Feedback after a couple evenings:

[Ashery]

Loaded up the game, set the difficulty to hard except for raiders on normal, and settled on a random biome.

…And it’s Arid Highlands.

Welp, this’ll be an interesting first run. Here’s some feedback after my time with the game, and full disclosure, I’m a slow, micro-heavy player. I’m only just starting the fifth year.

• Tweak storage cart capacity and design. I saw in the recent patch notes that storage carts are no longer buildable, and while I can understand why that was done from a balance perspective since they were grossly overpowered, a few tweaks could salvage their design:

  1. Dramatically reduce their max capacity. We’re talking down to 150 or even 100.
  2. Increase the number of storage carts you get with the high resource starting condition to compensate for the loss of space. The amount of resources the medium setting starts with may end up being what defines the actual max capacity for all storage carts, but I’m strongly favoring the lower end of the 100-150 range currently.
  3. Storage carts now require two cows. This also means that each starting storage cart provides the player with a breeding pair of cows. This gives the player with an “end game” for their starting storage cart, where there’s an actual reason to retire it. The cows can also be slaughtered in the event of an early famine.
  4. Additional storage carts need to be built at the wagon shop. Storage carts are ultimately just scaled up wagons, so it makes sense thematically.

  I’m also amused that “storage carts” in game are what most people would consider a covered wagon, while “wagons” feel more like hand carts.

• Place the foundry in Tier 2. It could be slower, use fuel less efficiently, be unable to smelt gold, and/or some other tweak, but it just doesn’t thematically make sense for it to be in Tier 3 with the way the everything’s setup. You can even build the charcoal maker in T2, but nothing requires charcoal until T3 except for the armory…which uses ingots. The product should require the higher tier building, not the resource. There are also several buildings that you get access to in T2 that require iron: Vault, upgraded hunter, and the upgraded well to name a few. With the way things currently are, things would even be more coherent thematically if the charcoal maker and armory were pushed to T3.

  It’s not that I have anything against requiring the player to import certain resources that they’re unable to produce early on, but it just feels really awkward that one can mine ore and forge armor but they can’t smelt the ore into ingots.

  And while where on an adjacent subject, I’ll second Choppy’s suggestion from elsewhere that “gold ingots” should be rebranded to “gold coins” to avoid potential confusion from the ore:ingot ratio not being consistent between the two.

• List the potential upgrades a building has while it’s being placed. It’s not exactly obvious what can or can’t be upgraded. It should also be possible to view the specs for the upgraded buildings somehow.

• Buildings that that can be upgraded to have a larger radius should display the upgraded radius in conjunction with their starting radius. Seems more complicated than it is. Currently, the radius is shown with a yellow circle, so my suggestion would just involve using a blue circle to show the upgraded building’s radius. As it stands, it’s difficult to future proof settlement plans without just memorizing some blueprint.

• Graveyards should be expandable like farms. Or be trimmed back, provided no one has been buried on those tiles yet.

• Allow farms, graveyards, etc. to not be strict rectangles. Part of the fun I have with these kinds of games involves the puzzlelike quality of designing a town around the landscape. It’d be even more amazing if this could be extended to certain classes of decorations, particularly gardens.

Onto bugs/oddities and some quick higher level feedback:

• Markets not directly supplying houses with food. Maybe I’m misinterpreting things, but to directly quote the game: “A building here household goods are stocked by a grocer and distributed to houses, saving time for working villagers.” (Emphasis added) The phrasing made me think that my market worker would actively work on stocking the covered houses, but instead she just spends much of the time standing around idling. (Admittedly, reloading my save has caused her to go pick up the vegetables she had been refusing to stock, so maybe reloading will temporarily fix the issue. Never mind, she picked up more meat. My market’s got 50 meat, 40 each of smoked meat and fish, and none of the beans or root vegetables sitting in my root cellar. Despite the fact that most houses only have meat products and one of my villagers has been incapacitated from scurvy.)

• Babies are born with a supply of food. I guess their mothers should be happy they weren’t born fully clothed with shoes?

• Cobblestone roads can be built in T1 by upgrading dirt roads. Despite the fact you can’t build them directly in T1.

Not sure how I feel about the frequency of small immigration waves. I feel like the overall threat of settling a new town in a far off frontier is greatly diminished by a steady stream of healthy, fully equipped, able-bodied adults. Hell, if people drop their gear when they die, immigrants would be the cheapest source of tools and clothing.

Loving the restrictions Arid Highlands is placing on me (No clay, willow, and the only forageables are the four berry bushes I explicitly settled next to and three more near some dead pines I’d clear cut), though I feel the balance is off when all the resources one has an abundant supply of are effectively locked behind T3. You’d expect a settlement in a region with such marginal food production to limit their population, but instead I’m forced to continue to grow in order to unlock a building I need to take advantage of the resources that I do have.

I’m sure I had more thoughts, but it’s late and this post is long enough already.

[skinlessravioli]

I’d rather see the storage cart made into a tier 3 warehouse type of building that serves a larger logistical purpose through a fleet of wagons - similar to the wainwright but with more flexibility, allowing you to better control where all of your resources go between various stockpiles, storehouses, and other warehouses. I never quite understood the point of the storage cart - it seemed like a placeholder building.

Big +1 to everything else here. I am also slightly mystified by the way markets work/do not work. I especially agree with the way immigration waves work - would be much more challenging if their ages varied, some were sick, et cetera.

[Kwaio]

I 100% agree on the market issue.
In my mind, the market’s job is to distribute food & luxury to houses.
Even if it’s just a closer storage to help villagers gather their needs faster, as OP said, they’re not stocking up on vegetables or fruits while there are hundreds available in the nearest root cellar, and market has available storage. Consequence, vegetables & fruits go bad and houses refuse to upgrade due to lack of food diversity, not to speak about scurvy.