So you already played Eco ? Nice. How about another try ? But this time you do it with these essential and basic principles in mind.
Eco is a cooperative game which means every citizen contributes to victory. Once you know the basic tricks to move, build and maintain your inventory, it’s time to think about faster ways to accomplish projects on a server. Note this means to think a bit more about cooperation than your previous games.
In a cooperation game, players who research a skill book alone is a signal that cooperation is not happening (insert drama sound here). Most importantly, researching the same book twice is wasteful and may trigger competitive behaviors.
I have seen many server hosts work hard to research basic skill books to help new players on their server. These are generous intentions, thank you. But keep in mind that research is the first server-level cooperative project available and new players are missing an easy opportunity to learn to work together and establish a cooperation culture on the server. Best to work on a town hall and public library infrastructure instead.
To avoid independent research, you may first ask if other players are interested in sharing a research project with you. Each player you get increases your productivity in this project. Tell them you will share extra skill papers with them. If a contract board is available, start the research project, then make a work party with the board where people can bring research papers and receive the skill. If you care about community growth, you should consider making a common room with a public research table or create a town’s research center with a library store.
Upgrade modules are essential in any good plan to increase productivity. Their first effect is to reduce resources needed in crafting recipes by 10% up to 50%. However, many recipes involves more than one step of transformation, so you can get compound bonus too. Intermediate players and expert players often refrain from doing any mass production unless their crafting tables contains an upgrade lvl2 or even lvl3. Clever pacing means an efficient use of basic resources, hence increased productivity.
At the server level, large distribution of modules means a larger amount of actions and items are made pet time unit invested in the game. Their availability is a great indicator of the collaborative level of a community. Speaking of communities, your server as a whole will find very difficult to tackle any type of major project and reduce wasteful behaviors without laws. Laws and currency are like upgrade modules: they help to coordinate individual efforts to reach a more productive community and you should at least make the basic infrastructure as soon as possible.
I often notice inexperienced players by the size of the lands they claim: the bigger the lands, the more likely you have a newb. Maybe you just left a small server with aggressive neighbors or you are a farmer who wants to single handedly feed everyone on the server. Maybe you have a very special project in mind or you are unsure about where this iron is. But in most case, a 3x3 area is well enough for a first base unless you play 10 hours a day. I always keep one paper on myself in case I need to secure a stockpile far from home. Guess what ? The game gives you 10 land papers...
There are very few reasons to claim a single land area bigger than 4x4, especially during the first days of the server. Huge lands are uninviting, can quickly cause territorial dispute, cost more to link with roads (since people will settle elsewhere) and make you lose more time in transport. Large lands are seldom exploited to their full capacity and they make trade annoying when you can't place a cart in front of a store because the owner claimed a 8x8 area around it.
On the other hand, cost-effective designs do not require a lot of land and you can save your land papers for specialized areas and projects elsewhere. Adding an extra level to a building, instead of building next to it, helps you save on building material (shared roof/floor areas are often bigger than shared wall areas) while allowing more links between workstations and storage. Digging an extra stockpile space under your store takes about 10 minutes (if you have food in your inventory) and offers a good storage solution. Communities also save a lot of resources and time on transport when several players settle close to each other.
If you already know how to move a whole stockpile of items (see this post if you don't), you can think about transporting a large amount of items across medium distances easily. For example, if a forest is located 50 squares from your processing center, you first put a stockpile next to the forest. Then from this stockpile to the processing center, you make a line of stockpiles, each spaced by approximately 13 squares. Also, make sure there is a regular stockpile, then a tiny one, then a regular, then... until you reach your processing center. If you lack stockpiles, you can use a cart to replace a regular stockpile and a crafting table table to replace a tiny stockpile. When you finish putting wood in the forest stockpile, interact with the tiny stockpiles to transfer in bulk the wood from one regular stockpile to the other. Tiny stockpiles act like myelin sheath in neurons by allowing the items to jump from one regular stockpile to another one located 26 squares apart (hence stockpile jumping). It works very well on uneven terrain.
The same jumping approach can be used when mining to great depths, except stockpiles are on top of each other, hence vertical mining. Using this trick, smiths can easily design a store on the surface with a ninja processing center below which automatically disposes tailings 39 squares below the surface.
One common problem in Eco is players who do not sell items related to their profession and don't contribute to contracts. For example, I have seen a great deal of players who choose the carpentry profession because they want to build a big wood house. However, they actually use all the hewn and lumber for their own project. Unless other players compensate this loss, non-carpenters are left to wastefully make their own hewn, spending more calories in the process.
Eco is a cooperative game, meaning other players depend on you to win and you depend on them too. Unless other players next to you have the same skills, assume you will need to provide items and resources to at least 3 other players : have these items in store when you are away.
When there is no common currency, making your skills available also means your store needs to buy items related to other players’s skills. For example, chefs may sell food and buy crops. This is a minimal option to consider, but most players on the server will be more productive and useful if they invest their time mining and cutting wood. So if you are a food producer, buy hewn, mortared stone, etc. By the way, buy stone roads too.
How these trading ideas help your own productivity? Creating a flow around your area (even better in a town center) creates a lot of opportunities for projects. Overall, you'll end up making more than if you were alone in your corner. This idea also works well with the theory that cooperation is achieved when your individual success depends on the individual success of those around you: the flow will help everyone.
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