As you know, there’s been a ton of work put into building better models for the harvesters. Unfortunately, in the current state of the game, there’s a tremendous rock placed on top of our heads. That is the cost to upgrade installations into the end-game is prohibitively expensive. This includes the aaltar.
I wanted to open a discussion on a few points.
Is the community open to revising (reducing) the cost of the aaltar?
Is there enough justification re: channeling etc. to have the level 9 aaltars keep their current build cost?
We’ve been toying with the numbers and reducing the cost to post L5 aaltars to look like this:
It opens the possibility for the L6 and beyond builds to be much more viable.
Of course if anyone has upgraded beyond those levels now they would be refunded the difference.
Another alternative which has been floated is to remove the level requirements from the aaltar altogether. Meaning you could feasibly upgrade everything without needing to upgrade the aaltar.
In the current state, the maaker is not justified at any point to be used. GLTR is simply too cheap and the maaker too expensive.
As an example: right now an L9 maaker costs 13k GHST to build in total. At current prices, the most expensive insta build for Recipe A/B is around 350 GHST. That means GLTR needs to more than 37x in order to be the same price as a maaker. And even still, GLTR is still more powerful as it’s instant.
So, we can greatly reduce the maaker cost. Or we can go back to re-imagining the maaker and give it more power.
Reservoir costs & capacity - There is little reason to upgrade a reservoir to the higher levels as the cost is too high (and the capacity is insanely high)
This is less important, but worth discussing. We can retool the reservoirs to be cheaper at the higher levels, but give lower capacity, too.
These type of discussions go far beyond the scope of the project originally taken on by @MikeyJay and me, and it’s time to really crack into this and bring everything home.
Most of the estate solutions involve altars, they have significant profit at higher levels, with channeling, and spillage, and they help to gate the levels of the other buildings.
Maybe Ayahuasca could comment on how his level 9 altar is going? We have a “first look” there
Just to give a bit more insight into the math at play… in both the initial recipe and recipe B (with most up-to-date version revised yesterday) - the harvest rate of an L9 is such that it would only take a single L9 harvester a bit over a year to empty an average spacious parcel of a single alchemica type (disclaimer: this is napkin math).
L9’s are probably not viable for a real-life player who starts building at harvester launch - you’re limited by the fact that you only get 25% in your initial survey (which I think is a very good thing!)… so this leaves L9’s as being more niche strategies for late entrants who are playing catch up, and maybe high roll partner parcels. Or just for degens who haven’t done their math
Personally speaking, I am not sure if I mind the diminished role of higher level harvesters, but I could understand why some have raised the concerns about some of the higher level harvesters not making sense due to their high harvest rates relative to parcel alchemica supply.
If we see the harvest rates as a problem, then any lowering of harvest rates beyond what has been done in recipe B will most likely need to be accompanied by one of the additional measures outlined by notorious above:
Make altar upgrades less costly
Eliminate the altar level requirement so the altar does not restrict the level of your other installations
Make the maker less costly
I’m hesitant to mess with the altar recipe, as we have not been tasked to simulate and study channeling economics… and messing with the altar recipe has the potential of throwing a wrench into channeling. It’s not a can of worms I personally want to open.
My own personal preference is eliminating the altar leveling requirement. This rule has not technically ever been canonized in the bible chapters - and I also have a hunch many players (in particular those not following this discussion as closely as we are) are still not aware of this limitation.
I’m also in favor of reducing the maker costs by some linear factor across the board, and my guess would be some combination of this and removing the altar requirement would allow us to lower harvest rates sufficiently to make higher level harvesters a bigger factor in the gameplay.
The side benefit of any of these options, is that I think there’s a good chance this will slightly help the balance between parcel sizes a bit more fairly as well.
Makers are by far the best thing to tweak, to get the curves you were looking for, and be able to focus your changes on different parcel sizes.
They are essentially the “spacious tax” and are part of what made the lines cross in your model, so it’s a natural way to balance the various parcel sizes. The recipe of low level makers, is most important to the humble, and as you go up, the value proposition for it, tends to the spacious, so you can tweak those numbers in a way that gets you the desired result in that size band.
