Making A Home Planet Worth It: My Suggested System.

So, a lot of noise on the forums tends to be focused on either A: Fuel, or B: the value of having a home planet. Without getting ahead of myself, I'm going to address them in opposite Order.

What's the point of a home planet? What's the point of guard spawners that just die once, or die easily to monsters, and then you've wasted the money? Further, if you accidentally hit them, then they attack you, EVERYTHING on the screen, in fact, attacks you. It's horribly not worth the money.

How do we solve this? Rather simply, in ideas, a bit harder in mechanics and coding. This is my proposed system.

First, get rid of spawners. They're trash, and don't offer what we really need to make it worth it. Instead, we'll be replacing them with something else, in this proposal.

You land on a forest planet. You decide this is it, this is your home planet. You start building your village/home. After fleshing it all out, you decide "Alright, now I need some guards."

So you craft an "armory rack". Placing this armory rack allows you to define two points. This is the "Patrol" boundary of the NPC guard this rack will spawn. The guard will spawn at the rack, and will only travel to the ends of the two boundaries noted buy placing the rack. This means they will only chase an enemy to the end of this boundary, and never move beyond it. Further, these guards will start naked, save for some clothing. No longer are you spending pixels for your guards. Instead, Right clicking the armory rack, will open an inventory similar to your own gear window, with slots for back items, head armor, body armor, and leg armor, as well as cosmetic item slots. It also includes a slot for left and right hands, which may hold any weapon you could hold, ranging from a two handed weapon in both hands, to two one-handed weapons, to a pistol and shield. Upon a guard spawning, these items will be consumed, and equipped to the resulting NPC that is spawned as a guard. Should the guard die, these items are not dropped, and you would need to re-equip the armory rack for the next guard.

Now, one could just spawn masses of naked guards, right? Not quite so. Spawning won't be a result of placing an item now, but a result of "Random explorers" finding your planet. This can be increased in frequency by placing a "Welcome beacon", which will consume power, generated by a Generator, which consumes fuel (the same fuels as the space ship), in order to generate said power. The Welcome Beacon would increase the spawn rate of "Random Explorers" that decide to visit and settle in your homeworld.

In order to make the Random Explorers remain on your homeworld, you would need to have a few requirements. Requirement one is a habitable Planet. First, the NPC must have a location in which they can remain warm, within their spawning location. Failing this, they'd need to have access to warm clothing (stored in an NPC's spawn area, in a special item called a "Explorer's Wardrobe", which would be provided by the player. Secondly, the Random Explorer must have access to food, which will be consumed by a value determined by the amount of citizens in your territory, reduced by the filling value of the food (better, more filling food, means they consume less). Thirdly, the NPC must have a bed within its spawning area.

This means that Guards will be best placed in guard towers, where you have also placed campfires, and a bed, as well as some food storage. This means that guards will not cost as much in the way of pixels as they do now, but, instead, will cost in food upkeep, random explorers happening upon your planet and settling down, the living quarters required to house the guard, and then equipped with any equipment you CHOOSE to give them, meaning you can either have tons of copper-wearing guards with swords, or a handful of imperium-armored guards with sniper rifles. It's entirely your choice. The cosmetic equipment slots mean that you can design your own uniforms for your guards, as well.

Of course, what good are guards, if they have nothing to guard? NPC citizens are great, but if they're doing nothing but scarfing up your food, what's the point, right?

NPC citizens will actually generate income or resources, based on certain objects. Lets break down the Income Systems Objects first.

We have guards, we have their patrol areas established. Now we need to bring in some resources, to make it worth guarding our home world. Logging Camps will automatically generate unrefined wood, so long as you have Citizens to man it. Sawmills will refine unrefined wood into wood planks. These items will generate, on a daily basis (in game day, that is) in chests at each "camp". During day time, NPC citizens can be seen working in these areas. When right clicking the camp, you will be given an item to place in an NPC's spawn point, to designate that NPC as a "Worker" for that camp. This NPC will travel to that camp each day to work, so ensuring that their path to the camp is safe and free of hostile creatures, is vital, thus making use for the guards.

