Green Industry Is The Lose

[essence]

Just for review:

Lazziez-Faire Industry:

• Gains a PM bonus equal to Power, so having high-end buildings benefits your low-end production.
  
• Ignores the first 5 pollution to your GM, so having a Power up to 5 (and thus gaining that bonus to production) doesn't matter in terms of your GM.
  
• Has a GM Cap of 10/-10, but the instant your GM goes negative in the first place, it stops being relevant, so the only thing you care about is not going into Desolation.
  
• Drains your pollution more slowly than anything else, but since you ignore 5 of it, the only time that really matters is when you get huge overflows, and then you can just pop over to Green for 12 hours and it'll go away.
  

Neutral Industry:

• Is entirely dependent on your neighbor list for GM bonuses.
  
• Drains pollution moderately.
  
• Has caps of 20/-20, which will basically allow you to get away with 97% of all circumstances without suffering Riots or Desolation.
  

Green Industry:

• Has massive GM caps -- so massive, in fact, that it's only theoretically possible to get near the positive GM cap. You would have to be mining Bauxite, running a Syndicalism, under sunny or rainy weather, with at least half of your city undeveloped and at least 5 green neighbors and/or lighthouses in order to approach the cap. Because it's weather-dependent, that means that even if you manage to maintain this perfect setup, 50% of the time it's going to be no more useful to you than it would be to be Neutral, because the weather is the difference between those two GM caps.
  
• Has small PM caps, which presumably you don't care about because you expected that to happen and you're not really trying.
  
• Drains pollution fastest -- but costs a Power, which increases your base pollution by one in the first place, which docks your GM a point, making those massive caps that much more useless.
  

In short, Green Industry isn't a playstyle -- it's a trap for unwary n00bs, or at best a short phase that more experienced players go through for a half a day if they happen to get caught off-guard by the onset of bad weather.

Even Neutral, which is clearly designed to be the 'null hypothesis', gives you a reliable 'bonus' insofar as you won't ever go into Desolation or Riots unless a Horseman forces you there. The caps are high enough that it's exceedingly unlikely you'll ever need them to be higher or lower, and that's really the main draw of Neutral: you don't have to play to it. LF requires intent; neutral lets you just do your thing, and that's cool.


But Green is stupid. There shouldn't be traps for n00bs in a well-designed game. Green Industry should be a totally playable choice, but for that to happen, it would need to have something besides pollution drain that made it useful. The PM caps on LF aren't really all that useful either -- it's really hard to get +30 PM, too -- but LF gives you solid, dependable bonuses that are useful even at single-digit PMs. If you play smart and don't get massively polluted, Green gives you jack shit except a higher Power cost which leads to more pollution which leads to a lower GM.


Green Industry needs to have some sort of bonus that makes it more like LF: something that forces you to play to it with intent, but actually gives you the ability to grow things the same way that LF's power-to-PM bonus and pollution-ignoring gives you the ability to produce things.


Random Suggestions:

• Green Industry gives you +1 GM for each Windmill, +5 for each Solar Plant, and +8 for each Reactor (basically +1 GM per square taken up by any building that allows you to avoid burning coal for power.)
  
• Green Industry gives you a straight-up 100% chance of growing one crop every food cycle regardless of your actual GM, in addition to whatever would normally happen.
  
• Green Industry gets a GM bonus equal to your PM penalty. This would create an interesting dynamic of trying to get your PM low without constantly threatening riots, and also encourage Green people to not have big-time industry.
  
• Green Industry pleases Ramul, whose base restocking time starts at only one hour for Green people.
  

And, my personal favorite:

• Green Industry gets a bonus to GM equal to the number of Trees in their city.
  

This one I particularly like because it encourages the 'happy plant land' image that people have when they think of food-rich territory, but also means that Green players benefit from the city-expansion techs and that once you commit to a Green path, you have a tendency to stay on it. It also means the GM cap is actually meaningful: it's not that hard to have 10-15 trees in a big city, which means the cap is approachable even if you're not a Bauxite-harvesting Syndicalism. I honestly believe that Green Industry would be balanced if, exactly as it is now, the +1GM/tree rule was added on.






x

[Rasteroid]

what about if everyone on your map was green?

[essence]

"What about if" doesn't matter -- what matters is what actually happens. But sure, let's play Magical Tea Party.

If everyone on the map was green, it would take about 5 seconds for someone to realize that he would get all of the benefits of all those green neighbors without the low PM cap and stupid Power penalty by switching to Neutral. It would take slightly longer for most everyone else to catch on, and before long, the map wouldn't be all -- or even mostly -- Green anymore. People would find out that being Neutral wasn't that smart when the board isn't full of Green players, and some of them would turn LF for the actual benefits, which would hurt the idiots who stuck with Green even more. There's even a name for this effect: the tragedy of the commons -- and designing without keeping it in mind leads to silly designs. Which this is.

