After a few dozen hours, a "city building veteran" gives a little feedback

Farthest Frontier Ideas and Feedback
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A tiered priority system, and a quicker way to apply those priorities, would be massively appreciated.

Timberborn’s, a game I’ve been playing recently, system comes to mind. 5 options from least important to less important to neutral to important to most important, and the ability to drag apply those settings to an area instead of having to select each individual operation. Prioritizing a construction project like a wall is really a pain currently. Honestly it was a little jarring to see such a rudimentary prioritization system in a game these days, maybe a more fleshed out one wasn’t a priority? :wink:

Workers are really lazy when there’s no work to do.

The Forager Shack comes to mind, not just in the winter, but if there’s nothing to be gathered in their target area they just stop working, leading to constant micromanaging. Or if, say, a soap maker runs out of tallow, they just stop working and do nothing. It would be great if they would become temp labor, but if the micromanaging is something you want to encourage, can you at least have an icon over the building or something to let us know, so we don’t have to keep checking each and every building individually? Especially important if you happen to be struggling, only to find the 6 people you allocated to your weaver building aren’t doing anything because you’re out of flax.

The Trading Post. Some form of alert would be awesome.

I’ve missed so many traders, noticing that icon just as they’re leaving. It’s a rare occasion and when your settlement starts getting large you aren’t always paying attention to that one specific building in town. Alternatively some form of automation would also be great.

A desirability widget would be nice.

Long term resource generation.

Running a map out of important resources sucks. I know it’s in the works, just wanted to take a moment to say Thank you.

The terrain flattening feels terrible.

I don’t know if there’s some trick to it I’m not getting, or if it’s deliberately supposed to be difficult to manage terrain in order to encourage less “spreadsheet building” but I really struggle to get it to do what I want it to do.

Controlling villagers during a raid to have them fight is, awkward.

I get that the intention is to not have the cobbler, for example, fight to defend the town, that should be up to the guards, but there are times when everyone must take up arms, or they’re just going to starve through the winter anyway. However the AI for the villagers seems to want them to just run for their lives. I don’t really have any suggestions here, just really wanted to stress that playing at half speed and pausing often to micromanage selecting small groups and telling them to attack specific raiders is super awkward. Especially when you mix in guards, and dragging to select a group prioritizes the guards and ignores the villagers, then you have to try to gather up the villagers without selecting the guards. It’s awkward.

That’s all I can think of for now, at least that I haven’t already seen suggested commonly elsewhere. My friends and I have been really enjoying Farthest Frontier so far and look forward to what you’ll be adding throughout early access.

3 Likes
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The Forager Shack comes to mind, not just in the winter, but if there’s nothing to be gathered in their target area they just stop working, leading to constant micromanaging. Or if, say, a soap maker runs out of tallow, they just stop working and do nothing. It would be great if they would become temp labor, but if the micromanaging is something you want to encourage, can you at least have an icon over the building or something to let us know, so we don’t have to keep checking each and every building individually? Especially important if you happen to be struggling, only to find the 6 people you allocated to your weaver building aren’t doing anything because you’re out of flax.

Maybe in the future Crate could add some kind of building that functions like a worker pool. Where you assign a certain number of total workers to this building and the building would delegate these workers along a priority list to industry in the neighbourhood. And if the workers were unable to work in one industry they move to the next free spot in the priority list and eventually end up as labourer. This would also make farmlands a lot more effective, allowing you to delegate farmers to the cheesemaker, miller and smokehouses during winter.

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I agree with you. And it is a problem for everyone, and I hope it’s something they’ll fix among the first.

But then again, think about it. What you’re asking for is the department of labor :smiley: it’s not the 20th century… It’s still a simulator set in that timeperiod, so what’s the right way to go about the problem?

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I don’t know what the right fix would be, but, doing nothing for months has never been common, especially in the early days of a fresh settlement. Layabouts would be tossed out, or starve due to not getting paid, or not being able to get work that would get them paid. Or they’d end up homeless begging on the streets for scraps. We don’t have homelessness in this game, everyone, sort of, contributes, until the jobs we give them run out of work.

Since we don’t have a realistic complex economy where each villager get’s paid for their work, having them find something to do, aka, entering a temp general labor pool, or at least trying to find something else to do, would fit the theme and not feel so punishing.

5

Spot on, yeah I actually thought about this also the other day. No salary, still everyone gets same basic needs, without a question. It’s like utopia, where nobody complains (apart from food shortage and lack of entertainment). Some work 24/7 whole year, while some work only when needed, seasonal.

Until I get enough big fields and materials to produce, and demand for certain things; bakers, foragers, millers, coopers, they will work only about half the time compared to some others.

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I skipped the intro now the few times… But they mentioned about Nobility not giving a flying f***, so… If I’m not completely mistaken here, the aim is to rebuild the whole concept of a settlement, every aspect of it. No classes, everyone contributes. No religion or church, but a shrine to go praise, pray, pay respects to whatever and anything you feel like. Money is the thing that divides societies and mainly it’s the mindset and basic human nature that needs to be altered in order to make utopia work. Easy enough :smiley:

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Philosophically speaking, utopia like that won’t work unless everyone contributes though, or we as humans suddenly lose the ability to compare ourselves to others and notice we’re breaking our backs all day to feed some of the people who aren’t.

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Not in our societies, no. But speaking of the game, it’s managements duty to make sure there is work to be offered. I know, there is, it’s just not coded into the game and the AI doesn’t know how to pick up another job by itself. I’m sure the devs are working on this.

And I guarantee one of my guys nicked my heavy tools for the mill…

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