Time to sum up my experience with this game. over 60 hours have passed, 18 settlements, the largest 495 settlers, a lot of fun, a lot of problems. The game at the moment promises to be great, but there is still a long way to go before it will bring only satisfaction to the player without any irritating moments.
Below is a list of things that caught my attention during the game:
[Bugs and problems]
1. Trading outpost
- Relocating or expanding an outpost causes problems with the merchants. After moving an outpost, merchants sometimes do not go to a new location and tabs freeze and do not disappear after the merchants leave the map. (Reloading a save or restarting the game fixes the problem).
- After upgrading the facility to the second level, when the merchants are already on the map, the merchant tabs will be duplicated. When the expansion is complete, the duplicate tabs disappear and the traders leave immediately. The correct tabs remain and you can continue to trade. however, after the trader’s stay is over, the trade tabs freeze as when moving a building. (Reloading a save or restarting the game fixes the problem)
- After moving objects from the outpost to the settlement, they are not actually transferred. they are available but the depot overflow icon above the outpost is annoying.
2. Barns
- Expanding the barn does not increase the animal limit from 13 to 16. After expanding and assigning 16 cows, the game shows an overflow icon.
- The animal kill button gets buggy a lot in my game. After selecting several cows, nothing happens.
3. Bee hives
- Bee hives often have big bonuses in strange places, e.g. in the middle of the city + 68% and with arborist trees + 31%.
- Bee hives can be built on farmland.
4. Sources of iron, coal, gold
- After exhaustion, the sources remain visible on the map.
5. Plant diseases
- The descriptions of plant diseases do not correspond to reality.
6. Long loading of new maps.
7. Long go to the main menu. almost the same time as when generating the map.
8. Lag in during the game.
9. Intermittent game freezes (every 10 - 20 minutes) for a few seconds.
10. Walls
- Settlers often get stuck in walls, especially two-layer walls (you have to remove the walls to free them) and near the water.
11. Warehouse
- It happens that settlers deliver more items to the warehouse than the capacity of the warehouse, overfilling it.
- Having two firewood only stores in two parts of the settlement, I had a situation where one was filled to 100% and the other was empty. Next to the latter there was a lumberjack who was working but strenuously transporting wood to the former.
- When moving the warehouse, the settler who was carrying the baskets dropped them. after moving the warehouse, the baskets were lying on the ground and nobody wanted to pick them up and bring them to the warehouse. The baskets only disappeared when the settlers took them for their own needs. I would like to point out that all warehouses had a lock on the baskets except for the one that was moved.
[UI]
1. Assigning workers
- Adding shortcuts for adding 5, 10, max workers would speed up the manipulation of production. Clicking is monotonous for 500+ residents
2. The center of the settlement
- The settlement center icon in the build window is unnecessary. Or maybe we don’t know something? (Building independent settlements?)
3. Quick access icons
- The sidewalk creation icon should be able to select the stone version as it is available.
4. Expansion icon above the building
- Dost of the decorations (probably only the temple has an icon), the healer’s hut, the theater does not show the icon of readiness for expansion after meeting the conditions
5. Range of impact on other buildings
- Healer’s hut, school, decorations, well should have a circle of influence on other objects, such as the market during construction.
- The same should be true when choosing existing ones. Now, when I choose a school, I don’t really know what it affects. I have to click the move icon and hover over its current place to check it.
6. Building houses.
- Highlighting objects that will affect him.
7. Minimap
8. Bee hives / wells
- During construction, the game should inform about the penalty that will be charged when building them next to each other.
9. Notification of a new trader
- If you do not see for yourself that a new buyer has arrived, you will not buy or sell anything and he will simply leave.
[Nature]
1. Animal migration
- It would be a good idea to modify the behavior of the animals. In the following years, animals could appear and disappear from the area. It would make this aspect more difficult and would require a little more attention from the player. Currently, it is enough to properly place the hunters at the right distance so that they do not kill the entire herd. set it and forget it.
2. The influence of people on the environment of animals
- The animals only move away when the buildings almost enter their area. Experimentally in one of the settlements I left them a piece of land with a 6x6 field, building around it.
3. Wolves
- Wolf holes should regenerate less often. good positioning of the hunters and taking care that the burrow is not destroyed will give you an unlimited source of food. strengthening the attack or stamina around the den for wolves would change the attitude towards them.
4. Fishes
- An indicator of the current number of fish in the lake would allow for the optimization of the fishing process. Now it shows that there are 1000 fish in 100,000 meters of water or 0 if all will be caught.
