I've been thinking about balance a lot lately, and the production and upkeep requirements of plots. With no offense meant to Kinggath and the team that have spent so much time on every element of SS2....the production and upkeep consumption numbers for some plots strike me as frankly ridiculous. In trying to make a good argument about what it "should" be, however, I always end up circling back to the fact that resource values in FO4 are extremely fuzzy to begin with, and that makes finding a good benchmark to judge "reasonable" production and upkeep against quite hard. For example, a full car or truck that you scrap at Red Rocket yields you 20 steel - but a single screwdriver is 2 steel. I'm pretty sure that even a sun-addled wastelander could find more than 10 screwdrivers worth of steel in a car! This continues everywhere, and is especially outrageous when scrapping weapons and armor that have mods on them - you'll frequently get close to as much steel and far more other components from scrapping a single modded weapon than you do from tearing apart that car....a car that supposedly had enough high-tech components under its hood to be running a consumer-safe nuclear reactor on the roads, but only yields generic Steel when you scrap it!
What we're left with is a nebulous idea that "it needs some maintenance, and if our benchmark for resources is X, then Y seems appropriate". If 2 steel is a screwdriver, then yes, needing 4 steel and 9 wood to keep a jury-rigged multi-level shack (L3 Single-person Residential) going doesn't seem too bad. On the other hand, 20 steel is a car (and 30 is a tree), so you're saying that you are consuming about a quarter a car worth of steel each day to run a SHACK. By the end of the first week, you've put close to 2 entire cars and more than 2 full trees into that shack, with no visible difference.....or just over a dozen screwdrivers which you've probably just broken off at the handle to turn into makeshift nails/rivets as you try to hold things together against wind and radrain.
I feel like SS needs to step back for a minute and look at the whole system in relation to the game environment. Building shit in the Commonwealth is supposed to be hard, which is why after 200 years the best we've got is Diamond City. Paramount to that difficulty is finding usable resources - yet SS2 plot production produces huge amounts of material. If we keep the "20 steel is a car worth of scrap" benchmark, then a single Level 1 Building Materials plot finds and processes most of a car (16 steel), most of a tree (25 wood), half a car-weight in each Aluminum, Asbestos and Concrete (10 each), plus another car-weight combined worth of fiberglass and glass (8 and 14 respectively). That means that a single level one plot, ONE SETTLER, is locating and processing 93 units of material a day - aka just shy of FIVE CARS worth of material.
Every Day.
In a wasteland.
That has been picked over for 200 years already.
By the time that plot gets to level three, that single person is now processing 299 units a day - FIFTEEN CARS worth of material, located, brought to the settlement, and broken down/processed/readied for use. If a single person can produce 15 cars worth of material a day (and that's before adding in SPECIAL stat modifiers, by the way), then in a year they have processed 5,475 cars of material - since nobody takes weekends off in Fallout 4. Five thousand, four hundred cars worth of material from a single person. That single person has just processed enough material to completely rebuild Sanctuary, Red Rocket, and probably most of Concord, from the ground up.
If one person can do that, why is Diamond City the best the Commonwealth has after 200 years?
My proposal is simple, but far-reaching. Cut all production and maintenance costs to 1/5 their current values. Since resources are produced and stored virtually, independent of FO4's physical items, there seems to be little reason resource values need to be whole numbers - use a single decimal place for small upkeeps if needed. When this is done, keep building and upgrading costs the same - the choice of what to build and when to upgrade should be a meaningful one, and having it take a far larger proportion of production output would do that.
The flip side to this is the player. The player character in Fallout has always been a heroic figure, and the amount of resources you can collect somewhat reflects that. In vanilla Fallout 4, settlements are almost entirely reliant on the player to collect the scrap needed to expand, and reducing production levels while retaining construction/upgrade costs will restore a bit of this feeling. The player won't be made obsolete in their early-game role as resource provider as quickly, and the feeling that its hard to build up in the wasteland for the average person should return to an extent.
