Hey everyone,
First of all let me thank you for providing me with my first 40 hours of awesome settlement building fun! In my book the game has already been worth it and I can’t wait to see where it goes!
I have played 2 Settlements (400-500 pop) to T4 on Trailblazer difficulty with raids enabled (one idyllic valley, one lowland lakes) and would like to give some collected feedback, notes and ideas that I gathered during my roughly 40 hours of playtime.
QOL:
Manual Repairs: Every so often buildings deteriorate and need to be repaired. This quickly becomes tedious and does not really add a lot to the experience in my opinion. Allow us some toggle to automatically have buildings repaired. (If that is already the case, it should be communicated somehow)
Manual Rebuilding After Raid: Sometimes a raid goes straight through pastures and fields and devastates fences, small buildings and gates. It can be very tedious to manually rebuild them all. Allow for some kind of “select all rebuildable ruins” and let us order them to be rebuilt with one button.
Manual Replant Arborist: Love the arborist, love having a variety of different fruit trees, hate having to manually replant them. Just give us a “replant automatically” toggle for the arborist.
Upkeep Increase from Upgrades: Many upgrades increase the upkeep of a building. I have so far not found anything that communicates that increased upkeep. Would be great if that could be added to the upgrade details. Feels like an important thing to know.
Cobbler Upgrade: I think this one must have come up quite a bit already. Please let us upgrade the cobbler at some point to allow for more ppl working in one building.
Monthly Gold Report Realtime Update: The gold report felt very unintuitive to me. In my opinion it would be more helpful to reflect current income/upkeep in realtime. Especially income from goldmines would often completely throw me off when estimating a balanced income/upkeep ratio.
Crop Disease Micromanaging: Love the crop disease system and the variety and how they can interact with similar fields around them. But I often find myself putting one field on maintenance for the next year and then forgetting about it. I would love some kind of “one time pause” that skips the plan for next year and either does nothing with it or just grows clovers. Especially when working with a lot of smaller fields it can quickly get overwhelming to manage rotations when you have to constantly adjust for crop disease.
Visual
Biome Identity: While I love how the game looks and feels, I felt a tad bit disappointed after loading up all the different biomes and finding very little in terms of colour pallet variety, vegetation etc. I would love it if they felt a lot more distinct in what they look like.
Traders parked at Trading Post: I don’t know why exactly, but the trading post was one of the most essential buildings in my games and I always disliked the way the traders arrived at it and parked there. I feel like it should get reworked a little bit and provide a clear outside area where all traders can set up shop without looking like they are half parked within the building at an awkward angle.
Gameplay
Temporary Shelters: Absolutely loved work camps and gathering resources further away from the settlements, but somehow felt that temp shelters are very unintuitive and in a generally awkward spot. I was never quite sure if they were being used and most of the time the workers would just walk back into town instead of sleeping at the shelter, which resulted in most of my workcamps having 60-80% travel time. I would prefer it if they would temporarily move the temp shelter and live there for the time of their assignment to the workcamp.
Wall Upgrades to Avoid Triple Walling Effectiveness: Finishing that first wall was awesome and upgrading it to stone felt really good. However after the stone wall effectiveness fell off, I was left with the option to double and triple wall. Something that most certainly is very effective but always looks wonky. I have no specific suggestion, but somehow I would wish for effective alternatives for double/triple walling. I hate the way it makes the city look, but the upside in terms of defensibility can’t really be argued with atm.
Deer Reduce Faster: I liked the way it sounded: Deer population reduces / moves away as human civilization creeps up. In my game it somehow never really happened though. I saw some of the deer spawns go from 3 to 2 on occasion, but for most of my second game I had a T3 deer spawn half in my city and half on my fields. My hunter did not complain about his extremely short “way to work” but I felt like those deer as well as those near my mines, Graveyard etc should have slowly disappeared.
