I have had an improvement running in my Prote plantation. Even as the clock ticked down no change was evident in either lit stars or description... it stayed a flat area in the wilderness. Today the clock hit zero and... nada. Worse still now there is no choice to switch to another area to improve... just the link to add gold bars to an area.
So... I'm gonna do that after 40 days of 'improvements' has produced zilch.... yeah...

Gold bars to improve runs out, I am pretty sure your plantation is just out of gold bars. Everything you say, fits.

couple things about improving - firstly, the amount of gb required to reach tier x of improvement is based dolely on total population of your plantation.

as example, lets assume you have 1m poor souls on your plantation. you should need less than 700 gb to get half star rating on a building, and close to 13k gb for fancy 5 stars. if you add 50% more immigrants, the gb required also increases by 50%

second thing is, that each building requires certain % of total pop on your plot to show quality. so, on our example 1m plot, if you invested 1k gb, but only have 50% of required workers on said building, you see no quality. do note that adding more acres beyond the minimum do not add to quality, you always need to invest set amount of gb first, which is based on total pop

Plantations need more indicators to show that improvement has actually happened. Dumping multi-millions of GC/GB into a plant and see no results is very discouraging for any plant owner. Even if there was a little notification saying your utilities/building has risen by .005% would help belay the impression that one just did not throw thousands of GB overboard.

Stan Rogers wrote:Plantations need more indicators to show that improvement has actually happened. Dumping multi-millions of GC/GB into a plant and see no results is very discouraging for any plant owner. Even if there was a little notification saying your utilities/building has risen by .005% would help belay the impression that one just did not throw thousands of GB overboard.

+1

Stan Rogers wrote:Plantations need more indicators to show that improvement has actually happened. Dumping multi-millions of GC/GB into a plant and see no results is very discouraging for any plant owner. Even if there was a little notification saying your utilities/building has risen by .005% would help belay the impression that one just did not throw thousands of GB overboard.

+1

Building improvement is a function of load on the building and GC invested.
Stars show the effectiveness of the structure vs the load on the structure.

Unless you have a constant load on the building the invested GC will show varied results.


Lets say for example you have 5000 *workers, and your kitchens are showing 2 stars.
if you cut your workers to 1000 your kitchens may now be rated at 3 stars
if you increase your workers to 7000 you may drop to 1/2 stars.

*Workers being the total plantation workers not the workers assigned to the building

% improvement is not particularly relevant unless everything else remains constant.
We need to know capacity per investment.

Showing how many workers the building can ideally support as invested would be the most relevant information.

Remember everything that changes has an effect on everything else that is occurring.
Since there are other variables like health, hours, rations, ect. This would need to be shown as an Ideal.
Given all other variables at their optimal levels. The number of workers the building can support on its own in a normal circumstance.


edit - added a not about workers to be more clear.

I,m with Stan on this one : improvement process is just far too opaque : no indication of what you need to achieve it and none to say you have : just a row of stars that twinkle rather pointlessly.
I do rather think plantations in their current form more than meet the negativity requirement of a gold coin/gold bar sink: But they dont seem to have much positivity about them so if the future is player-produced goods... we all gonna go hungry.

I have sacked all my workers: re-tasked my immigrant transports and sent the QM to the tavern with strict instructions to only bid on rare bottles of rum.

Its because plantations just dont make any sense to me and I aint that dumb as to just keep dumping gold and effort into mine in the vague hope I am doing it right but with no clue hiven as to whether I'm on the right track or wandering aimlessly in dumbfuckland.

I pass on this.

The improvement process is opaque because there are to many variables going on.

"utilities/building has risen by .005%"
as their is no theoretical maximum to the improvement of the building it can not improve by percentage.
It can only improve in capacity.


Metric indicators need to show useful information that can be useful even if other things do not remain constant.

these are fictional examples, I do not know the real bar investments and returns

2 million bar invested - per 10 allotted acres fully staffed your housing can support 100,000 healthy workers that work 6 hours per day.

2 million bar invested -per 10 allotted acres fully staffed your kitchens can support 250,000 healthy workers that work 6 hours per day

5 million bar invested -per 10 allotted acres fully staffed your utilities can support 1000 acres allotted to buildings

ect

I think the drop in GB prices during the 2nd quarter of plantation development is an indicator of how well the current plantation model is perceived within the community.
I'm not saying the plantation design model is wrong but rather, the many builders of plantations perception is wrong.