I have a deck in M:tG that can potentially kill people on turn 2 without using any rare cards. It's a one in four hundred thousand chance, but it could happen. You know what actually happens? It loses games. Green Industry is the same thing -- and it needs help.

[Rasteroid]

better milk LF then.

[essence]

So the official response is "Go fuck yourself, I can't even be bothered to make anything approaching a counterpoint"?


Awesome.


Because I'm all here if you actually have some defense of Green Industry as it currently stands. I'm perfectly willing to believe that I've missed something. But I've asked on chat several times, and no one has been able to say anything in defense of Green Industry, and every time, you've just blown the whole thing off like you have some sort of secret understanding that no one else does. So what's the deal, Rast? Is there something the entire long-term playerbase isn't seeing, or are you just being a stubborn dick about it -- to the detriment of the only game you've made that anyone has ever spent any money on?


I'm not trying to disrespect you, but I feel like you're disrespecting me. I don't like spending an hour making a complex post to make a point only to get blown off without any actual contrafaction.

I'm trying to make the game better, because I like it and I want it to succeed. I don't get your attitude here at all.

[thekirkunited]

I agree with Essence's opening remarks on this. The benefits of green industry simply don't balance well against the other two. I played with green for a while thinking the bonuses to GM and pollution reduction would be a good combo for me since I was running bauxite at the time and trying to maximize food output.

In practice however the 5% extra pollution reduction is pretty insignificant especially with the power hit. It only works if you have a bunch of green neighbors, which is an unreliable proposition at best.

A tweak of some kind to make green appealing in it's own right (irrespective of your neighbors' choices) would be a good move in my opinion.

[Rasteroid]

As a matter of fact, I did not say go fuck yourself. I didn't swear at all, I was quite civilized.

But since you've started, yes, go fucking fuck yourself. Off the edge of a fucking cliff. Don't talk to me about respect, when clearly this thread lost sight of it long ago.

I refuse to argue anything when it's taken it to the point of a religious feud, turns out I have a million more important things to address.

[essence]

This isn't a religious feud. It's a game designer who has heard several players address him about an issue in several venues and has yet to actually acknowledge that it's a valid issue in any way. I realize you've got 'a million things to deal with' - that's called life, and we all do it every day, but even with all of the other more important shit that I have to do every day, I took the time to give you feedback on a part of this game that is clearly unright, and you shat in my oatmeal.

You have no idea how you come off to the people you reply to when you say something like "go milk your LF". It literally comes off to me as "shove it up your ass, because I couldn't care less about you, your opinion, the work you put into your post, or actually the entire aspect of the game you're concerned about."

Literally. And I actually know what "Literally" really means, and I'm using it correctly! That's what "go milk your LF" literally translates as, because it brushes aside everything that came before it. Go back and read it carefully and you'll see clearly: I'm not dropping f-bombs at you because I disrespect you, I'm doing it because I'm trying to convey to you that fact that you are disrespecting me.

If you don't give a shit about that, and you WANT to be one of those douchebag game devs who thinks that just because a BUNCH of players are all complaining about the same aspect of the game, they must ALL be selfish fucktards who only want their personal playtime to be, you know, better, that's all you. It's no skin of my back in the long run -- I'll keep "milking my LF" and fucking off. I'm playing URO anyway, I'm not going Green anytime soon, so I'm damn sure not saying all of this because it's going to make my personal game any better. I'm trying to do YOU a motherfucking favor by giving you feedback on a game that YOU are trying to make money off of.

And I'm not the only one who's giving you the same feedback. You've heard the same thing on the chat now from at least four other players, and TKU is backing me up, so I know I'm not some whackjob. Like I said above, I want you to succeed -- that's why I put in the hour-plus it took to formulate and write the OP in the first place. Your complete failure to respect that, or to put together any form of reply that actually addresses the issue in any way shape or form is the real crime here -- not my using a vulgar word because I'm trying to show you what you sound like.


If you still want me to fuck off, that's totally fine -- but it's your loss. I'm on your side, even if you're too caught up in OMG HE SAID THINGS I DIDN'T LIKE HEARING to see it.

If you're willing to get over your ego, Mr. Walle, then fuck it: let's make this fucking game fucking awesome, motherfucker.

[thekirkunited]

Sigh, flamewars.... great.

While I can't support Essence's vitriol, your responses were rather dismissive. He wrote a chapter of feedback for you, (feedback which you requested) and your responses were a single sentence long.

While no expletives were used it could be interpreted as dismissive and as such rather insulting to the effort he put forth to help you.

Towards the end you both come off as rather childish.

I don't suppose it's possible for everyone to calm down and talk about the game in a constructive manner?

