Food buff issues

[Borotaur]

Over the time the food buffs are starting to bug me more and more. Someone tosses my building a fish platter? Nice. I'm greatful. Except I was just about to put a basket on it. I buff my gold production for 9 hours. Can't make it back exactly 9 hours later? I'm bleeding gold. Ok, I made it back, turned everything off, went away happily. Only to notice a day later that the gold production was shut down only client side, so the server exhausted all my gold mines.

Things like food, fish, meat, water I can build up to the level that lasts easily a day. I can come back whenever to replenish them without significant losses. Even explorers are ok. Food buffs? No.

Having discussed this with others, few options to 'fix food' came up:

1) Have food buff durations stack. Like fish/meat deposits. Add 3 baskets on one building for 18/27 hours buff time. Toss in few fish platters too. Everything goes. This would allow planning our lives bit further than 9 hours ahead. Also stop food buff from being used while the building is inactive. These changes would allow you to play when it suits you, be it less or more than 9 hour intervals. In the end, happier players is what we all want, right? Just to keep things reasonable though, there should be a maximum for stacked food buff duration. 36 hours maybe. That'd be exactly 4 baskets. Issues caused by this change: Fish platters and sandwiches may be slightly too cheap. Even though it would be massively painful to use hundreds of fish platters instead of just some baskets. Consider increasing costs of fish platters and sandwiches to make them less attractive alternative. Another issue is how the 3x production buffs from gem shop would work with this model. I guess you'd have to wait for the 2x buff to run out before being able to apply a 3x buff (which you could then apply several for longer duration, up to massive 168h maximum as an extra incentive to use gems).

2) Instead of food buffs doubling production vs consumption, change it to 3x production speed. As a benefit, you wouldn't have to shut down your buildings anymore whenever they're not buffed, so your life wouldn't have to revolve around 9 hour intervals. You could run all your production 24/7, just much much slower without food. As an example, current Coinage uses 4 bars to make 1 coin in 24 minutes, 2 coins with food buff. Going with this change, Coinage would use 2 bars to make 1 coin in 24 minutes, or in 8 minutes with food buff. Gem based buffs could drop that further to only 2 min 40 sec (another 3x). Issues caused by this change: overall production would be higher than now due to 3x benefit from foods. Using speed up of 2x would keep production amounts exactly same as now, but 2x may be too low benefit to keep people using the buffs. This change is probably bit more work since you'd have to adjust the production/consumption of all buildings to have the same production ratios available as you get now with food only (e.g. 1 gold ore deposit > 2 ore > 2 bars > 1 coin).

[The_Sarmatian]

I second the above. It is at least a proposition to fix issue on which I commented on on test server forum:

http://forum.tsotesting.com/threads/...-RANDOM-buffs.

[EmperorScruffy]

A 3rd option as has been mentioned before I think:

3) Ability to cancel buff. EG. Your Iron mine has another 2hrs to go, but you are off to work, and not back for 6 hours. Either you stop production, or you will have 4hrs of unbuffed production. HOWEVER, if you could CANCEL current buff, and re-apply another basket, that will see you through till you get back online.

- It creates more of a drain on resource, because some buff time is reduced, meaning players will use MORE resources to make MORE buffs to cancel one buff and apply another.
- This keeps players happy as they can truly control when they buff, without fear of loosing precious resource to unbuffed production.

[Borotaur]

My main concern with food buffs is the fact that the game forces me to return in 9 hours to shut things down. Gold production mainly. Everything else in the game works nicely enough around my schedule except this. What choices do I have? Use short buffs and stay online all the time? Or not buff at all? Neither is really an option.

But to keep the thread going, I propose one more option.

4) New food buff that lasts 24 hours, doubles the production like a regular food buff, BUT also doubles production time. Cost: a small amount of fish, bread and sausages.

What's the idea really? Using this food would give you the benefit of saving 50% of the materials in production without actually doubling your overall production. So people using this buff could run their stuff 24h without having to condone to the 9 hour schedule, the buff is cheap enough to produce, yet it doesn't double your production speed like regular food does. So it'd be a tradeoff. A choice. Shall I use the powerful shorter food buffs, or the less effective long one?

[Borotaur]

5) Add a "Operate only while well fed" toggle button to every building. This button is by default off. When player enables it, the building automatically shuts down whenever it's not under a food buff effect. No more need to come back 9 hours later to save your gold production from the huge material drain: they'd stop automatically. No more hoping that the server lag didn't eat your command to stop the level5 gold mines: they'd be stopped for sure, on server side, as soon as food runs out.

Possible issues: if building also resumes operating automatically, people would come and exhaust your level 5 gold mines by buffing them. On the other hand, it would be really nice if they did start again automatically. Solution? Remove the auto-exhaust from mines. When they reach 0, just leave them there waiting for the player to come and demolish them. This has a wonderful side effect: a popular policy of destroying iron/coal/gold mines when they have 1 ore left in order to get 25% of the cost back would be come unnecessary. You could just let them run to 0 without having to be present and still get your 25% materials back on demolish. On the other hand, if the material return on demolished mines is unintentional, just remove it. But still, remove the auto-exhaust so you can at least refill an empty mine or demolish it manually if you prefer building a new one.