Winning Back Workers - Development Log #268

Tired of seeing your workforce disappear once new players arrive? Never fear! Molp to the rescue!

Michi (molp)

This week I spent quite some time on implementing changes and adjustments to the population / workforce model. The most biggest and most important change addresses "workforce stealing." In case you haven't heard that term yet, I need to go deeper to explain how the population and workforce models interact:

Every base needs a certain amount and type of workforce to staff their production buildings. Once a new production building is built or demolished or there is a change in habitation buildings, the base determines what the workforce requirements are and sends a workforce request to the planet's population. Every week (when the population report is created) all the requests are taken into account and the whole planetary population is assigned to the requesters in round robin fashion. If the total population exceeds the sum of the requests, every player will receive enough workers to fully staff their buildings. If not, the workers are shared between all players on that planet and thus the production buildings will be understaffed and less efficient.

While this algorithm is relatively fair for existing bases, it has a major downside: Building up one of the higher population tiers can be very costly considering the population infrastructure costs. If a new player arrives on a planet and builds a production line requiring a higher tier workforce, they are treated just like the older inhabitants by the algorithm and get their share. That results in very unhappy long-time players since every new player effectively "steals" a large part of the workforce that long-time players built over weeks and months without ever needing to contribute towards the growth of that workforce. This is called workforce stealing and the smaller the number of bases using a certain workforce type, the worse it is.

To mitigate this I implemented a suggestion made in the forums by one of the players. Instead of re-distributing the whole population each week, every base keeps up to 75% of their workforce and only the 25% returning into the population are then re-distributed. This will give existing players on a planet plenty of time to react to the new arrivals.

Other noteworthy changes are:

• The amount of necessary building materials for infrastructure projects was reduced
• I increased the upkeep intervals to 3 and 10 days (was 1 and 7 days)
• Each base now generates more safety and health than before
• The POP command is renamed to WF to discern it more clearly from planetary population commands

Fabian (Counterpoint)

Since Michi went into detail on the population-related changes, I'll spill the beans on some of the general material tree adjustments coming post-reset:

• You'll be able to make MAI in Hydroponics Farms now, meaning you can actually make all the required inputs for RAT right there.
• S and MG are rightfully moving to the "Elements" category. This also means they'll get their own new minerals.
• Electronics MMs will be reduced significantly. This includes NV1 and NV2 which will make ships less expensive.
• Weight and volume of H2O will be reduced significantly.
• Habitations will have a smoother cost curve (e.g. HB3 now uses lightweight prefabs, HB4 now uses reinforced prefabs).

Nick

Last week, I spent the majority of my time on Early Access preparation since we are getting closer and closer. I hope to have the new website redesign ready in time, so I've been working with Manoj and our freelancer Melanie in coordinating different content items that could really enhance the site. I rewrote a lot of the old content to reflect changes that have been/will be made when we finally roll everything out. Really excited to share it with everyone, just wait a little longer :)

Just a reminder that we are still running the First Access key giveaway on Twitter and Facebook, now is the perfect time to get your friends into the game! Send me a message if you don't have any social media accounts. Also keep sending me YouTuber/Twitch streamers that you like so I can contact them about doing a video for us. Appreciate all the help so far on this!

As always: We'd love to hear what you think. Join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!