Sevenless wrote:WowGain wrote:jorb wrote:
- Realism: They have vaguely realistic mechanics. E.g. animals need to be tended.
- What is the alternative? What types of good and well-designed challenges can we present that can serve to make resources valuable?
tedium =/= challenge and if anything is its antithesis- unless the challenge you're looking for is presenting people that code bots the challenge of writing the script
steel still maintains plenty of value purely through the triple-refining process and 3-day timegate involved in producing it. removing the overdone cheese mechanic was one of your best changes this world and its philosophy should be copied to many other industries with similar mechanics.
But you didn't answer his question. What can we do to replace tedium while maintaining steel's resource value?
I've suggested "special coal" as an option, or at least making it so that steel crucibles require black coal to fuel instead of just sticks or charcoal. Realistically the same people would be producing it, namely established villages, but they'd be less annoyed about producing it. Someone argued that having steel Q depend on black coal lucky finds would be bad, but honestly that seems kinda par for the course on quality mechanics for mining so I don't know how important that is. Especially if the impact was minor, like 1/4 final quality.
That said, black coal becomes quite trivial to mine after early game. Long term steel would be extremely easy to produce.
it already HAS value
steel still maintains plenty of value purely through the triple-refining process and 3-day timegate involved in producing it.
i genuinely think you underestimate how lazy most people are, even people with titan-level stats.
even if 100% of black ore you mine up is used exclusively to make steel, each step of the process of refining that ore will narrow down the amount of resultant steel by a large factor.
0.30(max black ore smelt%)*0.50(chance that cast iron won't become dross)*0.33(chance of cast->wrought)= a whopping 4% of your ore will actually become potential steel after a single cycle of refining it. additional cycles of re-blooming cast iron/resmelting dross add to the yield but not in significant enough amounts to change that you're only recovering a very small amount of initial ore as actual steel. this discounts the fact that at least some of your cast iron and wrought iron will go unrefined into steel because of the specific uses of each of those metals and that not all of the iron ore you process will even be black ore and give the best yield possible for iron-ores.