So now that we're producing unrefined wood, and refining it into planks, Now we construct a carpenter's shop. This shop will, again, be manned by an NPC citizen that has the proper living quarters and has been set as the shopkeep. This NPC will consume a certain portion of wood planks a day, and produce furniture. This furniture can be purchased by the PC's themselves, at a heavily discounted rate, or kept on the NPC's stock. Should items remain on the NPC's stock by the end of the day, it will be compared to the amount of citizens in the village, and a random number between 1 and the total citizens count, will be picked. This number will determine how many of the NPC's stock is sold that day. The items sold will be randomized, and the player will receive half of what it would have cost them to buy it from the NPC, as profit, deposited directly into their pixels.

So now we have a furniture vendor, a lumber camp, and a saw mill. We're making a little bit of money, but we're spending most of our time making food for our NPC citizens. Totally bogus, right? This isn't chef tycoon. We need to make some passive food. What's the best way to do this?

Well, if we build a butcher's shop, Now when our guards kill things, we'll have a small chance for meat to spawn in the butcher's shop. That's great and all, but hardly efficient. At this point, we need plenty of food, and random, small chances won't cut it. Treking out a bit past our guards, we build a Hunting Camp, Preferably somewhere nearby where non-hostile alien creatures spawn. We'll set up a tent and camp fire nearby, so that these hunters can have someplace safe to sleep and warm up, maybe even post a guard to keep them safe at night. Hunters will have no food requirements, as they are adept at living off the land. Instead, they'll gather meat for us daily, by hunting nearby alien creatures. Of course, they could also be gathering leather for us, but we haven't built a tannery yet.

So we head back to town, and establish our tannery. A random explorer stops by, and he determines he'll stick around. We assign him to the tannery. Now, whenever our guards kill something, they ALSO have a very, VERY small chance of spawning leather in the tannery chest. Further, along with the meat that they gather, our hunters now ALSO gather leather, at the same time, which spawns in the tannery chest. We decide that we're going to take full advantage of both of these situations.

We build a Tavern and a Leatherworker. Two random explorers stop by, they move in. One of them becomes the Tavernkeeper, the other becomes the Leatherworker.

Now, the Tavernkeeper requires half the food upkeep of any other citizen, but the Leatherworker requires twice as much. Each day, the Tavernkeeper will convert a random number, between, for example, 5 - 15, of raw meat, into cooked meat. This will be distributed equally among all of the food chests in the city, both at the start of the day, and the end. Should there not be enough to fill all of the chests, it will be randomly placed in a chest. This means that larger villages will require more Tavernkeepers, or better Tavernkeepers. How do you make your Tavenkeeper better?

Well, the first solution, would be offering him a wider selection of goods. However, a larger selection of goods doesn't mean he knows how to cook them, or use them properly. Thankfully, we now have an object called a "Scribes desk", which allows us to convert our recipes for cooking foods, into recipes once more, removing them from our "learned" list, at a small wood and pixel cost. This recipe can then be placed in the Tavernkeeper's "Recipe Chest", thus letting him learn it. Now our Tavernkeeper is more valuable, because he can craft, for instance, hamburgers, if he has both the wheat to bake bread, and the alien meat. Of course, if he dies, we've just lost the recipe -and- the Tavernkeeper that knew how to make it. If we -do -manage to replace him, the new Tavernkeeper will have no idea how to cook a hamburger.

This creates a value for recipes, as we'll need to re-learn them upon scribing them. It also means we'll want to protect our Tavernkeepers. Of course, the only way for us to acquire recipes, are to randomly find them via exploring, or trade with other players.

Perhaps, at this point, we have a large production of food, and can afford to hire a Librarian. The Librarian requires use to place Book blocks inside of his bookcases, on top of the other requirements of citizens, and consumes THREE TIMES as much food as the normal citizen! In exchange, however, he has a 25% chance, each day, to convert one of those book blocks into either a random recipe (Both crafting and cooking), or a lore book.

