Merge Great Hall and Mess Hall

[Magheat2009]

Mess Hall provides +3 morale, enough for a tier 3 skill tree the dupe is interested in. This can be obtained by just building two walls around mess tables. For comparison, the shower which gives +3 morale requires pumped water and costs a time slot.

Great hall provides +6 morale, enough for a tier 3 skill tree the dupe is not interested in. All you require is an easily procured decor item and a disabled water cooler. Nature Reserve, which provide the same amount of morale as the Great Hall, requires a lot more planning.

OP nature of the Mess and Great Halls reduces the importance of morale as a mechanic in the game, as well as reducing significance of diverse ways of gaining morale, such as Nature Reserves.

So, Great hall and Mess Hall should be merged into a single room called the Mess Hall giving +4 morale requiring an enabled water cooler. Enabled water cooler costs dupe labour and caries the risk of spreading Food Poisoning. The decor item requirement is unnecessary in the system I have proposed.

By merging the two rooms, Klei can also make the information about them easier to understand and remember for new players.

 

[ZombieDupe]

I have found it unreliable to rely on parks and nature reserves, primarily because they last for half a day instead of the full day. I think the great hall requirements could be set for the mess hall and the great hall could have extra requirements to it. The morale bonuses could be reduced to 2 and 4, right now they are insane for the cost of basically nothing.

[Magheat2009]

2 hours ago, ZombieDupe said:

I have found it unreliable to rely on parks and nature reserves, primarily because they last for half a day instead of the full day. I think the great hall requirements could be set for the mess hall and the great hall could have extra requirements to it. The morale bonuses could be reduced to 2 and 4, right now they are insane for the cost of basically nothing.

That is supposed to be the challenge with Parks/Nature Reserves. Designing your base in such a way that your dupes pass through them frequently.

[tuxii]

I disagree with nerfing the Great Hall simply because morale in rockets is painful as it is and there is an associated achievement: Morale High Ground (Have all Duplicants in a rocket survive in space for 10 cycles in a row with a morale of 25 or higher.)

Requiring an actually active recreation building I do agree with but I doubt most players know they can disable it anyway.  In Spaced Out the recreation building often is an active Party Line Phone as well.

In my 6200 cycle Base Game save my Great Hall was made with an Expresso Machine that didn't function for the first 2100 cycles it existed.

[Spoonwood]

On 4/24/2022 at 5:00 AM, Magheat2009 said:

Great hall provides +6 morale, enough for a tier 3 skill tree the dupe is not interested in. All you require is an easily procured decor item and a disabled water cooler.

Not always so easily procured on Rime or a 100k map.  On Rime you can easily also lose your great hall bonus, since the plant could cool off and then stifle that you had for a decor object.  I think you can use a painting?  But that requires reed fiber, and that takes some effort on Rime.  You can use a marble statue (doesn't even have to get decorated).  But, that's a bit into the research tree, and thus requires more time to get to at least.
 

On 4/24/2022 at 5:00 AM, Magheat2009 said:

OP nature of the Mess and Great Halls reduces the importance of morale as a mechanic in the game, as well as reducing significance of diverse ways of gaining morale, such as Nature Reserves.

Uh, so does barbeque.  Also, you only need so much morale for skills.  It's not like the game is lost if no one has improved carrying level two, since it doesn't make possible to do anything new, unlike hard digging.

I don't agree that the rooms need merged like this, nor that the water cooler should necessarily give food poisoning.

[Magheat2009]

On 4/25/2022 at 7:26 PM, Spoonwood said:

the water cooler should necessarily give food poisoning.

I was not proposing water cooler giving food poisoning as a mechanic. Increased risk of food poisoning is just a by-product of removing disabled water cooler exploit.

On 4/25/2022 at 7:26 PM, Spoonwood said:

Uh, so does barbeque.

Barbeque production is far more complex than building a great hall.

[ZombieDupe]

On 4/24/2022 at 3:27 PM, Magheat2009 said:

That is supposed to be the challenge with Parks/Nature Reserves. Designing your base in such a way that your dupes pass through them frequently.

That's not going to happen, they may pass by it once per day but each duplicant will go to wherever due to tasks needing to be done in places. I'm not gonna surround my entire planetoid with nature reserves here, there and everywhere, how ridiculous is that?

