Sim Settlements and Maintenance Costs - City Design and Building

[Whisper]

The tl/dr executive summary: If you are playing with maintenance costs turned on for Sim Settlements - do not not not manually build a settlement casually. It takes some planning and thought to do so in a way that you don't go crazy from having to top the thing up with caps all the time.

It's no fun if it keeps breaking down.
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I'm going to add some placeholder posts and fill them out as I go. Four more posts after this:

* Costs and Production
* Vanilla Items
* Examples
* City Planning

 

[Whisper]

Costs and Production

Note that Lil' Fallons appears to be a bug at present for water costs. I've raised a bug report.

As you can see, it's a lot more involved than you might expect. You need extra water for those agriculture plots, power and extra water and food for residential plots...it can get messy if you don't keep an eye on things.

Note: The caps created assume a normal tax rate.

 

[Whisper]

Vanilla Items

This is the place where people get hurt. They go to do something and throw down some vanilla items which generate defense/power/water, and suddenly they're paying caps out the wazoo each day.

This is where you get people showing up to scream "your mod broke my game WAAAAAAAAAHHH!"

Which it *did* - because they didn't know how to use it right. Which is why we have the Koeran Configuration Wizard Development Thread.

Next, some examples to illustrate things. How players can really get themselves into a tangle - and get themselves outta trouble.

 

[Whisper]

Examples

So, lets start with what a beginner player might slap down without looking too hard at things:

That works. Excess food, water, enough defense, a place to buy weapons, a medic to patch the character up - looks good! Unfortunately it's not obvious that the settlement is in negative territory when it comes to the caps.

Worse, when things upgrade from L1 to L3 it looks like this (not that they will upgrade, so the hasty player might start thinking it's broken):

Once they figure it out, the player starts throwing more water/power/defense at things:

At a 144 caps deficit a day, the player grits his teeth and works on fixing things up. He can use vanilla objects to reduce the costs of power and water:

The crying (or screaming) and alcohol abuse commences.

The real solution is a complete rebalance of the entire settlement. The player has *no need* for all the food produced, and under vanilla game modes that caps out at 11 per day anyway - a complete waste of time:

Finally! A settlement to be proud of, producing 64+ caps a day for the character's pocket! A little extra food, water, a place to deal with Power Armor, Weapons, Medicine, and buy Armor. An unemployed Settler who can be used for supply lines.

Settle down and enjoy.

 

[Whisper]

City Planning

City planners have a few other options that the ordinary player doesn't have - especially console players. We have to balance it between various levels too. Also, it's probably not that kosher to give players several 60+ caps a day cities. Just a hair cheat-y.

So we do something a bit like the following, splitting it between the 0 .. 3 city levels:

A little bit of tricky balance with the splitting between levels. The 35 caps a day at fully-developed L3 city is not as overbalanced as 64 caps a day. Though still plenty high, it should be reduced more.

The players are totally free to set up their own settlements, if they want that high a return in caps/taxes. They may as well get a good bonus for going to all that extra hassle and work of doing it manually.

 

[Whisper]

@Rudy - I might use that ^^^ as a basis of redesign for the Starlight Drive-In city plan.

So, looks like you get your wish after all. Though it won't be a City Contest plan, I'll see about getting it out there.

 

[Rudy]

Sweet! You ARE a rockstar @Whisper and I'd love to see your redesign.

 

[Hike20]

Thanks! Any chance that spreadsheet is available? I have some settlements that keep running caps deficits despite the workbench saying there's a surplus. This would help me double-check the math.

I've also found that many/most of the ROTC settlements are WAY out of balance in their default builds. I get that having production themed builds is cool and all (without costs turned on), but if you are trying to make them sustainable you have to really scale back their food or water production. This is especially frustrating when there's hidden water sources etc.

I'm going to make a post in suggestions, but one thing that would help would be to have either industrial plots generate caps income (aka real world) or have a commercial plot that you can dump stuff into to automatically be sold off and put into the revenue.

 

[Whisper]

@Hike20 it’s in excel 2010 IIRC. I can upload a copy tonight - it should be small enough - give it a thorough check with a couple of scanners just in case it’s a virus-laden mess.

 

[Hike20]

Thanks!