This is great, we've got recipes being randomly created for us, we've got food generating, pixels generating, and we're stockpiling leather. But now we have two Citizens that are consuming extra food, and sure, we have tons of recipes on our Tavernkeeper, but he's not getting the ingredients he needs very often. It's time to start domesticating animals, and farming.

So we head a bit outside of our city, and we set up a small guard post. We till up the land, build a farm house or two, and put the requirements for Random Explorer housing into it. Next, we start planting our crops, and we place some Farmers Tools. Next thing you know, we've got a new guard patrolling our farmlands, and some citizen farmers working the fields, automatically generating half of the amount of crops we have planted in their spawn radius, and having a 5% chance each day to spawn one seed of each of those. Of course, these crops sitting in the farmer's house doesn't do us any good. We build a wagon and a home for a wagonmaster. Now we have someone who works just to transport these crops into the town, to stockpile them in another building we've established, the Warehouse. Of course, a warehouse requires someone to keep it secure, and to keep a tally of the goods inside of it. We place a Warehouse Armory, and a random explorer shows up. Now this Random Explorer is our Warehouse Keeper, functioning both as a guard, and someone to keep tabs on our goods.

This warehouse keeper will now ensure that our Wagonmaster transports our goods to the chests they need to go to, in order to produce goods. He's running Food from the Tavernkeeper to the citizens, running crops from the Farmers to the Tavern, and running leather from the Tanner to the Leatherworker. He's not doing it very efficiently, however, only being able to transport a certain amount of goods per day. He'd do a ton better, if he had some type of non-hostile, domestic animal to haul his wagon.

So how are we going to domesticate our animals? Well, first things first, we'll need the creature capture station they just implemented! Next, we'll capture two of the same creature, and take the balls to a Domestication Farm. Grabbing another Random Explorer, we'll assign them to be an animal breeder, by building the Domestication Farm Fence. We'll place the balls into the nearby chest, and the two animals will be released into the pen, where, once a day, depending on the creature type, they'll either A: Lay four eggs, which will spawn in the nearby chest, or B: spawn a capture ball filled with a baby of that animal, as well as four jugs of milk. These animals will also consume either eight pieces of vegetable-based food, or two pieces of meat-based food, depending on whether it's a herbivore, or carnivore, each day. (4/1 vegetable/meat per animal) If the animal happens to be an omnivore, you can swap out 1 meat and 4 vegetables, or two meat, or eight vegetables. They're omnivores, it's interchangeable.

Now eggs give us the option to use the egg in a recipe, or take it over to the next station we'll build.

The next station is the "Incubation farm", which allows us to place baby animals into the nearby pen to "Grow up". Eggs will hatch after one day, and captured baby animals will "hatch" immediately. Both creatures will not consume any upkeep, for the first day and night. At the end of the next day, each baby will consume 1 jug of milk. Egg-based lifeforms will take four game days to mature. Live-birth lifeforms will mature after two.

At this point, you can capture the mature creatures whenever you desire, and transport them via capture ball. This ball can then be placed at the Wagoneer's chest, giving him the ability to perform twice as many transportations as day, while increasing his upkeep to normal random explorer food cost + 1 meat or 4 vegetable-based foodstuffs a day (depending on herbivore/carnivore) Omnivores can eat either 1 meat, or 4 vegetables, instead. Alternatively, we can take them to the Butcher's shop, at which point they will produce 16 raw meat and 4 leather.

So now we've got a thriving economy rolling. We've got furniture being converted into pixels. We've got hunters and domesticated animals helping to get us leather and meat. We've got farmers producing crops for use in food dishes, and keeping our livestock going. We've got a Tavernkeeper cooking all sorts of exotic foods, further fueled by our librarian scribing him up new recipes. He's even made a few drink recipes, and as soon as we gave these to our tavernkeeper, and he got the ingredients to start brewing them up, he started selling them, along with his other food items, so he's not only cooking food for us to feed our people, but he's also giving us a small pixel income, as our citizens flock to the tavern to eat, drink, and make merryment. Speaking of which, that librarian also scribbling up some recipes for weapons and armor. In fact, some of these recipes seem to be for leather-based armor and clothing.

