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Rebalancing the maintenance system

cbrgamer2

Well-Known Member
Messages
723
I know the maintenance system has been brought up in another thread, but I have a different take on it so I thought I'd start a new one (and hope I don't get roasted for it ...)

I love the idea of the maintenace system. It never made any sense to me that you needed a bit of oil to build a generator and that fueled it forever. Same with turrets and they also magically got infinite ammo. In my last playthrough I didn't build machine gun turrets for this reason (I allowed myself laser turrets, because they at least required power).

So thank you Kinggath for making the game make a little more sense (and everything else of course!)

That said, I do think the basic idea of 1 defense = 1 cap and 1 power = 1 cap is too simplistic and ignores other factors when considering what to build. If you want to put down a laser turret, you need to pay 2 for the power and another 8 for the defense. May as well just plop down two machine gun turrets and get a full 10 defense for the same cost, without the hassle of getting power to them (and skipping science 1 and using much easier to obtain materials). In other words, while discouraging turret spam at the start of the game and making us think of other options, I think it actually encourages turret spam over other options in the later game. If you have the perks and materials to build better stuff, there should be some benefit to it (aside from just space reduction I guess).

For defense, I suggest half the cost is for fuel and half for ammo.
So both machine gun turrets still cost 1 cap for each defense (5 and 8).
Shotgun, laser and missile turrets cost only half of their defense value (no fuel, since they are power operated)
Spotlights cost no upkeep at all as they use neither fuel or ammo. May as well put upkeep on street lights ...

It should be noted that the more advanced items already have perk requirements and are harder to build anyway.

For power, I think the more advanced generators should be more efficient, thus worth building later on (and even replacing less advanced generators). By more advanced, I mean needing higher levels of science to build. So maybe the large generator could cost only 7 caps and the fusion generator (which already needs science 4 and a pretty decent material clost to build) should cost 50 caps.

I know in the video Kinggath said he wanted to stop players from just going to high end stuff, but I think perk and material requirements already do this (my intelligence 1 melee character won't be building any fusion reactors or heavy laser turrets any time soon).
 
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