City use for Lanterns and Torches

[Deantwo]

With the number of new/returning players, we are again seeing a lot of players experiencing the horrors of citizens not working during the night. This might be even worse if the world is so dark or has extra long nights that citizens never get to work.

I suggested this back on the old forum, but that forum is dead and gone now, so here we go again.

It would be useful if citizens could work at night when your city has Torches, Candles, and/or Lanterns. It would allow players to build up to a more stable first city faster, and it would give another use to some commodities that are barely used right now.

Related old idea: (Idea thread) Scare away Animals by Holding a Torch

[Rockinsince87]

With the number of new/returning players, we are again seeing a lot of players experiencing the horrors of citizens not working during the night. This might be even worse if the world is so dark or has extra long nights that citizens never get to work.

I suggested this back on the old forum, but that forum is dead and gone now, so here we go again.

It would be useful if citizens could work at night when your city has Torches, Candles, and/or Lanterns. It would allow players to build up to a more stable first city faster, and it would give another use to some commodities that are barely used right now.

Related old idea: (Idea thread) Scare away Animals by Holding a Torch

This is a really good idea. I liked the suggestion before and now it makes even more sense.

[GaelicVigil]

With the number of new/returning players, we are again seeing a lot of players experiencing the horrors of citizens not working during the night. This might be even worse if the world is so dark or has extra long nights that citizens never get to work.

I suggested this back on the old forum, but that forum is dead and gone now, so here we go again.

It would be useful if citizens could work at night when your city has Torches, Candles, and/or Lanterns. It would allow players to build up to a more stable first city faster, and it would give another use to some commodities that are barely used right now.

Related old idea: (Idea thread) Scare away Animals by Holding a Torch

I don’t like this idea at all.  Building up your city in the early game should be slower because it is simulating your civ's dark ages.  Of course if is not 100% realistic that no work is done at night, but it helps abstract the idea that early development was slow. 

It underscores the necessity to use mounts to get around your city faster to build things manually.  It makes getting electricity a big deal.  Removing this would make electricity less useful overall.

I think it is also a slippery slope to start nerfing game features to make the game more appealing to casual gamers.

I suggest it would be better to just communicate the mechanic better in-game.  There should be a message in the building window to indicate that production has stopped at night because there is no electricity.

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Perhaps a compromise would be to allow *some* night production with candles and lanterns to give them some usefulness. I'd be cool with that.

But making them = to electricity is a bridge too far imo.

[Celarious]

Yeah I was gonna say, I feel like this would significantly lower the value of power plants/electricity generation, I would argue night-working is one of their main benefits on habitable worlds and without it, idk, it feels like building them would be one of those "maybe later, not really necessary" optional steps in the guide

[Deantwo]

Yeah I was gonna say, I feel like this would significantly lower the value of power plants/electricity generation, I would argue night-working is one of their main benefits on habitable worlds and without it, idk, it feels like building them would be one of those "maybe later, not really necessary" optional steps in the guide

I don’t like this idea at all.  Building up your city in the early game should be slower because it is simulating your civ's dark ages.  Of course if is not 100% realistic that no work is done at night, but it helps abstract the idea that early development was slow. 

It underscores the necessity to use mounts to get around your city faster to build things manually.  It makes getting electricity a big deal.  Removing this would make electricity less useful overall.

I guess that is true, it would feel less impactful to get electricity.

But the night does slow down the game a lot in a way that literally stops some players from being able to able to progress for quite a while. So some way to make it less of a complete stop might be a good thing, at least for the few people that even find out about this alternative.

I suggest it would be better to just communicate the mechanic better in-game.  There should be a message in the building window to indicate that production has stopped at night because there is no electricity.

This would definitely help a lot. Just a simple line at the top of the manufacturing tab saying "No electricity, citizens refusing to work at night." or something.

Perhaps a compromise would be to allow *some* night production with candles and lanterns to give them some usefulness.  I'd be cool with that.

But making them = to electricity is a bridge too far imo.

Electricity still increases the production rate of all manufacturing jobs, so it is not like this would be better than electricity. Not to mention electricity actually being a requirement to continue progression to electronics.

But yeah, it could just be something like a 50% chance of running a job during the night at the cost of a light source commodity.

[Norm49]

I'm with Deantow on this one. I think it is a good idea.