Embracing the freedom of smaller-than-whole-number upkeeps would also allow SS2 to fine-tune upkeep values to reflect consumption, where keeping a shack going day-to-day requires a couple of rivets and a fist-sized patch over the new leak in the roof, rather than running through both doors from a Corvega every day!
TL;DR: number bloat from consumption and production is bad. Drastically scale back both numbers while keeping construction/upgrade costs the same to reduce bloat, improve immersion to the lore/environment and prevent stripping the player of their heroic-provider role that the base game sets up.
What we're left with is a nebulous idea that "it needs some maintenance, and if our benchmark for resources is X, then Y seems appropriate". If 2 steel is a screwdriver, then yes, needing 4 steel and 9 wood to keep a jury-rigged multi-level shack (L3 Single-person Residential) going doesn't seem too bad. On the other hand, 20 steel is a car (and 30 is a tree), so you're saying that you are consuming about a quarter a car worth of steel each day to run a SHACK. By the end of the first week, you've put close to 2 entire cars and more than 2 full trees into that shack, with no visible difference.....or just over a dozen screwdrivers which you've probably just broken off at the handle to turn into makeshift nails/rivets as you try to hold things together against wind and radrain.
I feel like SS needs to step back for a minute and look at the whole system in relation to the game environment. Building shit in the Commonwealth is supposed to be hard, which is why after 200 years the best we've got is Diamond City. Paramount to that difficulty is finding usable resources - yet SS2 plot production produces huge amounts of material. If we keep the "20 steel is a car worth of scrap" benchmark, then a single Level 1 Building Materials plot finds and processes most of a car (16 steel), most of a tree (25 wood), half a car-weight in each Aluminum, Asbestos and Concrete (10 each), plus another car-weight combined worth of fiberglass and glass (8 and 14 respectively). That means that a single level one plot, ONE SETTLER, is locating and processing 93 units of material a day - aka just shy of FIVE CARS worth of material.
Every Day.
In a wasteland.
That has been picked over for 200 years already.
By the time that plot gets to level three, that single person is now processing 299 units a day - FIFTEEN CARS worth of material, located, brought to the settlement, and broken down/processed/readied for use. If a single person can produce 15 cars worth of material a day (and that's before adding in SPECIAL stat modifiers, by the way), then in a year they have processed 5,475 cars of material - since nobody takes weekends off in Fallout 4. Five thousand, four hundred cars worth of material from a single person. That single person has just processed enough material to completely rebuild Sanctuary, Red Rocket, and probably most of Concord, from the ground up.
If one person can do that, why is Diamond City the best the Commonwealth has after 200 years?
My proposal is simple, but far-reaching. Cut all production and maintenance costs to 1/5 their current values. Since resources are produced and stored virtually, independent of FO4's physical items, there seems to be little reason resource values need to be whole numbers - use a single decimal place for small upkeeps if needed. When this is done, keep building and upgrading costs the same - the choice of what to build and when to upgrade should be a meaningful one, and having it take a far larger proportion of production output would do that.
The flip side to this is the player. The player character in Fallout has always been a heroic figure, and the amount of resources you can collect somewhat reflects that. In vanilla Fallout 4, settlements are almost entirely reliant on the player to collect the scrap needed to expand, and reducing production levels while retaining construction/upgrade costs will restore a bit of this feeling. The player won't be made obsolete in their early-game role as resource provider as quickly, and the feeling that its hard to build up in the wasteland for the average person should return to an extent.
Embracing the freedom of smaller-than-whole-number upkeeps would also allow SS2 to fine-tune upkeep values to reflect consumption, where keeping a shack going day-to-day requires a couple of rivets and a fist-sized patch over the new leak in the roof, rather than running through both doors from a Corvega every day!
TL;DR: number bloat from consumption and production is bad. Drastically scale back both numbers while keeping construction/upgrade costs the same to reduce bloat, improve immersion to the lore/environment and prevent stripping the player of their heroic-provider role that the base game sets up.
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