What Stonehearth can learn from Timber and Stone

@athenalras
I’ve been brainstorming a couple game ideas for myself for the past couple years. I wrote an outline for a fortress/city building type game last year, and included a production flowchart. Mine is more based on buildings instead of just workshops, but I’m attaching it anyways since it’s basically exactly what you want.


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Wow. 10/10 post. :smile: :+1:

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Yes but it doesn’t change Stonehearth from being communal based to something more capitalist (or even slightly meritocracy).

Your diagrams are closer to production graphs rather than how an economy works where exchange of money takes place.

I appreciate the effort to express a working economy but an economy usually works around the fact that objects degrade either through time or consumption. In a game like Stonehearth, where players micromanage over macromanaging a city or empire, the cpu load for calculating all the degradation of everything would be massive.

And then your workers have to be somewhat autonomous, rather than having the player control the production line. Because essentially, we all want to make money and making your hearthlings autonomous can pose gameplay problems.

It would be nice to see if you can come up with a solution addressing the problem described (tangentially?) in this post.

The goal of Stonehearth as always been the opposite. Macromanaging your city as an orchestrator instead of micromanaging the nitty gritty details.

They have added the recent therapist UI for those who like a little more micro, however.

As to the topic of Timber & Stone:
I agree with most of what @mCharger said. It was a good analysis and I appreciate the effort into his thought process.

Timber & Stone is a lot further developed in terms of combat and scenarios like that. So it’s hard to make a comparison, though I have little doubt that T&S will be a much more punishing game than Stonehearth. I’m hoping with the addition of the orc faction, ranged combat, and enemy spell casters, the challenge will start to really present itself in Stonehearth in it’s own way. (I can see Stephanie and Tom making an enemy spell caster that turns Hearthlings into poyos…)

Pacing… mostly agree. It feels fluid so far, but if you really bear down and focus on it, you can pretty much get everything the game has to offer done in about 4 hours normal time, 2 hours 2x time. Hopefully with the extended classes eventually making there way into the game, more scenarios showing up, and some balance tweaking for crafters and the daily update… the game can keep that nice fluid feel and extend the gameplay significantly.

In any case, i’m excited to see where the next few alphas take us.

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On the economic model issue:

Well as I mentioned above my graphs, I made those for a game idea I was fleshing out, not for Stonehearth. I didn’t include the concept of consumption in the actual flowchart because I didn’t really need to for my own personal use, but all workers in my game outline have basic needs (food, shelter, fuel, etc) and will take goods out of the production chain for personal consumption, which makes them happier. The player can restrict how much the workers take but may suffer penalties in worker happiness and health if they do not receive basic goods to meet their needs.

I imagine with this system one player may allow their workers to take all the goods they could want or need from the system willy-nilly, and be left with no resources for building or expansion, and in some cases being left with workers who receive nothing while others gorge themselves. Another player acting as a despot may force their citizens to starve while they sit on a massive pile of gold they made profiting off their of citizens’ forced labor. Of course, you could balance this with happiness bonuses; happy workers could produce more or unhappy workers may stop working, and eventually riot, until they completely rebel and throw you out from power.

An alternative system more based on capitalism is where all the workers are paid based on their profession, and will make money, but will have to pay their wages in order to receive the goods they need in order to stay happy; making it the player’s job to not only provide them with goods, but also jobs for them to earn money to pay for their goods. Consumption drives production and vice-versa, which creates the paradox we call an economy. As the player it’d be your job to maintain this cycle, and somehow pull value (or profit) out of it for capital creation (building.) If you do a terrible job and somehow kill the economy with poor tinkering or choices, your citizens may require you to interfere, or they may just riot and oust you from power.

As for decay:

Objects degrading (decay, amortization, depreciation, corrosion or whatever you want to call it) would be an interesting mechanic. A lot of games include tools breaking as a mechanic (Banished and T&S both coming to mind) and it basically forces the player to maintain a functioning metal/mining industry in order to do anything; or be forced to make mass purchases of metals or tools in order to maintain their economy. Having weapons break after a long period in combat would have the same effect, and having the ability to repair tools or scrap them for their base parts could add another layer of depth to the economic model.

