Hello Crate devs and farthest frontiers-people. I don’t know how much might be accomplished by sharing my early access experience at this point, but here goes. For reference I’ve invested about 450 hours, including about 70 in the last few weeks trying out 0.93. I know some of this is likely discussed elsewhere; I’m just trying to give complete feedback on my personal experience.
Issues with the user interface:
- No mini-map is a constant source of frustration.
- When you place a house, the UI should highlight both the beneficial and detrimental buildings that the potential placement will be within range of. Currently the only way to know if a house will be serviced by a market or impacted by an undesirable building, is the build-and-find-out approach.
- Lack of an area-select upgrade tool (i.e. one similar to the harvest and clear tools) for roads, walls and fences, parks and plazas.
- The clear/harvest tools can’t be used to remove orchard trees.
- You can’t queue an upgrade to existing buildings if you don’t have all the resources available, even though you can queue new buildings without the resources.
- No blueprint/planning tools.
- No way to set defaults for storage buildings, no copy & paste option for storage settings.
- Similarly, farm fields need copy & paste and “advance 1 year” options for rotations.
- The tooltip for each crop that tells you things like heat tolerance and growing time, should also show you the soil type preference and disease susceptibility.
- No (custom) hotkey options for buildings other than roads.
Gameplay and mechanics issues. Some of these may require me to be a bit more verbose.
Messaging about raids can be very frustrating. I think the messaging about excavation sites seems to be bugged currently, but the thing that really bothers me is split raids. You get arrows when there are multiple groups approaching, but information about the size of forces is buried. You can approximate that info by hyper-clicking on the magnifying glass in the “your village is being raided” message and noting where your screen re-centers. But that’s an awful way to do it. This is somewhere a minimap would be hugely helpful. Basically, it makes it really hard to know how to distribute your forces. (And maybe you don’t want to make too much info available to the players, but if that’s the case then we need better reconnaissance options).
There are some things I can micromanage that I want to be able to automate. Setting military patrols would be amazing. Having a way to recall and restrict non-military citizens during a raid to a ‘home zone’ of some sort, feels conspicuously needed.
Early in the game I tend to change my foragers’ target areas throughout the year to get the most out of them; being able to automate that would be amazing, although I understand that’s perhaps not intended behavior. I’d be more than placated if I could upgrade the forager’s shack to something like an agro-forestry outpost, which could regenerate depleted resources and propagate new sources of the resources in their area, when they aren’t harvesting anything.
I find myself wishing I could set behavior policies, like “guards should shoot boar on sight” instead of them waiting for the boar to agro on a random laborer. (And actually just wishing the boar were more like they used to be.)
I wish I could somehow manually assign service routes to wagon drivers to better control what goods they move, from and to where.
In buildings with multiple production outputs, like the smokehouse for example, it would be nice if there was a “prioritize productivity” option that was maybe enabled by default. So instead of walking across town for fish to smoke every other time they do a job, they’d perform whatever job requires the least travel time (assuming the production quota hasn’t already been met).
I would really appreciate a ‘hay loft’ storage building that worked like the grain silo for hay in terms of not promoting rats.
I love the complexity of the crop system, but I find it frustrating that it’s so poorly integrated with livestock management. Being able to automate grazing areas on a 3-year rotation would be a huge step. I’d also like to not be restricted to specific square areas based on the animal, because I don’t always build my farm fields in those dimensions. Intuitively, I’d want to set a grazing area manually and have the farmers tell me how many animals they can support in that area.
Similarly, every time I set up arborists and orchards, it just feels kind of disappointing compared to field crops. The circular work area feels small and restrictive; maybe employing the second arborist could increases the radius by 40%? Or maybe just let me build rectangular orchards in whatever size I want, designating the work area manually, and come up with a good mechanical reason to not make them too big. IRL you’d have arborists spending much of the year managing the trees’ health, including pruning to remove diseased branches and things like that. And you wouldn’t want to just alternate between different types of tree to prevent disease from spreading, because IRL fruit trees have much better pollination rates when planted in groups. Maybe a productivity multiplier based on the number of nearby trees of the same species. (On that note, it’s irksome apiaries don’t benefit from fruit trees.) Maybe also add cherries as a crop that ripens a month or two earlier than peaches, because I’m greedy for more pretty trees.
Last thing about agriculture… fertility feels way too easy/forgiving. I hope it’s just because you haven’t implemented tools to rotate livestock grazing and done a general rebalance. In general my tier 4 towns are overflowing in compost with every field getting fertilized every year or two. Even on the more arid maps, it’s just a non-challenge.
Late game immigration feels painfully slow. Would be nice if larger groups were attracted based on existing town population, at the very least.
The individual buildings and other visual game elements are gorgeous. With the one big exception being the town walls. I wish walls and fences could run diagonally and curve with the same visual elegance roads can, as well as integrating into guard towers. I grudgingly live with the system for walls that you’ve given us, but I’ll never like it.
Beyond that, there are a couple small decorations you could add. 1x1 decorative fruit trees would be nice, or just make all trees 1x1 but no other trees can grow/be planted in any of the 8 adjacent squares (which would also help with those ugly forest blobs the foresters plant).
A “tree planter” tile would be cool–a circular planter that was empty in the middle, but had stone (upgraded to brick) corners, and you could still plant a tree into the tile after the planter is built. Basically it’d be a way to better visually integrate decorative trees into your town.
Being able to decorate with some of the smaller bushes and rocks would be nice too.
I also really wish ‘landscaping’ was easier. The 10x10 tile limit on the flatten tool sometimes means you end up with bumpy paths after having to smooth over areas multiple times. I’d also appreciate a “smooth” tool that simply softened the hard edges, and a plain “lower” and “raise” tool. We’re doing it anyway with the flatten tool, so why not just make it easier on us?
Taking a step back, the game can lack variety at times. It’d be nice to see something akin to the quests from Anno games eventually added. Considering that the game names and tracks each town member, you could also consider something to add life to individual people. I’d probably buy a DLC that did something like that.
Anyway, if you’ve read this far, thank you for taking the time. And if you haven’t, it’s a fun game anyway and it’s been a joy to follow its development. If it’s half as good as GrimmDawn it’ll be a classic in the genre.
