First and foremost, congratulations on the new DLC! Including the option of having settlers raise cats and dogs is a really nice touch. Wasn’t there also a Bear mode that was included as well, or was that a silly meme?
I was never particularly great at this game, and I was hoping that the DLC - alongside the fancy new tech tree - would have smoothed things out regarding difficulty. Upon starting a completely fresh new town, however, the game simply gets too difficult, too fast, and there’s never a good way to get ahead of the town before the raider army gets too numerous and too big and sacks your village because… reasons!
The biggest pain point, which has consistently been true in every playthrough so far, is getting the town from Tier 2 to Tier 3. More specifically, there are far too few opportunities to get a healthy economy, and the game in general vastly over-requires clay to get the upgrades you need. If you can’t get to a clay source, or your only source is a deep mine that you can’t access until Tier 4, you’re pretty much dead before you can begin.
Here are the ways of making money I could figure out from doing multiple playthroughs:
Upgrading Shelters to Homesteads and have them paying taxes: You need 200 people to upgrade to T3, and it has taken me quite a long time to clear out the more fertile areas to have 3-4 big crop fields, numerous hunter & forager cabins, and having a cow farm and chicken farm to get enough food to convince people to immigrate here.
Luxury items - Candles are fine and easy to make, but pottery requires clay, which my town didn’t have access to…
Market Squares - Possible to be upgraded, but upgrades require bricks, which you can’t even make until Tier 3. Also, why are there Tier 2 buildings that require bricks in order to construct them?
Trading Markets - Even if you select the “I really need to buy this item!” option, it usually takes 3-4 years for a trader to actually come into my town to sell me things. In more than 1 occasion, the traders would come right as a bandit army is marching to raid my village.
Refining Gold into Gold Ingots: This was the only real option I had for a while; since it often takes more than a month to refine the gold, I couldn’t rely on it too much to cover monthly costs like having a functional Army, as I can’t use the Army pro-actively because I can’t find where the bandits are even coming from!
There were other things like Salvage sites and ruins, but often they pop out too little and too far between, and it’s not like I can take 20 or so villagers and make a second small cluster far away from the main city because there’s no groups of shelters, or food supplies, or anything else the main city has!
Ultimately, gameplay devolves into periods where I’m either playing at 0.5X to make sure I can set all the construction requirements and nature clearing ready to go, or there’s long stretches of nothing because I don’t have the materials to progress any further and I’m agonizing in hope that the trading merchant comes before the raiders destroy my village.
Can anyone help me out in smoothing the difficulty curve?
I think it just comes down to using the traders to your advantage as much as possible.
In FF, you’re main source of income should not be coming from your house taxes, it should be coming from the traders via you selling excess goods that you make. For example, I find that most games I play, I tend to have a pretty good amount of tallow and willow around early game, so I really focus on getting basket and soup production going good. Then once you start to build some of those up, start selling them like crazy to the merchants. You should be doing this for everything that you possible can depending on your starting resources/what is close by your town centre. Pick a few main exports and build your talent tree around them to max how much you can produce, and then start raking in the profits from it.
You mentioned bricks not being available till tier 3 - this has been brought up many times by others before, and I can see the point/confusion of course. But this was a deliberate design decision, and it kind of nudges the player into using the trader as early as possible. As soon as I advance to Tier 2, I always get a trader post build asap, and then check the traders every year for bricks. As soon as you see some for sale, quickly buy about 90 of them if you can afford it. You then use 60 or so to upgrade your market to tier 2 to the upgraded version so you can start making more tax money, and then use the remaining bricks to upgrade a work camp to tier 2 so you can start planting trees and have an unlimited supply of wood coming in.
These steps basically frame every new game I play, and sets you up for the rest of the game IMO. Hope some of that helps!
Clay is almost on every map I play. When you start a map. Always go somewhat close to a clay pit as it’s essential. Get lots of hunters and trade away pelts/shoes/coats. Play on pacifist until you get comfortable.
Really depends on the map type/size. I started a small Plains map the other day and I have one very small (301) clay and one infinite. So I’m going to have to trade for a lot of clay before I can use the infinite one and even then that might not be enough since I won’t be able to fit more than 1 pit on it.
Also TPOM you do know you can play Pacifist mode and not have to deal with raiders/predators?
I could play on Pacifist mode, but I picked my map specifically to wreak vengeance on Raider camps for being such big meanies to my previous towns! I wanted to heavily emphasize being a strict military-focused town, but the game never let me fulfill my fantasy!
To better illustrate some of my complaints: my town already had a near-infinite supply of wood without needing to upgrade my work camps, but there was never a way to reliably turn that wood into money. I wanted to make furniture to sell, but that’s also behind the Tier 3 gate, and IMO you can use the Technology tree to offset some requirements, but furniture is not one of those you can elect to make early.
The trading post is something my previous towns invested in, but each trader has a specialty (Anita being more iron and military based, Scorv being more meat and herbs based, etc) and there’s no way to influence how often a trader visits the trading post. There are years where I’ll have 0 traders, years where I’ll have 1 trader, but he or she is selling nothing that I want, and some years there are 2+ traders, but neither of them want to buy the things I want to sell!
Basically, the game has 6 different “biomes” each with varying degrees of resource availability, but with so many buildings having a heavy negative desirability score and so few providing a positive desirability score, constantly fighting the slope + terrain, and no way to give my towns different personalities, there are way too many systems working against the player and too few systems the players can utilize to get ahead of the curve and bolster resources for the inevitable bandit attacks.
