The following post is mostly meant to give you insight on Plantation Buildings. I will also explain to you 2 key parts. One of them, has been stripped away for your convenience.
First of all, here are all the feature details, as mentioned in the first post:
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[b]General Help on Buildings[/b]
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Every building adds something but all are optional. It is up to the players to choose the strategy plan that they prefer. There is no such thing as guaranteed success if you build everything, keep them all well fed and well treated. For example, a well fed worker that spends few time on the crops, might end up fat and this will reduce production. Sure, he will be very happy and will create less trouble for your guards but you need to ensure that overall costs of provided goods are worth it.
You will be able to expand an existing building or build more of the same type. If for whichever reason you want to limit it, you will be able to do so by limiting the acres of space allocated by it. This will be a way to turn the building off, or limiting it, without destroying any infrastructure. By doing this, you gain on two aspects: 1)Less upkeep and 2)Less workers to the particular building
Acres of space will also play a quality role. Piling up one building in to another is going to create more hygiene problems for example. However, too large space will mean that your workers have to move more which means they will spend more energy for non productive tasks, such as moving around. This will reduce your production.
[b]Buildings Upkeep[/b]
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According to the building, a different upkeep (paid per hour, whenever at least 1 to pay is gathered) will be required.
Housing -> Iron
Utility -> Tools
Kitchens -> Wood
Baths -> Cloth
Recreational Areas -> Rum
Guard Houses -> Tobacco
Buildings upkeep, as well as food for workers, is calculated and paid once per hour.
If you fail to pay the [b]FULL[/b] upkeep for a building, you lose its bonus till you will be able to pay it fully.
Buildings with upkeep similar to the plantation's produce, have no upkeep (ie, at a wood port, kitchens get no upkeep).
[b]Improving Buildings[/b]
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Plantation Owners will be able to improve their infrastructure.
Improving buildings will also increase maintenance but also required workers in order to work at full capacity.
The amount of needed workers for each building, is calculated automatically and it is redacted from your workforce at the fields.
Improving Buildings costs gold bars.
All improvements costs are linear, for all buildings and any level.
Improvements are final and permanent but are vulnerable to events (Events System - Driven/Random events. Ie During a revolt, some of the houses might burn down).
[b]Buildings Rating[/b]
Each building will count its total quality in stars. There will be multiple factors that will affect efficiency. Such factors will be:
-Building state (you improve this by expanding it)
-Total Acres allocated to it (you improve this by allocating extra acres to it)
-Amount of workers (You improve this by having more people working at the building)
-Amount of Plantation population (Higher population means higher needs, therefore higher demands to maintain top quality)
-Maintenance (whether you will be able to maintain it at its fullest by both supplying needed resources for its operation, as well as keeping it at its best shape).
Maintenance in particular, will be affected by two buildings:
Utility Shack -> Workers here help maintain the condition of all other buildings.
Guard House- > By protecting buildings from fires.
What has been removedImagine that you have 20 workers. Some of them have to cook, some other have to guard,etc and the remaining workers will work at the fields. This is a functionality incorporated in plantations. The initial design (we actually coded this, so its more of current design) also gave this power to the plantation owners. In short, you would decide how many workers you wanted at each post. Or better put, you would define priorities on which posts to man fully.
This is what we removed. The priorities control. The rest of the functionality, remains. The whole difference is that AI now takes care of this. This is of course double extra work (1, we do not use already coded work and 2) we have to create the scripts to do this for you).
However, we ended up that this was important to be stripped away. Still, there were issues that had to be resolved. For instance, how do we allow a player to save workers for somewhere else without putting him though this constrain. This has been solved.
What remainsWhich brings us to the second key part which is nothing else than acres. This is something that also existed in the initial design (current) and it has been retained. With an added value; it will play a role in helping the AI take actions based on your will.
An enlighting exampleThese are a bit complicating to explain. But let me give you a simple example instead.
Let's suppose that you have a big guard house. So big, that it gives you a star rating of 5.
The game, will automatically assign workers to it and as long as there are enough workers (which should be the natural scenario), it will assign the maximum required workers to achieve this rating.
Let's assume though, that the guard house is so big in comparison to the plantation size that you would get 5 stars with even a smaller one. This means you could save workers for the fields. Or, let's assume that you do not have much need for guards, therefore you want to reduce their amount.
Then you only need to allocate LESS ACRES to the building.
By allocating less acres, you will limit the potential of the building. You can even set them to 0. This will turn the building off. You will retain all infrastructure in this case and all allocated workers will be distributed elsewhere.
Win-Win SituationBy studying the example below, it becomes evident why we stripped the priorities functionality. We remove an extra headache from the plantation owners while retaining the command for them to do as they prefer. It is not that we make it easier; we are making it less frustrating as managing both acres and priorities was a nightmare for us during closed beta.
Food for thoughtThe natural question that could come to your mind is how would you know how many acres a building needs. The game will help you determine this every time. We will display the amount of workers on the building and we will update quality hourly.
Some words for buildings qualityPreviously, having top quality for a building is the best for your plantation well being. Remember though: It comes with the following prices:
1)You need gold bars,workers and time to improve infrastructure.
2)You will pay an upkeep (higher as quality rises).
3)You will tie down workers that could be used at the fields.
It will be up to each plantation style, to find a way to balance this to where you prefer it.