Hey, wait, don't we have a leatherworker? And that dude is chowing down on twice as much food as our normal citizens. What's he been doing?

Well, heading over to check out the leatherworker's shop, we find out he's been selling leather armor and cosmetic items to our citizens. All this time, he's been generating pixels for us, because we haven't been buying out his stock. He's selling his goods for twice as much as the furniture maker, but like the furniture maker, we're only receiving a partial profit from his goods. Checking his inventory, we find out that he's crafting items using the leatherworking recipes we've taught him. Like the tavernkeeper, he also has a chest that we can deposit recipes in for him to learn. Like the Tavernkeeper, if he dies, the new Leatherworker will have to learn the recipes all over again.

So that's great, we're producing some pixels, we can use the Leatherworker's goods to equip our guards. Some of our citizens are buying armor from him as well, and actually equipping it! Our furniture maker is making furniture for us, we're letting some of it sell, and we're using some of it to help decorate our village. Most of our citizens are working to help the economy, though a few are just lounging around, consuming goods to help boost our income. Animals are being bred and butchered for food. Crops are growing. Our warehouse is starting to fill nicely. That's great. Whenever our Leatherworker, Tavernkeeper, or Furniture Maker is producing something that doesn't get sold at the end of the day, it's being deposited into our warehouse, for us to use at our own whim. Even excess unrefined wood and wooden planks are being deposited in there.

However, that Welcome Beacon is sucking up Coal/Wood/Plutonium. Further, we just realized we can boost the efficiency of our work-spaces, if we power them from the Generator, which increases the fuel use. Not to mention all of those metal-based crafting recipes the Librarian is making us, that we can't use. We're going to be spending all of our time mining for coal, at this point. What's the solution now?

Well, a mine is a fine solution. We can build a mine shaft, and designate how many citizens we want to work it. Of course, if we want them to actually work, we'll need to supply them with pickaxes, light sources, and extra food. After all, tunneling is dangerous, and hard, work. So now our miners are consuming light sources, food, and pickaxes. However, the better the light source, food, and pickaxe, the longer it lasts for them. Further, the better the pickaxe, the faster they work. We go ahead and craft them diamond pickaxes, give them the lantern on a stick back item, and throw some hamburgers in there. Now they have a light source that is never consumed, a pickaxe that lasts for about a game week or longer, and a nice food source that keeps them well-fed. On a whim, we throw some drinks from the tavern that were left over, and find that they work twice as efficiently now. Excited, we go around town and give everyone some free drinks, enjoying the bonus to productivity it brings.

Each day, the miners are producing coal, copper, iron, and a bit of a higher tier ore, randomly generated and limited by what is currently spawned on the planet (Which means if you've mined all the gold on the planet, you've just made it impossible for your mine to generate gold!). Sometimes this random ore is Gold, sometimes silver, sometimes even diamond or plutonium! Now we're producing some passive fuel and metals. We head back to town, and build a blacksmith. However, he refuses to work without a water source. Further, our farmers are only working half as efficiently, we realize, without one themselves. So, since he's relatively close to the farmlands, we build a well, as well, and hire a Well-tender. On a whim, we also build a fountain near the Tavern, which increases the amount of sales we make on drinks, due to people stopping to admire the Fountain, and stopping in for drinks.

Now our blacksmith is hard at work, and, like the Leatherworker and the Tavernkeeper, we're giving him recipes. He's crafting Swords, armor, and we've upgrade his anvil from a regular iron anvil, to a metalworking station, and his worktable from a wooden one, to a robotic one. He's really churning out weapons and armor for us now, and is able to work higher-tier ores. Not only is he using the ingots he has available to him to make equipment, but he's also smelting 50 - 100 ores into ingots a day for us, with this high-end work equipment. Sure, he eats three times as much as normal citizen, but he's a workhorse and really gets things done. The items he doesn't manage to sell get dumped in our warehouse, which we can use to outfit our guards. Meanwhile, our citizens are buying up weapons and armor as well, and equipping themselves better. We're getting a pretty decent pixel profit from this, and our citizens are making themselves more durable, as a result. Sure, most of them are wearing their regular work clothes and town clothes in their cosmetic slots, which makes them look like they're not wearing any armor, but they're getting to be pretty tough now. This is turning into a real city, a real homeworld now. Our own little kingdom in the stars. We're not done yet, however.

