Light cavalry, their high movement speed is keep cities expandable and safe.
It’s more sophisticated than defenses that rely on watchtowers and fortifications, and brings a sense of life to the world.
Please, need a horse man.
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I like the idea. They should also include a livery stable with horses that distance workers can use to get there and back again faster. They can be looked after in the temporary housing with delivered food just the same as it is normally stocked. That would liven the game up no end. 
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The complete absence of horses is the surest sign that this is really a fantasy game and not modeling historical Medieval Europe, no matter how much like historical medieval European villages they look like.
The biggest problem with adding horses is that they would/should also then, be added to the Raiders.
- And “light cavalry” throughout history has always been primarily a pursuing, looting, pillaging force, not a defensive one. If modeled anywhere near correctly, light cavalry as a raiding force makes agriculture impossible. No farmer on foot will ever make it to the Town Center and safety if he’s being pursued by a man on horseback.
Second problem is that horses are not simple to keep. You’d have to add Production of saddles and tack (more hides going into leather goods) and men have to practice riding and the horses have to be trained and stabled and pasteured - it would complicate the game enormously, even without the complication of correctly modeling mounted versus dismounted combat animations.
Not saying it couldn’t - or shouldn’t - be done, but it would not be a simple Add Animal change, and it would change a lot about the game and the problems associated with keeping the FF towns healthy and fed.
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You make some pretty good points. It would make the game more complicated for sure. Horses just need feeding, not necessarily pastured. As for raiders on horses not giving ie farmers a chance to get to safety. In real life they would not be attacked by cavalry, because horses don’t make good siege weapons. They die too easily and cost too much to keep, bearing in mind an invading army would need to carry enough food for the horses as well as themselves. They would only be used against another army in an open battle ground, not for siege warfare.
Absolutely right that horses have little place in siege warfare, but they are still deadly to agriculture and farmers on foot, which would make them extremely dangerous to our FF towns and villages. After a certain point of population (in a tiny representative sample of 2 games, I found it to be about 150 - 200 population), without agriculture you simply cannot feed the town and your ‘build’ collapses. If it takes a full-scale military expedition to get your farmers out to harvest or you have to extend your walls to include the fields, I suggest that the game would have to have a lot of other factors re-designed also.
It would also have to ‘nerf’ the cavalry so that they could not carry torches, or without walled fields you’d never be able to harvest anything from the burnt-over fields - or, for that matter, get Traders to the town alive, or set up mines and work camps outside the walls.
Much as I would love to see the ‘full scale’ of Medieval military represented, horsemen would require a major re-work of how the game is balanced now - probably more than they would be willing to do between now and Release.
Yep, I’m talking more advanced game, at vanquisher level and when everything is established, ie level 5 with at least 400 population, perhaps it should trigger when the population reaches 600, that way you can avoid it by keeping numbers under that. Or perhaps like with other city builder games that have earthquakes, tsunami’s, tornado’s etc, it can be toggled on and off.
Provided you’ve always got 18 months supply of food, it wouldn’t matter if an invading army trampled your crops, you’d scrape by until next harvest. It’s not like the fields would vanish where you would have to create new ones. The invading bandits break holes in your field fences where they get eaten by wildlife, so I don’t see much difference to crop loss if it’s by wild life or by trampling horses.
I think when it gets to where you’ve completed everything and there’s nothing left to build, it’s get’s a bit boring when all you have left to do is select which dung heap is emptied onto what field. They should include a siege war option, where an army would block you in to starve you out. Cities had their defenses, not just walls and arrow towers they also had catapults that could lob fire bombs, burning oil was poured down on them from the entrance if it was being attacked. Also on the outside they would have banks and ditches to stop heavy siege weapons getting too close. There’s lots of things that could be included to keep the fun going.
Dog knows, I’m definitely not against having more Upper Tier options: I think that’s the main area that the game is lacking right now. I have posted about potential ‘advanced’ defenses - hoardings on top of the walls, enhanced towers, fortified Gate Houses, moats, etc. - and those would have to be balanced by advanced Attackers to keep the game ‘honest’.
But I am absolutely against turning the game into an Advanced Medieval Battle Game. I’ve played enough of that in board, miniatures and computer games even when it was not the primary focus - too many game designers start making a Medieval Whatever Game and wind up concentrating on the combat part because they’ve seen one too many movies with people in plate armor.
So, while more Options for combat isn’t inherently a Bad Thing, if that’s the only advanced option we get I think it will diminish the game overall.
More Upper Tier constructions have been proposed and debated on this Forum before; just to repeat:
Guilds enhancing production and Guild Halls for big, impressive Top Tier constructions would be nice.
Being able to start Traders from a Top Tier town to ‘rake in’ Gold and Goods from off-map instead of waiting passively for other people’s traders to bring them.
More Luxuries and products for High Tier housing: combine the existing Honey, Milk, Spices and Flour for Confectionaries, or have a Master Chef who can combine Meat, Spices, Herbs and Flour into Fancy Cuisine of some sort. A Master Tailor (‘Masters’ can be a product of a Guild System, of course) who combines flax/linen with Fur/Hides and Gold to make Fancy Dress clothing (with ‘Fur’ maybe only available from Traps or Bears: make them Upgraded Hunters earn their Keep!).
