This is not a rant. I really love(d) this game. I am about 1000 hours in. Still I understand, the game needed changes and is on prerelease. But for now, the update (and the mentioned changes upto 1.0) jeopardize the game. Why?
it got too easy (ranges of buildings like school, healer, parks)
riders / knights are so op, no need for walls or army anymore.
performance got worse - at least on my computer at about 700 inhabitants
I hope all that will be fixed and I am sure the brilliant devs will find solutions as they did before.
Remember tier 5 housing is not yet put. The changes to radius were to accommodate tier 5 without having to half your house/market spacing ratio. Other than that walls being obsolete is a bit depressing and the speed factor we now need 4x which we dont have yet
Yes, you are right. But tier 5 canāt be that big of a change. A friend of mine has a theory.
The biggest fun in the game is to explore it and to find out the real mechanics in a game. so they might have just killed a lot of the Mechanics to establish new ones to make the game more attractive to us early access players when the final release comes out and for completely new players. so they will engage in the game as enthusiastic as we have done before without us being able to spoil all the solutions right from the start.
Itās a bit too much conspiracy theory like for me but it might have some truth to it.
I agree on the first point. It used to be a main part of the game getting desirability up in order to update your houses. With the increased radii itās so easy now, itās starting to spoil the fun. Also, the cities look less interesting now, because you simply donāt need so many desirability buildings anymore. I think temptation is always high making a game easier in order to make it more accessable for new players. This, however, is a dangerous path, since it also makes the game far less interesting in the long run.
As for the second point, I tend to agree here as well. Though, I have to admit I only have some very limited experience with knights yet, havenāt used them with 0.9.3 yet.
As for the last point, I really canāt judge yet. My 0.9.3 town is still too small (~230 pop). Up till now, game feels way smoother than before.
What seems not to be easily understood is that this increased radius is due to the introduction of the long-planned Tier 5 housing, which I guess will require 100% desirability. With old radius only very few houses could have got Tier 5, unless you plan the city layout in a very odd way.
Also with small radius we were forced to make city layouts which felt in most cases absolutely not medieval-ish and more like a XX Century american suburb, something which had literally destroyed my fun and forced me to stop playing since late 2022ā¦ until official mod support was established. And Iām sure Iām not alone in this.
What can be done is the introduction of a new setting which will set the radius small or large depending on difficulty level. So those who love american design will be happy, and also those who want the game to be very hard, and also those like me who want more freedom in city planning.
But that is bogus. I always had 100% desire. The t5 bakery would have fit in easily, libraries were always in my design as well. There will be a university but that could have had theater range. So t5 would have fit in the old mechanics.
So the t5 reasoning doesnāt explain such a drastic change sufficiently.
The official reason is that we heard the communityās feedback that the old desirability ranges felt too restrictive in regards to what kind of settlements and layouts they could make. Ultimately, we decided that flexibility wins out over stricter layout requirements.
Yes, this effectively makes it āeasierā to meet desirability requirements, and I understand that is a negative for someone that enjoyed the challenge of fulfilling them. But I have to admit that it definitely has its appeal, especially for very mountainous settlements:
The reality is that this is kind of a natural process that occurs in early access as players get their hands on the game and we get impressions from a much larger sampling. Farthest Frontier entered early access as a much more difficult game. Grim Dawn went through the exact same thing, where it was once called the ādark souls of ARPGsā, but we had to gradually ease the challenge to meet the needs of the player base.
As someone that enjoys challenging games, I absolutely understand that can be frustrating. We still jokingly reminisce about how Grim Dawn went downhill after B9 (a beta version of the game that was our first measurable drop in difficulty). The game of course has a resoundingly positive score though, so we really cannot complain.
Personally, I never liked spamming āsmall garden, small garden, small gardenā¦ā. It is not an entertaining challenge.
Yes, the game does need challenge, but it needs to look for challenges elsewhere. So, I made up my own challenges, like the āMinecraft butā¦ā trend among streamers.
I agree that the game has gotten a lot easier, at least once you get to mid-game (T3) and beyond. FWIW, I like the changes that have led to this - especially the broader radius for desirability. I am firmly in the camp of wanting more flexibility in building cities, and not wanting to micro-place desirability buildings.
I do think that by the late game, more can be done to amp up the difficulty of ādisasters.ā Fundamentally, even a smallpox outbreak in my city of 1600 people is only going to kill maybe a dozen people, because Iāve got clinics. Invading armies are trivial to defeat once you have 40+ Lancers.