Food decay would be another system that could be introduced; Stonehearth already has a system where crops will rot if unharvested for too long, but having all food types being able to decay would be a good system so long as the player could take steps to prevent or slow down the rot. Additional storage types such as ice-fridges could be added, where the player had to harvest ice from lakes in frozen regions in order to completely stop all rot. Having a smokehouse (like in my model) where meats can be smoked and salted to make them last longer would also be viable. Salt, a valuable medieval resource most games tend to ignore could actually have an important economic role where it prevents multiple types of food from rotting for long periods of time AND adds taste to food. The possibilities to dive in depth with this mechanic are almost endless, because it was a very real problem in pre-Industrial society that had many different solutions across many cultures.

On to the autonomy and control issue;

Worker autonomy does not mean that the players do not have control. Setting the game to where the workers have autonomy, but follow a set of RULES is where both autonomy and control can occur side by side. The Hearthling Therapist is the perfect example of player control and worker autonomy working side by side, since essentially you are allowing the Hearthlings to have free will, so long as they fit within the parameters you set.

With my production chain graphs, if you set up a certain part of the chain to either over-produce or under-produce goods, you can gain control of later processes by controlling the flow and production of goods. You can also control the rate and flow of goods being produced in many different ways. As the player, you decide minimum and maximum stock levels, the number of workers actually authorized to that particular job, the number of work stations available for use, and their placement relative to each other.

If you want a very fast paced metal industry where raw metal ore is quickly converted to weapons, you would want to place your entire metal industry down one street in a row that matches the process path to minimize travel distances. The player also would have the ability to break production bottlenecks, or artificially create them if needed. Having multiple end products come out of a handful of resources also creates scarcity, which is very important for creating challenging choices the player must face.

One of the resources I was always running out of in T&S was dirt; it was readily available and cheap but was used in making bricks, plaster, and landscaping. Most games would just make dirt be a cheap and readily available resource and not used for other objects besides landscaping, but T&S included it in the recipes of many masonry goods purely to make it more challenging and force the player to decide if using dirt for their lawn or for their walls was more important.

These are the kinds of economic decisions I want to see in Stonehearth. I want to have to choose whether to have my cake or eat it, and it should be impossible to do both. None of those types of decisions have much to do with messing with Hearthling autonomy; in reality if I just ignored those decisions the economy would still work, just not as well. Those kinds of decision are more higher-minded decisions, something akin to a CEO running a factory versus individually commanding a worker to do X task, sort of like a low-level manager on the same factory floor.

I agree about macromanagement being more much fun than micromanagement. I think T&S’ building system is a good example of micromanagement overboard; I often will have builders trap themselves with pathing issues by stacking themselves single file up my scaffolding ladder, and I will have to manually tell them all to go away and try again; often multiple times on larger buildings. In order to prevent this problem in T&S, you need to design your buildings with steps in the walls left out for the initial construction phase or use excessive amounts of scaffolding that you manually place. I did not realize how great of a feature Stonehearth’s automatic scaffolding was until I kept running into this problem on T&S. Now that I’ve experienced T&S’s building system first hand, I’m really impressed with TR’s foresight on the scaffolding problem.

I also agree with it being too early to tell about the pacing and difficulty of Stonehearth. I’m really looking forward to seeing the pacing be more fleshed out as more content comes in, and see how TR handles the balancing issues with difficulty and progression.

@Solus
When compared to T&S, sure Stonehearth is very much macro in that sense. But when looking at games that have some simulated economy, Stonehearth is very much micro in comparison where the player provides everything whereas in those games, the player could care less about production lines and more about trading.

But even in those games, the “economy” isn’t applicable to games like Stonehearth, Timber & Stone or Dwarf Fortress because all 3 of these games are micro and track every object.

Simple example: Furniture.
Macro game: Furniture number, x number of furniture might degrade over time or x number of furniture consumption/year. You get the idea.

Micro game: Chairs, tables, windows, etc, all in different buildings. They can be counted but if degradation/consumption were involved, it would not be based off a number but rather it would be very involved with individual pieces of furniture with their own ‘stats’.