I see where you are coming from, and you have a point regarding some of the limitations in the early game. That said, those limitations are forcing you to pursue a number different avenues to develop your town. Making best use of traders is one of those options. It took me a while to figure out that getting an overabundance of food and housing is another. With many more settlers moving in quickly, options greatly increase. Do not emphasize military too early. The small gangs of raiders in the early game can be dealt with fairly easily by larger groups of settlers in the beginning. Better wait to switch to stronger military until later in the game.
“There are years where I’ll have 0 traders” - this never happened to me. Maybe a matter of how far you push the difficulty of the game in your setup?
“and no way to give my towns different personalities” - you do have a point here. I am hoping to see more varieties and options with an expansion DLC that is hopefully on the way…
Is it possible to attach/youtube a playthrough? As someone who always play on vanquisher/arid highlands without issues wit over 1.1K playtime, I will go over and review where you are going wrong. You don’t seems to be far off, just missing a few tips.
Even better, do a live stream and I’ll guide you
Appreciate the suggestion, but no recordings for Youtube here. The preference is to understand the game’s mechanics and engage in a bunch of trial and error as the lessons from a failed village really stick.
One of the hardest things to figure out - and it’s not covered in the Game Guide or tutorials - is figuring out optimal spacing. Placing all the negative desirability buildings clustered together and far away from shelters is intuitive. Markets and Shrines benefit from clustering shelters very close to each other as well. But if a vital resource is… 50m / grid spaces away, what’s the best way to get a search party out there to get the process of harvesting those?
If you put shelters there, they will have 3 desirability and no one will want to live there. There are very few positive desirability buildings early in the game that aren’t pure decoration (schools, healers, temples), so that might not be a big draw either. Then there’s the logistics of taking those resources and shipping them to the main hub using wagons, but the wagon building isn’t very clear on what it does. On top of all that, you have to make sure raiders don’t aim for those important buildings in the outskirts far away from where your lookout towers and military are.
It’s just a lot to balance, and knowing more mechanics like the optimal amount of spacing for certain things would help a ton towards understanding the game better.
The first four can be accessed before Tier 3 if you put the knowledge points into it. The pub requires Tier 3 but you can craft and sell beer in Tier 2 for a good profit.
In the early game, market, salvage and the trader are my income streams. I overbuild houses early because you obtain income from housing, not population.
I usually have lots of furs from hunting cabins early so it is the item I sell first at the trader. If you have lots of herbs they can sell well early too. These income streams are usually enough for me to have a military company of 6 soldiers for the first raid. If possible at least two of the early soldiers should be light infantry, but swords and shields are not always easy to get early on and budgets are still limited.
Upgrade your market as early as possible, even if it means buying 60 bricks from the trader.
Obtain the ‘Military Logistics’ knowledge node as early as possible to reduce the maintenance cost for soldiers. (requires tier 3 or 24 knowledge points used)
Far away resources are a challenge. I admit I will try several different game seeds before I find one that seems optimal. A distant resource node may get raided a few times but once you obtain defensive walls, you can build walled ‘outposts’. You can build any building there except a town center. Your housing will be fine as long as you include a market and other buildings that increase desirability such as shrines. Usually though it is enough for me to enclose the resource in a walled and defended enclosure connected to my town with a road.
Food, wood, gold and population are the essentials for growth.
From these you can build everything you need for a growing town.
I am still happily enjoying playing peaceful mode. And I usually stick to small / medium maps. So some of my ideas may need some adaptation for you, but :
you asked about spacing. I build houses based on a 9 by 9 block, 3 houses per side, use the middle for desirability or functional structures. like a shrine or a root cellar. Or, set up a block with a 4X4 structure, like the May Pole with a Well and a rat catcher, then a row of houses next to it, etc.
You need multiple of the wagon shop spread out around the town, either near the storages for building materials or near their sources. I learned that one the hard way. And you are right, I wish they were more detailed in the descriptions for some of the buildings. The wagons transport all the items in the Stockyard.
I agree with those who have said to focus on manufacturing early as you can and choose those easiest / closest / most resources to sell at the traders. Usually herbs, hides ( worth more turned into shoes and coats ), pottery, soap and baskets. Use your tech tree to improve your hunters and foragers, and to increase production of key manufactured items. If you have a ton of wood, process it into board and send those to the trading post also.
Send overstock materials to the trading post early, don’t wait 'til the traders come. Then you will be able to handle raiders and traders arriving at the same time. When the alert comes for the trader, pause the game. Go to the trading post and make all the trades you can with what is on hand. Grab some bricks if they have any. Then un-pause and focus on something else, like the raiders. ( my game gets paused all the time so I can focus on one thing and not miss something else going sideways in the meantime). The traders usually stay for a few months, so you may have time to check back and send over any recently made items before they leave.
I have never seen a year without traders. Almost always 2, sometimes 3 after I upgrade the trading post. I save up all the money from my manufactured goods and then put in a request for bricks when I am ready to buy a whole load of them (assuming I don’t already have a decent number from the salvage sites).
Also, you mentioned not being able to provide food to an outpost. If I find several resources grouped together that are far from the main area, I will build the mine, pit etc. and the “undesirable” buildings that go with them. Then give them a well, storages and a temporary shelter. Then I take my storage cart, give it minimum demands for certain foods, a few baskets / tools, soap, firewood, candles, etc. and go park it out there. From what I can tell, it does not count negatively for the citizens as far as being unhappy with their home because they still technically live in the city. And they will still walk into town occasionally to visit their family, get a new pair of shoes, pray at the temple, etc. just not every day.
It may not work for a giant map. You might have to build a little “mining town” in that case. But using the cart might work for short term food supply until you can get hunter / fishing and forager set up in that area.