I would like to see the possibility of much more catastrophic events (a 600-person invading army, for instance), or the bubonic plague or something. As frustrating as itās been to have entire 300- or 400- pop cities wiped out by invading armies that just wonāt stop destroying, those moments are still fun. I donāt see why they canāt continue once we get to 1000+
Sure, more disasters will be nice, but I think this game should play to its strength. At its core, Farthest Frontier is a commute micromanager, right? I think optimizing commute should be its biggest challenge.
Increasing length of day from 5 to 8 seconds was the biggest mistake imo. Maybe they can make a system where the higher difficulty settings will have shorter day length to make commute optimization more crucial. For added challenge, production rate can be slowed down.
But we also need more control over commute. Production buildings need a maximum resource fetching radius, ox carts need manual route management, restock triggers need to be manually controllable, ore spawn needs to be more tight. There is a lot of stuff that the game currently automates that they can hand over to the user for control.
However, the game needs an easy mode too. I know plenty of people who gave up on Civ VI because of the micromanagement.
@Zantai: First off, youāre aware itās really mean feeding us Screenshots with these most beautiful tier 5 houses knowing that we canāt build them (yet)?
@Ro84: I have to agree with @sfin that with library, temple, pastry etc. added, we got so many more desirabillity buildings that getting to 100% desirabillity really is not very difficult. But, I very much see your point with those non-medieval-ish city layouts. Never liked them at all and always refused building my town according to them. And I have to admit, if you donāt rely on these layouts, you had to get reeally creative when building your town. I agree itās a good thing we donāt need them anymore, now.
@Zantai: Following up on this, you kind of got me with your mountainous settlement argument, especially considering this beautiful screenshot.
@Subhasis_Banerjee: I liked the challenge of having to place many desirabillity buildings while still trying to retain a medieval-ish city layout. But, I agree that spamming small gardens indeed kinda was somewhat annoying. And being honest, thatās what it often came down to in the end.
So, to conclude, maybe Iām starting to change my mind on these larger radii.
Blockquote However, the game needs an easy mode too. I know plenty of people who gave up on Civ VI because of the micromanagement
Well, I both think 0.93 is my favorite version yet (and am really excited for 0.94), and am in the camp of people who gave up on Civ VI because of micromanagement
I think this all speaks to the devsā point - thereās a lot of different playstyles to understand and try to accomodate.
My point on disasters is more about surprises or things that break optimizations. By the late game, the city is basically invincible. The map I am playing now, I could leave it running without intervention for 3 years - heck, maybe 5 or 10 - if there werenāt dialogue box interruptions, and nothing fatal is going to happen to the city. Maybe I need to go rebuild some outbuildings every few years. Itās well-optimized within the capabilities of the game. The only surprise left is when I get bored and continue to build or change things, and then have to rebalance.
But that is also in the nature of this sort of game. Eventually each build gets boring and we start over. Thatās fun.
Anyways - Iām loving the changes, 0.93 is my favorite so far, but I agree with the sentiment that it is much easier and I for one would love to see catastrophes scale better with the wealth and population of a city, just to make it a bit harder to have an eternally resilient city in the late game.
The desirability radius changes will lead to more interesting cities as players will have more flexibility with how they place and arrange decorations. Some maps will benefit more than others. I always struggled to raise desirability on alpine maps due to the excess of hills and valleys interfering with how I could design my town. Those of us who are into organic city layouts and building Medieval Barbie Dream Towns are now freed from the need to cram everything together.
When you boil the game down to a ācommute managerā it makes me not want to play it. I like the slower pace of the longer days. We all have different aspects and challenges of the game that we enjoy.
Maybe with your play-style, catastrophe spices things up, but you need to look at it from the hardcore point of view as well. I do not play hardcore either, but others do.
Hardcore is initially frustrating, but it comes with the motivation that one day, everything will work out. Knowing that a tornado or a Mongol Invasion will ruin all of it one dayā¦ that is jarring. It is a factor that the player cannot control. That is not satisfactory. It is probably an OCD thing.
Manageable threats are fine. Building up the city to be able to endure a year-long (or longer) seizeā¦ that might be awesome. But disasters that break optimization or cannot be optimized against? I think it is bad news, or at least should be toggle-able.
Disasters that test the resilience of your town but donāt totally destroy it (unless youāve done a really poor job planning it) are ideal. They shouldnāt be apocalyptic though.