5. Forests
- After cutting trees from a large field and placing the city there, the trees grow back between the buildings. It would be logical for trees to grow around existing ones, expanding naturally. It would be good for the player to feel his influence on nature.
[Buildings]
1. Wagon with starting resources
- It would be a good idea to replace it with an additional building [temporary storage] being built next to the settlement center. When the first warehouses were built, the resources would be transferred to them automatically and the temporary storage would disappear.
2. Warehouses
- Icon for getting rid of items in the warehouse.
- Food rotting time indicator [hovering over the icon]. the game doesn’t tell you how long the food stays fresh or I’m stupid and can’t see.
- Blocking the maximum amount of an item in the warehouse to prevent overfilling with one material.
3. Sidewalks
- Sidewalk clearing is terrible. sidewalks should be automatically split when an intersection is created. the second option is to select individual pieces of pavement when selecting for deletion.
- Limiting road building to at least 3 fields is tiring. it often happens that the road is not perfect and one square is missing during the expansion. at this point, the game forces you to either artificially lengthen the road or remove the existing fragments and re-build them.
4. Fences / walls
- The expansion of the fence should not be related to the walls. I have had situations where I was expanding a palisade to a stone wall and accidentally marking a fragment of a stone fence by expanding it to a palisade
5. Farmlands
- Farmland expansion should be rebuilt. the current solution is unreadable. adding an option to reduce the field was also useful. sometimes, reorganizing a settlement requires removing one of the field lines, which is now impossible. it is necessary to remove the entire field, wasting the invested time and fertilizer, or you have to drastically change your vision.
- Farmers mindlessly run around all the fields instead of working only on their field neglecting the crops when creating a new field. ordinary workers should be involved in the process of creating a new field.
6. Walls
- Fragments of walls built next to the shores of the lake, mountains should get an additional texture that would visually blend into them so that the player can be sure that no one can pass there for sure. now it is not known if the invader can go there until he catches the settler and does not check it manually.
[Other]
1. Control over the rescue of the wounded
- When the settler discovers a wolf hole, he is wounded and the rest of the stupid settlers run to save him. the rescuer also gets hurt and so on. twice busy with other things, I lost half the population. The only thing left to do is grab the settler and send him back to the settlement, but in a moment another one will follow.
2. Water after the fire
- The settlers mindlessly leave the water after the fire has been extinguished, run to their duties and immediately return for it instead of taking it to the warehouse with priority.
3. Generating resources on the map
- I noticed that sometimes absurdly small sources of raw materials are generated on the map, e.g. 2 pieces of coal, 10 pieces of iron ore. On version 0.7.2, such terrain was often generated for me. Mainly on small and medium maps. This interested me and I found on the web how to access the game manager to increase the view range. I generated several dozen maps and 1/10 had this problem. At 0.7.4 so far, only with one settlement I found 4 sources with low resources. I did not conduct the test because the maps take a long time to generate
4. Iron sources
- Iron sources should be generated near mountains or higher elevations because it would make more sense. in flat areas, iron ore would be more suited to groups of rocks like stone.
5. Priorities
- The mechanism requires expansion so that a given activity is moved to the first place in the queue
6. Assigning settlers to work
- After the death of the settler, the workplace should be automatically replenished if there is a free settler
7. Production limit
- Manufacturing sites should be able to set an upper tooth production limit not to waste e.g. wood after producing 100 coal
8. Leveling the terrain
- One could write here for a long time. now you can only make a few square squares by leveling larger hills and that’s it. It doesn’t look nice looking at how long it takes from the settlers.
9. Alternative sources of raw materials
- Any mechanism for obtaining e.g. stone after exhausting them from the map.
[In the future]
**1. A larger house, e.g. 3x6 tiles **
- The size is adequate to other buildings, a theater, a school, an improved healer house in larger cities. Larger settlers capacity at the cost of more luxury resources
2. Rat catcher lvl 2
- adaptation of the appearance to stone houses in the city. the current one fits badly in the city. a poor hut but a stone one would fit better into the landscape.
3. Trading outpost
- Adding a slider to keep it level of items in the warehouse for sale.
4. New animal farms
- Chickens for egg production, pigs for meat production
5. New map
- New map on the coast. Additional opportunity to trade with incoming ships. Mechanism for catching fish from a boat.
- New map with rivers. additional bridge building mechanism
6. Church
- Not so much the mechanism of faith, but supplementing the village with its important archiotectonic point, which was the church
7. Forester’s hut
- Adding a forester’s hut to automate the planting of trees in a selected zone.
So much from me. Good luck with the further development of the game.