First, put yourself in the shoes of a programmer or one who does algorithmic problems on a daily basis. Then rethink about what you’re proposing here.

I’ll reiterate some points you made to criticize either in positive light or negative light.

First 3 Paragraphs: Basic needs and fulfilling basic needs can be done. But how does one go about defining shelter? A reminder that a [shelter] needs to be able to be defined within code and using game variables that are either already in place or plausible game variables.

By the second paragraph, you begin to wander into your imagination where reality and logic don’t take a strong hold. A summary of your 2nd paragraph: set up a reserve stockpile for the player.
There is no current avatar for the player, but even if there was, the only reason this feature would exist is to provide another way for the player to fail. Eventually, you talk about capitalism, where “1st one with money, 1st one served”, or the “freedom to make money”.

Again, you didn’t flesh out very clearly, the logic behind such a implementation.
First, where does the money come from? Who coins them?

Second, in a game where the population is in the dozens, which professions are the richest? Are they comparable to what a functioning capitalist society would look like?

Third, “paradox we call an economy”? Okay, its all right to not have taken any courses in economics but at least watch your words or at least learn some history.
Your imagination of economy:
Jobs provide needs
Jobs provide money
Money buys needs
I fail to see the paradox.

Fourth, if hearthlings were given wages based on their profession, its not capitalism. The player would be running a corporate scheme because these hearthlings are dependent upon the player to provide their salary. If it were capitalism, some hearthling cooks would be richer than other hearthling cooks. But capitalism isn’t the only way an economy can ‘work’ in a game.
Besides, how do you logically define the price of a product?
Assuming that you want each level of product to have a static price. What happens when the quality of the product sold is too high for hearthlings to buy?
Assuming that you then mentioned additional workers doing the same job, what happens when all craftsmen of the same job are at the same level where they craft “priceless” goods?
Assuming then, that you say that workers can craft whatever level of good they want. Give me a skeleton algorithm of pseudo-dynamic pricing within the confines of the game using plausible variables if necessary.

Fifth, you have a hard-on for being ousted from power. Enough about that. Its a trivial gameplay feature that forces the player to be a hearthling. And how would you go about determining a ‘good economy’ versus a ‘bad economy’ in a game like Stonehearth? What is profit? That pile of gold from selling fur is not profit? or is it? When you say profit, one should assume that there is expenditure and there is a revenue.
There are two types of revenue:
Operating Revenue
Non-Operating Revenue
Non-Operating revenue sources can be imagined easily: "Goblin McGee pays tribute of [x] to Lord Player, Deity of all objects with cubes"
Operating Revenue is considerably more difficult to imagine. First, how are you going to define the gameplay?
Will it be where each individual hearthling acts as their own enterprise within their respective jobs?
Will the entire settlement be considered a single enterprise?
Or if the player is allowed several settlements, will the collective player settlements be considered as a single enterprise?
Addressing this issue is paramount because after all, trading with yourself is not trading: its a glorified form of masturbation. Ever buy baseball cards from yourself? Don’t try, its a sad thing to do.
After addressing this issue, who are the consumers of the enterprise? How heavy will the load be upon our hardware to simulate these consumers?
Assuming that you want to go ahead with true capitalism and every hearthling strikes out to be the best in their profession, what happens when all the craftsmen can’t sell their goods because they are of too high quality/price and they still have to buy bread to fulfill their needs?
What happens when farmers can’t sell their non-qualified goods because craftsmen can’t afford to sell their goods?
What about services? How do soldiers get paid? Assuming the player is indeed in charge of allocating a retinue’s wage, when all other professions get stuck in a grind (like in the previous example), the only hearthlings with purchasing power is the player(?) and their retinue?
Assuming that you want to go ahead where each settlement is a single enterprise, how does the player go about dividing money? Communism? Is meritocracy possible? At this point, the economy is no longer capitalist.
What expenses other than salary exists?
Assuming salary is indeed the only expense, how does the game handle deficit? At the start of the game?
How are consumers going to be modeled? How are you going to define the limits of a consumer’s purchasing power from the player’s enterprise or each individual hearthling’s enterprise?

