Land-Speculation: #4 Buildings
Intro
Please note that this is just a sub-post covering only a puzzle-piece of my Land-Speculation.
To start on the "Front Page" or to return to the Overview-Post please click on the picture below:
In recent town-halls we heard that plots should only have enough space for 1 building:
- Harvesting
- Refining
- Storage
However I am not too sure about whether thats a good idea. Cause where do you store your goods?
Just imagine you are a player who managed to get 1 Plot. Now in order to harvest its ressources you would need a storage first? That would basically make owning a single plot completely useless.
A solution could be that a player has to have some sort of Base-Storage that is capped (no plot needed to have this storage),
HOWEVER you could increase that storage by either some sort of tract/region bonus or you build storages on plots. That way a single plot can still function but if you want to manage more plots you would also have to upgrade your storage space to adjust your production accordingly.
But thats just a starting thought I wanted to get out of my system. Now to Stronghold:
As you can see above thats a pretty standard village. There are 5 different types of buildings:
- General
- Building Materials
- Food
- Banqueting
- Weapons Workshops
In Stronghold if you want to produce more of a certain resource/item you basically build more of its building types.
So if you want to upgrade your stone-production you can just build another stone quarry (as seen in the bottom left). With a few tetris-skills you can manage to maximize that quarry-amount.
In Splinterlands you will just have 1 building which you can upgrade, and the higher level, the higher the costs. Kinda like Castle-Buildings I mentioned in my post #2 Castles & Keeps.
To get a better understanding about the resources of SL and Stronghold make sure to go back to my Post #3 Resources.
General
Depending on various factors, the total popularity figure can go up or down. These factors are:
Tax Rate -> you can adjust the tax rate to earn gold
(High taxes = negative effect on popularity)
(low taxes or even a negativ rate [bribe] = less negative or positive effect on popularity)Food Rations -> allow you to set peasants' food ration levels, up to a maximum of x4. Doing this improves the overall popularity, which in turn, is also affected by number of different food types that are eaten - the more food types, the higher the popularity. However, the more peasants you have in a village, the more food you will need to produce.
Beer Rations -> like Food Rations
Housing Capacity -> if you have more people than houses, people are unhappy
Buildings Modifier -> Entertainment buildings can give you positive boosts
Events can have a big effect on your peasants' happiness. They can be either positive or negative. (e.g. Sunshine=Good ; Storm=bad ; plague=bad ; Enemy NPCs in the area like bandits/wolfs or enemy castles = bad...)
So in the example on the right we can see the following:
- I am giving away money = +
- I give away the highest rate of food = +
- Highest rate of beer= +
- I have a housing occupancy of only 44% = +
- I don't have entertainment buildings = neutral
- There are 6 events currently that are effecting the popularity negatively: AI-Castle, Bandit Camp, Wolf Lair, Disease, Weather, Lack of Defense
The overall Popularity however is highly positive right now and that attracts people so new workers arrive to town more frequently (as seen on top of the picture)
So if you have negative total points workers will flee from your village over time resulting in a lower production of resources.
Compared to splinterlands one could say that there will be a "similar" thing:
- Cards / Summoner can be placed to boost production = +
- Totems can be placed to boost production = +
- There will probably be tract/region bonuses = +
- In recent townhalls they also mentioned a weather-system. Meaning there could be e.g. a rain-cloud that is moving over the world map and every plot it touches gets negative effect on fire monsters/summoners but positive effect on water monsters/summoners = -/+
- And who knows: Maybe (if more than 1 building space is available) they could come up with a similar thing than Entertainment Buildings = +
- Maybe they even add A.I. enemies aswell that spawn randomly and give a negative effect = -
And coming to houses now. In Stronghold you need to build houses in order to have more capacity for your workers. I could see SL doing a similar thing so you can build houses to fit more monsters/summoners onto your plot. Especially with Occupied Lands.
See, for Occupied lands all we know is that we can fight monsters. So what if there would be something like a Baracks (instead of a House).
And first you can only fit 1 Monster on there to fight for you but when you level up your baracks you can fit 2/3/4... to fight these A.I. enemies. Just a thought I had when thinking about houses.
Building Materials
are basically like the natural resources in SL: Grain, Wood, Stone, Ore
The market is used to trade resources with other villages, and sell goods to parish capital stock exchanges.
#5 Transport & Markets
Food
Banqueting
These Banqueting-Goods are similar to the magical resources within SL. They are rarer than natural ressources and can only be found on specific land-type plots. See my post #3 Resources
In SL these are:
Reclaimed souls - Death
Ulana seeds - Earth
Sparkstone - Fire
Bottled storms - Water
Heliostone - Dragon
Weapons Workshops
Weapons are basically what we know from splinterlands as Items & Spells.
In Stronghold these are weapons needed for combat against your enemies, same for SL
So as you can see in this picture we have several Woodcutter's Huts producing the building material wood on a regular basis throughout the day. This harvesting is automated, the only way to interact with the process is to boost production using several options. As it will be possible in SL with cards, totems, castle buildings ...
So to create the item Pikes to arm our troops we can construct the Poleturner-Building. That will result in a constant creation of Pikes, however every creation costs us 100 Wood.
If you want to extend your Pikes-Production you can build another Poleturner.