And, along with more Water Options (bridges, terraforming to drain ‘marshes’ and make buildable land out of them) please, please, please give us the truly Medieval Option of Watermills to power grain grinding, sawmilling, hide, metal and flax-working - all were in use during the period, along with ‘canals’ to bring flowing water past more wheels for ‘industrial districts’ - a whole new set of options for town planning, construction and production.
There is so much that can and should be done to keep the Upper Tiers just as fascinating as Starting A Town is already, without turning the game into an End Game Combat Dance only.
I’ve been informed that the ability to order goods via the trader is being planned for a future update. Don’t know when though. My suggestion on that was the ability to order just enough to last one game year of the things your map doesn’t have and to make it cost loads, like it would in real life, not so you can ‘rake in gold’, but so you can just tick over.
It’s good that people are suggesting idea’s, it shows there’s a lot of interest. Everyone is different, likes different aspects of the game, it’s the dev’s job to keep it balanced. 
When though …
Bad choice of words on my part. I was aware of the post that @medea_fleecestealer added that they have planned to add trade requests sometime in the future. What I meant to suggest was a progression: getting trade goods as now, at near-random as traders arrive, then being able to request specific goods but probably in limited quantities (I like your suggestion: no more than a single game year’s worth. Make that dependent on your current population, and it would limit expansion until you moved to the Next Level), and then, at some X Point, be able to build your own Trader’s Wagons and send them out (off-map) with your own manufactured or rare goods.
The game could provide a display of a notional off-map Trading Post (“World Market”?) where you can unload your goods and pick up new ones, or it could simply be a source of more Gold to pay the high prices for stuff you order from the traditional traders. In fact, make it possible to get extra quantities to fuel expansion for Really High Prices, and the Gold from generated Trade of your own might be almost a requirement to avoid hitting a limit to expanding your population.
Parenthetically, this is the third game development/early access project I’ve been involved with in the past two years, and Crate is doing a superb job of gathering data and providing some feedback/response (necessarily limited by the fact that the primary purpose is to find and eliminate bugs and Game-Stopping problems, not add new ones!). - And while they are getting a lot of the same suggestions repeated as new players chime in, I think they are getting a good mix of ‘new’ features to select from and improvements to existing features to refine before Release.
I remember a game from a long while back called ‘Spore’. It populated your world with the creatures other people playing the game had created. Not sure how they did that, my understanding of programming is very limited, but couldn’t this game do the same kind of thing with your “World Market” idea? That way we are trading with real people rather than bots. They would have to expand on the type of goods that can be created to make it worth the while. Maybe allow the creation of your own unique items out of available raw materials.
This is another one of those potential High Tier additions that the game needs more of.
The big problem I can see is that right now, except for naming the villagers at random, the game doesn’t really use individuals at all: there are no military or civic leaders, nobody with any special attributes other than education, and that’s pretty much a single tier: you got some or you don’t.
That probably means to add even Off-Map ‘entrepreneurs’ would require some major additions to the code that applies to individual people. Since the last programming language I studied formally was FORTRAN (Neolithic Computing!) I have no idea how much of a hassle that would be, but I suspect it would have to be relegated to a Post-Release DLC.
Speaking individualizing people in the game, I just noticed yesterday that there is no one actually driving the Trader’s wagons: they may be Named, but they are apparently Invisible, which may show how much of a problem ‘fleshing them out’ would be!
You are the undisputed dictator of your FF kingdom, call yourself what ever you like. The name of my current village (more like a small city now) is called Fortnox. It’s a hillfort with just over 500 population and apart from the first 12 citizens, they are no additional immigrants apart from the ones that move in without asking. So it’s Fortnox of clan Nox and right next to it by the entrance, is a small hill now covered in blueberries… ‘I found my freedom, on blueberry hill’. Every time I see it, I start singing it… 
The only programing knowledge I have is in Basic, was that before or after the dinosaurs? 
Perhaps when you send out the world trader wagon, it can take you out of the game suspending it for the duration where you can do your trading. Once you are done, you would return to your village. You are the trader.
All games, not matter how designed, include Role Play - the mental game is at least as important, or more so, than the ‘mechanical’ game, whether you are visualizing yourself as Babe Ruth in a sandlot ball game or Odius Asparagus the Roman General in a miniatures game.
I tend to use peculiar names for my towns/villages, because it helps me identify with them. My latest is Naro Fominsk, because it sits next to a river-like waterway (Lowland Lakes map) next to which I have concentrated several Clothing/Weaving Mills (Naro Fominsk IRL is on the Nara River about 70 km from Moscow, and was the first textile industrial town in Russia, 3 textile mills being built there in the 1830s - what can I say, I wrote a fat article on the fighting there in 1941) but I’ve also used Steilacoom, Nisqually, Snohomish, and Tahoma - native American place names still in use around where I live in Puget Sound.
- And, of course, I always try to have my cemetary on a hill - ‘Boot Hill’ . . .
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If you want a list of weird names, I’m Welsh. We’re all experts in weird names. How about Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
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My favorite of all Welsh placenames is the village in Dylan Thomas’ poem Under Milkwood: Llareggub
Which literary critics tried repeatedly to find a Hidden Meaning for it in Welsh, until someone simply spelled it backwards and realized Thomas’ attitude towards all of them and their efforts.
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Yep, that’s one really weird poem… it is the grass growing on Llareggub hill. That’s where my father came from…Arglwydd Ward neuadd dywarchen ar fryn Llareggub. (Lord Ward of Sod Hall on Llareggub Hill)
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