An update has just gone out with a few different changes, mostly focusing on the way that fields & buildings scale with Ranks in order to make for some more interesting gameplay, improve technical performance and scalability, and make the math significantly easier to follow. There are also a few little QoL additions and some bug fixes.
I've been mostly focused on full-game content, but in doing so, I noticed a few issues with the way that Rank scaling works which lead to a few different pain points in the later game, especially as farms get really large and your progress into the later ranks. This resulted in two changes to the way Ranks work:
Rank Math Changes
Firstly, the more impactful change: Rank scaling was previously built to be 2.5^Rank increases, but it is being shifted to 2^Rank instead.
Using 2.5^Rank leads to increasing decimal places each rank (2.5, 6.25, 15.625, 39.0625) which is both a technical pain point but also hard to think about and hard to display to the player: UI elements would end up needing to show another decimal point with every rank in order to maintain accuracy. By using a whole number (2, 4, 6, 8, 16, 32), the UI get's a lot clearer and it's much easier to think in terms of "doubling" and "quadrupling" things instead of trying to think in terms of powers of 2.5.
Also, from a gameplay perspective, there's nothing else that really works off of factors of 2.5... Some recipes work in factors of 2 where they may need twice as many of their input producers, and I think lining these up will make for much more interesting layout options and solutions.
Rank Productivity Changes
One other thing that comes up pretty quickly in the existing system is that you will soon reach crazy "production times" within a few ranks, such that fields/buildings will produce multiple times within a single second or even a single game tick.
This leads to progress bars needing additional states because they move too fast, and it becomes a little harder to make the progress still apparent to the user. It also means the game has to run the production logic for each of these fields/buildings every single game tick, which adds up when you have a lot of them... Which would eventually lead to bottlenecks and performance issues.
This update reworks Ranks to provide a "Productivity Bonus" instead of increasing the production speed of the plot. This means that when you Rank Up a plot, instead of increasing the base run time of the plot, it will instead double how many products are produced each time the plot runs. (For buildings, this will of course consume twice as many products as well)
In other words, a Rank A Level 20 field and Rank B Level 20 field will both run a production cycle in the same amount of time, but the Rank B field will produce twice as many crops each time a cycle completes.
To be clear, while the above 2^Rank scaling changes impact the production rates, this change doesn't impact how many items are produced per second, it just causes the items to be made in larger and less frequent batches. And that reduced frequency will mean far less work for your CPU to have to do every game tick, especially when you have a ton of Rank M plots running ;)
To complement this change, the Plot window will also now show "Speed Bonus" and "Productivity" values at the top to make the scaling a bit more clear. The "Speed Bonus" will show it's total production speed increase as a percentage of the base speed, and the "Productivity" will show how many "extra" runs the field/recipe is producing each cycle. And of course, hovering over upgrades will show you how they will affect those values.
Impact of these changes
The scaling changes do unfortunately mean that players with existing saves with Rank B+ plots will see a decrease in their production rates. Since the Rank scaling also impacts maximum storage values, some plots may start out overfull until they are emptied/consumed over time.
I do try to avoid making larger scale changes like this to content that has been released, because I don't want to impact current builds/players and what they have already built, but I think this is an important change for the game's future and wanted to get it out sooner before it impacts more people and more builds.
There's also a slight reduction in the scaling of some of the later Rank compost costs to try to allow a bit more growth for those who are really pushing the limits.
Supporting Development
I've had a number of people reach out asking for ways they can contribute towards development. I've opened a Ko-Fi page for those who are keen on donating, but it is of course voluntary and by no means necessary.
Support in any form is always appreciated, whether that's sharing the game with your friends, posting feedback in the forums, or chatting and discussing things on the Discord. This project wouldn't be possible without all of those things, so thank you to everyone for every little bit they've contributed :)
Full Patch Notes
- Reworked Rank scaling from 2.5^Rank to 2^Rank
- Reworked Rank scaling to increase "productivity" of plots instead of their production speed
- Added a "Recent Crops" list to Fields to show what has previously been planted there and would incur penalties
- Tweaked Business Collection Trucks to prioritize completing contracts instead of just highest value
- Slightly lowered later rank Compost requirement scaling
- Fixed an issue where placing plots over existing ones would inherit their old logistics rules
- Fixed an issue with the Production Graph "All" tab miscalculating total rates
- Removed some UI scrolling bounce effects which were a bit buggy