I recently crossed 600 hours played in FF, and I’m still loving it! There are a few things that have been addressed recently that were bothersome for me and I’m thrilled (like removing tools for children), but there are still some things that I haven’t seen addressed in future roadmaps or Dev feedback in other posts, so I thought I’d mention them here and see if there’s anything I’ve missed, or perhaps bring to their attention.
Fields - if I place a field and “forget” to account for the fencing between it and the road, or for any other reason, I cannot find a way to cancel the field placement. Even though the outline of the field is shown, it is not clickable to make any changes once placed. Also, when expanding fields, you should be able to expand it by smaller increments than when placing the original field. Sometimes the spacing doesn’t work out as I originally planned, and I’m left with a space of only 3 or 4 squares that I’d like to farm, but because it’s smaller than the required 5 square minimum, I cannot use it. Expanding fields should have a smaller minimum requirement than the initial placement.
Road Building Priority - This has been one of the biggest irritants since day one for me, that I’m laying out roads to plan my town and my villagers are dehydrated and out of firewood because they’re so busy building roads instead of wells and firewood splitters. Either reduce the priority of road building to something that they do when there’s little else to be done, or make it like everything else and allow the player to ‘untick’ the priority box on roads (also, why when a rock or tree is slated to be removed for building a road, can you not untick the priority box, only “Remove Target”? I still want them to remove it, just not before building the darn well!)
Harvesting resources - specifically trees, should allow you to choose to only harvest mature trees, like the work camps do. Especially early game, I only want my villagers cutting down the trees that are going to give the most logs, but it’s a serious time suck to have to go through a forest and find the mature ones and tag them one by one for harvesting. I like my villages to have an organic feel to them and resist clear cutting. I simple key tool, like holding “M” while dragging your harvest area would highlight only dead and mature trees for harvesting.
Deep Mines - these don’t really make a lot of sense to me. Instead of showing right from the get-go where the infinite resources are, wouldn’t it make the game more immersive if once your early game iron mine got up and rolling, your miners discover a vein located below the initial surface iron ore and then through an upgrade to that iron mine, it becomes a deep mine? It would eliminate the need to build around these unlimited resource patches and make the game more realistic, not to mention, removing that sparkle effect that you can’t shut off. Not every resource deposit would have the potential to become a deep mine, obviously, but I’d much rather have those initially untouchable resources available early game.
Desirability of certain buildings cannot be seen once placed - the school is a perfect example of this. Already built houses show green when placing a school nearby, but once the school is placed, I cannot tell how far out it’s area of effect is for placing new homes. I can move the new house around and see that it’s desirability % increases or decreases, but I can’t be sure that it’s the school/bakery/healer that is causing it. Can we get either a visual representation of its area of effect like the service areas of other buildings, or when clicking on the school, it highlights the houses that are within its range of effect?
Labourers waste time transporting 2 of something as produced when numerous are needed - when a build site requires 15 planks, it’s a waste of manpower to have multiple labourers or builders only move 2 at a time as they’re produced at the sawmill. They should either wait until there are enough produced for a full load (whatever max the worker can carry) or the full number of required item is available. This is especially detrimental early game when 3 labourers are mining stone for the wells, but one runs off with 2 stone every few seconds to carry them across town to the well/root cellar that requires 5 or more to complete. I’d rather have that extra worker mining the stone and when either there’s a max carry load available or the total remaining amount required, then one of the workers takes it to complete the build. Apply the same idea to planks, iron, coal, etc, etc.
Finally, I don’t know if this is intentional or a bug, but when new immigrants show up to my village, and I accept them, they all head to the temporary shelters, even if there are more than enough housing slots available. This wouldn’t be an issue, except the temp shelters are usually quite a ways out of town, as per their function, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense for them to travel so far out of the village, just to turn around and come right back.
I love this game. It consumes a lot of my free time, and contains a lot of the features and strategies that I feel have been missing from a lot of the city builder games that I’ve played, but expands on games like Banished (which I still love to play now and again). It gives me hope and warm fuzzies to see Devs actively taking suggestions and feedback and possibly implementing player ideas into their future plans. Great job!
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I’d like to see the Desirability effect as well. Also, in another comment I asked about wagons being used to transport bulk materiels to sites, even if it means creating a new type of wagon.
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I read that post and I agree, that would be a fantastic addition to the game. I often wondered why the wagons wouldn’t stock the build sites while playing, but it slipped my mind when making my post.