Simulation games

After a comment earlier, I decided to post the following because I bet a lot of people need to hear this:

It is OK if your valley isn't decorated at all.

I have played the game since early access. The very second it released, and to quote myself:

My valley isn't decorated worth a Softwood

There are rocks and ice blocks everywhere. I only break them to get places. I only put decorations down for quests.

I am here for the storyline and quests.

Occasionally I go wild and unlock all the recipes...

But decorating and collecting critters on a Saturday morning at stupid o'clock? Not for me.

And if its not for you... thats OK.

Stop judging yourself against others in the subreddit.

Its your dreamlight valley. Your forgotten. Your playthrough.

Enjoy it.

From my understanding, these are the goals of the Tile Upkeep expense:

• Extra challenge: To create more challenge for maintaining a profit

• Thoughtful expansion: To apply a "risk" to purchasing new tiles so you plan expansion more carefully and pace gameplay

• Late-game expense: To add an expense that scales up in the late-game to counteract your income scaling up a lot in the late game

Those were all good goals for the devs to strive for, but Tile Upkeep was the WRONG way to achieve them, because it has now created its own set of problems. These problems decrease the realism of the simulation, and reduce the diversity and fun of strategies the player can pursue in city building.

• Unfair scaling: Tile Upkeep scales with the resources present in a tile, but vanilla maps have a serious lack of resources in them. Custom maps that recreate very fertile regions of the world have insane Tile Upkeep costs.

• Nonsensical compared to other expenses: Simply owning open ocean and completely undeveloped plots of land will cost the player more money than entire city services.

• Punishes regional/rural play: It punishes the player from building up an entire region at once, spreading out settlements across the region, or any kind of rural play.

• Punishes expansion before density: It punishes expanding wide BEFORE you expand tall. But this is a common rule of city development; when a city is small it's always cheaper to build out first before you build up (unless geography prevents it). You don't want to force the player to create a Manhattan city core before they even have the surrounding suburbs and farms and rural areas to support it. If anything the city core of skyscrapers should be one of the last things a player accomplishes in their build.

• Not an interesting/strategic choice: Lastly, although the devs wanted this to add an element of strategic decision-making to city planning, buying a tile is HARDLY a strategic choice. It's a simple binary choice, that you make once. Either you continue to leave a tile unpurchased, or you purchase it and now you're stuck with the upkeep for life and you can never sell it back. And the price of purchasing land/tiles never fluctuates based on anything in the economic simulation, nor does the upkeep (other than being based on how many you've purchased).

I think every single one of these goals can be better accomplished by massively reducing Tile Upkeep and shifting MOST of the expense over to Infrastructure Upkeep. Here's why I think that's better in every way:

It still meets the three objectives:

• Still creates a challenge: However much expense you wanted the player to incur from tile upkeep can simply be shifted over towards infrastructure upkeep.

• Actually thoughtful expansion: You still have to be thoughtful with your expansion, because if you want to build a new rural community, or a new rural industry, you need to consider all the up front costs of running roads and utilities there. And then you need to consider all the upkeep costs of whether it'd be worth it. Maybe building a rural town with local utilities and services will cause you a net loss to maintain every month, but it creates a valuable source of workers for a nearby factory and the growth of that factory's company benefits you more.

• Still scales with late-game: Infrastructure upkeep will still scale up fast in the late-game because the periphery of the city grows quadratically (like how a 12 inch pizza is much more than 20% bigger than a 10 inch pizza). Plus you can add in late-game infrastructure/utility/service types that have higher capacity but increased costs.

And it solves all of the problems of Tile Upkeep:

• Resources simply existing will not create excessive costs: Just because a tile contains fertile land, or ore, or oil, doesn't create an excessive cost for the player. Laying the INFRASTRUCTURE to harvest the resources in the tile will actually create the cost, such as laying down the roads, power, water, services, etc. for farming, logging, what have you. Now the "cost" of those resources is correctly attached to being a consequence of the player choosing to harvest them, NOT applying the cost to the player unnecessarily before they've even decided to harvest them.

• Infrastructure costs actually make sense: Real world property taxes paid by municipalities for open ocean or undeveloped land are hardly as high as they are in this update. But maintaining a road, a bridge, a tunnel, a power line, a rural services building, a rural utility, these definitely cost local governments a lot of money. This will shift the expenses of the city into emerging from realistic sources.

• Enables regional play: You can now spread your communities and industries across the region in a realistic way without being punished, since it's mostly the cost of the infrastructure connecting them that costs you (you would be better off building communities/industries closer rather than farther if possible).

• Enables expansion before density: For the same reasons as the point above, your city will actually be able to grow wider at first until it makes more sense to densify the core. That's why you hardly see skyscrapers in a town of several thousand. It's only once a town has grown wide enough that you will reach a point where it makes more sense to build a taller building in the center than to run utilities all the way to the edge of town and commute that distance. And at first, you will only see several floor buildings, then maybe some real medium density once the town has grown larger still, then finally only after the city has expanded very wide will you see actual high density and skyscrapers. And that transition from expansion to density is currently punished by Tile Upkeep.

• IS an interesting, strategic choice: Infrastructure is not just a binary choice. You can choose what mix of infrastructure and utilities and services you provide to a rural community or industry. Roads and power and water? Mail? Firefighting? Police? Locally produced power or pay for the power lines to connect it to the main grid? And you can also choose what level of each of these to provide. Dirt roads with little maintenance? High capacity paved roads with high maintenance? Multiple roads to split traffic heading in different directions? A small fire station? Is a water tower enough? Do I need a whole water pump? AND the costs of all these things actually fluctuate based on the wages of employees, the resources (such as fuel for power), whether you are importing services, etc. AND you can always reverse these decisions in the future by changing your budget amounts or demolishing the infrastructure, utilities, or service buildings. So overall a MUCH more strategic decision than simply buying a tile.

I'm happy for someone to change my mind on this but I feel like shifting the bulk of the expense of Tile Upkeep over to Infrastructure (by which I mean utilities and services as well) it would MASSIVELY help the game.

I see a lot of people saying it doesn't matter for PC players that eyelashes are coming since we already have CC ones, but: With eyelashes coming as an official thing with their own category, they will have their own dedicated texture area, meaning Kijiko and other eyelash creators will most likely be able to transfer their eyelashes to that instead of having to take the place of glasses or rings, meaning we will finally be able to use eyelashes without giving up one of these.

If they are indeed on their own category it will also be just a lot more convenient especially if you use the glasses version where you have to put them on in every single look (and if you use the skin details version, well it won't take the same category as one of the skin details).