We have an excess of coal now, and plenty of plutonium. Of course, if we chose to make our homeworld on a higher-level planet, in exchange for the greater danger to ourselves and our citizens, we're receiving increased amounts of ore, compared to someone on a low-threat planet, but it's worth it for this extra ore, and most of our citizens are well-armed and armored now, and our guards are well-placed, preventing all too many deaths from the deadly creatures. We'd be safer, however, if we had some guns, and we have more resources than we really need to randomly explore space, though it's wonderful that now we don't need to worry about mining for coal on every planet we visit, since we can just jump back to our homeworld to refuel with our stockpiles. Lets make good use of this coal, and these high-tier ores. We build a gunsmith, who begins to use the high-tier ingots, and our recipes, much like the blacksmith, to produce guns. Some of our citizens purchase these guns. We see a really nice one that we like, and we purchase it for ourselves at a reduced cost. Some of the guns don't sell, and are sent to the warehouse. We pull them from the warehouse, and give them to our guards. They deserved an upgrade.

Now our Homeland is mostly complete. We've got a self-sustaining economy, pixel and fuel income, raw resources being made. We build our own personal mansion, and as the final touch, we build one last thing, our own personal 3d printer, because, hey, maybe we don't feel like going up to our ship every time we want to make a new decoration in our village.. No, our city. Our homeworld as really taken hold of the planet. All that is really left for it now is terraforming the landscape and atmosphere, and decorating the rest of our buildings. It's time to relax, on your homeworld, the seat of your civilization...

Unless, of course, you decide to head off to another planet, and establish another colony. After all, While it may be your homeworld, A true Space Empire will never consist of merely one planet. There are other planets out there, with valuable resources, just begging for a colony.

 

I actually like it how it is.
Also I don't think that much about it because it is a Beta after all.

 

This idea is magnificent. I applaud you you good sir.

 

Homeworlds are coming. Jeez when will the ppl start to read the Roadmap..

 

You appear to be lost. This is the Suggestions forum. I.E., a place to suggest things that you would enjoy being added to the game, or alterations to systems.

 

Great idea! Hope they implement this or something similar!!

 

This would be an extraordinarily ambitious project for Chucklefish to undertake. One might even call it a pipe dream. But man, if they did this...

 

Man this could really help me since Im the Ultimate Fish Emperor of the Intergalactic fish empire

 

Epic idea. If they don't listen to you, they're nuts.

 

Nice idea, but waaaay too complicated. The first thing you are talking about sounds like you only want your own game in a game.. this is not sim city or something and you are not supposed to build up your complete own dungeon. THE GAME does generate dungeons for you so you don't have to care about that stuff Keep it simple and think of a not disappearing guard, merchant and normal NPC spawner which continues spawning NPCs until a certain number of friendly dudes at your homebase is reached. But.. the idea to be able to equip your guards yourself is absolutely awesome.

And buy the way.. all your ideas could work absolutely perfect without any of your complicated NPC things and even completely without NPCs. On a Server, with a guild, some nice friends, and a shared storage. And this is why I want this game to be MMO one day. The universe of starbound is big enough. There are thousands of things Chucklefish could add over time. It has so freaking much potential. THIS would be awesome.

 

Yeah I agree, I like the concept but it's overly complicated for a game where setting up a complex city isn't the main focus, for Starbound I'd want a simplified version of this, I don't want to run or command a town I make, I just want to make it prosperous and of my design!

 

I have to agree with this. The idea has a ton of ambition, but perhaps too much ambition for what is essentially just going to be a home base.

If you cut out a most of this idea and strip it down to bare bones, I would find it more agreeable. I would ditch everything after the Random Explorers. I would still remove the spawners, and have some kind of beacon, but after that I would just make it like so:

You make your base and you have your beacon set up so travelers are starting to show up. In order to house them, there is a system similar to Terraria. You need floors, walls, and a ceiling, you need a background wall, and you need a Bed, Heating Item, Door, Storage, Light, and 2 comfort items like a chair or desk. You also need to give them a decent amount of space. This is encouraged to give them more space, as you could essentially make tiny cages for your people in Terraria.

