Art Decay

[ImpalerWrG]

I find artist to be one of the least used jobs because art is a make once and forget about it for the rest of the game.

So I propose that Paintings and Sculptures become 'blase' the more they are viewed.  Each art object would have a 'novelty' value which is reduced each time a dup receives NEEDED decor expectation fulfillment from it (so uncultured low tier dups use up art slower).  Once the item runs out of novelty it downgrades a level until it is a crayon drawing or even blank.

Artists will redo any piece of artwork that is below their skill level, and which you have flagged for 'maintain x level' upon.  Say you want your bedroom pictures to be always masterpieces, they will be redone as soon as they fall below that.  But say your hallway paintings could be set to Mediocre so they don't trigger a job to repaint until they hit crude level.  The repainting can still be a masterpiece of course if that's the skill level of the artist, it just means that much longer before the next visit.

Under this system art skill gain would be slowed substantially so a master art is a more rare and valuable thing, and they have a finite amount of artwork they can keep in top notch shape so the standard strategy of plastering every inch of the base in portraits will come at a higher labor cost, instead strategic placement of art would be more rewarded.

[Kasuha]

11 hours ago, ImpalerWrG said:

I find artist to be one of the least used jobs

Scientist?

[BlueLance]

Doesnt scientist at least have a bit of a use now?

[TheScaryOne]

I think art decor meta is dead. I still plaster it everywhere, but I think everything over 75 doesn't matter, at least according to the occupations screen.

[Jigsawn]

I like the decay idea - it doesn't need to be a blase meter or anything, just have the materials deteriorate and put it down to the nasty environment of the asteroid.

In the longer term for Art I think that there should be a few more art objects to build, of different sizes, which contribute different amounts of decor.

Right now paintings and statues feel OP - and its really not hard to find high Art stat dupes straight out of the fabricator. I've had many art students create masterpieces.

Thinking longer term, if dupe happiness was more of a consideration in the game - not just influenced by decor and food - then the artist position could be replaced by a Creative position. Maybe Creative dupes as well as art, can be responsible for playing music, massaging dupes manually, and other little things - things which reduce stress and increase other dupes happiness. As well, this would stop the artist role from being so stop/start and make it an ongoing role with things to do every day. 

[goboking]

Speaking personally, remaking paintings and sculptures over and over again for the sake of creating busy work for artists sounds like an uninteresting game mechanic.  There's no progress to be made in such a system; all of their time and effort goes into maintaining the status quo.  I'd prefer a system wherein an artist's function evolves as technology is researched and I think graduating from painting and sculpting to music would be a natural progression.

[ImpalerWrG]

We have to continually make food and oxygen for Dups to live, if decor is ever to be a challenge it can not be a build once kind of thing, the whole game is premised on maintaining continuous flows of consumables in the face of shortages/waste accumulation.

I'm all for making art more interesting (musical decor sounds particularly clever) but without consumption and continuous new supply the stale and unchallenged dynamic won't change.

[goboking]

6 minutes ago, ImpalerWrG said:

We have to continually make food and oxygen for Dups to live,

Yes, but the way we feed our dupes evolves as our research progresses.  We start out compressing mud and water into something that gives our dupes diarrhea.  But soon we're on to planting berry-producing blossoms in boxes filled with dirt.  After that we're stuffing the berries with peppers we grow in hydroponic farms maintained by automated climate control and irrigation and we're cooking them on an electric grill.  Later still we're building fully automated machines that fertilize the berries and peppers for us and store them to our refrigerators.  That's a bit different than remaking a painting over your dupes' cots for a second and third and fourth time.

[scientas]

Perhaps the creation of a museum room would give us more use for artists? Say the room requires 4 paintings and 4 sculptures and all must be masterpieces. This room could give a buff of morale but maybe arts would decay in the museum only and an artist could have an art curator level that would let them repair?