[essence]

I think I've made my constructive points, but I'll summarize for ease of consumption:

The problem with Green Industry is that it relies on lots of people being Green, but the moment that lots of people are Green together, it's actively more beneficial to any one of them as individuals to stop being Green and go Neutral, which allows them to gather all of the benefits of their Green neighbors without contributing to the Green-ness. This results in rapid collapse of the system -- the tragedy of the commons -- which means that in the end, no one is Green unless they just haven't figured out that it's clearly and provably the worst of the three paths.

The solution is simple: let there be a reason to be Green even if none of your neighbors are. Even if it's a reason that you have to build around to take advantage of -- in fact, that would be better than a reason that didn't require effort. The moment Green has an independent reason for existence, people will be Green for that reason, which will encourage more people to be Green for the current, essentially nonexistent, reason.

[Rasteroid]

Ok, so you say not everyone is going to be green.

So since LF is so OP, presumably everyone in the world is going to be LF tomorrow, or sometime down the road.

So who's going to be able to grow food, the one vital currency you can only otherwise farm in a slow, expensive greenhouse? The answer is, the first person who goes back to green.

Ta da, world balanced.

[essence]

Straw man. No one has ever said LF is OP, therefore your entire post is irrelevant.


Seriously, though: Green is UP. Neutral is a solid choice. LF is a solid choice. This is what you don't seem to understand: it's actively better to use Neutral to grow food, because Neutral allows for just as high of a GM, a higher PM, and doesn't cost you Power.

If Green actually was better for growing food, it would be great. Which is exactly why most of my suggestions in the OP involved a conditional GM bonus when playing green -- that would actually make your post sensible. But there is no reason to play Green when Neutral exists, therefore your point isn't.


[edit]Let me be really clear on what I'm saying here. I realize that in strict mathematical terms, Green Industry will usually have a GM that's a point or two higher than Neutral. Green gets the bonus from Green neighbors but doesn't get the penalty for LF neighbors, so as long as the Neutral person has at least two LF neighbors (two because the Power penalty makes up for one LF neighbor all by itself), the Green player will actually have a higher GM than Neutral.

But for that extra 10-20% more food, you have a lower PM cap so high that you'll end up in riots because the weather changed even when you haven't been stocking up on things, and you have to spend an extra coal on every single building you activate. The extra Power you spend actually makes it easier (by which I mean 'possible') to minimize Pollution with Neutral industry than with Green.

Let's not forget that food alone of all of the resources rots away, so you're going to lose some of that extra few percentage points, and that Ramul eats food first, so you're keeping yourself from using the Black Market if you keep it in your stock. The tiny bonus you get is eaten away by design -- food is meant to be temporary -- and it just plain makes infinitely more sense to save on Coal and play Neutral.

If Green Industry could actually deliberately play to the strengths of food consistently in a way that Neutral cannot, it MIGHT be a viable option (depending on how good the 'strengths of food' are.) As it is, it's simply not. [/edit]

[essence]

And as a separate point, I'd like to have a discussion about game balance in the abstract. Your posts seem to imply that because there's a circumstance in which Green is nominally better than Neutral (i.e. when every other player is LF), it's "balanced".

That's a pile of hooey. "Balanced" is not the same thing as "useful under a limited circumstance that may or may not ever see play." There's a reason no Magic player would ever play a card that says "If you get attacked by a 3/1 flying creature, you win the game." That's not a balanced card, and for the same reasons that Green Industry isn't a balanced choice: it's only useful under a limited cirumstance, and you don't control that circumstance at all.

Neutral and Lazziez-Faire both allow you to build to their strengths knowing that those strengths will be there. You always have reasonable caps under Neutral. You always have power added to your PM under LF. There's nothing you can build to under Green, because the two benefits -- a high GM cap and neighbor-bonuses -- are both dependent on things you can't control: the weather (and that only when you've built to it to an extreme degree in the first place!) and your neighbors.

Green needs a bonus you can build around -- a bonus that's dependable -- and it should help you grow, keep, or better use food, because that's nominally what Green is for.


OK, so that didn't really stay about game balance in the abstract, but I made my point.

[Rasteroid]

My plan was, if LF or Green weren't balanced to play with their pollution dissipation rates a little.

Don't want to make them any more complicated.

[thekirkunited]

Playing with the pollution numbers is a good idea, though I think a little extra complexity in this instance wouldn't hurt. The game is already quite complex and the players who stick around are presumably the people who enjoy that sort of thing.

Bumping the dissipation rate of Green might be a good start but with high dissipation as it's only draw it's more likely to be used as a temporary fix for nasty pollution rather than as an actual 'policy'.

Neutral is a nice middle ground for those who dislike complication. It has great caps in both directions so desolation and strikes are unlikely to happen and you have decent room to grow for both industry and agronomy.

If you really want to keep it simple I would suggest REMOVING the other benefits of LF and then tweaking the pollution numbers. Otherwise I would ADD equally complex mechanics to Green to make it more interesting.

Just my 2 cents.

Anyone else have an opinion on the issue? We've only heard three voices in this forum. An extra pair of eyes could quite useful.