First— I love this game. And I especially appreciate the agile/ iterative approach to its development with feedback from the community. Reading through the dev updates and other user’s feedback I’ve seen a lot of “wouldn’t it be nice…” were already addressed or are planned and I believe that approach has already made a great game even better for everyone.
So I’ll add my .02 since in that same spirit— and it is completely intended to be constructive and value add— know that I am very impressed with everything I have already experienced.
I have had 2 complete playthroughs, with a lot of hours, both 1000+ pop, my preferred playstyle is extensive use of the flatten terrain- I like building castles on top of mountains and turning them into sheer fortresses. And then sprawling out my city in the valleys below. So that’s where I’m coming from.
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Terrain: I love love love that I can make use of natural existing terrain features and incorporate that into my village build. Lakes, chokepoints, mountains— it makes every map feel unique and like I have to change my approach. I love that you can share map seeds. I love you can reroll the map. So all great stuff…”yes and…” id would love it even more if there were more features along this philosophy. Raise or lower terrain. I understand that might create some balancing issues. So cool with it costing a resource to raise terrain. (Like gold etc in addition to labor)… also think it’s be cool to lower terrain— think like being able to creating a moat around walls with drawbridge access.
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Soldiers: I’m aware some great updates are coming for combat and garrisons. One thought I had that may or may not already be planned: giving soldiers something to do outside of combat might incentivize keeping them garrisoned in the “off-season” between fighting raiders rather than disbanding them for the extra manpower. A few ideas could be setting “exploration/recon/patrol zones” similar to how you set work areas for them to explore, without having to micro it. Or for them to gain experience/veterancy over time— nothing to crazy but maybe a buff to crossbow reload speed or damage similar to how relics work if they served a few consecutive years assigned to barracks or a tower.
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Data for us data nerds— I love the resource screens and trend lines showing food spoilage and produced vs consumed. ( I work in data Science so of course I love it)— I’d love it even more if I had the option of viewing a a table of actual numbers and be able to adjust my date range and not just see trailing 12 month summary statistics. Look I’ll be honest— my dream is to take those numbers and run a linear regression or exponential smoothing model on my cheese and wheat/flour/bread production outside the game — just saying. I realize that isn’t exactly realistic for medieval times or whatever— but hey I enjoy the challenge of optimization and I’d love to be able to export or cut and paste my production numbers into python or excel and have a go at it. Having a table of actual numbers and dates opens up a whole world to me… I can then optimize seasonality, safety stock, optimal reorder points, compare supply and demand to population growth, track my throughput, etc.
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Waypoints—Some sort of way to set waypoints for wagons and/or laborers… like I realize their default is the shortest distance between two points— but I’m willing to sacrifice some efficiency for security when i want them to avoid wildlife, unsecured routes prone to raids, or just use the very defensible front gate I built to keep them safe vs the treacherous but more direct path across the frozen mountain I just walled off.
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Auto-Refill Professions— The ability to auto-refill some, but not ALL, professions. Basically an in- between option from what exist now.
6.fences— Would like to see grazing areas of cows/barns when building fence.
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Storage priorities—The ability to set priorities on storage/source locations, especially water wells, but could also be useful for corrals, food storage. Or maybe zones would be a better description. Like I want these houses/market to source from this water well or root cellar kinda thing primary, secondary, contingency if there in an area with dual coverage…etc. . (I’ve had some issues with all my villagers sourcing water from the same well— while the next closest well remains un-utilized). Or useful for garrisons searching for weapons. That said— big fan of production limits mins/max— whoever developed that. Good job.
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Cats to catch rats—Lastly, my wife… who hasn’t played but has exercised an immense amount of patience allowing me to over the last month… says rat catchers shouldn’t be a thing… they should have been (or at least included) farm/town cats instead. She’s a veterinarian though… so I chalk a little bit up to bias. But then again isn’t that how they became domesticated? I dunno— I throw it out there just the same— especially now we’re getting chickens, goats, horses.
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Mute alerts— or just some customization options on the alerts… like maybe I only want alerts if a villager dies from anything other than old age (particularly useful on higher populations) or I only want alerts for new predator attacks (not the same groups of boars , just the grizzly bear)— you get the idea.
Great game though. Seriously, keep it up. Excited to see the finished version.
