The 2% light bonus...

[chemie]

Really?  2%??? That is meaningless.  It rounds off to zero.  You would get more from a dup with a single point in operate.

2% is an insult to the programmer who had to waste their time coding a feature most players will never utilize.

Now 25%?  Even 20%?  I would be putting lights up over every dup-operated machine.

 

This needs to be buffed? What do see as the right threshold?

[goboking]

I wouldn't have phrased it the way you did, but I do think it's a bit on the mild side.  For aesthetic reasons, I personally build lights anyway.  If I didn't, though, I don't think a 2% buff would be enough to convince me that lights are worth the heat generation.

[Technoincubus]

For 2% I won't even touch light options. 

[Darkin Coaled]

lights are for berries, always used them only for that. if they want us to use them more often a 2% bonus to something or other ain't gonna change my mind.

[fredhp]

I think 25% is an ideal buff for light bonus.

Lights requires power, generate heat, will require some automation.... meaning more costs to build and maintain.

[Nightinggale]

Now we need to build lights everywhere and add proximity sensors to avoid wasting power when dupes are elsewhere. While I like the idea, I'm most likely not going to do it for 2%. I love the proximity sensor though. I can imagine various setups where it makes a huge difference.

[goboking]

While we're on the subject of lights, I wouldn't mind a late-game tech for LED lights made from plastic that produce less heat.

[Rebrait]

Just now, goboking said:

While we're on the subject of lights, I wouldn't mind a late-game tech for LED lights made from plastic that produce less heat.

10W... they are led lights

[SakuraKoi]

Well, a 10% bonus would a balanced bonus. 2% is indeed meaningless but 25% would quite possibly be too much.

[badgamer123]

5%for work bonus and walk/ladder speed seem more balance

[goboking]

It is worth noting that the bonus is 2% on top of whatever decor boost light offers, but I still think 2% is too low.  10% sounds about right for me.

[ozymandias_3]

So...does it buff the bathroom usage as well? 

[Lurve]

The important thing is that there IS a bonus.  The exact number can probably be tweaked with a mod to whatever value you think is fair.

[PhailRaptor]

18 hours ago, Rebrait said:

10W... they are led lights

They appear to be quite confused.  They consume very little wattage, but produce a huge amount of heat, far too much to be LEDs.

[SharraShimada]

2% is not much, but to say its a waste is also not right. 

If you play for 1000 cycles, and your dupes work all the time, you save work time worth 20 cycles for each dupe. At 10 dupes, its already 200 cycles worth of time. Of course minus the off-time. 

And hey, its a bonus. If you dont like it, just ignore it, and please stop complaining. If you want more, make a mod. 

[Guinaro]

Yeah, but have you taken into account, all the work you need to do get those lights in place? To automate them, to stop them from heating up the place? The extra runs you need to do, to power them? Extra infrastructure to cool them? Extra resources consumed for wiring, ...?
So + 2% is not actually +2%, certainly not initially.
I cast my vote for at least a +20% workspeed increase. At least make the light mechanic worth implementing in your base.

I would also suggest that having dupes stumble around in the dark, slows them down by 50%. That way you would be motivated to light up your base.
We could also design a Suit with Helmet that lights up the environment in the direction the dupe is facing, allowing for base speed. Placing actual lights would provide you with a +25% speed increase for walking and climbing. Ofcourse walking with such a helmet around, has a severe penalty regarding your look. Such helmets are ugly: so -20 decor penalty!

Also as previously suggested. Some form of LED lights, which have much less heat production would be nice aswell.

[chemie]

1 hour ago, Guinaro said:

...
I would also suggest that having dupes stumble around in the dark, slows them down by 50%. That way you would be motivated to light up your base.
...

The problem here is you would put lights on dup sensors and the whole map would turn into a disco with lights flashing on and off in an annoying way

[DreamApart]

19 hours ago, Lurve said:

The important thing is that there IS a bonus.  The exact number can probably be tweaked with a mod to whatever value you think is fair.

Yeah, you got the point. 2% can probably be a placeholder for further tweaking, just because there are way more things to balance.

5 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

And hey, its a bonus. If you dont like it, just ignore it, and please stop complaining. If you want more, make a mod. 

Well, I think it's OK to complain. If everyone should shut up because something is a bonus there is no need for a beta test.

[Nightinggale]

10 minutes ago, DreamApart said:

Well, I think it's OK to complain. If everyone should shut up because something is a bonus there is no need for a beta test.

