I am writing this as both an explanation of some of the costs -initial and maintenance- coming up and a request for both constructive critique and understanding.
This is not my first time running a group of interactors, nor even my first time running a settlement-managment game (I ran Pathfinder Kingmaker as part of an RPG club), yet in all prior instances the costs and finicky bits of settlement management were never the focus, and nor did I have to think of all the mechanical details myself.
I write this with the hope that far cleverer questers will lend me their brains over the course of this colonial venture.
Thus far my initial plans for -as an example- the Farms and Rice-Paddies is thus:
Farm: Requires 1 manpower to build, 2 construction materials.
Requires 0.5 manpower locked in as weekly maintenance, plus 0.25 Mo per Week.
Can only be active on Non-Flooded land.
Produces 5 food Per Week.
Jade Rice Paddy Requires 1 manpower to build, 3 construction materials.
Requires 0.5 manpower locked in as weekly maintenance, plus 0.25 Mo per Week.
Can only be active on Flooded land.
Produces 5 food Per Week.
My thinking on the maintenance being in the fractions of 1 is simply this: I don't want to have all of your manpower locked up in farms, and this price means that food security will not be so-much a game of growing the food (Lustria is fecund to a ludicrous degree, especially so close to the amaxon river) as it is a game of storing it.
In the beginning all of your food will be stored in the ship, awaiting the building of Granaries, and in there -and in the granaries to a smaller degree- the horrifying weather, pests and diseases of this continent will be taking their toll in terms of spoilage. Add this to cults, infiltrating saboteurs and corruption adding their own taxes on usable food.
Just 2 farms will theoretically produce exactly enough food to feed the initial colony every month, but new colonists will be arriving each month and potentially even faster with events, and thus food security will be reliant on a healthy surplus and even healthier paranoia about spoilage.