Paragraphs 4 and 5
I have not played T&S but in Banished, tools breaking is fairly simple and has no real impact on the economy in Banished. And tools breaking does not equate to item decay, although I imagine it to be a veritable substitute within a game like Stonehearth where each item as a chance to break each day.
Speaking of which, if a player were to be extremely (un)lucky with their goods where they don’t break, how do the craftsmen get paid when they aren’t needed to provide anything?
Or what happens when everything breaks all the time? Source providers such as laborers and farmers would be bankrupt because their possessions would be breaking all the time.
I have presented a skeletal overview of problems dealing with a [breaking mechanic].
What about with actual decay?
Decay for each item would be expensive to a computer. Each item carrying with them their own set of data for qualitative purposes.

Having decay within the game is certainly possible. But the question now is, “is toll on computer hardware worth the feature?”

The question now is if the game were to have decay, how would the game model the decay rate?
Modeling decay rate is actually quite easy but what I actually meant was in context of the game.
Items will be in various stages of decay at all times. This equates to a ton of more memory dedicated to calculating stages of decay.
On top of that, you want to factor in freezers, smoking and various methods of preservation. This requires the game to modify object values individually, most of which will have different values than others.
That is extremely taxing, needless to say.

Last Section
What do you mean by the "Hearthling Therapist is the perfect example of player control and worker autonomy working side by side […]"
The “Therapist” is nothing more than GUI for the player to manage individual tasks, it has nothing to do with autonomy.
When a hearthling is hungry, it goes to find food to eat.
When a hearthling is sleepy, it goes to sleep.
There is no autonomy within the game.
The End.
The player doesn’t set any “parameters” other than “Hearthling X does jobs ‘G’ and ‘H’”. What other parameters help to define what a hearthling is allowed to do?
Stonehearth does not have ‘parameters’ that allow the following to happen: “Hearthling X does jobs ‘G’ and ‘H’ when X feels like doing its job” or “Hearthling X gets freetime after 6 hours of doing job ‘G’”

Just redo your economic model based on something algorithmic and not on vapid ‘idealism’ where it might take place in reality(our real world) but would prove to be an insurmountable task to overcome when it comes to coding them into the game or having a consumer-oriented console being able to run the game executable.

Remember, put yourself in the shoes of a developer, not a designer. There is never any significant amount of respect for a designer who is unable to understand his engineer’s problems in doing his job.
“I said I want my skyscraper to float from the ground and be in the shape of a sphere with other various spheres rotating around one big one! Use electro-magnetism to stupefy the Voldemort quirks into Harrying the Potter electrodes into liquefying the excalibur molecules into rigid Casanova lipid cells. I know this will work! I tried it out in my diet-coke and nestle puff-the-magic-dragon equation for transmogrification!”

I think most of our misunderstanding comes from the fact that we are discussing essentially different things. You are are responding to what I am saying as suggestions for Stonehearth, when what I’m saying could be implemented in the genre at large, not just in Stonehearth. A lot of these concepts don’t fit with Stonehearth’s feel or tone at all. In all reality, this entire tangent of discussion should be in an off-topic segment of the forum on a different thread, but I’ve always been a bit of a forum anarchist.

I explained it as best as I could that my production/economy model was being used as an example. Over half of your points against my economic model stem from this misunderstanding. I don’t know how many times I said it’s not for Stonehearth, but I will say it again; that model is NOT for Stonehearth; it’s an (arbitrary) example. Tearing it up piece of piece is sort of annoying, since it is almost off-topic. But, since you kept doing this and it seems to really confuse you, I’m going to keep going back to it, so please look over the chart again since I don’t think you looked at it too hard. If you are going to take the time to criticize something, at least do me the favor of reading it so I don’t have to answer every point you raise that’s already basically covered. That being said, I’m going over it anyways with you.

You asked where the money comes from?

See that? It’s a mint. At a mint, they turn precious metals such as gold, silver into coins. The coins then go into a treasury, who distributes them to banks. That’s where money comes from in this economy, since it’s based around a medieval city’s economy. I thought that was pretty straight forward, but I guess not.

