Impressions after 170h: challenge shift from population number to survival

Farthest Frontier Ideas and Feedback
1

Hi everyone,

I thought I would shortly share my thoughts on the game after playing it for 170h. Left out issues that are already being added in 0.7.8. Note: writing this from a survival point of view.

A TLDR for the busy: it’s a beautifully envisioned and fun game, but the main “challenge” currently is waiting for the pop number to increase so the town centre can be upgraded. The game could be more user-friendly and difficult from a survival point of view.

The good

  • The level of depth attempted in the game: farming, bees, desirability, water, food spoilage, diseases, resource/logistic chains
  • Visuals: the game looks great
  • Raider AI: quite good at finding vulnerabilities and generally being as much of a nuisance as possible
  • Dev communication: really top tier, it’s great to hear what changes are being planned
  • Dev prioritization: main issues are being addressed quickly

The bad

  • On a general level, there could be a more distinct difference between the easy and hard modes.
  • Food management too generous: Feels like this is quite far from the level that would still be manageable with proper gameplay. I am talking mainly about the low food consumption to production ratio, but also the spoilage rate.
  • Gold economy: okay in the early game, but quickly becomes trivial (this has been mentioned by others too).
  • Disease outbreaks have only been a minor issue. Hygiene does and should help with certain diseases, but influenzas etc should be common regardless of the presence of soap or a healer.
  • Tougher raids: this is probably more controversial, but IMO the player doesn’t need to be able to stop all incoming raids. Especially in the early game, raids shouldn’t be something you fight off, but something you survive and recover from.
  • Flatten tool: mentioned by many others, but continuously having to set flattening areas is very tedious. Flattening effort does and should scale with the volume of land moved, but maybe it could be done with a single flatten block where the working time vary as required.
  • Population requirement for upgraded town centre: waiting for the population to increase when you are “done” with the current level feels very artificial, especially after the pop requirement for T3 & T4 was last increased. Requiring infrastructure and resources would feel more organic, while indirectly requiring a certain population anyway.

The misc

  • Many good user-friendly suggestions have already been given in other threads
  • Effect of food level on happiness: seems strange that villagers would be unhappy with a constant 1 - 3 month food supply stored. If you have a constant stream of food coming in and nobody is hungry, they shouldn’t be worried?
  • Would be nice to have five levels of difficulty instead of the current three, especially if the “hardcore” level is made harder. Same applies for the map size, the difference between medium and large is big.
  • The ability to build buildings and walls at different angles would be amazing…
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Welcome aboard! Excellent suggestions and observations.

I would love to be able to orient buildings in different ways for placement and construction.

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“Tougher raids: this is probably more controversial, but IMO the player doesn’t need to be able to stop all incoming raids. Especially in the early game, raids shouldn’t be something you fight off, but something you survive and recover from.”

Would love to see that in the game.

When a proper storage management will be implemented in the game the efficiency will rise greatly.
A good counterpart for that rising efficiency could be stronger raids that will break your defence. IMO a new kind of defence could be implemented. Some kind of castle thats very costly to build with high defence. It gets more costly to build it at a higher position, but so rises the defence.
This way the position of this very important sructure would be set by the environment and bring in a higher purpose for hills.

If a very strong raid arrives all inhabitants could evacuate to the castle and take all they can carry with them by clicking a bell in the castle. So they are save at a smaller position and you could use all of your inhabitans as soldiers despite a few that deal with essential work (baker, arrow maker, weapon smith smithing some cool defence things, hunters, gatherers).
Before, the castle can be stocked with goods if you can afford to (like durable food, firewood, weapons, arrows). Maybe add some super storage there where food can be stored with higher duability (but maybe only processed ones like glassed vegetables and salted meat (new idea) and dried grain (new idea). So that it neets preparation time to prepare for a siege attack. If you didnt prepare the years before you wont make it) to add siege attacks. The fortress should have a bakery inside and the opportunity to build tunnels for hunters and gatherers if the castle gets sieged.

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Talking to myself. I discovered that the orientation of a building for construction CAN be changed – it’s the TAB key! I used it to build my glassmaking factory. Works for houses, too.

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