Wider roads or speed buff for plazas: I am not sure if there is a speedbuff for plazas, it doesnt look like it. I would love to create wider roads in the city for a nice aestheti, but I obviously dont want to give up the cobblestone road speedboost. So my suggestion would be to give Plazas the same speedbuff as roads (t1/t2 respectively). Alternatively allow us to draw roads that are 2-3 tiles wide.
Rats sound fun but don’t have an impact: I loved the idea of having to manage rats, but after I built 2 rat catchers I didn’t have to worry about rats anymore for the whole rest of my game (450 pop). It feels like it should be a mechanic that is relevant for you even when you have your granaries etc covered by rat catchers. I don’t have a specific suggestion, but I feel like this could be expanded upon.
Terraforming Water: I’m sure many have had that one pesky little tile of water that messes up the city’s layout. I would love to be able to terraform patches of water by adding sand and converting them to land.
Diseases are awesome: I love the way the disease system works, with lack of different foods/amenities leading to different diseases/issues of varying severities. My only issue is that if you are proactive about these things, the disease system rarely ever seems impactful. In both games I never encountered a situation where I had to worry about infectiousness or too many people not being able to work because of X. Similar to the rats, it feels like a system that should be more impactful even if you are managing it well. My suggestion would be to have new settlers or traders have a chance of bringing in new diseases. That would also make the “want to accept new settlers” choice a bit more meaningful beyond “Do I want to expand and have the food for it?”.
Metal abundance: I am not sure if I was just lucky with the maproll, but my second settlement was at the hill of a mountain that easily contained some 300k-500k iron. I never managed to deplete a single mine before reaching t4. It felt like way too strong a source of income. This may or may not be rng, but It felt a little excessive (although possibly realistic).
Trading Update: Trading feels awesome. I love the different traders with their different inventories and identities. I would love it if we could have a certain amount of influence over who is visiting. Sometimes I want to specialize in producing 1-2 goods and only get visited by traders who arent a fit for anything. I think the upgraded post should give us some kind of influence over who shows up.
Secondly I would love to be able to take a more active role in trading. Maybe we could start sending out our own traders, pack them up with resources, set prices and what we want them to buy and send them on their way. Maybe a requirement would be to build a road sufficiently far out of town for the trader to leave. Either way, its a good system that should be expanded upon further by giving the player more agency.
Personal Impressions:
Love no active forest replanting: I was very sceptical at first when I noticed the lack of a “forester” who actively replants trees and makes sure you have a sustainable income of wood that will never stop. However I am very much in love with how this game forces you to expand outwards with work camps etc to exploit new resources. I think it feels very unique and I would love for this aspect to remain.
City Guard: I am not quite sure why, but I was in love with the upgrading of the city guard. Much more so than the towers, I felt that the state of the city guard resembled the progress that my town had made very well. Starting out with bows and a few crude weapons and ending up with heavy weapons, crossbows and plate armour. The Barracks itself is also an extremely beautiful building (especially upgraded).
Decorations: Amazing and satisfying to use. I hope to see even more options to further distinguish and personalize your town and give it a special identity. My only beef with it was that often I felt a bit driven into thinking in grids and much of my town would end up looking very squareish. This is probably a bit too outlandish, but I would love it if you could “put together” your own decoration made from building blocks that already exist (plaza tiles, garden tiles, statues etc). The range and decoration value of the final result would depend on the size and setpieces used. I would love to create a large garden central in my village, but due to the limited range of the smaller pieces that is rarely an efficient way to go about it.
Raids: The threat of raids is currently the defining difficulty feature. While it plays a major part in how I expand and defend my city, the raids themselves feel very flat and one-dimensional. I am not sure how final the current raider system is, but I feel like it needs a very extensive rework to give it more depth, meaning and variety. Many have suggested to me to turn it off (which already shows that its not so well-received) but to me that would take away a lot of the edge.
Performance: After 400 or so pop the game started to feel much more clunky. I am sure optimization is part of the EA plan, but I just wanted to mention it. I doubt with the current performance I would want to play with a much higher pop.