D3nnis3n
commented
2 years ago As a team we have decided that we want to stress knowledge as a resource that 'stays' and should be freely available. We love seeing knowledge being distributed via distribution stations and easily accessible, especially for new players and late-joiners.
I'm very well aware that this does not work with every server concept out there currently, given White Tiger did deviate from that specifically for a special economy focus due to LCPs bound to skill scrolls for a long time before introducing the university as a common government funded research place that has to ensure that everyone has equal ability to get the knowledge even though it is incorporated into the economy (here in the abstraction of teaching the profession, given WT limits profession amount a lot and skill scrolls have no other value, as they don't give LCPs on WT anymore - the payment being for the teaching, funding the research efforts for everyone), but our main goal with options is to introduce them where we consider any option you could set to be within the games vanilla design and maintanable for us.
For this setting that is not the case, given we have a clear internal opinion towards it. We generally incentivize modders and using mods, though and altering research to fit into the economical concepts via mods is extremely easy (you could for example just let people craft 5 skill scrolls for the cost of a book) and typically compatible with updates as well when done with overrides, so there isn't really a need to introduce such a setting to support economically focused concepts either. As a matter of fact, the skill scroll modification on White Tiger is the only one that did not have to be updated a single time since it's introduction in Update 9.
But that's not all, we are actually removing the tie of land claim papers to skill scrolls with Update 10 to stress the books focus on knowledge, not economics as a result of White-Tigers experiment and the move of LCPs to be a government controlled 'permit'. With skill scrolls no longer giving Land Claim Papers in 10.0 it's rather unlikely this would ever make it to the game, given the need for it even for high economy servers is basically gone and the last advantage of the setting would be putting the knowledge itself into the hands of economical use in the form of simple items, which is not within our vanilla design goals, hence a modification fitting much better for that.
This is especially relevant with upcoming changes to the server browser and achievements that are bound to if the server is modded or not, with official options not counting as modded, but all being within what we think should be eligible for achievements and unmodified display in the server list.
Please don't forget that modding your server is absolutely appreciated and will give players even more options for crazy concepts of servers - just not every modded game fits within what we imagine for a vanilla game experience. (Like Big Shovel mod, for example, which is based on a former vanilla item that we actually removed because of it not fitting our design goals)
So I'm closing this suggestion.
Right now a researchbook contains infinite pages. So every serverpopulation only has to make 1 book per specialization, and they are set for the game, granted they print pages and share.
I suggest introducing some flexibility, by making it a server-option whether a research book contains 1, 3, 5, 10, or infinite pages, instead of only containing infinite pages as it is now.
Default can remain infinite pages. Introducing flexibility here, would spare servers for relying on a mod.