In Capitalism, people ARE paid wages according to their profession; I do not know many WalMart Greeters who make millions of dollars a year and at the same time I’ve never heard of a CEO who makes minimum wage. For simplicity’s sake in any video game, I’d argue people should get paid according to just their job, but if I wanted to get really creative/complex, I could base it on the price of goods they make or sell and their production levels.

On to your next point, how do we come to prices of goods?

It’s not hard to track overall supply and demand in a game; almost all games already track inventory (supply) and you can estimate demand based on your citizen’s needs, especially on commodity goods such as food . You can even use real-life forecasting techniques to guestimate future demand (although not perfectly) to make the projected demand more realistic since it will not be perfectly right (but will be close.) That’s how real businesses figure out how much of a product they will make, and determine how the price will be set. I did this literally all the time in college using excel, I’m not an advanced programmer by any means but I have learned a bit and I know that excel spreadsheets are not incredibly hard to pull data from into your code, and its possible to introduce data into a spreadsheet for calculations.

For saving computing power, you could even limit the number of computations being done by dividing goods into categories; if the demand for food is high and supply is low; then overall food prices should be raised across the board. I actually already did this for my economic model, the color coding of different industries would be a decent way to determine the supply/demand of any given category of goods. I wouldn’t recommend any game to do a full supply-demand-price scheme for every individual item, I’d broadly categorize those items then give them an overall demand scheme per category. Prices for individual items could be set manually, with the supply/demand ratio being a multiplier to that manual set price.

Another point I thought was funny was you asking how to define shelter and to take into account that it has to be coded. I think the fact two different games in relatively different genres did basically the same thing as I’m suggesting is enough evidence that it CAN be done. I think the concept of shelter and room quality are fairly related; if you have no home maybe it’d scale a 0 on a 10 scale for shelter quality. If each of your citizens lives comfortably and has ready access to heat, a roof over their head, a bed, and some nice furniture they could score a 10. Both games I linked to below basically do just that and include it as a mechanic in their game. For someone who called me out for not understanding DF’s difficulty level; I was really surprised you brought that point up since DF has a room quality mechanic.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/v0.34:Room

The hard-on I have for being ousted from power is because that’s what actually happened when rulers managed their economies poorly. You tell me to learn history, but I guess I should link these below. I think it would be a decent mechanic in a city-building game, since it’s a very real failure state that would be interesting. Some games like SimCity 4 have done effectively the same thing by having you fired if you could not balance the city’s budget, and I’ve played other games where if you are just a poor ruler you can be voted out. It’s not really a crazy concept in strategy or city building games, and no, you do not need an actual avatar for it to occur.


I think you misunderstand what I mean about profit. With raw resource extraction (as is the case with your pelt of fur), there is an operating expense; labor and food. There is an opportunity cost with your hearthling working as a trapper instead of lets say a farmer, and there is a revenue in terms of goods they extract from the environment in terms of fur and meat. If you throw in foods to feed the trapper, any upgrades you give them in terms of clothing to increase their speed, and even the bed they have to sleep you can see where other operating expenses come in. So yeah, the gold you get from selling the fur is your revenue, and if you consider that you could have sold the goods necessary for producing that piece of fur (food mostly, but some wood and cloth in my extended expenses) then there actually is a profit so long as the fur is worth more than the resources used to make it. If trappers did not make ample food or furs for the time investment in them, or if farmers made considerably more food than trappers, there would be little reason to have trappers.

Trading within a single settlement depends on the mechanics of the game. In Stonehearth I would say that no, there isn’t trading within your settlement since goods are communal and Hearthlings don’t use money to purchase goods for themselves; they are basically an idealistic Communist society. The only trade happening is between the settlement (a single enterprise) and outside traders. Looking outside of Stonehearth, there can certainly be trade within a settlement. Hell, even Prison Architect has a basic economy based on supply and demand within your prison; your prisoners even earn money by working in prison labor programs, and will purchase goods either directly from the Prison shop, or from other prisoners illicitly. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check it out. It’s a very simple mechanic that is very interesting to watch as a player and illustrates several points I’m trying to make about a game’s economic model.

