Game Development: Theatrum Chemicum

[Darkside]

The grind is generally a simple concept but these are some criticisms I have of the current system:

- Tree grinding takes so long and the player cannot do anything to effect it. For example in the old system of seed purity grinding the player if he so chooses can do extra work to produce charcoal to speed up the field and hence speed up the purity grind. With new system you cannot do anything except stare at the pot for a week.

- Tree grinding has a random chance to completely fail - and this chance is rather high! Gardening pots for all other stuff never fails, farming never fails (Sure the purity may have some random adjustments but you never completely fail to produce) but trees fail, and fail often. Not only that the cuttings never grow back so with just two cuttings you the high chance of failure you are quickly going to hit dead ends on tree purity. You'll reach some purity and the offspring will fail and then you have to start from scratch!

- It generally does not make much sense. The old system was very logical and was based very much on natural selection just like the farmers of old used to do... you plant a crop and on harvest time you take the seeds from the strongest plants or rather the plants that most exhibit the properties you desire and you replant those hoping to produce another generation even better in that regard. New system with compost bin and worms being the key to the quality of the crop... is quite illogical.

[dageir]

The new system is designed to put a soft cap on how high purity can get. This to avoid ridiculous biled characters and the spamming of said characters.

[lachlaan]

And if you think it's easier now to spam mid ranged biled raider alts, consider it was 3 times easier before, since after you got to 100% purity you could just have a steady production of 90-100% food that would take 3 times less to get your humours up than the currently available 10-20-30%(hopefully) purity food.

Also, consider the fact that with just pure crops having 100% purity the amount of viable foods was very limited by your need for sugar, water, and all the other ingredients that used to be impure. In the new system, instead of mixing 100 Lead oatmeal with 25 lead water and getting 62.5 lead crackers, you would only need to get your flour up to a value of 80 in lead to get the same result, considering the availability of water with 45ish in one element. And that's just for the flour+water stuff alone. With the reduced purity for crops it's now viable to make recipes that contain meat, and wild ingredients rather than potted ones.

I think it's fair to not reward farming alone, and instead give some breathing room to hunters and foragers as well, while also bringing down the overall purity and capping the maximum amount of biles you can get. In the end have no idea what vision the devs have for the game, but we will eventually see it with patience.

Still, it would be nice if beta testing was actually facilitated rather than hindered, and if our feedback mattered a bit more Either way, I'm curious about next thursday.

[DemonEyes]

I was refering to the invariance change.. making it easier to glutton..

Plus only needing mid ranged raiders as walls are thinner.. the only defense farmers have are braziers perma damage.. which for mid ranged raiders is less of a worry as its easier to glutton back to previous levels..

Personally I wont feel any base is worthy of putting the purity grind into, until there's permadeath animals.. that i can trap in some fence rings to make sure it really is tough to get through my defenses and a REAL risk for raiding!..

[Mereni]

Well, with what we have so far, it looks like older groups of players who stick around and slowly build up purity with huge amounts of work will be uncatchable by new players, and especially by players who play casually. I'm really hoping the next few updates add or change something with this new alchemy system to make it actually possible to increase purity.

The only way we seem to have of increasing purity at all right now is test tubes, which are random. Their tick is a whopping 4 hours long. Even I, with a fair amount of free time, have a hard time with a tick of that length. And you can't let it sit for longer than that. Even though the element change is only 0 - 1.2 points (in tests so far) the instability has always been 'somewhat' or 'clearly' meaning they can't be left for a second tick, ever.

Try using this on cuttings and what happens? You get 2 cuttings from a tree. You put them in the tubes for a tick, and plant the result. The next tree gives you two cuttings, and regenerates... when? I've been waiting over a month on a tree I took a cutting of and marked to see how long it would take to grow back. So, when you put These cuttings in the test tubes, you better hope you get lucky and one of them increases in purity because you may never get another cutting out of it. And then you have to get Really lucky and have a 100% survival rate of the cuttings you planted so you can get another two measly cuttings to attempt to raise again. And there's no getting around the tree purity grind because your harvest is almost entirely based on the boards.

Seems to me that the devs did this thinking it would be a neat thing to do, which maybe it is, but they forgot to adjust the tree's properties to compensate! They take forever to grow, okay, makes it tough, but not horrible yet. But make the cuttings grow back in a week or a few days, please!

From what I can see, currently, alchemy and hence any kind of purity grind, one of the basics of this game, is unreachable for newbies who haven't figured out how to make money yet because of the glass, and casual players because of the incredibly long tick. Plus, unless this stuff becomes available on the market, and there will be so much work put into it, I doubt much of anything good will be sold, it'll take new characters years to catch up to anyone who is established, and no way to speed that up.

[reeper_aut]

the old system may have been to much of an upward spiral, but with the new system i only see a spiral downward.
even if you HAD good props. in pots, trees, bins and worms ('cause you had enough humus stored, or have been lucky with purity fields) you won't get higher purity humus, and seeds, even with good humus, mostly will go down in purity ....
new alchemy is a gamble at best! it's pure random if you get the same or better out of it as you put in.
more likely to loose it all!

so, all in all this system NOW is more broken than it was. (for me as a player)

p.s. yeah, the new system isn't as much logical as the old one ....

[malaclypse]

Here's the problem summarized in a single image.

Diminishing returns are implemented with logarithmic functions. They:
- Make the game fun and rewarding for new/casual players
- Give hardcore players something to work for
- Impose a "soft-cap"

Instead what we have is a barrier to playing any part of the purity game until the end-game. It is shown in the graph as a long flat line, that then very slowly picks up at the end.

How to fix? Lots of options. I think the simplest is to balance out how purity of all ingredients involved contribute to the final product. Instead of wood for compost bins being the only thing that ultimately matters, make it so the newbie who was paying attention to clay and granite purities can at least have a small reward for that effort.

[Wournos]

...Urgh, that means making a separate sawbuck for holding "purity" trees, which means more occupied claim space.

No this is not true - sawbuck has no effect. I was the one who reported that the sawbuck's purity has effect but it was based on an error on my part - so don't worry 1 sawbuck is fine

I know that but I want one to hold the unpure 25/25... trunks while the other holds the "pure" ones. As far as I know we can't remove trunks from the sawbuck, which means I have to have at least two to keep track of the trunks.

Think he meant one for rubbish wood and one for good wood

For the love of whatever holy - SHE.

[MagicManICT]

Diminishing returns are implemented with logarithmic functions.

Have you actually graphed the formulas for things like damage, work effort, and other areas where you have actual increases of abilities or stats? Have you looked at the net return per point of increase in quality of items?

[malaclypse]

Have you actually graphed the formulas for things like damage, work effort, and other areas where you have actual increases of abilities or stats? Have you looked at the net return per point of increase in quality of items?

Nope, I have actually not graphed all the formula's in the game. Have you?

I have looked at how much fun I and others have been having while playing, though. Does that count or do I need to run all the numbers first?