesting point if view and tbh I do agree with you. I like the way you look at the "safe trips for storage carriers".

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by lembos-hauser:

Originally posted by glass zebra:

You are cutting down on storage worker transportation time with stacking the wood production in one place instead of in many. They only need to do one trip to get all the wood instead of e.g. 3 trips

Initial resource cost of a building does not matter that much in the long run, but efficiency does, especially with walking times the bigger your settlement gets. That matters less if you stack the wood production, refinement and storage facilities one place though. For the most part is gives you more option on how to build your city, which I think is one of the biggest points in this game.

For very early game, getting multiple camps is very much the better choice, especially you probably also want to cut away some trees in different parts of the map to get some space, but that might not be relevant forever.

Interesting point if view and tbh I do agree with you. I like the way you look at the "safe trips for storage carriers".

I remembered that you might be able to make all 3 camps part of the same building though, but I don't really want to install the demo again to check. They might be capped on 1 per building or still have separate storages.

I was fairly certain the extensions gave labour splendor too.

[lembos-hauser]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

I remembered that you might be able to make all 3 camps part of the same building though, but I don't really want to install the demo again to check. They might be capped on 1 per building or still have separate storages.

I was fairly certain the extensions gave labour splendor too.

I dont really understand what you mean by 3 camps part of the same buildiung. But as far as I remember every expansion has a cap, but in my calculation I built the max cap of the workers adding expansions - then you have 3 + 12 workers.

According to storage it is the same: the small has a cap of 5, the middle idk, the big one a cap of 3.

There are expansions giving your splendor, yes, but as far as I remember only the pure decorative ones, not the ones which give you workers or storage.

[Utsuho Reiuji]

I hope i dont misunderstand this, but where did you find a tech tree? I was looking around in the menus, but coudnt find anything that lets me upgrade my Produktion Buildings. Am i blind, or is this an option for a mod?

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by lembos-hauser:

I dont really understand what you mean by 3 camps part of the same buildiung.

At least in the latest beta version you can e.g. select the to build more market stall buildings from the build menu inside the select market stall and then have 4 market stalls that all belong to the same building, instead of 4 separate ones.

I thought you might be able to do that with the woodcutters too and then have a combined workplace with combined storage, but have not tested that (and I don't want to install the demo anymore just to test that). Are there only the extensions selectable in the build menu on the woodcutter or also still a woodcutter camp (with no 1/1 cap shown)?

Originally posted by Utsuho Reiuji:

I hope i dont misunderstand this, but where did you find a tech tree? I was looking around in the menus, but coudnt find anything that lets me upgrade my Produktion Buildings. Am i blind, or is this an option for a mod?

As soon as you did the first few steps of the tutorial, you get access to the progression tree. The woodcutter extension is also a demo-only thing until the end of month

[Utsuho Reiuji]

Ahh ok thanks for the info. Im not playing the Demo, that explains a lot. So right now the Demo is ahead of its full game... thats pretty sad. I hope get to use those Demo Features aswell.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Utsuho Reiuji:

Ahh ok thanks for the info. Im not playing the Demo, that explains a lot. So right now the Demo is ahead of its full game... thats pretty sad. I hope get to use those Demo Features aswell.

The full game is release at the end of the month and the demo has a ton of stuff missing/locked that the bought version has. You have like 10 basic unlocks, no clergy, no kingdom. But I get what you mean

[lembos-hauser]

Originally posted by Utsuho Reiuji:

Ahh ok thanks for the info. Im not playing the Demo, that explains a lot. So right now the Demo is ahead of its full game... thats pretty sad. I hope get to use those Demo Features aswell.

The EA version has a tech tree aswell. Just not the "technology" for expansion of lumerjack camps.

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Originally posted by lembos-hauser:

I dont really understand what you mean by 3 camps part of the same buildiung.

At least in the latest beta version you can e.g. select the to build more market stall buildings from the build menu inside the select market stall and then have 4 market stalls that all belong to the same building, instead of 4 separate ones.

I thought you might be able to do that with the woodcutters too and then have a combined workplace with combined storage, but have not tested that (and I don't want to install the demo anymore just to test that). Are there only the extensions selectable in the build menu on the woodcutter or also still a woodcutter camp (with no 1/1 cap shown)?

I see but I dont know. Ill wait for the 1.0 to test it.