Gameplay Suggestions After 120 Hours of Testing

[Danza]

Been playing FF for a while now, and have some ideas for the devs for future consideration! Thanks for looking

• There should be an easier way to upgrade dirt roads to cobblestone without having to manually click every single piece. Very frustrating when you have roads within layered walls/gates to select.

• The tier 2 trade post should have more than 2 workers, ideally 4?

• There should be a way to level up the traders or increase the capacity of items they arrive with. When I’ve got a 1200 pop town, a Tier2 trader coming with 60 pelts, 30 weapons, 200 raw ore and items generally in this range doesn’t even register as a worthwhile trade at that point for how low quantity that is. If their gold and resources they bring could scale with your population, that’d be great!

• I often find my markets are always low stocked, having the Tier 2 market have more employees would nice nice to help balance this, or have higher tiers of markets.

• WHERE ARE THE POTATOES??? I’m still really surprised such a nutritious and vital food is missing as a growable choice for farming.

• It’d be amazing if you could build specialist farming equipment, or by having horses they could be used to massively improve farming via hoeing and ground turning over. Kind of like how the wagon shop is a specialist building designed to improve logistics there could be a building designed to help and equip farmers better.

• A player should be able to copy and paste a crop field setup from one field to another.

• Farmers should automatically be assigned as labourers in winter months.

• We should have some way to defend against long range trebuchets. Perhaps a ballista tower or specialized long range defence that’s costly, only effective against siege equipment but means we can rely more on our defences late game.

• Trees and natural resources like the rocks on the map should be chopped/mined faster, more of a balance suggestion but it’s frustrating when you need 300 stone, you’re at 0 and even 40 labourers take forever to mine a node down.

• Wells should output a bit more water or have a T3 upgrade, my wells despite having almost max density without overlap, so many of them are constantly out of water.

• T2 and above upgrades for many of the T1 exclusive buildings like the rat catcher, compost yard, cobbler etc. Would look much more in place then in a highly developed T3/T4 town.

• Disease at least at vanquisher difficulty needs to be much harder, I’ve never seen more than 2 people get sick at a time in any of my games. Healers hospital + all benefits/soaps/medicine you’d hope would help cure villagers well HOWEVER, many should still be getting unwell via spreading disease when it’s a disease known for fast spread. I’ve never needed more than 1 healers hut/hospital because the spread is so low.

• Tools should be unlocked at Tier 2 not Tier 3, it’s really frustrating having to trade exclusively for tools because you can’t access them until Tier 3 with the smelting/industry unlocks. Unless this is by design to encourage more early trading?

• On Medium/Small maps, the enemy are now often spawning INSIDE my town walls, within 50 meters of my actual houses and in my current game, within 100 meters or so of my actual town centre! Enemy armies should be spawning exclusively at the edge of the map or as far to the edges as possible to stop this happening.

• The restrictions on building steepness should be massively relaxed or removed entirely. I played with a mod that removed it entirely… I’ve had SO MUCH fun playing since this change. Especially when you’re trying to build walls in vanilla, it’s saying it’s too steep yet villagers AND THE ENEMY can just navigate around them on steep edges with ease. This one change has massively improved my gameplay experience and I’m loving how dynamic and hilly my town looks.

• There should be a mass upgrade button, like you click a watch tower and it could say “upgrade all” as an extra option, could have that with most/all buildings just to reduce clicks and RSI when doing it to hundreds.

Ideas for now, game has amazing potential. Loving it so far!

[medea_fleecestealer]

Many of your suggestions have already been made, whether we’ll see them added to the game only the devs know.

Have you tried clicking on a section of road and then upgrading it that way?

Devs so far have avoided New World crops like potatoes, corn, etc, though they haven’t ruled out the possibility of adding them in the future.

As far as diseases go count yourself lucky.

All Them Old-Timey Diseases - Farthest Frontier / Dev Discussions - Crate Entertainment Forum

[WhileyCat]

@Danza

The tier 2 trade post should have more than 2 workers, ideally 4?

I’ve… Literally never needed more than 1 unless the first worker was drunk. Are you moving things in advance? Tip: Things never spoil when in Trading Post storage.

@Danza

I often find my markets are always low stocked, having the Tier 2 market have more employees would nice nice to help balance this, or have higher tiers of markets.

Markets are stocked according to their need, or your supply.

@Danza

WHERE ARE THE POTATOES??? I’m still really surprised such a nutritious and vital food is missing as a growable choice for farming.

Since this game is based on pre-colonial middle age Europe, there are no potatoes since they originate from America and weren’t farmed in Europe until the 17th century.

