The Ever Sensitive Wheat & Water Debate

[RuneMunki]

Hi All,

I've been playing TSO for a few months now. Have pretty much enjoyed the game and love the progression I see when updates come out. I took a break from the game around last Tuesday (18th) and came back yesterday (Wednesday, 26th). Needless to say, things emptied/ground to a halt as I expected they would. It's taken me quite a bit of time to send out my geologists to find new deposits and replace mines and whatnot to get my settlement running in tune once more. That's not a problem - I knew that and real life does take precedence!

What bored me to tears though was replacing all of the wheat fields and wells. I don't think I've been as bored in a game for ages and I played a master crafter in Star Wars Galaxies when it first came out so don't get bored very easily. It was the sheer amount of time wasted that was the problem, place three fields and wait for two to be built, place another two, rinse and repeat.

I know that most people seem to fall into two camps with this - the hardcore "buy silos & watermills" being on one side and the "not going to pay for a browser game" on the other. I actually fall somewhere between the two, I've spent around £50 so far on gems and starter packs over the past 2 months so I'm not afraid to support the game with hard earned cash. Most of these gems have gone towards my Veteran General and extra building licenses.

This isn't a dig at anybody who has put more money than I have spare into the game and hats off to anybody who has bought silo's and watermills. I just feel that it would be nice if wheat fields and wells could be made less of a chore.

Discuss

[PChamps]

what do you propose?

[Morgy321]

well if you give me back my money for my 36 silos and 34 water mills then i am all up for a sjange if not i am moust deffenetly not

[Gavona]

A longer building queue would do it.... Say 25 slots. But then no one would buy silos so BB would make less money on gem sales. It won't happen, sadly.

[YPHANH2002]

Silos would still be cool even if the queue is longer, imo. If you have more slots in the queue, you still have to login everyday to rebuild the farms. Silo is made so you don't have to do so, the daily reward is not significant.

[RuneMunki]

what do you propose?

I could put up a whole list of ideas - top ups in the provision house, 10 second build time, separate queue for fields and wells, silo tops up all adjacent fields, etc.

well if you give me back my money for my 36 silos and 34 water mills then i am all up for a sjange if not i am moust deffenetly not

I'm not saying to make silo's and watermills redundant, in fact I think they should provide more benefit than they actually do - and fair play for buying over 30 of each. I generally restrict myself to only spending £15 a month on things like online games so I'm not able to do the same.

Silos would still be cool even if the queue is longer, imo. If you have more slots in the queue, you still have to login everyday to rebuild the farms. Silo is made so you don't have to do so, the daily reward is not significant.

This is my point, currently replacing fields and wells is a chore. Silo's and watermills remove this chore. This isn't right - a game shouldn't be a chore to play. Anything you spend your hard earned cash on should actually provide you a significant benefit, not to make the game less dull to play. How many people would complain if a silo halved the speed of an adjacent farm?

[Dilbe]

I would be happy if they made it less of a chore to rebuild each individual field or well. For instance if you click on an empty field or well, that that would add a new one in the queue. What would be even better is if i dont even need to look around my island every hour to find empty fields and rebuild, but if 1 field or well is empty, that a button is added below the build queue and if you click on that then one random field or well is added to the que.

[peck_ed]

Why not add a 2nd build tree for things like wells and wheat fields that allow you to queue them up without issue having a limit to that queue. Then force the building queue on everything else.

[Peajay]

I propose a redesign on depleted items, so they can be rebuilt in the same spot at a reduced cost (and maybe time too?), that way it would be more cost effective not having to send out the geologist or demolishing almost depleted items for the 25% refund. Perhaps they could remove the limit of 3 in the build queue for these too.

[Kotugo]

http://forum.thesettlersonline.com/t...om-build-queue

I made the suggestion some time ago to remove wells/fields from the queue. This doesn't stop silos/watermills being useful since those slow the rate you need to rebuild (or completely stop if you have enough), they have the effect of saving you a lot of wood/stone (the level of wood/stone depends on the type of well/field you prefer to make).

The main advantage of this change is you can rebuild all your fields/wells in about 10 minutes instead of having to actively spend 2-3 hours doing it, the cost in game resources is identical since you still use all that wood/stone while rebuilding.

Unfortunately, the extra queue slots (both perm and temp) are likely aimed at people who are sick of the short queue for wells/fields, what else actually needs a longer queue? It's probably unlikely that more than a handful of players have paid for the perm slots, but they would become worthless if anything was adjusted on well/field replacing (unless they add something else costing gems to fix it...)

I guess only copper mines are the other thing which require daily work to keep going and we have already seen the price on the fix for that