The equal-footing attack and defense for base destruction is definitely impractical, and I don’t play huge multiplayer games often but I’ve never experienced myself a well done “sleeping shift” system implemented, and it seems like a pain in the ass for casual players. Rebalancing the mine/build speed yourself doesnt seem like too hard of a mod to make if you’re really interested in that. Although, for the vanilla game, I quite like the idea of big machines to assist in this, e.g. in the ancient era building a fortified castle takes a ton of npc workers, pulley machines, and is overall tedious, while a thatch house is a quick one man job but not very expandable and very prone to natural disasters, while by the skyscraper age an entire city could be built in maybe two weeks, at a huge resource cost and the risk that the NPC economy would not overcome its cost. I’d say the same for mining, you can’t just smash together a stone pick and infinitely and quickly tunnel to the core by yourself, having to resort to mostly surface and cave deposits, but soon after the insustrial age dynamite, drills, excavators, etc. make mining much quicker (and a single machine won’t require 100 cubic meters of stone). Though I’ve never designed a game and dont know much about how this would be specifically implemented, so these are just my random ideas.
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