I’ve put in a couple hundred hours on .9.4 and have some feedback. I’ll try to avoid anything that I know is on the road map and focus on the easier fixes first.
Item tooltips: it’d be nice if the game would tell you how long items last. If it’s a bit complicated, fine, but some vague info is often better than the FAAFO approach.
12 month report: I really wish this kept data for your entire run. Vertical graph lines make brain go brrr.
Honey: short of covering an entire map in beehives, it feels nearly impossible to produce enough honey. It isn’t just increased demand due to making pastries; it seems like the base production value got nerfed.
Luxury food: the addition of pastries as a luxury food really brings home a little something that’s bothered me. Salt! How could there not be salt in this game? Cooking fats, too, are missing from the game. I kind of wish there was a “luxury food” at each tier: herbs, salt, fats (add butter making at the dairy). Maybe it’s a bit much to fit in before v1.0, but I really like the economic complexity the most.
Grain: grain crops feel underpowered. The food output for growing grain should significantly dwarf what you can get from growing veggies. It’s both historically/agricultrually accurate and reflects better balance for all the extra jobs bread production requires. There’s a reason they call it your “daily” bread. I don’t know if the better way to go would be nerfing non-grain crops, but…
Hay feels especially overpowered. I had a set of three 12x14 fields growing enough hay to support 3 upgraded cow barns, a horse stable, and 16 chicken coops. I’m not about to sit here and crunch numbers, but that doesn’t seem like an accurate reflection of how much food livestock actually requires, even when you account for grazing them for most of the year.
Preservationist building: why isn’t there a recipe to preserve greens? My people want saurkraut and/or kimchi.
Flax also feels a bit overpowered. I had flax in the same rotation as above supporting 2 clothing shops and 2 paper mills, although I was using the Hair of Haida artifact and production limits on clothes to keep the buildings going on (what felt like) a relatively modest supply of flax. Nerfing flax a bit might help, but mostly I’d rather see more uses for fabric and fiber, like maybe tapestries as a lower-tier luxury item.
Hay/flax/willow: I really wish there was a smaller (2x3 or 3x3) storage building for hay, flax, and willow that would be immune to rats. I also find myself wishing for a small building to store firewood, since the markets want to stock it, but I hate putting a whole stockyard next to a market for just that. I’d be fine with one building that could do all of these.
Rat clusters: if I have a cluster of storage buildings, the game seems to spawn rats in all of those buildings at once. A dedicated rat catcher handles it, it just that having them all spawn at once makes it look like there’s a problem when there isn’t. Maybe just stagger the days rats will spawn a little more?
Small game traps (upgraded hunter’s lodge): feels underpowered. I feel like I hardly every see them having triggered. It seems like they’re supposed to be a solution for late-game demand for hides, but I end up having to rely on trade because traps hardly make any difference.
Forestry camps: I complained about the “ugly forest blobs” last time, so I hate to say this, but now they seem to space trees 2-3 squares apart, and a fully employed camp can run out of mature trees. Not sure what the best solution is: maybe trees mature faster, maybe the work area can be bigger, maybe it’s possible to dial the spacing back a bit (although I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some weird emergent behavior that makes it hard to get the spacing just right).
Tools: producing enough tools for everyone in town feels unreasonably difficult. Was it always the case that basically everyone uses tools? But it’s also hard to keep up with iron demand. Maybe the recipe should output more tools or something.
Tier 5 houses: they are beautiful on their own, but the way the roofs clip into each other if you don’t space them out doesn’t look great. There’s probably nothing to be done about it at this point, other than placing and spacing houses differently.
I also kind of wish that Mansions/T5 houses required stone, in addition to everything else. It’d help further justify building a deep stone mine (which is a beautiful building I wish I got to see more of… seriously, I wish that was the model you’d used for T4 deep clay and sand mines).
Markets: they feel a little small by the time you get T5 housing. Both the work/service area, and the building itself. It also feels like 4 grocers is sometimes struggle to provide timely service. So I wouldn’t mind seeing a second upgrade to the market (and maybe some decorations I could use to make it more visually impressive). It also seems a bit odd that you can’t set min and max quotas for your markets, but grocers seem to do an ok job of balancing what they stock on their own.
Persistent tool tips: sometimes after I open the building menu and then close it, a tool tip describing one of the buildings appears a second later and won’t clear from the screen unless I re-open the building menu and hover over another building to force a new tool tip to appear.
Trade automation: I really, really want a more advanced interface for trade including various ways to automatically buy or sell. For example: “always buy and stock spices sold at a very low price” or “always stock 500 flax, and always sell flax at any price.” Also please add honey and beeswax as things the traders sell.
Trader widget countdown: you know the little circular bubble that appears in the upper left corner when there are traders at your center? It’s be really awesome if that bubble displayed a countdown of days that particular trader had left in town.
