So I have maxed out multiple different towns on different play throughs, on every difficulty, with pacifist off. And here are some of my thoughts.
1- Raiders should give some rewards/loot. It makes little to no sense that we have to spend gold and resources to protect ourselves, and have no benefit in killing raiders.
They are able to pillage items and gold but we cannot get anything from them in return. At least make it possible to loot their weapons and armor. Or give some moral buff, something, anything.
Don’t even get me started on the actual armies that come later on, demanding over 8k gold or attacking, and they are fully fitted with plate armor and weapons and once again, you get nothing from defeating them.
2- The barracks/ground troops are utterly useless until you get raided by the actual armies. They’re only useful then because the tower defenses do little to no damage on the armies plate armor. But prior to that which was around year 85 for me, they are completely useless. The towers strategically placed around your base can kill all incoming raiders much more efficiently because the ground troops literally WALK to combat. Like you’d think with your home being invaded you’d have a little more pep in your step.
And by the time they do get to combat, 90% of the time my fully geared barracks troops, outfitted with battle axes etc, will literally walk into melee range and start shooting arrows at the enemies. Like what?
3- The cow farms are a mess. Sometimes it will say Disable milking, but they’re not actually milking, and vice versa. And the slaughter button stopped working for me. My cow farms are always over the limit with cows, and even though they’re fully staffed and the herd size it set, they wont slaughter the cows. And when I manually tell them to slaughter, they don’t. It just seems messy.
4- Brickmakers, I have to have at least 5 different brick maker buildings, all fully staffed with the ridiculous maximum of two workers to make any somewhat substantial amount of bricks. There needs to be an upgrade for this building sooner rather than later, or at least allow more workers per building. In a year they’ll only make 20-30 bricks and that’s with thousands of available required mats.
5- Condemned buildings need a repair button, if my tier 2 theater becomes condemned now every single one my manors is now abandoned, and now everyone’s homeless and dying. I will have all the mats to repair it but it wont get repaired. I have to wait until its destroyed and then rebuild it and at that point all my manors also need to be rebuilt and half my town has died to exposure because they’re spoiled jerks and would rather die in the cold than live in a manor that doesn’t have an available theater nearby.
6- The maps need some balancing, my most recent playthrough which was on normal difficulty, had zero gold on the entire map. Plenty of clay deposits though, not that it mattered since my brick makers work like they’re blind folded.
7- The lag is unbearable once you get around 500 people, I can’t even imagine what it will be like when more tiers for the town hall become available and you’re required to reach around 1000 people. I can’t go any faster than 1x at over 500 people, unless I zoom into the ground.
And then when you’re at around 500 people, and an army of 150 comes to raid, forget about it. It looks like you’re playing on a Tamagotchi. The lag is unreal. I just have to sit and pray my troops are walking fast enough so they can come sheath their battle axes and shoot some arrows.
With all that said, I have invested a ton of hours into this game and I thoroughly enjoy it. I blink and 12 hours has gone by, and even though there’s no more content for me I still play and have fun or start over. I think the game is awesome and has great potential to be even better. Lets get some horses for mounted units, and some motes and draw bridges or something. Maybe even some prisoners of war. I can force them to care for my overabundance of cows.