No judging from me, at any rate. I do try to optimize for footfall as well but never to any extreme. If whatever settlement I’m building at is below 40c/visit, then I bury some iron under the thing until it gets there and that’s good enough for me in effort/reward.
Too much work to carry something to 60c solo, and the next jump up from there seems insane even for someone as obsessive as me. If the place develops to naturally reach that, great, if not, I’m more interested in it being pretty anyway.
I can understand why people that are interested in going for warden/capital/viceroy would get more extreme about it tho. Personally, while I enjoy a good old-fashioned e-peen measuring contest as much as the next guy, those in particular never caught my fancy.
I think what you’re experiencing here are minuscule changes to the Built Ratio bonus. If I got it right, it’s the bonus you get for not filling plots to the brim with blocks, essentially for free space. Which is why you see prestige going up while adding more free plots. It’s also why total prestige goes up by small amounts for removing blocks that don’t grant any prestige by themselves (as in natural blocks).
Because the values in the debug menu are rounded down, you won’t see the change to the % in builds that already consist of a lot of plots/blocks, but it still happens and is reflected in the total prestige.
There is actually not a single block that grants negative base prestige. That includes Ancient Corruption which I keep hearing has negative prestige. Either it used to be the case, or it was always just a myth perpetuated by that odd little bonus wielding results that can be easily misconstrued.
There have never been negative prestige blocks. As you say, its an interaction with the bonuses that produce reductions in prestige on new placements.
It’s one of the things the rebalanced prestige would resolve; so that prestige never goes down when placing blocks which feels like being punished, and instead just may not go up as much as usual (in the case where ‘bonuses become worse’) or even go up more than usual (in the case where ‘bonuses become better again’) so that it always feels like being rewarded instead.
Understood. I think I’m making sense of it as I go along ok. There’s clearly a lot going on though.
In the meantime, I build what I like. I appreciate MOST of the comments I get, and I have never, until today, looked this deeply into the final prestige figure shown at the beacon stacks up. There’s something to be said for the fun and mystery of it but of course, the more I know the more I’m tempted to optimize.
That’s not because I actually feel prestige-competitive though. It’s exploring the system and I’m wondering right now if I can push that 100 - 150% initial bonus factor all the way to base prestige with a build that’s not a monstrosity.
It’s footfall that might lead to some actual tuning that I wouldn’t otherwise bother with though.
Speaking of footfall, the reason why I didn’t go play around in your test area earlier was that I was busy conducting an experiment on the new footfall system at the time, the results are here if you’re interested:
