I have played the game all the way to about 350 population. Seems that I have hit the end and there is really nothing more to do. Here is where I would take it from here if I could.
Make the map bigger and have one (or more) other AI based civilizations starting in other far away parts of the map. Make a more extensive technology tree for armies and give more fine grained control over battle. Eventually as your kingdom grows, you need to branch out to continue gathering resources to expand and power your ever growing army. All the while the AI players are doing the same. Eventually your kingdoms meet and clash. You raid them as you are now raided. its an arms race to level up your technology, balance your resources, keep the people happy. Maybe you capture their subjects and have ways to turn them into your subjects instead of just getting immigration. Or maybe they pick you because the life you provide is better then what they can get where there at. You can win by taking all the AI’s players, or destroying them. Other ways to win could be economic where you need to spread out as quickly as possible, capture and hold all the mines for example. And you need supply lines to do this, for example you cant expand past where you have basic necessities like housing. If your people become unhappy they start leaving to go to greener pastures. Not sure but the game needs to have some sort of “endgame” or objective to achieve. This could be strung into a dune2000 style map where after you achieve victory in your map, you are charged with expanding the kingom to farther and more hostile lands which progressivly rank up how hard the AI works, and makes it harder to win. Anyway, just my 2 cents. Had a lot of fun with this game up until I did everything.
Im bumping this, because as a standalone game, youre rightm the replayability after a certain point becomes redundant.
If there were AI and WAR (army) mechanics that were unlocked after a certain lvl, that would bring a WHOLE new breath of fresh air to the game as the playability gets stale.
Your main mission at the start is to survive. But after you have become comfortable in survival and try to expand, now you have other things to worry about, other kingdoms with other populations, random difficulties and sizes all around.
The more explorability, generated structures, random events, difficulty in progression there is – the better the end user experience will be!
Agree that the game is not that engaging after you unlock the last tier, as you’ve basically “made it” at that point and the challenge up to 1000 population is just about scaling without really any “new” challenges. But I don’t think the answer is to turn the game into one of those crappy online “city builders” like Travian/clash of clans abominations. Those are just awful.
Some of us like to say the game is too easy. In part it is because once you find an effective “solution” to survive on a map you can simply replicate that formula to increase population. But to say this, you really should have created a town to 1,000 pop and not stopped at 350, thinking that’s all there is to it. There are some hurdles that you haven’t encountered like a 200 raider well trained invading army.
I would suggest that the game designer consider natural disasters that nobody can predict and really prepare for. It’s how you handle the after effects of such a disaster that will make or break your town. An example could be to start having heavy rain and extend the period of time for it, then suddenly a notice appears over the town stating your town has been dealt a terrible blow from a flood. When the player clicks to close the dialogue the screen briefly goes black and the town comes back to view in a ruined state where low lying portions are destroyed and have to be rebuilt. Replicate with earthquakes in the mountains, droughts and wildfires in the prairies, etc… the amount of destruction could be tied to the map difficulty (easy 5-10%, moderate 10-20%, vanquisher 20-40%).
My idea here is at t4 or the eventual t5 to give every town a blow that will cripple it unless the player is forced to adapt to the “instantaneous” changed conditions of the town. The AI should have permission in vanquisher to target weak spots in the towns design and supply chain. And nobody should be able to avoid the calamity by closing the game out and coming back in. Tie the calamity to the map creation. It will happen at some point and there is no way to play through and avoid it.
You could say blizzard does exactly that in some part. Stopping your supply chain completely for a month and wrecking your buildings. No, I think improvements in military system is what we’re looking for to make the game more challenging later. Some diseases migh make things more interesting too.
A blizzard has never wrecked a single one of my buildings. In fact, I can only remember one building ever being condemned and I’ve played over 200 hours. I’ve played my last several maps in vanquisher mode.
Players can predict and prepare for your suggestions. They cannot for mine. Which is my point. We have players placing multiple walls against each other to avoid a potential invasion and then they complain when there is not enough resources on a map to allow this.
Enabling players to prepare in advance for all calamities makes the game too easy to predict and play. It does in fact become redundant as Jake implies.
Simple addition of trebuchet to enemy army would make your walls useless +some slight AI improvemnt so they don;t charge until the wall is down (and there are so many things I could think of which couldn’t be easily countered). Then why can’t you prepare for a disasters like you mentioned? With strong eco it will all be rebuilt in no time without any significant harm to your village, unless it wipes out all your resources or some disease which would decimate your villagers.
Just posted an idea that relates to the thread I posted it in, but also applies to this thread: Multiple Town Centers? - #3 by EvilGinger
… And that I am not going to copy-pasta or type again, because I can just link it.
This could be an option or DLC or something but I can tell you that most people who play city builders do not like to see it arbitrarily destroyed with no option to avoid it.