So once you have open space, people will start to appear on the planet, mostly by these open rooms. They aren't your people yet though. If you talk to them, they will give you a GUI of some basic information about them like what they do (Food Merchant, Farmer, Soldier, etc). It also displays their name, some general stats, and you can see their gear. Finally, you can choose to accept them into your base or kick them out. If you accept them, they move into the closest

To keep the game balanced, all their gear, stats, and trading items (merchants) will range from the level of the planet you are on to the level of planets you have been to. It can be equal to anything within those two levels, but typically gravitates towards the average. You cannot hurt your citizens, nor can you take their stuff. If you talk to them you have the normal options of that class (for example, Trade for a merchant, Follow Me for a soldier), and you can also look at their gear. This is to give your citizens better gear to defend themselves, so you can only give them items, you cannot take them. Finally, you can boot them out of your base, in order to make room for someone better. At that point you CAN kill them, but they drop random loot. All of that is done to prevent citizen farms.

Finally, a bit about their AI. When they choose a room they set a colored marker that designates it as theirs. You can break this and move it to another room, at which point they will attempt to move to the new room, provided it is a valid room for them to live. They prefer paths deemed "safe", meaning ones that monsters will not spawn on. So you can spread people around the planet as much as you want, but it would be smart to have a tunnel or pathway to different places or they may die while moving.

Lastly, there needs to be a limit on citizens, something like 20-30 per planet should work. I think this system is a lot cleaner than the one in the OP, and it does all the things you would want in a base short of turning the game into Sim City.

 

Just to let you know a few of the things you've mentioned have been planned for the game since early development. There's a very small blurb about it on the official wiki.
http://starbounder.org/Homeworld

 

I hope Tiy reads this

 

When i began researching about starbound they promised to add machines that can change anything on the planet so dont worry just wait (a long time) because this stuff is hard to implement

 

Not bashing YOUR style of playing, however, Starbound is, above and beyond everything, a Sandbox, designed to be played however we want. The game provides the tools, then the player decides what tools they want to do, to augment their own playstyle. As a game focused primarily around being an exploration and building sandbox, there's nothing wrong with giving the players the tools to play a "game within a game" so to speak. Some players want to explore random planets and see the randomly generated sights. Some want to delve into random dungeons and acquire loot. Some people want to build homes for themselves, others want to build whole cities. This very nature means that there is no such thing as "You are not supposed to" do anything. Starbound is a Sandbox, you're supposed to do anything you want in it, utilizing the tools available. This system would just be another tool for people to make use of, and is a bit similar to the one they've -already- stated they plan on having, just that it gives you a little more control over your people, requires you to do a little thinking and planning about your cities, villages, etc, and gives you a benefit to maintaining your homeworld. In short, it's another tool for you to play the sandbox game however you want, whether it's exploring the stars, mass murdering aliens, or building your own dungeons and cities.

That's just the thing, the main focus of Starbound is whatever you want it to be. You don't want to run or command a town you make. Others do. Starbound's main focus is "Being a sandbox that provides tools for you to do whatever your own playstyle leans towards".

Most players tend to use their space ship for a home base at the moment. It really all comes down to what the individual wants. After you've beaten the main quest, after you've seen most of the random planets out there, gathered all of the decorations, what are you going to do? Some players will probably focus on their homeworld first, gathering their strength and resources, before they even start on the main storyline, or random explorations. Some players will focus on their homeworlds, after they've finished with exploration and the storyline. It's most likely that the majority of people, once they finish with most of the content in the storyline, will focus almost primarily on their homeworld. Having more stuff to do there, and being able to make it grow into something, offers a tool that can keep people playing.