If we shouldn't mention poorly balanced numbers, does that mean the complain about the gas range using 4 times the amount of gas as a metal refinery is wrong too? The preview is an open beta and all issues should be reported. If an incorrect number makes a feature (almost) useless and needs to be modded to be useful, then it would be something to talk about.

[Lilalaunekuh]

On 28.6.2019 at 2:29 PM, SakuraKoi said:

Well, a 10% bonus would a balanced bonus.

That 10% bonus was my first idea.

On 28.6.2019 at 2:55 PM, badgamer123 said:

5%for work bonus and walk/ladder speed seem more balance

A good one in my eyes as well, but do we really want more conditional stuff involved in the movement of your dupes?

Spoiler

(I see problems with automation and game performance)

So now the bigger question:

Should it be an additive or multiplicative bonus?

• Right now it seems multiplicative.
• I would argue for an even higher additive bonus

 

=> How about an additive 50%-100% exclusive work speed buff?

Spoiler

It´s a hard job to set up lights early and keep them working (power, heat and even the installation work).

So there should be a good reason to build early lights (besides the new room requirements, please correct me if I am the only one that dislikes that focus).

So an equivalent of 2-4 skill points (+50-100%) seems like a good speed buff.

 

And if we are talking about the late game, it loses much value if your duplicates already work at 600% speed.

So even the huge 100% buff would only be a 16,6% increase in working speed. (Not talking about the increasing travel to work time ration in the late game.)

 

 

[badgamer123]

1 hour ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

That 10% bonus was my first idea.

A good one in my eyes as well, but do we really want more conditional stuff involved in the movement of your dupes?

  Hide contents

It´s a hard job to set up lights early and keep them working (power, heat and even the installation work).

So there should be a good reason to build early lights (besides the new room requirements, please correct me if I am the only one that dislikes that focus).

So an equivalent of 2-4 skill points (+50-100%) seems like a good speed buff.

 

And if we are talking about the late game, it loses much value if your duplicates already work at 600% speed.

So even the huge 100% buff would only be a 16,6% increase in working speed. (Not talking about the increasing travel to work time ration in the late game.)

 

 

There never going to be enough movement speed lol,In every game you should chase for higher move speed you know .

[Lilalaunekuh]

4 minutes ago, badgamer123 said:

There never going to be enough movement speed lol,In every game you should chase for higher move speed you know .

You, me and most of you love permanent movement speed, it´s awesome in every way.

 

But we are talking about a conditional buff, so if you don´t have light everywhere ...

Don´t even think about the additional computational time needed to process an "additional" new value for the pathfinding algorithm.

Spoiler

And if you play the game to a later stage at least for most of us fewer performance requirements result in more speed than a real speed buff would do

 

 

[Nightinggale]

There is a static array of light for each cell. While I agree we shouldn't slow down movement calculations, this concept will at least most likely not be horrible for performance.

I see other issues. If the dupe is trying to use the fastest route, one has light and the other doesn't, then the dupe will pick the one with lights. Next check and the routes swap light, meaning the dupe will now pick the other route and we have another "heading for oxygen" type of dancing. Lights can turn on and off based on when dupes open doors to get through and similar, meaning lights on ladders might not be constant at all.

What if we turn on the lights with proximity sensors? The dupe will plan a path through dark areas, only to make them light when passing through. Clearly checking for proximity controlled lights is out of the question for pathfinding.

Maybe pathfinding should just ignore light and then the actual movement code can use a light modifier.

[badgamer123]

it would be overkill to make the game waste computation power for 2-5% move speed ,any path that is faster should be taken.

[Coolthulhu]

For movement speed, the bonus would have to be in range of +20% to even be noticeable. And it still would lose hard to +50% from having plastic/metal tiles, which also cost no power.

For work speed, in most cases even +50% wouldn't be huge, since dupes spend most "work" time "preparing" and not actually working:

• Moving to workplace (by far the biggest time sink)
• Waiting for the critter to come to grooming station (often a really long time due to how AI works with lag)
• Grabbing ingredients
• Running away from the forge because it wasn't full of coolant after 2nd/3rd craft in a row

The exceptions are molecular forge, glass forge and maybe kitchen, where the light bonus would be a no-brainer above +10% because you can chain many jobs without breaks.

Overall it sounds like someone though "how can we make light give a bonus?" instead of the much better question "should we make light give a bonus?". And even if the answer is "yes", it's the kind of "yes" that goes "have buildings like kitchen and forge come with an integrated light to avoid pointless tedium of setting up a motion sensor/weight plate light". Just imagine the dupe flipping the light on when starting work.