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They should have made it so that the machines have durability like tools. And can be fixed like tools but with the use of spareparts of somekind.
No worries, that is already planned as well.
Who knows maybe they’ll revert it like when they f**ked up our cart controls, or in the same update when they f**ked up our starter campsites.
We at least have no plans to do so, but the calorie use is pretty minimal. We plan to monitor it and adapt the amount of calories it takes if it turns out too little or too much.
It is a very helpful change, as those machines are the main reason for reduced calorie usage in the later game. And yes, we're aware of what someone else had already said on Steam, the current workings of late-game making people only eat cheap food, but that is not effecting the quantity of calories being used, just the quality.
Next to food spoiling for basic foods being very restrictive in Update 9.6 we also plan to implement changes further down the road to fix this food quality issue, but the mentioned change here was tested both on normal servers of varying sizes and the one with WT logic, where the problem doesn't exist as much, given players are required to keep their food score up to a specific level to be able to add labour to mid and late game professions.
The feedback towards this change was and is majorly positive, while the carts ... let's not talk about it, I still have nightmares. It is no doubt a change intended for dedicated servers, but that's also how we intend Eco to be played. Give it a chance!
I don't mind the balancing perspective, the issue is that it doesn't make much sense. Perhaps calories should be consumed to transfer items between inventories with the exception of moving items into the player's inventory. This should scale with machines as players are dealing with moving much larger quantities of items from the machines? - the distance between the stockpiles could effect calorie cost. This would also double as a deterrent for stockpile stacking mines, and encourage players to build elevators instead - which is a lot more fun to load up trucks to haul between stockpiles instead and is way more immersive.
And if you wanted to introduce a transfer speed to items like in rust for example and you don't want players to have to stand around and wait as items move between stockpiles it could just be a calorie-queue system like how crafting works, the initial cost of calories to move x amount of items is spent and the items continue to move between inventories if the player moves away.
(workbenches moving items to stockpiles is already paid for in calories when the player initiates the crafting order)
This simulates the labor cost of someone having to haul items between stockpiles, it makes a lot more sense, I understand it's harder to implement but it's not immersion breaking, this change just doesn't make any sense, it feels like such a low effort attempt.
I don't really see how it doesn't make much sense. Operating heavy machinery is a very hard job consuming lots of calories compared to an office job. But even if you believed that isn't the case, Eco has a lot of things it does for sole balance reasons, less for sense. (The way we 'wear and tear' barrels or in 9.6 the much shorter spoil rate for basic foods for the very same balance reasons are just some examples - at some point we need to abstract, typically players tend to point on the very fact stuff shouldn't always make sense as well)
It goes without saying that implementing a system like you suggested is a whole new feature that will take months to be correctly implemented, functioning, balanced and tested, while smaller changes are much more effective in that regard without introducing unecessary complexity, especially when we already have other plans for that:
In regards to storage, as I have mentioned a few times, the whole option to transfer things via UIs will long-term be replaced with a system requiring manual transfer with applicable machinery aside of rather low range and early game transfer.
Honestly, the abstraction you suggest for the hauling is something that would be totally acceptable to me personally, but that I find much more unrealistic and atmosphere destroying than the use of heavy machinery requiring calories.
I don't really see how it doesn't make much sense. Operating heavy machinery is a very hard job consuming lots of calories compared to an office job. But even if you believed that isn't the case, Eco has a lot of things it does for sole balance reasons, less for sense. (The way we 'wear and tear' barrels or in 9.6 the much shorter spoil rate for basic foods for the very same balance reasons are just some examples - at some point we need to abstract, typically players tend to point on the very fact stuff shouldn't always make sense as well)
It goes without saying that implementing a system like you suggested is a whole new feature that will take months to be correctly implemented, functioning, balanced and tested, while smaller changes are much more effective in that regard without introducing unecessary complexity, especially when we already have other plans for that:
In regards to storage, as I have mentioned a few times, the whole option to transfer things via UIs will long-term be replaced with a system requiring manual transfer with applicable machinery aside of rather low range and early game transfer.
Honestly, the abstraction you suggest for the hauling is something that would be totally acceptable to me personally, but that I find much more unrealistic and atmosphere destroying than the use of heavy machinery requiring calories.
Let's spin that further:
In such case we also shouldn't have talents like allowing players to pick up all rubble in an area for a cheap single click. We still have it, because it is convenient and we like the collaboration aspect when two people collaborate. We're currently finishing up the talent rework that will provide unique talents for all our professions and we do have several other convenience things, but also a lot 'realistic' things.
I also saw you mentioned elsewhere that just mining by hand may be more calorie-efficient. I did not do the math myself and hence need to trust the work the balance team did, but they state that is not the case. Even if it was, the way to address that would be to make the manual labour less overpowered in comparison to machines that are supposed to feel like giving you the option to quickly and efficiently do things - they're not mainly intended to save calories. We actually do have changes coming adressing the fast levelling for manual work professions as well - and already had some major ones for calorie usage in Update 9.5.
I mean I can understand that you feel this is not immersive, it is a very subjective thing, but for me it perfectly is. The suggestion you made for me sounds totally immersion breaking instead, but I would nontheless like it, given it adresses balance issues on economic scale that I deem to be more important for a game of Eco on a public server than immersion, especially given we have a player base that is torn between a realistic approach and to what degree and more abstraction with the interests being in totally different areas - often not even the game itself, but it's meta level (which is also what we advertise mainly, e.g. the economy, ecology and governance aspects in regards to a society simulator).
But in any case, we do have former heavy machinery operators in our team and I do know people operating them at construction sites personally. Your mileage may of course vary vastly, but those people do a hard job in often very uncomfortable climate conditions and they don't just sit in their machines and concentrate for eight hours a day, but need to do several tasks at their direct work site to ensure everything is going correctly, that is of course part of the abstraction.
In any case I can promise you that we will monitor the change and will make sure that changes happen if we see that those are necessary.
I don't think i've said mining by hand might be more calorie efficient that might have been someone else, I wasn't too concerned about the calorie usage I think ultimately it's necessary in some form to balance the mid-late game food economy. I'd actually be one of the strange players who would love more actions to be even more calorie consuming to promote farming professions and slow down progress without a good agricultural infrastructure(?) to support it so i'm all for calorie costs.
I've mentioned that it might be a good idea to have food gradually give back calories while it's in the player's stomach (with a max stomach size) - quickly enough so players can still mine and perform manual labor while they are 'digesting' the food but will need to take a break to restore some calories if they want to make a large crafting order queue. To in-turn promote the labor market and give high collaboration players some downtime to talk, trade, participate in community events and government issues, without sacrificing progress. I again understand its another big undertaking to implement but it might be worth considering to balance out the late-game food economy as you could make late game, complex cooking foods digest faster and therefore restore calories faster to handle larger crafting projects and that kind of thing. - you guys obviously have plans to fix that issue anyway though.
Anyway, thanks for replying, I feel like the long-term plans are definitely on the right track. I guess so long as the solution is interesting and adds some gameplay value or collaboration opportunities (like the sweeping hands talent) then some immersion is worth sacrificing.
Yes, sorry, I confused you with u/SoopahCoopah there, that is my fault.
Your calorie idea sounds like different approach to our in-development stamina / exhaustion (not to be confused with the server exhaustion feature) feature that is doing a very similar thing. There the problem is much more though that there is and will be massive resistance from our more 'invested' players against this feature set as the last thing they want to do is being forced to put their mining equipment out of their hands for even a single minute to do something else. I can sense a bit of a possible "Cart Controls debacle" there, so it's a feature we take especially long time and will do several extensive playtests on before we even consider presenting more details or releasing it to the public.
Pretty sure this was done so that exhausted players can't keep working.
No, it actually wasn't, it's goal is to support the economic balance in late game. It does have that side-effect, but the exhaustion feature is actually being scheduled for a makeover in upcoming updates to fix most of the problematic 'workarounds' and to probably try a bit into the direction some suggestions of players were, e.g. doing the limit in a different way, similar to what our stamina system might look like in the future.
The exhaustion feature is actually only used by very few servers as well, even though the interest of players in it was pretty high. It seems server admins do not agree.
We want factorio online 😡😤🤑
Wrong game, sorry.
Interesting! We're really happy for it from an exhaustion view anyway :)
I think server hosts are likely to be in the demographic that doesn't want to use exhaustion themselves.
We get people on our server that come looking specifically for exhaustion servers.
I've considered turning it off myself though as it's just not mature enough to really use. So that may be another reason for the low adoption rate.
The biggest issue is that there is no filter and for some reason it didn't make it into 9.5 either ...
Oh, so players can't even search by exhaustion time? :<
I've had it in the title before and I guess that helps in the meantime
No, they can't, it's pretty bad. I had created a task for that a while ago, but somehow it didn't make it to 9.5. :/