Not knocking you guys down. You just have to realize that Starbound is a Sandbox. It sells itself on letting you do whatever you want to do in it. This idea is a bit complex, yes. The main post could also use some editing and re-writing, as I simply wrote it as I went. However, this system is actually probably a bit LESS complex for the players, compared to the current idea of making the NPC's equipment based on the value of the items around their spawn point, and also offers more customization and tools for the player, themselves. More control.

We already know that NPC's on your homeworld will be equipped and generated based on the items surrounding them in their spawn point. I, myself, would simply prefer more control over my citizens, and if I could build my own city and have a thriving economy as a result? That would be my ideal sandbox game. Some people don't want this. Some people do. I say that there's nothing wrong with providing sandbox players with more sandbox tools. Don't like economy management? Not a bit deal, just ignore homeworlds, or don't bother worrying about keeping up the infrastructure or economy. If you like "Towns" Gameplay (Because this system is more like the Towns game, and nothing like SIm City, which is extremely complex), then the tools would be there for you. If you don't, then you simply don't bother trying to run the economy.

 

Yes but you do need to realize that some gameplay mechanics can go against another player's preferred mechanics, for example: you want to run a complex village, I don't, I just want to maybe build one and not worry about providing resources, food and the like, how would the game go about implementing both preferred styles of gameplay? If I could simply ignore feeding the villagers wouldn't for your gameplay to have some challenge, be some consequence? I guess there could be a simple option of "How do you want your Homeworld? Complex or Simple" I also agree with the game being a sandbox and there needs to be varying things for players to do but I just don't see each branch of gameplay being this complex.

 

On the same note, I put your own argument back against you. I want to run a "Complex" city, which means I want to have the capacity to upgrade my capital, have it produce things, have a (VERY BASIC, I'll point out) economy, and customize the citizens the way I want, so not having a system for this would prevent me from doing such, as well. However, the system I proposed actually addresses your playstyle, as well, and allows it. No need for simple or complex. You want to build a village, you just build a village. It might not be populated, if you choose not to feed your people, or your people might simply move in, starve, and leave. You've still built your village, you simply decided not to maintain it. On the other hand, you could simply cook the food for the few villagers you want to have, and they'd stay. Of course, if you read my post a bit more in-depth, you would have realized you didn't even need to do that. All you'd have to do is setup a Hunting Camp, a Tavern, and a Guard Post. Now your city is self-sufficient, and all you've done is construct three buildings. Not all that complex. "Simple" mode so to speak. They'd produce their own upkeep, costing you nothing. You wouldn't get any free benefits as a result, but you'd still get your "Simple Mode" village.

 

Actually I did read in fairly well, simply because I don't want to make a Simcity style village doesn't mean the one I make should be empty and constantly killing villagers. Of course I could do all the butchery, hunting buildings and such but the way you were suggesting how that fed people seemed to be very exact in numbers so suddenly a new person could jump in, die without me knowing. Basically if I want a normal, self sufficient village, by your suggestion it's either a ghost town or a micromanagement town. I have to constantly hire and decide where villagers go to take up jobs, hire more guards, etc when I simply want a village that doesn't implode the moment I don't want to deal with it's problems. Maybe if villagers were more independent or you could decide how the land would be used, example being, letting villagers build homes, smithies they want to run/manage, etc. They would probably just appear after you teleported down. But as the game is, it fits my gameplay more easily than yours, you're here to prove why your system is really nice and I'm disagreeing with certain parts with it. I think you should rework how your suggestion would work so it could comfortably fill both roles of a complex system and a simple system, maybe there being different kinds of towns? Like when starting a town you could either appoint yourself "mayor" or what have you or you could appoint an NPC that would have to deal with all the feeding problems, you could assist simply by building the required buildings or not.

 

a solution for everyone who says its too complex: Planet Manager.
a nice npc which makes all that easier. you CANhire him and tell him to establish a colony with this and that on this planet. you can tell him that he should build an economy which produces 500 pixels a day, then he will build enough hunters/farmers/tavernkepers/guards/hunters to make the colony self-supplying and enough-protectet, or you say you want 1 or 2 librarians, and a gunsmith. then he will build those buildings and all the other stuff required for that (foot,ores,light sources).
who wants a big nice city, do it youself without a manager!