Ok, so obviously I’ve had a lot of fun if I’ve played 80 hours so far.
Experience:
80 hours, 4 medium maps (all Alpine Valley), two to 450ish population and Tier 4, one to 270 and Tier 3 (intentionally kept it low by refusing immigrants to see play differences, refused to upgrade to T4), fourth at 50 so far.
Feedback in no particular order:
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Add the ability to Shift-Click in the profession menu to change the value to min or max instead of going one number at a time. Adding/removing 30-40 farmers or miners is a lot of clicks.
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Farms are too easy to delete on accident. I realize highlighting a building and then hitting the delete key works as a way to remove a building. But on farms I many times now have hit a crop and hit the delete key wanting to remove just that one crop from the menu but deleted the entire farm. I wish the delete key in farms would just delete the crop, even if it meant removing the delete key ability from all other buildings.
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Option to hide the display of citizens based on profession. A window similar to the professions window where I can just click if they are shown or not. It’s fine at lower villages but once you get 200+ people it’s just a spam of people running all over. Have a widget display option to cycle between “All shown”, “Custom shown”, and “None shown” so you can quickly cycle between the displays for raids or other needs.
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It’s very difficult to use hills or lakes as barriers. There is almost always a gap that raiders just walk right around, or villagers will use to sometimes get stuck. If the terrain square is unable to be used to build something because of water or impassible due to slope, it should block travel completely.
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Create an alert for “A new trader has arrived in town.” Everything has an alert in-game except one of the most important.
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Don’t force us to place Town Center immediately. Many times the spot I want I can’t use because the terrain isn’t level enough, but I can’t use the Flatten tool.
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Change priority order on buildings. Allow us to build houses and the firewood splitter with no prerequisites. That gives us a little time to adjust the land or explore to find the best location.
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Ability to move Town Center.
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Allow gathering of mushrooms, nuts, etc by any laborer but must be manually done by clicking node and hitting “Harvest” then not remembering that node on future. Useful for early game, but too tedious to abuse after that.
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Add “Fill Land” ability. Flatten Land feature is nice, but has a lot of issues. For mostly flat terrain it’s fine but around hills it can have drastic effects even on squares you didn’t select. The main issue I have is that if one small area is just a bit too low I can’t fill it in, instead I have to lower everything else which then just leads to other problems including breaking of terrain and villagers getting stuck.
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Expand farm mechanic is very unfriendly. I have to pick a square on the edge of the farm but then expand in a direction that includes my existing farm. So if I have a 6x6 I can’t turn it into a 12x6 by just selecting squares at the end, I have to make it ##x7. Why can’t I just select squares outwards?
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Add “Reduce Field” mechanic. If the farm is too big, allow a way to select a portion and remove it from the farm.
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Change Nightsoil Collector to be targeted like the Rat Catcher. The Rat Catcher mechanic is great, when a rat pops up on the building the Rat Catcher runs to it. The Nightsoil Collector runs all over creation in a super inefficient manner that you have no control over. Would prefer a targeted circle system and have him simply prioritize based on the highest waste count in the building.
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Add upgrade options to Nightsoil Collector. Tier 3 Town would add increased capacity to the cart and/or larger collection radius. Tier 4 town would add another collector per Compost Yard.
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Add a mechanic to adjust where a person lives or better options to hire people for a job. It’s really annoying when I put down a building on one side of town only to get workers from the extreme opposite end. The travel time and amount of time I see them “Stocking Shelter” is insane and no way to modify that. The pop up when out of workers when trying to assign another is the start of a mechanic to allow us to manage people.
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Adjust the absurd mechanic where 60-75% of buildings just randomly go to 33% structural integrity after being at 100%. It’s random since a reload of the autosave file will show it not happening. New buildings will go to 33% along with very old buildings, so it’s not even based on how old a building is. I’ve had this happen two years in a row as well, gutting my resources. If you are going to keep it as a random mechanic change it to happening more often but have it happen to far less buildings (5-15%). Better option would be to actually have the Structural Integrity bar actually work and slowly count down.
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Show repair costs for each building on the building window so we can plan.
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Have a display showing the town’s total repair costs for this year and next year.
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There is no way to actually select “Repair” even though the tooltip will say “Select to repair or demolish building”.
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No way to prioritize the repair of a specific building over others.
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No way to control inventory of wagons, stockyards, root cellars, etc. when it comes to forcing items out. If I want to empty an item by unchecking the box, a laborer or wagoneer should come move it to another building. Instead I have to wait years or decades to get some random worker to take the item out or use the trade market to pull it out. And where things get placed currently make no sense. I put a stockyard, warehouse, and root cellar at a far off outpost where I had mines and a gatherer, only to find it had been stocked with finished materials from town, instead of the storage building right next to the building that manufactured it.
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I would like a way for having storage buildings set to receive “checked” items from local workers as displayed currently, but add another check box for “keep items”. So anything checked to receive but unchecked for keep would be picked up by a wagoneer and moved to a different storage building where it’s checked to receive and keep. This way I can have storage buildings near an outpost that will accept ore, wood, stone, gathered items, meat, etc from local workers, but then the wagoneers will come to move it all to town.
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Add ability to “Check all” or “Check none” on storage buildings, having to check all those little boxes is a pain. Having the all/none by category would be nice.
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Trade workers are infuriating. I get a trader to show up for 50ish days, try to move something they want to buy from the warehouse immediately adjacent to the trade center, and my two workers will spend more than 50 days: stocking their shelters, getting food, getting drunk, and all kinds of things other than moving the item as requested. They generally have 300 days to do nothing per year, but when a trader arrives they never want to work. Oh and then there is the time the worker decided to grab gold ore from the mine 10 miles away instead of from the warehouse right next door.
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Tier 2 Hunter building adding Traps seems to greatly reduce the time the hunter is actually working. I found mine constantly running to town to get 2 iron ingots to make traps, instead of actually hunting. I just set all to 0 traps now because of it. It’s a nice mechanic to have, but the ingot cost is creating a huge problem from a logistics standpoint.
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Why do apiaries not get the best bonuses by being near fruit trees or farms? Not only should they get a honey boost from being near those but they should also give a boost to farm/fruit yields as that’s what bees are actually for.
In summary:
I think the game is a lot of fun, especially early on. The control of what is going on is far better when you have under 100 citizens, once you get near 200 it starts being more difficult to manage things. Not because it’s a bigger scale, but because there is just no easy way to control the issues. Once you go over 400 it just becomes a mess trying to get workers to do what you want them to do. The Prioritize button stops being effective as I’ve waited years to get some things done.