When I loaded my Alpha 14 save into Alpha 15, I was 1200 items over the cap of the inventory, and had to wait for a merchant and start selling everything.
But still the map has plenty of resources if I ever need, not to mention the amount of gold saved from selling all those items. I guess I spent many days without building, just waiting for some trees to finish growing.
When your trapper / farmers level up, the production increases faster than you can use/sell, but it’s a pity to just delete it with the clear tool
Honestly I haven’t found it annoying at all. Obviously I’m not discounting your opinion, that’s what this community is all about after all right?
But as an indie game developer myself I can say that I see GREAT benefits in resource caps like this. What most people don’t realize is that with simulation games like this, many factors come into play in terms of performance, but one of the biggest ones is the sheer number of objects being processed as your civilization grows.
There’s been a lot of hub-bub about performance not being CPU related, but Graphics related. I honestly don’t see how that’s true at all because I’m running on an Intel i7-4790K octacore with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti with 6 GB of VRAM and 16 GB of System RAM, and in A14 I was still lagging on lowest graphics settings (even though I run AAA games on a dual-monitor 8K setup with no lag whatsoever). That being said, A15 (as far as I can tell now) is a HUGE improvement as far as performance.
But I digress - like I said, a big factor in performance with these types of games is the sheer number of objects being processed. With every new object added into the game (obviously at varying degrees, items cost less on your CPU than a new citizen) you add one more object that the threads on your CPU have to handle. This is especially true with a game like Stonehearth where you can tell that every object is its own entity (i.e. you can click the sword in a hearthling’s hand. This means that that sword is an object separate from the unit itself - unlike other games where a unit is just a single object with metadata about it’s inventory and such).
So like I said, for you (and probably many others) it might feel annoying or intrusive, but as a developer myself I can definitely see the benefit in a cap like this (and as a player I honestly haven’t found it the least bit troublesome).
I hope my little rant didn’t seem to aggressive, it wasn’t meant to be, I just wanted to share my opinion
I did mention that one of the reasons for the cap is to improve performance. The problem is that I dont think it really does that. I can still mine and farm as much wood as I want, and as long as I do not collect it, my resources stay under the cap, yet the items are still rendered and sucking up time for the CPU. If anything it might be less efficient, as now the game will have too look around to see if the needed supplies are on the ground instead of in a container.
So I see what the devs are trying to do with the cap, but it doesn’t really add any appreciable challenge, it just adds a layer of annoyance. A better way would be to give us an incentive to sell our stuff rather than a penalty if we do not. Right now gold is pretty much useless. In my latest save I think I have close to 20k worth. What am I going to spend it on? What good does it do me? Sure I can buy some cloth and save my crafters some busy work, but its not like i can buy a steady supply of cloth so at best it just supplements my crafters. Gold cannot replace any of my basic requirements, and I have crafters to take care of the more advanced stuff.
If the devs want gold to be useful we need to be able to use it for something, and it needs to become alot more scarce. If merchants had a set amount of gold tho buy stuff, I would probably sell stuff every time they came around, because then gold would be harder to come by and more valuable. Until that happens having raw resources will almost always trump having gold because it has more uses and can be sold. So it is almost always in my best interest NOT to sell my stuff until I want to buy something.
True, but I also feel like that’s kinda the point? Sure, the CPU has to look around for items on the ground instead of in your stockpiles, but then again so do your hearthlings. So you as the player have an incentive to keep your village clean because then both your hearthlings (by not having to search around for resources) and the CPU will be much more efficient.
This also might be true, but (at least when I play) I find it interesting to try different ways of incorporating this into my game. If I can buy coal and ore, why waste time mining when I can save my stockpile for wood, farmed resources, hide, etc., and then sell my excess reserves of those to buy ore and coal to make ingots/blacksmith stuff?
If I don’t have to waste time mining for those resources, I can spend more time specializing in other things (and have more hearthlings dedicated to building/gathering faster) instead of mining.
Or I could collect it into stockpiles, wait for the hearthlings to neatly place everything, then delete the stockpile, leaving neat efficient piles of resources right next to my crafters.
These are all really good ideas! Thanks and keep them coming!
Again, I get that this is very early implementation, but I feel that it seems to be much more of a stick solution rather than a carrot one. If we should increase our towns worth instead of hoarding, give us reasons to do so, rather than punishments for not.
We talk about carrot and stick all the time, so we’re definitely on the same page. Look for more carrots (as well as sticks that drop loot) in the future–if not in A15, which is entirely earmarked for performance, now, but in alphas to come.
A carrot is a reward, a stick is a punishment, so a gameplay mechanic that is primarily a stick, is one that punishes a player, while a mechanic that is mostly a carrot rewards a player. Ideally you want a little of both.
Has not impacted me at all. I’ve not come close to the limit even with deforestation and having piles and piles of rock, metals, and other goods laying around. I’m not ultra aggressive about crafting and selling off stuff either - I get rid of some but could be doing more probably.
I’m not compelled to gather as much stuff as humanly possible just to stockpile it even if I do like to have large quantities of everything, but to each his own.
I think the resource cat being a cap on all objects as one inventory should not be said that way I can see several problems arise from the like in somebody’s description they said you go and get dinner and your farmers keep going and keep farming well let’s to limit that so they don’t severely hamper your game. But what happens when your farmers keep going hit the limit and stop and wait and you come in and you need to mind material or cuts wood and they won’t store any of that material you need. So I think the best way to do it would be to set it worth of the individual item cap. it would also be extremely great if it was in game changeable. Sunsetting window kind of in the background but you go into that window as you notice you’ve got a performance hit and go in and tell it to reduce the amount of would you store. This would also have kind of the added benefits say you cut a whole bunch trees down and they’re close to your center point and your stockpile. All your heart saying spend all day moving that would there but you’ve got a trapper that you need that material and food from but they won’t pull it into your stockpile. Well then fine I’ll just set Wood to a low enough number that I’ve got enough now my heart things won’t carry more wood but will then turn around and grab the other resources little farther out. And in this way people also have the ability to control their set up based upon their machine.
Nice suggestion @DevanMedrow, the game Banished does something similar - each category of items has a user-settable limit (for example food is a category, wood is, stone is, dairy products are, etc.).
As far as I remember this was for single storages though, so you could ensure that there would be a diversity of goods all over your town and not only be filled with food for example. Can’t remember anything like an absolute (realistically reachable) total resource cap which couldn’t be increased with more storages.
@Frostbyte, are you talking about Banished or Stonehearth? If Banished, there was a global “production cap”, which stopped citizens from working if there was enough of an item. You could set the cap larger than available storage spaces, and thus the cap was essentially non-existent, but the caps could be used to prevent your farmers (for example) from filling up your entire warehouse and not leaving any room for coats, or tools, etc.
