Lighthouses should use fuel

[BZR]

It's very annoying for me that the shore is full of lighthouses, it makes them less useful. What is more, some of them are in dead cities, what is very confusing for sailors. Sometimes, it even encourages to break the capital rule, as nobody really like visiting every port with a lighthouse, but goes straight to the one, where he knows that somebody lives.

My proposition is to implement some kind of fuel consumption

For example - person must click on the light in lighthouse, and make a project:

1. Light the lighthouse (wood) - 1000 grams of wood (166% of DoW)

2. Light the lighthouse (coal) - 700 grams of coal (70% of DoW)

3. Light the lighthouse (propan) - 30 grams of propan (33% of DoW)


The lighthouse is then lit for one cantr year.

The strange amount of resources come from few reasons:

- usually propan were used in real world before electricity was invented.
- wood is an "emergency fuel" - so if you run out of propan you can use the wood to buy some time to obtain propan or coal

What do you think? Personally, I love the idea.

edit: one more advantage - the fuel will propalby have to be traded, the resource flow will be slightly increased.

edit2: Piscator - indeed, I forgot about oil - it should be also a choice. It should be as efficient as propan

[Piscator]

I'm not sure yet if I'm in favor of the idea, but I'd like to comment about a few things.

First, the fuel values seem a bit extreme. I think the DoWs could be set a little closer to each other. I don't like advantaging one fuel arbitrarily over all others. After all, wood has been used in navigation beacons, too. Also oil would perhaps be a better choice than coal.

If the lighthose had an off mode, it would be nice if the lighthouse could be switched off on purpose.

You should also be able to see and identify an unlit lighthouse from close distances. After all, it a high tower and should be visible when sailing along the coast.

[SekoETC]

I agree that it would be good if they used fuel. Wood and coal could have about the same efficiency since they can both be gathered and don't need to be refined in any way. Using oil would also be good. Canceling projects that already have resources on them would be difficult, so rather than specifying a set duration, people could set up the project to any size they like (with an upper limit) and if a town wanted to be able to turn off the fire within short notice, they could only use fires that last a day or some hours.

[Cogliostro]

In my opinion this is another one of a broad class of ideas that look very good on paper (realism) but bring nothing to the game except for more headaches for players. Lighthouses are already difficult and quite expensive to construct.

The only gameplay result coming out of this suggestion is that many lighthouses in the game will go dark - in many cases permanently. Is that what we for some reason really want to have happen?

[SekoETC]

They should go dark if there's no one left to maintain the fire. Maybe they could burn for more than a year, but it's silly that they last forever and there's no way to turn them off. For example one of my characters is a bit of a pirate, he settled in a certain location because it was in a very secluded bay and hoped that people would skip it instead of following the shore all the time. But some people build a lighthouse there and it's like "hey, look at me, we have a secret home base here, come visit!" One of them asked him earlier if it was okay, or proposed the idea in general and he said (or expressed in pictures) that a lighthouse would bring in people that kill everybody, but they apparently didn't listen.

[Piscator]

I think every achievement should take some effort to be maintained, otherwise they will stack up. Sooner or later every coastal town will have a lighthouse and with the current game set up there's no chance they won't have a lighthouse again.
Taking this into consideration it seems indeed like a good idea if lighthouses would go dark.

[€e$y]

I think it's good idea. But:

1) Should be an option to put more fuel to light than one year, because people can forget about maintaining the light. One year is not much in Cantr. Personally I would not like to write when I have to set fire, but I would rather put coal for 10 years

2) What about dried dung as a fuel? It's ok to cook meat so maybe it would be also good to keep up the light. I know, I know - it's funny, but this is Cantr

Piscator wrote:
"You should also be able to see and identify an unlit lighthouse from close distances. After all, it a high tower and should be visible when sailing along the coast."

That's good point. It should be visible from further distance than harbour.

[Rebma]

I like this idea, what I understand of it anyways. My question is, in terms of what we'll see in game.

Will an "unlit" or "dark" lighthouse mean the distance at which we'd see that will be changed to a lot closer than what it is now? And a lit one, a bit farther?

Would there be restrictions on how long you could light the lighthouse for at each "lighting" i.e. 5 days, 10 days, 20 days, 6years....or will it be just like every other project (ALMOST) in cantr, where it's our choice?

[Cogliostro]

Maybe it should work similarly to how petrol and drills do. So without fuel, the lighthouses can be seen a fair distance away close to 3/4 the current distance (we imagine it's due to reflecting light with a large mirror or something like that), and if proper fuel is added, they get another boost to the visibility range.

[Illidan]

it seen's dungerous.... because a crazy fag can do the wrong project like:

"we, at location X have Propane and coal... NO WOOD (o.o), nowhere to get it and nowhere to trade it... but we have 1gram of wood left.

We need to set the lighthouse on. We have coal and propane to do that, but a newspawn character saw the wood... saw the lighthouse and started a project with the wood"

Bam! we can't cancel the project, we can't put more fuel, the project will not start or even finish because we don't have wood to fuel it rightly.

Sorry about my bad english writing skills, i hope someone can understand it

[SekoETC]

If something like that happened, you could just contact Support and have the project deleted.

[Andu]

Maybe it should work similarly to how petrol and drills do. So without fuel, the lighthouses can be seen a fair distance away close to 3/4 the current distance (we imagine it's due to reflecting light with a large mirror or something like that), and if proper fuel is added, they get another boost to the visibility range.

I think 1/2 of the current distance is better.

[SekoETC]

The light shows much further than the tower itself. There should be no magical free flame, if there's no light project active then the tower should only serve as a landmark and shouldn't be seen from awfully far.

[Dudel]

The light shows much further than the tower itself. There should be no magical free flame, if there's no light project active then the tower should only serve as a landmark and shouldn't be seen from awfully far.

I think they are getting at "Look I can see something really tall in the distance" as the 1/2 mark... thing.

Kinda how you can see towns from X amount? Same idea but a bit farther then allowing the light thing which keeps the lighthouse "where its at".

Then again, I might be confusing things.

[Lord_Igor]

So, any decision on this? I'd really like it if abandoned places stopped having functioning lighthouses.