In SL however it will be upgrading the 1 building instead of building multiple copies.
However you have to be aware that:
- To produce more weapons/items you have to make sure to produce enough of the base-resource
- The costs of building upgrades increase with every level.
- The more items you produce the more storage you have to have or else your armory will be filled to the max and production comes to a halt until you either build more storage or sell/use the items in the armory to make space.
As already mentioned in my previous post about "Resources", I would actually also like to see more than 1 building-space per plot, not like previously hinted on. That would just add a little variety to the land-expansion and give players more options to choose from.
But if they really decide to limit the space to 1 building per plot imho they would definitely need to consider my take on storage on the very top of this post, so that every player has some sort of base storage:
(no plot needed to have this storage)
HOWEVER you could increase that storage by either some sort of tract/region bonus or you build storages on plots. That way a single plot can still function but if you want to manage more plots you would also have to upgrade your storage space to adjust your production.
In Stronghold they solved the capacity/storage problem using a tech-tree where a player can use his Research Points to unlock certain skills or bonuses. The research points are earned by player progress and the more you research the longer it takes. So your first skill takes only a couple of minutes to unlock but the later ones can take days. So in the picture below you can see the part that boosts your certain storage buildings:
- Housing Capacity (Villagers)
- Armoury Capacity (Weapons)
- Inn Capacity (Beer/Ale)
- Hall capacity (Banquet Goods)
- Granary Capacity (Food)
- Stockpile Capacity (Building Materials)
However I don't think they will add such a system to the game (at least not right at the beginning).
I think SL will firstly focus on specific Storage buildings to increase your max-capacity.
But who knows maybe they surprise me with such a Research-Mechanic. I mean with the gladiator-cards in brawls they already implemented something where a player who plays long enough can slowly build an advantage over a freshly joined player. So a slow upgrade to the land-skills is unlikely but could actually be considered🤷♂
In my next post "Transport & Markets" I will focus on the transportation-system of Stronghold as this was a topic often hinted at by Splinterlands stuff (however they said it might be done in the future)
So if you are interested in some more thoughts around land (and comparisons with Stronghold Kingdoms) you can either hop over to the next post "PvP & PvE" or return to the "Overview" Post by clicking the pictures below:
Either way, thank you so much for powering through the post. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Maybe you also have a particular game in mind or maybe just a particular mechanic you would like to see in Splinterlands.
I would also love some feedback so I can improve my posts so feel free to leave those aswell.
Thanks for the support
I agree, one building will be extremely limited in terms of what a single plot owner can do. It is also a wasted potential of further DEC burning because constructing, upgrading and maintaining each building will all create a massive sink for DEC/SPS. Why not double-dip if it further benefits the economy that way? But it would be much more complex with multiple buildings and such things could probably be introduced later.
Assuming they stay with one building, I could imagine that higher levels would give larger on-plot storage, even when you don't have a specific storage building on it. So you would have to come every x-days to collect the harvest and move it out to make room for more.
It would be pretty boring if it would be reduced to that but it would be good enough for a first MVP. The benefit of this new land game is, that it is entirely time-based. It takes time to harvest and safe for buildings, which take time to build, move around resources which takes longer for larger distances and finally craft something, which also takes time. Rince and repeat. Meanwhile, the dev team can figure out the next phase, while the players have a more or less (because of DEC burn shortcuts to speed up things) predictable time to play to reach a level where they will eventually ask for more.
Although nothing concrete, the team seems to consider a PvE game that even includes non-land owners to a degree. If so, I suspect it will all be time based stuff as well (at least in the starting phase).
Maybe something like sending a team of monsters and a summoner to a quest, which takes them out of circulation for a fixed amount of time. The better your monsters, the higher chance to complete the quest and/or the better the quest rewards. Depending on where those quests happen, they could have to pay a tribute to the plot owner, the tract owner and castle owner, which is deducted from their loot. This could be done randomly to spread monsters into all corners of Praetoria and let all land owners benefit from it.
Boss Fights have been mentioned as part of the PvE in Lands but probably not in the starting phase.
Oh yeah, I also agree that one building per Plot would be a wasted opportunity. More slots give you way more choices you can make to optimize your plot and "play" the land-game.
I also thought that maybe rarity plays a role in that aswell. So common land is only offering x building-slots , rare ones x+1 and so on.
I also think it would be a good idea to include non-land-owners somehow to participate in parts of the land play because that way you can include more players. Maybe some sort of PvE mode (PvP and PvE is going to be Post #6 so there I also play around some ideas, actually including the one you just proposed)
But yeah I can't wait to see how Boss Monsters will be implemented in the land-game. Especially for your sake I hope those will be awesome. Can't wait to fight your Boss Monster. Do you have an idea in mind already? Don't think I have ever asked you that 😅
It will be a !1UP mushroom monster.
😲 That looks amazing !!! Now I can't wait to fight it, which will probably be pretty tough
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I used to play Stronghold way back in the day. I nice game that really had you involved in creating town and defending it.
Great post! It is actually this very fear of one building per plot that made my buy more plots so that their total number is always a multiple of 3, in order to have one building for each purpose. Not that I have that many plots anyways, but hearing the comments in the Town Halls I didn't want to be stuck with just one storage plot, or just one harvesting plot, etc.