Bringing Cotton Cloth back into Balance.

[James Bowen]

...if it ends up happening, it's going to have to overlook some pretty annoying aspects of realism. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Realism is secondary to game balance. Ideally game balance can be achieved in a realistic manner, but that is not always possible.

Hence 'Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.'

[elTegra]

Under that sort of logic, mining should be labour intensive as well (which it is, unless you spend the capital to get drills or quarries). And cantr doesn't handle slaves very well, for some reason young people don’t fear death, maybe its their belief in coming back as something else? .

But I think we can agree that cotton needs to be more intensive (and require more equipment to process) than hemp, even with special equipment.

Just had a thought, could you restrict building a cotton picker to areas that only require cotton (a little obvious sorry), but instead of getting cotton from operating the machine you would get "cotton plant" (I'm better with numbers than names sorry) which you would receive quite a lot of cotton plant for ... but you would also have to build a second machine indoors to process that "cotton plant" into either fibres or cotton.

Both machines would be resource intensive to set-up. But the pay off would be making cotton cloth at 200g per day? Still a fair bit less than Hemp (With no special equipment), but 4 times more than if you did it by hand. Is that a solution you'd be happy with?

[Oasis]

That sounds way too complicated. I think the process is complicated enough. I liked your first suggestion. Add a machine to increase the gathering rate to put cotton somewhere in the middle between hemp and silk. Makes sense to me.

[Phalynx]

A machine for picking cotton just isn't really a posibility is it, how would it work?? I see potato/carrot harvester as really a plough that brings things up to the surface but a picking machine... that's almost a robot?

The curious thing is I can se clothes having more value when weather and its effects has its mythical implementation, but fur and hemp will keep you a lot warmer than silk and arguably cotton, unless we are talking underwear....

[mtm21]

Ahh! I got a cold bottom!

[Pie]

Actually, a cotton picking maching would probably be a little pincer thingy with weals and blads that will cut the plant and stuff.

[James Bowen]

For game mechanics purposes, recieving a different resource for harvesting cotton through a machine isn't really possible if I understand the way the project coding works. It'd be easiest just to make a machine to increase the amount of cotton that can be harvested a day. We'll just imagine that the machine automatically processes the cotton as it gets ahold of it.

[Phalynx]

Lets face it the gathering rate just needs to be massively increased - I have no expereince of cotton picking but I imagine a skilled cotton picker could gather way more then 100gs of the stuff...

"We had worked three hours and took our cotton in to be weighed. I had thirty pounds and he had forty-two. The white man near us had eighty-five. In talking over this discrepancy we found that we had been picking only the clean white cotton, while the more experienced pickers picked the bolls along with the cotton and more than doubled the weight."

Source: http://www.catholicworker.com/ah_coton.htm

And I was wrong there is a mechanical Cotton Picker here:
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Multimedia.jsp?id=m-3351 But this would require similar resources to a vehicle surely...

[Surly]

Lets face it the gathering rate just needs to be massively increased - I have no expereince of cotton picking but I imagine a skilled cotton picker could gather way more then 100gs of the stuff...

I think you have completely missed the realism vs game balance point there...

All in all, I don't see that cotton needs a harvester as neither hemp nor silk cocoons have a machine. Any argument for 'balance' there is floored.

Personnally, I think somebody needs to compare the cloth amount per day against the amount needed for clothes. There is no reason why cotton needs to be easier to make than silk... nor do I see a compelling argument here why a harvester is needed...

[SekoETC]

Ok reduce ginning loss to 10% and increase daily gathering rate a bit, that's it. If a cotton harvester is added, it should be difficult to make. Cotton should be cheaper than silk but more expensive than hemp.

[Oasis]

I know that clothes are not programmed for usefulness, but if that were possible, a simple pair of gloves, to save the hands from those thorns that I believe cotton plants have, could realistically increase picking speed by twice as much. Ever wonder why all those cotton dresses are pink?

[Maelstrom]

What's wrong with one type of clothing being easier/harder to make/produce than another? They shouldn't just be clones of each other with different names.

The entire thread implies something was done to tip cotton cloth 'out of balance'. Can you provide some sort of change history to support this, at all?

Also, I didn't vote because it's a skewed set of answers. I would put:

* No, leave it alone

-Mael

[Phalynx]

Lets face it the gathering rate just needs to be massively increased - I have no expereince of cotton picking but I imagine a skilled cotton picker could gather way more then 100gs of the stuff...

I think you have completely missed the realism vs game balance point there...

All in all, I don't see that cotton needs a harvester as neither hemp nor silk cocoons have a machine. Any argument for 'balance' there is floored.

Personnally, I think somebody needs to compare the cloth amount per day against the amount needed for clothes. There is no reason why cotton needs to be easier to make than silk... nor do I see a compelling argument here why a harvester is needed...

Dude do you resist ALL change for the sake of it...

The point is there is no game balance, with cotton being so labour intensive and no realism in the rate it's picked. A 'harvester' would restore the balance, hemp is easy to gather IG but not particulalry IRL.

I could accept a lack of reality if things were balanced more fairly. And I could accept imbalance on the grounds of an attempt to be realistic but the current rates don't reflect this either..

[Phalynx]

Hell it's not like I care, clothes are a waste of time anyway.... but it is an issue of prinicple in some respects...

[Oasis]

What's wrong with one type of clothing being easier/harder to make/produce than another? They shouldn't just be clones of each other with different names.

This is the whole reason for the desired change. Cotton clothing is as hard and labour intensive to make as silk ones, however not nearly as prestigeous or sought after. They seem to have been originally made to be "clones" when it is an imbalance for them to be this way.

The change suggested would not make cotton cloth as easy as hemp, but in between silk and hemp. I have always thought cotton collection to be way too slow, and it is refreshing to have someone come up with a viable solution, imo.