SLG-Dennis

Not wanting to get away from that at all - but late game is where most of the terraforming stuff happens on the servers I monitor and where it also should happen based on our idea. Great example was WT's queens tribute cycle with the monument, in my opinion. Best cycle we ever had as I think. Great progress, big stuff focused from mid-week 2 onwards to the later weeks. General intention is that the earlier the technology, the faster you get over it, ending in the longest play time in the full technology - balanced out to actually work, which is hard on non-concept servers, no doubt. (But that's where everything part of "Eco Infinite" is focused on - making it interesting to play once you are done with the technology race, which is indeed a major problem to solve.)

And absolutely, that is fast late-game progress, but unfortunately something that happens regularly on populated vanilla servers without specific concepts. It tends to be mostly either that or the total opposite, ...

Guess experiences there might be different. Even on WT those are available in week 2 and at a good point in time where most notable terraforming stuff is happening, as intended. (Terraforming is supposed to be a late-game thing, though I can understand when people count roads to it, which I don't) On vanilla servers there seems to be a tendency to them either becoming available much earlier due to people pushing for progress or them not becoming available at all, depending on activity on the server. That's only my experiences mostly from official servers and ones that I visit irregularly, though.

We consider the excavator and the skid steer to be these tools. Big Shovel was once part of vanilla, but didn't provide the experience we wanted people to have while at the same time feeling especially unnatural in comparison to other AoE tools we introduced later and still have.

Big Shovel impacts the economy massively and removes the intended feeling and restrictions on terraforming early game. But I do understand that some people don't like the effect of tediousness it can have, even if intended, so that's what mods are for anyway. I just personally don't play with any mods that make life easier either and see servers doing well without that as well.

In no case I would consider it a "Must Have" mod - for me that's what is on the Official Servers: Nid's admin tools and your great Chronicler. Discord Link has proven great as well at least for WT, but for data protection concerns we're not deploying it to other official servers yet, but we'd do if there ever was an ...

We're partnered with PingPerfect now, so can obviously recommend them. (https://play.eco/cloudhosting) I'd generally avoid any hosters that offer "slots" instead of any type of guaranteed hardware resources. If you plan on going big, hosting on own dedicated server will always be the most performant and cheapest option.

Or throw it to [email protected].

We're aware, thanks. It's just a display error, though, mechanics work as intended.