@Danza

We should have some way to defend against long range trebuchets. Perhaps a ballista tower or specialized long range defence that’s costly, only effective against siege equipment but means we can rely more on our defences late game.

Cavalry.

@Danza

Tools should be unlocked at Tier 2 not Tier 3, it’s really frustrating having to trade exclusively for tools because you can’t access them until Tier 3 with the smelting/industry unlocks. Unless this is by design to encourage more early trading?

Tools are a bonus, which is why they aren’t available til Tier 3

[Danza]

@WhileyCat

@Danza

The tier 2 trade post should have more than 2 workers, ideally 4?

I’ve… Literally never needed more than 1 unless the first worker was drunk. Are you moving things in advance? Tip: Things never spoil when in Trading Post storage.

Glad that it’s working fine for you, it’s nice when you need to restock mid trading or you just realised you had more of an item. Moving 3000 gold and say 1000 units of something is incredibly frustrating when you’re limited to two workers and one might not be there due to shelter stocking etc.

@WhileyCat

@Danza

I often find my markets are always low stocked, having the Tier 2 market have more employees would nice nice to help balance this, or have higher tiers of markets.

Markets are stocked according to their need, or your supply.

So what I don’t understand, if this is true… Why I end up with multiple houses saying they are lacking the bonus food resources, or furniture etc despite having loads in storage, my market workers seem to work constantly and can’t supply enough. I did experiment with a mod that let me have EIGHT market workers for the T2 market and it resolved all my issues.

Again, you may have a more optimal setup that works for you, I just feel it’s helpful to give the player a choice that they can either be very optimised in their layouts or throw more labour at the problem, the latter being a stop gap for learning and growing as a FF town builder.

That said, my first market was doing fine, my second market however was struggling so much as the travel time back to the main town was considerable. There’s no way other than carts right now to manage logistics movements, such as a storage warehouse that can have pull requests [unless this is also a thing that I’ve missed, not seen it mentioned anywhere]

@WhileyCat

@Danza

WHERE ARE THE POTATOES??? I’m still really surprised such a nutritious and vital food is missing as a growable choice for farming.

Since this game is based on pre-colonial middle age Europe, there are no potatoes since they originate from America and weren’t farmed in Europe until the 17th century.

Hah wow TIL… Alright fair enough!

@WhileyCat

@Danza

We should have some way to defend against long range trebuchets. Perhaps a ballista tower or specialized long range defence that’s costly, only effective against siege equipment but means we can rely more on our defences late game.

Cavalry.

Having there only be a single way to counter something is a really simplistic view of any builder or strategy game. Cavalry work yeah and it’s the only unit I use as the others are mostly useless mid/late game, don’t even get me started on archers…

Still think if the Romans 1000+ years prior to the era of FF could manage ballista towers, why it’s inconceivable to consider more defensive structures in the game.

@WhileyCat

@Danza

Tools should be unlocked at Tier 2 not Tier 3, it’s really frustrating having to trade exclusively for tools because you can’t access them until Tier 3 with the smelting/industry unlocks. Unless this is by design to encourage more early trading?

Tools are a bonus, which is why they aren’t available til Tier 3

Then the annoying and constant pop up saying there are no tools needs to go. If tools are a bonus then why are they treated like an emergency notification for buildings/workers without them? Guess if the devs want to stick to tools in T3 then the default should be buildings and villagers don’t have a giant “out of tools” icon above them when missing them?

[Danza]

@medea_fleecestealer

Many of your suggestions have already been made, whether we’ll see them added to the game only the devs know.

Have you tried clicking on a section of road and then upgrading it that way?

Devs so far have avoided New World crops like potatoes, corn, etc, though they haven’t ruled out the possibility of adding them in the future.

As far as diseases go count yourself lucky.

All Them Old-Timey Diseases - Farthest Frontier / Dev Discussions - Crate Entertainment Forum

Upgrading roads via clicking on sections IS the frustration we all have to deal with. It’s incredibly time consuming and click heavy when like with the wall tool, you should absolutely be able to select many sections at once and upgrade. Manually clicking every single segment length is so tedious.

Yeah I didn’t even consider the fact that potatoes were a new world crop and more recent… Which makes me wonder, perhaps it could be something added into T4/T5? Depends how strictly devs want to stick to the real world timeline VS unlocks/gameplay progression with farming.

Regarding diseases… Wow, I must be very lucky. Played maybe 7-8 towns now and never once had more than 3 people sick at a time, that said I’m a huge stickler for making sure medicinal herbs, soaps and medicines are well in stock and rat/soil problems are minimal.