Emergency shelters: it’d be really nice to control what foods can be stocked in your emergency shelters. Seeing them stocked with raw meat, milk, and berries instead of smoked meat, cheese, and preserves drives my wagon up the wall.
Military: I really loathe having to manually re-hire soldiers. I know you’re working on military UI stuff, so I just want to say that I’d really appreciate a way to see every soldier at a glance and easily order individuals to retreat/garrison. Currently, they wait until they’re almost dead to seek medical treatment, and usually end up dying as a result. What I want is for them to retreat at about 25% health, and the only way I can do that is by pausing constantly during raids and checking each barrack and stable individually so I can easily see the health of my soldiers and issue individual orders to retreat (garrison) before they die. Soldiers are expensive and I don’t appreciate them throwing my money away with their lives, especially when I have to manually re-hire the replacements.
Villager paths and info after death: when a villagers dies of an illness, it’d be nice if the corpse told you what disease it was. It might help in dealing with disease outbreaks more promptly. Similarly, when a villager dies of exposure, I wish there was a way to know what job they were working on and where they were coming from, so I could build a shelter out that way. The only way I could imagine that working would be if it were possible to see an individual villager’s current path (and that info “stayed on the corpse”). But visualizing villager paths actually seems like a pretty awesome thing to add anyway.
Build site highlighting: if you click on a build site, it’d be really cool if the assigned builders were highlighted so you could glare at them while you wait.
Chicken coops and book binders: the default and maximum number of workers for chicken coops (1/2) and book binders (2/3) both feel quite low compared to the default numbers for other buildings. I would recommend 2/4 for the chicken coops and 3/5 for the book binders. Book binders also seem to require an awful lot of bricks for such small buildings that look to be made of mostly wood.
Crocked buildings: some of the buildings are programmed to conform to the surrounding terrain level, and it can look really visually jarring. I first noticed it with the deep stone mine, but now I keep seeing it everywhere. What’s really annoying is that I have to flatten the adjacent tiles, not just the tiles the buildings sit on, to eliminate the lean. Could you at least make it so that these buildings would lay flat based on only the tiles they occupy, and not the adjacent tiles as well?
Entertainment: it really needs to be better explained in game. If a festival pole provides its bonus when it covers 30 houses, does that mean you should aim to build one for every 30 houses to max out the entertainment provided by that building? I seem to recall reading that the town wants 2 kinds of entertainment from 2 sources at 100% saturation, but you can also reach overall 100% entertainment with a mix of 3 or 4 sources.
Libraries: why can you hire a second librarian? Is it really just in case a single librarian can’t stock books on their own? Libraries feel a bit underwhelming in terms of how much entertainment they provide, at least if my understanding of how entertainment works isn’t totally off. I would love it if libraries worked like temples, and you could ‘slot’ rare manuscripts or first editions in order to provide a bonus to the building’s entertainment value. Plus it’d give you a great opportunity to add more humor into the game vis-a-vis silly/morose book titles.
Drunken brawls: it really irks me when a solider gets drunk, murders 9 townspeople, then goes back to work like nothing happened. If townspeople killing each other is really meant to be part of the game, then why isn’t there a constabulary, a courthouse, and a gallows? I want to see that bastard hang for what he did. However an oubliette would be an acceptable alternative to a gallows if depicting the latter in game would be a bit much.
Management screens: I somewhat touched on this when discussing military issues, and I’ve seen the agriculture management tool you have planned. I would also really, really appreciate a storage manager. I’d like to be able to name my storage buildings, and copy storage quotas from one to another. I’d really love to do all that from one screen, too. And I’d love for the farming and military management screens to be similarly useful for doing things, and not just seeing things.
Dedicated laborers: this is a suggestion to add a “dedicated laborer” job option to… most buildings? Dedicated laborers would bring materials to the building, and move finished products away, and if they had no jobs available would do regular laborer jobs. I know letting players control everything isn’t what this game’s design philosophy is about, but this feels like it’d be an excellent compromise that would help solve specific problems, like miners hand delivering every lump of ore because you can’t build up enough of a buffer in your storage buildings. Just a thought.
Ok. I’ve binged this game for the last couple of months while real life has been a bit too much. It’s been a great distraction, but I think I’m ready to put it down again for a while until 1.0 comes out. I really love what you’ve done here. I played a lot of Anno 1404 back in the day, and the nostalgia value is non-zero. But the game still stands on its own. The buildings are gorgeous, and I will keep wanting MOAR of them. Your art department must be having a blast. When I pick the game up again I’m looking forward to putting efficiency builds down and finally making a perfectly beautiful town.
PS: could you add the “red pine” trees to the decorative tree options? The model shows up on maps but you can’t plant them. And if the art dept ever finds time to add weeping willows, it’d make me unreasonably happy.
think that could be fun.