Limiting consumption in real life is often achieved through supply/demand on its own. If the price of milk turned to $50/gal tomorrow, I doubt you’d rush to the grocery store to buy more milk when you finished it, and I’d wager you’d even use it less. Modeling that into behavior would be tricky, but if your consumer’s can no longer afford the good they want due to demand increasing it’s price, they can’t buy it to oblivion. The designer would have to make sure that every good has substitutes too; again going back to my “category” system for supply/demand. As the player, being able to implement “rations” would also restrict consumption to certain goods and prevent a handful of workers from buying all of one good.

Do you seriously think the tool consumption mechanic as no effect on the economy in Banished? That’s surprising, almost every time I’ve lost a settlement in Banished was because of mismanagement of tools and iron. If your town runs out of tools and cannot keep up with demand for tools, it will fail. I’d rather run out of food or firewood in Banished than tools; because without tools you can’t mine, and if you can’t mine you can’t get metals to make tools unless you get lucky and a merchant sells you either tools or metal, which are very expensive and require you to sacrifice lots of other goods.

I’d agree with you that food decay probably isn’t a feature worth the hardware tax in Stonehearth. One way to ignore the decay model entirely is simply make food that has been preserved as higher quality ingredients. If you have salted raw beef be better for satisfying hunger than raw beef, you incentivize more complex food production.

I will say that if food decay was to be implemented into Stonehearth, having goods smoked or frozen would be similar to crafting them on a workbench. You could have “raw beef” that becomes “beef jerky” after you add salt and use it on the “smoking rack” or what-not. You could do the same thing with freezers; require the ice to “pack them” on a special workbench then restrict “frozen food” items to a fridge storage container. Obviously, this isn’t really necessary, just something to add difficulty and depth.

I disagree about your analysis of autonomy. Have you ever played the Sims? In the Sims, if you turn off free-will, your sims will pee themselves, stop bathing, and eventually starve themselves to death. That’s no autonomy. In Stonehearth, you can’t turn off free will. Your Hearthlings will always eat food that’s available, and complete tasks you give them in the order that works best for them. No, they won’t create work for themselves, but they aren’t mindless either. Hearthlings are like low-level company employees without much initiative but have a lot of discipline; so long as you give them something to do, they will do it how the best way possible for them. Maybe autonomy standards are way higher now than what I grew up with, but the fact my Hearthlings will feed themselves on their own makes them autonomous in my book.

Setting parameters G, H, and Y actually gives you a great deal of control but still allows your Hearthlings to be autonomous. Also, if Stonehearth had parameters for the Hearthlings to start doing stuff on its own, it’d move from the game realm into simulation, and wouldn’t be very fun. There’s a balance between autonomy and control, and it mostly has to do with the difference between micromanagement and macro-management. No, your Hearthlings won’t macro-manage your settlement, but they will micromanage it automatically for you.

Your last little bit actually annoyed me. I understand what’s realistic to develop, and none of my examples are impossible. None of my ideas are something I made up from thin air. My economic model was actually based on an extended supply chain of a Banished-type game design I wrote up that had influence from the original Stronghold. The shelter need was pulled from two different games; Dwarf Fortress and Prison Architect. RimWorld has a temperature mechanic, and food actually spoils if you leave it outdoors, which is where I thought of food decay. Supply and demand is used in so many games, that I’d be offending you by listing them all. All of my game examples are made from small studios with small teams.

I’d like to clarify I’m not a game designer or a programmer, I love video games and I have a few ideas for myself on what makes a good game and what types of things are fun for ME to play. If you disagree, that’s your deal. If you continue to treat me like a child and claim everything I’m saying is “not possible” or “too-taxing” or involves “electro-magnetism” when I’m clearly giving examples, then I’m just not going to respond anymore because frankly it’s a waste of my time.

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I apologize if I sounded like I sounded condescending. I appreciate your extensive research into this subject though. It was EXACTLY what I wanted from you.

If you noticed, it’s a tremendous improvement over your last post with being more in-depth.

Don’t get me wrong though, I still disagree with some of your points. But mainly, I’ve been able to see the reasoning/background on how you contrived your ideas, which to me, is paramount when presenting ideas.

Again, I do apologize for my condescending tone, if you were deeply offended by it.