Purity raising

Forum for suggesting changes to Salem.

Purity raising

Postby Potjeh » Mon Aug 06, 2012 11:31 pm

To start with, let's look at H&H's quality system. Some of the most important base resources had an uncapped growth. Crops had a slow but constant growth rate, and through them trees which gave a snail pace but uncapped growth to virtually everything else. Basically, it took inordinate amount of time to raise quality, and the time advantage for newcomers was virtually insurmountable. Yeah, you could buy your way into good quality range, but the large factions kept the very best stuff for themselves. As a world went on, the chances of finding a good clay spot to give you a boost diminished, as spots were discovered and claimed by the large factions. The main problem I have with this setup is that it rewards pure time investment too much over player skill. Also, unlimited growth doesn't seem to fit so well in a world that's never meant to reset.

In Salem, there is a natural cap to purity. But if you simply make the cap an asymptote, and retain the time investment approach to raising it, you repeat the same problems from H&H. I think that instead of that the cap should be reachable with a large resource investment in some reasonable time frame (2-3 months for crops, 6-8 for cows I guess). To put the focus on player skill, this should be about deciding between purity and quantity. Sometimes 1 p10 pumpkin pie is better than 50 p1 ones, but sometimes the reverse is true. Smart rationing of these purity-raising resources between all the different industries would give skilled player a well-deserved advantage.

Anyway, I think that it should still take a fair amount of generations to raise purity, to retain that nice sense of progress. Conversely, it should drop like a rock if you stop investing purity resources (let's just call them tinctures from now on, since they'll likely be something alchemical). This is to prevent cheap mass production of good crops and trees from a purified stock. Having to carefully ration the tinctures is kinda central to this whole concept anyway, and having to use them for maintenance as well as raising avoids various plateauing cheese.

There is the issue of workstation and tool purity, since a p10 smelter could produce decent iron without any tincture investment. So I think it's best if the workstations and tools merely softcap (or maybe even hardcap?) the purity of the products, rather than raising it like in H&H. Alternatively, they could lose purity with use and require tinctures to restore.

As far as tinctures are concerned, I think they should use something similar to the invariety penalty from inspirationals. Requiring a wide variety of tinctures gives sockets for lots of industries to plug into when it comes to purity raising. I think different tinctures should push towards different combinations of elements, so there'd also be a need to balance between raising the invariety penalty and messing up your purity. I guess you could always bruteforce it with a huge amount of one tincture and just a dash of others for reducing the penalty, but that would obviously be a suboptimal use of resources.

I think most tinctures should require some kind of a foraged item. Having different base items in different biomes would do wonders for trade. The trade doesn't have to be just in base resources though. Different biomes could prefer different elements, so for example living by the sea would make it easier to raise salt since you'd mostly find base items used for salt-raising tinctures. This would naturally push you towards producing foods that have good gluttony values on the salt column. Limiting yourself to only those foods wouldn't work, of course, so you'd trade with that group in the badlands that makes high sulphur food. Anyway, the point is to keep terrain relevant and different, while avoiding the lame invisible purity spots.
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Re: Purity raising

Postby APXEOLOG » Tue Aug 07, 2012 3:24 am

Natural cap makes me really sad, because i know that one day resources anyway would be p100 but nothing else. Also i hope selection will take lot's of time, baceuse if not it is easier just to grind stats and then go kill selecters and take everything they have.

The main idea is to link each type of resource to special map parameters. To achive max clay you need 4 p100 clay *nodes* or whatever, and if you will need to settle 4 different places for it - it would be hard even for big faction. So players should settle in various map conditions and ofc they will trade much more.
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