04-16-2017, 11:30 AM
I have been playing Banished with the MegaMod and Colonial Charter 1.75, and it technically works great. I love the vast variety of buildings that the MegaMod offers, but I have noticed that balance between similar buildings that originate from different mods can be a bit skewed in utility and it is hard to know what structures work best.
For example, a Medieval Kiln and a Brickworks can both make 3 Bricks at a time with educated workers (I’m not sure what their production is with uneducated workers), but the Medieval Kiln uses 10 Clay and 1 Firewood, while the Brickworks uses 13 Clay and 3 Furnace Fuel. Other buildings have similar discrepancies.
Major considerations include:
• Recipes that produce the same items, such as in the example above concerning Bricks, should have similar (if not the same) cost and output, but may differ in production rate. I think that the net trade-value of items produced by educated workers should always be greater than the trade-value of the resources consumed, where uneducated workers should produce quantities of items that are equal (or slightly less) in trade-value.
• Many buildings (and in particular homes) do not have balance in utility. In general, qualities that make utility go up include: having more production options, higher production rate, larger family size, and positive effect on Happiness. Qualities that make utility go down include: having higher cost to build, larger spatial footprint (discounting walkable areas), higher fuel consumption (for homes), and negative effect on Happiness.
• Some buildings require obscure materials compared to their counterparts. For example, advanced Medieval buildings require Bricks and Roof Tiles, while advanced Colonial Charter buildings require Building Supplies, Homewares, and Fancy Homewares. I would prefer all advanced buildings to require Building Supplies, Homewares, and Fancy Homewares. Roof Tiles can be incorporated into a recipe for Building Supplies or simple removed for the sake of simplicity.
• I love that we can now see the positive (blue) and negative (red) radii of building effects, but it seems that not all production buildings that I would expect to have a positive or negative effect do. The Roadless Well, Fort Well, and various statues lack positive radii, and many production buildings lack negative radii. I think any production building that would create a lot of noise or smoke should have a negative effect on Happiness. This would include most mines, quarries, saw mills, kilns, etc.
• Some of the Medieval production buildings employ Workers instead of Kilnmen, Potters, etc. I think the ambiguous Worker job should be eliminated and such buildings should employ a more descriptive job.
• I love the idea of archeological buildings, but I think they should interact with Arrowheads and Native Artifacts in some way. Maybe studying Stone or Clay can have a chance to produce Arrowheads or Native Artifacts instead of just Archeological Artefacts?
• The Tiny Quarry (and maybe other quarries or mines) should be made upgradeable in order to gain more resources.
In short, I would like to see some consistency between buildings’ relative utility. I realize that this is a result of combining huge quantities of mods together that otherwise would probably work well in isolation or with the mods that they were intended to be combined with. You guys have done a wonderful job combining them in a way where they all work together without introducing redundant materials. I guess what I am saying is that I think the work isn’t quite done yet.
Could someone make a balancing mod (similar to a compatibility mod) that overwrites some of the values of these buildings to make them more balanced? Or maybe (if this desire for balance is unanimous) make these changes in the next iteration of the MegaMod proper?
