I love the game’s music: the rural and folk vibe fits the ambiance perfectly. However, after playing for more than a few hours it becomes extremely repetitive. It’s one year-long track across the four seasons that plays non-stop over and over, never ceasing and always predictable.
I have two suggestions:
First: The music should “phase” in and out sometimes to give the listener some breathing room from it. Have it fade out for a few minutes at a time and be replaced by randomized ambient and season-appropriate world noises such as wind blowing, birds singing, footsteps crunching, wolves howling, children laughing, indistinct murmurs of conversation, farmers singing harvest songs in the fields, etc and so forth. There is already ambient sound in the game that you can hear when you zoom close to certain buildings, so this could be a slightly more cinematic extension of that. It would give players a respite from the relentlessness of the music, while deepening our immersion in the world.
Second: Have the music develop as you progress through the tiers. Introduce new tunes with more “sophisticated” medieval instruments and composition as your town progresses through the tiers. This would reflect the growing sophistication of your town.
So, for example, the current music has a strong rustic folk vibe with an emphasis on the fiddle, which is perfect for the early game. When you upgrade to Tier 2, the Tier 1 music would still play, but priority would be given to new tracks with a slightly less rustic feel and perhaps featuring a previously unheard instrument. When you upgrade to Tier 3, you get less of the previous tiers, with Tier 3’s music taking on a decidedly (medieval) cosmopolitan feel with more piano, perhaps a choir, a psaltery, etc. And so on and so forth through the tiers until you have “civilized” gregorian chants, grand pianos, organs and orchestras and the like (but still with a bucolic, rural vibe). Hildegaard von Bingen would be a good inspiration for that stage of the game.
I would also make it that so that even at the highest tier, you may still get the occasional lower tier track, just for nostalgia’s sake and as a reminder of how far your town has come!
The game’s central musical motif (the melody that plays on the opening screen) could still be incorporated into each tier, but with new instrumentation and harmonies, to give it a new feel (like how it already is throughout the different seasons, but MOAR). And some new melodies and motifs would be great, too, to break up the repetitiveness of the OG melody. Those could be inspired by the new industry options your town has access to, and bring different energies to the aural experience.
The end result would be that you’re constantly being exposed to new music and ambient sounds as you progress through the game, the new music reflects your town’s increasingly cosmopolitan state, and by the end game you have a large backlog of tracks that the game can randomly cycle through each year, which should help to break up any perceived monotony.
