Games for May

Some buildings have a varying stock capacity depending on how many workers are employed. If no workers are employed, the capacity gets reduced by 100% - it can't store anything at all. (If you fix this bug, please please remove the 100% reduction and replace it with something more reasonable - it's already really hard to get workers as-is (at this point there's even an economic crisis going on due to a global labor shortage which made the economy come to a near-complete standstill already), and nobody will want to work at a building that's not going to produce until its owner (hopefully) stocks it when they get online - something which, judging by player behavior up until now, is all but certain. (The big exceptions are of course stone quarry and logging camp jobs, but they definitely don't need to be buffed even further.))

You can, however, still store items in it, though the interface gets wonky and you need to add them one by one (holding the button reverts the amount to 0). For a long time I figured this was just an interface bug occurring when there's no worker, but I recently noticed you can go beyond the normal (with workers) building storage capacity without a worker, at which point I realized the intention was to make not having workers suck even harder by making it impossible to store anything at all.

I'm kind of happy that this bug exists as even further restrictions would cause the economy to collapse even further (when goods cannot be sold or stored elsewhere, they cannot be produced, reducing demand for their materials which can then also not be sold, propagating the problem further), but this should be fixed at some point.

VDZ wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 31, 2018 6:07 pm

For a long time I figured this was just an interface bug occurring when there's no worker, but I recently noticed you can go beyond the normal (with workers) building storage capacity without a worker, at which point I realized the intention was to make not having workers suck even harder by making it impossible to store anything at all.

Oh man I encountered this too with the Mill and just thought it was a bug.. but you are correct. It really is hard to get people to work for you when you can't offer them any work.

I'm thinking the reduction was put it place to prevent people from building something just to use as mass storage? i.e. build a farm to hoard all the wheat from other players without spending too much to store it.

I agree on making it something like 75% or 50% reduction, just to allow work to any available workers.

ibelimb wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 01, 2018 2:58 pm

I agree on making it something like 75% or 50% reduction, just to allow work to any available workers.

I don't really see the point of capacity reduction in the first place. You say they could otherwise be used as storage, but production buildings cost a lot to construct (much more than houses for equivalent storage) and are harder to sell than houses (in addition to missing the benefit of being able to live in them or the dynamicness of the storage as it only allows storage of specific goods); houses remain superior to production buildings for storage (except maybe for Timber and Stone, but those aren't exactly scarce goods) even without their added benefit of not counting towards your building limit.

(Note that there has already been a complete buyout of an item before (Refined Oil, tons of it) and houses were used to store the items.)

The storage reduction is actually just the method by which this particularly employment scheme was implemented - at the time it was simplest to prevent the building producing by using the storage reduction percentage setting tied to the building efficiency. I agree that that should be changed. (No reason why 100% of supply items shouldn't be allowed just coz theres no employee to process em).
Obviously the overstocking bug needs fixing too.

Have switched over to lack of worker not affecting storage capacity now. That may have side-effects (have only done a brief test on it) so please let me know if it causes problems. Latest client and server have various fixes to prevent over-stocking and possible loss of items related to that.