[Sasza22]

Personally i`d like if the great hall had higher requirements. Compared to bedrooms it`s super easy to get. Imagine if it needs better tables made out of glass or require reed fiber.

[Magheat2009]

22 hours ago, ZombieDupe said:

I'm not gonna surround my entire planetoid with nature reserves here, there and everywhere, how ridiculous is that?

You can get it twice a day with just one nature reserve by thinking outside the box a little bit and some dupe time. 

On 4/25/2022 at 7:26 PM, Spoonwood said:

On Rime you can easily also lose your great hall bonus, since the plant could cool off and then stifle that you had for a decor object.

I agree that Great Hall is quite balanced on Rime. If some decorative plants did not unnecessarily have a +30 C heat tolerance, that would be the case for all maps.

[Spoonwood]

9 hours ago, Magheat2009 said:

You can get it twice a day with just one nature reserve by thinking outside the box a little bit and some dupe time. 

I agree that Great Hall is quite balanced on Rime. If some decorative plants did not unnecessarily have a +30 C heat tolerance, that would be the case for all maps.

I did NOT say that the great hall is balanced on Rime.  Again, I don't agree with either of your suggestions.  You can easily just not use a great hall, or turn food off entirely so that your duplicants can't use a great hall.

 

[Magheat2009]

On 4/28/2022 at 5:56 AM, Spoonwood said:

turn food off entirely so that your duplicants can't use a great hall

That is a great idea. Let me just completely nuke one mechanic to fix another. Bravo, you opened my eyes.

On 4/28/2022 at 5:56 AM, Spoonwood said:

I did NOT say that the great hall is balanced on Rime.

So you want to say it is unbalanced even on Rime?

[Spoonwood]

7 hours ago, Magheat2009 said:

That is a great idea. Let me just completely nuke one mechanic to fix another. Bravo, you opened my eyes.

The great hall mechanic is not broken.  People voluntarily turn off the water cooler and use other techniques to get morale easily.  That should tell you something about their preferences.  And food is not a mechanic at all when duplicants can't eat.  It's a setting in the startup screen whether or not duplicants eat at all.
 

7 hours ago, Magheat2009 said:

So you want to say it is unbalanced even on Rime?

Getting a great hall is not the same, but probably fine on all asteroids, again WHEN you have duplicants who can eat.  People can make their own decisions to make it easier to get the great hall mechanic or not.  And it's perfectly legitimate and within the scope of the intended game settings if people decide to turn off food entirely.

What is broken with the game?

The food system.  Food diveristy isn't motivated well at all.  Klei's food spoilage didn't do much, if anything, to motivate food diversification (if it was intended to do so), and it resulted in the meat of all, not just some, sorts of dead critters on the map turning in rot piles and then polluted dirt, offgasing polluted oxygen.  And seeds too.  I'm looking at you dreckos and pincha peppers.  If Klei was trying to motivate food diversification, it was a bad change, since it increased lag by having more mixed gas calculations going on, among other things.

[Sasza22]

2 hours ago, Spoonwood said:

What is broken with the game?

The food system.

There is a lot of imbalance when it comes to morale. Some things add a low amount for a short time like parks while high or even semi high quality food gives huge morale boosts for whole cycles plus the great hall bonus on top of that. Hard to even get close to the morale food gives with other means so people focus mostly on food especially when meat based foods are pretty cheap to produce.

I`m not saying the system needs a complete overhaul but some addjustments that would move morale from food and great hall to other things like proper bedrooms and bathrooms. Maybe the idea of favourite foods for dupes wqould help diversify the food sources, also nerfing the mid tier recipie morale would help ecouraging the high tier recipies that need multiple ingredients. Also the juicer needs to be updated so that it`s usable and more food items added just increase the morale it gives.

[Magheat2009]

16 hours ago, Spoonwood said:

And food is not a mechanic at all when duplicants can't eat. 

[Spoonwood]

It is true that when duplicants can't eat, there are no relevant food mechanics.  At least in the base game.

[ZombieDupe]

On 4/27/2022 at 3:04 PM, Magheat2009 said:

You can get it twice a day with just one nature reserve by thinking outside the box a little bit and some dupe time. 

I am not going to split the schedule such that they have breaks twice a cycle. They are inefficient as is as I'm having to turn the speed to x10 for any construction project to get done in time late game. This is just stupid and should last a cycle, it's not that hard to do from a programming standpoint.