Sevenless wrote:We've done preplanned wipes before. It slaughters population. 90-160? Try like 10-20. With a wipe 3 months out.
When was this? World 2/3/4? Because 5 -> 6 was very sudden (server crash) and I don't recall 6->7 very well but I'm fairly sure it wasn't announced three months beforehand. And in none of the Hafen worlds has the time between announcement and wipe ever been three months:
9: Feb 4th -> Feb 18th (14 days)
10: Dec 28th -> Jan 7th (10 days)
11: Jan 18th -> Feb 1st (14 days)
12: Feb 23rd -> March 6th (12 days, leap year)
13 March 21st -> April 2nd (12 days)
Obviously, the population does collapse when the new world is announced. But that's because in a game of this timescale, there's not all that much you can still do in less than two weeks. Three months is enough to get all of your industries up from scratch with time to spare (especially in a late-game world).
bumfrog wrote:especially as you interact with more demanding progression systems which reward with time efficiency but are in practice basically chores (curios [...]) that require daily effort without providing much fulfillment.
For the rest of the list (and the rest of the post) I agree, but unless you insist on going for 100% maximum efficiency (which is simply not necessary as LP will not be the bottleneck in your progress (perhaps early-game is an exception for factions, don't know exactly how fast faction industry develops)) most of the curio system is actually really varied and fun, as there's a bazillion ways to get okay-ish curios (and even if you insist on getting only actually good curios, there's still plenty of those unless you restrict yourself to only the top tier curios). The only parts where the curio system feels tedious are
1) The limited space on Study Desks with zero upgrade options which requires frequent refills, which involves manual work to get the right curios on them,
2) Storage; as the number of curios in the game increases so does the amount of storage you need for them, and nowadays I have a dedicated curio house just to store them which frankly is a bit ridiculous, and
3) Crafting, specifically having to get all the right items from your storage together (especially if it involves a crafting station, in which case you're limited to inventory capacity) and having to repeat that a bazillion times because of how many curios you need to craft.
Still, compared to the other systems you mentioned I think the curio tedium is mild and overall I find the curio system to be very fun in spite of the tedious aspects. I think the biggest problem is that it heavily discourages playing for only a bit a day, as the work involved remains more or less constant per real-life day regardless of how much you play, meaning the less you play the more of it is spent managing curios. As long as you're spending a lot of time on the game every day curios aren't really an issue.