[medea_fleecestealer]

For walls/fences you use the Manage Walls icon on the bottom right of the screen, select what you want to change and then choose from the options listed.

FF is a fantasy world that happens to use medieval/colonial themes. That’s as real as it gets.

Yeah, I’ve only ever had it happen that once, but boy was it a surprise when it did.

[kendy4thestate]

If someone has a communicable disease it should spread to all members of the house, then to their co-workers, then to their homes and so on. Perhaps a plague on vanquisher setting?

[WhileyCat]

@Danza

Glad that it’s working fine for you, it’s nice when you need to restock mid trading or you just realised you had more of an item. Moving 3000 gold and say 1000 units of something is incredibly frustrating when you’re limited to two workers and one might not be there due to shelter stocking etc.

Are your main trading Storehouse, Stockyard, and Vault near your Trading Post?

@Danza

So what I don’t understand, if this is true… Why I end up with multiple houses saying they are lacking the bonus food resources, or furniture etc despite having loads in storage, my market workers seem to work constantly and can’t supply enough. I did experiment with a mod that let me have EIGHT market workers for the T2 market and it resolved all my issues.

Then what’s probably happening is you’re having a market service too many houses. I service up to 9 houses with each worker, with 31-32 per T2 Market. There is still some room for optimisation even with that.

@Danza

Then the annoying and constant pop up saying there are no tools needs to go. If tools are a bonus then why are they treated like an emergency notification for buildings/workers without them? Guess if the devs want to stick to tools in T3 then the default should be buildings and villagers don’t have a giant “out of tools” icon above them when missing them?

It’s rare that I have gotten them, but I don’t tend to buy tools before I make my own. There’s a chance they come up if they’ve had workers with Tools in them before (from buying them). That’s useful when you have a steady production chain of Tools that needs more workers, but not so much before then.

@Danza

Having there only be a single way to counter something is a really simplistic view of any builder or strategy game. Cavalry work yeah and it’s the only unit I use as the others are mostly useless mid/late game, don’t even get me started on archers…

How I use them is, after the red arrows pop up, I deploy them on the edge of housing/industrial sectors where or in between where the arrows pop up. Then I keep an eye out for where a Catapult could be coming from, and reposition if it turns out, after the raiders become visible, that the group doesn’t have a catapult.
Letting my main defensive area around the Town Centre pelt arrows at the main group, I use the cavalry to deal with the catapult, deal with small groups of raiders attacking things away from the Town Centre (raider cavalry destroying houses for example), then use them to mop up the reduced health remnants of the main attack.

[WhileyCat]

@Danza

Yeah I didn’t even consider the fact that potatoes were a new world crop and more recent… Which makes me wonder, perhaps it could be something added into T4/T5? Depends how strictly devs want to stick to the real world timeline VS unlocks/gameplay progression with farming.

The ability to buy seeds of new crops in late game could be a great idea, and could also feed into the recently discussed concept of a T2 Forager Shack’s herb garden

[Danza]

@medea_fleecestealer

For walls/fences you use the Manage Walls icon on the bottom right of the screen, select what you want to change and then choose from the options listed.

FF is a fantasy world that happens to use medieval/colonial themes. That’s as real as it gets.

Yeah, I’ve only ever had it happen that once, but boy was it a surprise when it did.

Yeah use the walls/fence management tool all the time, it’s a lifesaver! Hoping something similar is done for roads or even for mass selecting objects and saying “upgrade all that can be upgraded please”

[LordyLord]

@WhileyCat

Since this game is based on pre-colonial middle age Europe, there are no potatoes since they originate from America and weren’t farmed in Europe until the 17th century.

Yet we have beans and have no churches, I guess we all have different kind of medieval Europe?

[medea_fleecestealer]

Again, a fantasy world that happens to have medieval/colonial themes.

[LordyLord]

Again - potatoes did exist in medieval times.

[medea_fleecestealer]

Again New World crop which the devs aren’t including in the game atm.

[WhileyCat]

@LordyLord

Yet we have beans and have no churches, I guess we all have different kind of medieval Europe?

“Based on”. Also:

Fava—The Only Old-World Bean

[LordyLord]

Dude, that wasn’t food for ordinary folk. Same way you could talk bananas.

[WhileyCat]

What are you even talking about? It’s been cultivated as early as 10,000 years ago and were introduced as far as Britain 5000 years ago.

Whereas Europe never saw a banana until the 15th century when Portuguese sailors brought them over from West Africa

[TheSmokingHertog]

@Danza

Farmers should automatically be assigned as labourers in winter months.

Hear, hear!