[ImpalerWrG]

7 hours ago, goboking said:

Yes, but the way we feed our dupes evolves as our research progresses.  We start out compressing mud and water into something that gives our dupes diarrhea.  But soon we're on to planting berry-producing blossoms in boxes filled with dirt.  After that we're stuffing the berries with peppers we grow in hydroponic farms maintained by automated climate control and irrigation and we're cooking them on an electric grill.  Later still we're building fully automated machines that fertilize the berries and peppers for us and store them to our refrigerators.  That's a bit different than remaking a painting over your dupes' cots for a second and third and fourth time.

And what is the conflict between 'art is more complex' and 'art decays' I see none, just as their is no conflict between 'food gets more complex' and 'food is consumed'.  I have in no way said that making art decay is the ONLY thing that needs to change about art, but simply that their can be no real challenge without that feature.  If you want to make a thread about your ideas for how art could be made more complex go ahead and do so but don't create a false either/or narrative.

[goboking]

1 hour ago, ImpalerWrG said:

And what is the conflict between 'art is more complex' and 'art decays' I see none, just as their is no conflict between 'food gets more complex' and 'food is consumed'.  I have in no way said that making art decay is the ONLY thing that needs to change about art, but simply that their can be no real challenge without that feature.

Where's the challenge in remaking paintings and sculptures?  Making a painting on cycle 1,000 is no more complex than making one on cycle 10.  Your proposed system doesn't scale in complexity with the game.  That doesn't make it a bad idea, but the game is designed around the principle of solving escalating problems with more sophisticated solutions.

 

1 hour ago, ImpalerWrG said:

If you want to make a thread about your ideas for how art could be made more complex go ahead and do so but don't create a false either/or narrative.

I can't help but feel you're taking my critique of your suggestion personally.  There was no animus on my end, so if you were offended by anything I said in this thread then you have my apology.  If you wish, I'll refrain from commenting on any suggestions you might offer going forward.

[ImpalerWrG]

Yes you are using bad suggestion forum etiquette as your not evaluating the reason for the suggestion or any of the logic behind it and instead repeatedly reiterating your own idea with a blatantly straw-man that I am opposed to any other change or elaboration.  If your going to make me argue against your points then I will.

 

First your repeatedly harping on the idea that 'redoing art is not complex', first off I made it clear that I was describing an automated process much like how a dup harvests a crop, the player is only setting priorities for this, not manually rebuilding anything.  I've said repeatedly this is to provide CHALLENGE first and foremost, complexity must follow challenge because complexity without challenge is wasted.

You said you wanted art to be more complex with 'higher' forms of art later in the game.  Fine, but why would you built these if you already plastered your base with earlier art which lasts for ever and keeps everyone happy?  The decor system is simply additive so large numbers of low quality artworks do the same job as a small number of high quality ones.  The actual materials used in art are trivially cheap being just basic stone so the player can make essentially unlimited amounts of art, much like we can made ladder and tile.

This is very different from food, we MUST move up food tiers because unlimited mealworms will not satisfy an elite dups palette.  For what your describing to work would mean changing it so that high decor demanding dups could not be satisfied unless they experienced some of these late game artworks your describing.  But that is much more severe change (basically gutting the whole decor tabulation code) and would present all kinds of difficulties in making sure a dupe looks at a particular piece of art each day to get their decor score (I do not want my dups to have sudden impulses to stop working and go look at art).

The complexity your asking for simply can not be supported under the current paradigm of how dups adsorb decor at all times and the decor objects last forever.  But by making art decay you limit the total amount that can be in existence at any given time via the labor cost of maintaining it.  That means the whole base plastering strategy won't work and maximizing the strategic placement of the art becomes key.  So you immediately have more depth to base design.   

AND you actually have a reason to want higher tier types of art if and when they get added to the game because they will presumably turn labor into decor value more efficiently and allows more decor value to be packed into any given area which makes the base smaller and more efficient.