We’ve had some discussion on discord but here are my 2 cents on this.
Before the discussion ever took place, I suggested sprinklers being upgradable and also suggested limits before any of this was implemented or was a problem, so maybe I was on the right track.
My suggestion is this: if we want to not disturb the economy and not upset people or make some happy that they abused the system and got away with it, we do this: Most players build in a range of 100 to up to 800 ish, let’s assume an avg of 300 planters. We introduce limits to how many planters people can physically place, say 100, and limit each planter to be upgraded to 5, giving us a total of 500 planters if we really wanted to with much lower footprint. Oh and of course each and every level will cost 1 planter + 5000 net worth. Those who choose to build only 100 don’t need to upgrade anything and don’t need to worry about spending net worth, those who want to push it further will have to pay with their net worth and will cost them a lot.
The idea of having 1 sprinkler per 4 planters is good, but with those planter levels we have 2 solutions, if it increases water consumption, we need to upgrade sprinklers to more than just 5 levels, or say fuck it and just don’t change the consumption of planters and leave it as is and simply increase the harvest and sprinkles don’t need to be touched and 4:1 ratio can continue.
this way, economy flow is the same and not artificially limited, those who want 100 planters have 100, those who choose to build 500 virtually, can also do with the included levels.
100 times 5 levels or 50 times 10 levels, all will need planter + 5K networth.
if anything I wrote didn’t make much sense, feel free to ask.