[sorceresslulu]

Oh god, there are so many suggestions in one post but let me comment some of it

@Danza

There should be an easier way to upgrade dirt roads to cobblestone without having to manually click every single piece. Very frustrating when you have roads within layered walls/gates to select.

This feature may be fine, but it’s definetaly minor priority. It’s one-time action and trying to upgrade all roads at once is one of the easist way to **** ** city for several years due of maintanance costs.

@Danza

The tier 2 trade post should have more than 2 workers, ideally 4?

It’s already in 9.3

@Danza

There should be a way to level up the traders or increase the capacity of items they arrive with. When I’ve got a 1200 pop town, a Tier2 trader coming with 60 pelts, 30 weapons, 200 raw ore and items generally in this range doesn’t even register as a worthwhile trade at that point for how low quantity that is. If their gold and resources they bring could scale with your population, that’d be great!

It would make lategame extremely easy. There are so much gold I have no idea what to do with it, but if traders will supply more resources, there will be no reason to dig resources. Lategame is about setting up resource production with deep mines and I personally pretty much like it, because it adds reasons to extend city and even setting up multiple settlements around map

@Danza

WHERE ARE THE POTATOES??? I’m still really surprised such a nutritious and vital food is missing as a growable choice for farming.

Every culture could be marked as important. I personally like an idea where every culture has it’s own place, no real reasons to have different cultures with same outcome. Banished / Banished + CC with 30+ cultures it not a great example how to make farm mechanics overall.

@Danza

It’d be amazing if you could build specialist farming equipment, or by having horses they could be used to massively improve farming via hoeing and ground turning over. Kind of like how the wagon shop is a specialist building designed to improve logistics there could be a building designed to help and equip farmers better.

There are tools in game, I think that developers will make more sense on how tools should boots efficiency overall. Horses & everything else, I think it’s better to just have some fantasy, not really sure that adding more mechanics around it makes sense

@Danza

We should have some way to defend against long range trebuchets

Lancers, towers on top of mountains or just scout towers in some distance of city, barracks outside of city and smart walls outside of city to create killing zones / honey pots completely resolves issues with trebuchets. If raiders under you only walls around city itself, it means that you didn’t build good defence.

@Danza

• A player should be able to copy and paste a crop field setup from one field to another.

It’s not really usefull. Usually you should tune up every field even with same farm cycle just to be sure that you will create a constant food production without spikes

@Danza

Trees and natural resources like the rocks on the map should be chopped/mined faster

The game is designed around slow progression and there are multiple ways to end up with much more problems (maintanance, population, food and many more) rather than having low resources

@Danza

T2 and above upgrades for many of the T1 exclusive buildings like the rat catcher, compost yard, cobbler etc. Would look much more in place then in a highly developed T3/T4 town.

I’m not sure that compost yard is meant to be build in city. Rat catcher and cobbler agree but I guess it’s already on development list

[sorceresslulu]

@Danza

• Wells should output a bit more water or have a T3 upgrade, my wells despite having almost max density without overlap, so many of them are constantly out of water.

Not really sure, there was an issue with well a long time ago but I don’t see currently any issues with wells. Make sure that you have wells not only for houses but for production chains as well (suprisely but brewery is using water)

@Danza

Disease at least at vanquisher difficulty needs to be much harder, I’ve never seen more than 2 people get sick at a time in any of my games

Please no fronstpunk here.

@Danza

Tools should be unlocked at Tier 2 not Tier 3, it’s really frustrating having to trade exclusively for tools

Tools can be completely ignored atm because, well, tools do nothing at all currently.

@Danza

On Medium/Small maps, the enemy are now often spawning INSIDE my town walls, within 50 meters of my actual houses and in my current game, within 100 meters or so of my actual town centre! Enemy armies should be spawning exclusively at the edge of the map or as far to the edges as possible to stop this happening.

It seems like a bug and should be reported

@Danza

The restrictions on building steepness should be massively relaxed or removed entirely. I played with a mod that removed it entirely… I’ve had SO MUCH fun playing since this change. Especially when you’re trying to build walls in vanilla, it’s saying it’s too steep yet villagers AND THE ENEMY can just navigate around them on steep edges with ease. This one change has massively improved my gameplay experience and I’m loving how dynamic and hilly my town looks.

This one I actually agree. There is something wrong now with current flatten tool, it just doesn’t work as it should be

@Danza

There should be a mass upgrade button, like you click a watch tower and it could say “upgrade all” as an extra option, could have that with most/all buildings just to reduce clicks and RSI when doing it to hundreds.

Not really useful. Another easy way to destroy economy in single click