Old cans of worms are best left unopened altar recipe is absolutely fine
If I think as COC, we should have the installations upgrades forced by the aaltar.
This force you to level up aaltar and play gradually, and imo upgrading aaltar should be a must, for the use of alch too.
So. just reduce the cost for leveling is ok, IMHO.
Seems like tweaking absolute values of harvester alchemica will always be a challenge to get correct per parcel size. Has there been discussion having harvesters extracting in proportion of amount of alchemica in the parcel? ofc, Humbles have less alchem than spacious.
Also cost of harvester would normalize as well. Since a humble harvester is less powerful than a spacious it would cost less.
I think a lot of variables cancel out. So the end result is putting harvesters in terms of estimated days to “Clear a parcel” instead of absolute alchemica numbers.
Numbers for illustration purposed only:
days require the user keep the harvester running, I think harvester shuts off if reservoir fills.
1 L1 harvester takes 360 days to clear one alchemica
1 L2 harvester takes 340 days to clear one alchemica
More thinking would be needed to compute how multiple harvesters effect days till clearing out parcel
Side thought:
Farming should be positioned as a prequel, to setup players for the next phase of the game. There needs to be Act II sinks, this way farming is a kick off. Players will only have this farming time to get ready for the next phase of the game, Act II.
Yes, absolutely… the the goal should be starting Act 2 as the railroad tycoon, not the donner party.
|
EDIT: What if we have a railroad? at the end, introduce a way to save an installation instead of destroying it, so it can be moved to the new area during the great migration? Maybe only L9’s can be moved, and you pay extra to pack it and ship it, as opposed to cashing it out. It could be that you are buying crates to move things to The Beyond? If priced properly, it would be worth it, not totally mess up the tokenomics, because only the lodge and some other choice items would be worth it, and it would stop some of the biggest/fastest players from selling EVERYTHING at the the end and killing the tokens/bank run.
One argument in favor of lowering the maker costs across the board - an L9 maker buildout costs 87% of the alchemica value contained in an average spacious parcel - an L9 altar buildout costs 42% of the alchemica value of a spacious parcel… it doesn’t seem like an L9 maker offers 2x the benefit of an L9 altar.
On the makers… it seems like it might be prudent to price the L9, so it IS only for if you were gonna slam a high roll? It shouldn’t fit into the normal plan, it should be the turbo boost you need if you keep getting high rolls. Maybe put the peak “average roll” performance of maker at the L6, and then do the 7,8,9, as if someone got three high rolls in a row, on a boosted, in different types of alch? And also maybe for if someone has a 2 round old untouched parcel?
I don’t think the high rolls will actually play that much impact… there are 10 rolls in total - and the first roll is the largest factor, worth 25% of your alchemica… plus you roll across 4 alchemica types - so that’s 40 rolls total… the law of averages is going to take hold very quickly. We modeled a 2x roll and found it didn’t have that much impact on player strategy - and the chances of getting a 2x roll is something like 3% - and we modeled the player pulling that off on all 40 rolls… so don’t think we even need to pay the rolls much mind tbh
It looks to me like recipes overall are kind of wonky and need to be reworked or at least tested in more detail together. Alternately, if PC has a full tech-tree planned out that solves these concerns, that would be fine.
I see us walking into a potential Deenoschwap with hopeful looks on our faces. “Maybe it will work, we don’t know!” I think we can do better than that before proceeding, given that the problems raised in the report are not trivial.
I still do not see the need for a Maaker especially since GLTR price is so low. Users will use “Insta-build” strategy to save costs rather than building a Maaker. Also the insta-build strategy saves space for more production.
Maaker needs to contribute to production in order to be a viable alchemica sink.
With all these questions being raised on the harvester/reservoir recipes, spillover limiting and alch dumping is it worth raising a Sigprop to shift the teams focus towards more gameplay elements before we even get into farming?
i.e. should we see if we can switch gears and get some trait gameplay before we even consider farming? Maybe even push for some more alch sink style installations before farming too? Like the private vortexes and even walls?
