Essentially, I’ve seen it a few times mentioned some things that would be nice to change. Ill start with battles cause those seem the most in need of review.
Having tier 4 walk-able walls or towers which integrate into the wall system would be nice. Also, walls in general should be buffed. I don’t like that I follow the Meta of multi wall settlements because honestly, it looks ugly. Even if a wood palisade cost more materials but was much stronger than it is now, I would prefer that.
Towers and archers become meaningless against higher level enemies, but crossbow equipped troops/guards should be much stronger. 5 or 6 crossbow shots should still take down a ‘knight’, or at least do more than 7 damage on an enemy with 300+ health. Keeping the same deadliness against my own troops would be great, or even having enemy archers targeting towers and potentially damaging defenders. But walls need to be more effective than paper mache. Make battering rams or catapults harder to kill, or have the raiders defend these better for better siege attacks. If I have only 24 lancers, they can defeat entire armies compared to equivalent cost of ~150 archers struggling to kill stronger enemies.
Raiders destroy walls way too fast. With the horseman destroying them faster than rams or catapults. Personally, I would prefer if walls were considered far better ‘armored’ such that all units can do 1 or 2 damage each, but battering rams and catapults dont have a debuff. Just feels weird when the enemy can clear the way of walls before the siege equipment even gets to the walls.
Also, I love that gravely wounded horseman/lancers retreat to a healer on their own for treatment I’ve only seen it once, but it is fantastic that it happened. If there could be horse based healers that could retrieve other wounded villagers that would be wonderful too.
Fishing only seems viable for under 500 population towns, otherwise, over fishing is too easy even with larger lakes.
I feel like there should be far more wagon traffic, especially for markets stocking all the houses. Once I get over 300 people, the number of fully stocked houses drastically decreases despite having fully stocked markets.
Books being used as toilet paper seems apt. I understand low rate of making books, but they need to last far longer. After all, I’ve been reading for decades and have yet to destroy a book.
I think rather than a flat bonus to an industry, I would prefer if a guild hall would maximize production for an industry. Rather than rely on me to micromanage how many people work a mine or foundry or blacksmith, the Guild hall simply puts the optimum amount of people in each building to optimize output based on which building limits final products the most. That way any bottlenecks in production are handled so I don’t have too many miners or too many blacksmiths. That way it feels more like my people are governing themselves.
Farming animals still feels too weak. Having a bunch of hunters still seems to provide far more food than any amount of herders at least per villager.
I would like to build buildings with preset limits. For example, I dont want warehouses to have barrels, or weapons by default. Small village is no big deal, but on larger ones it gets tedious trying to find where the new warehouses are built and toggling things off.
Regular trade contracts would be nice, like I produce 40 furniture for 5000 grain or something that comes by every year or every two years and auto renews/trades as long as I maintain the amount needed. Then established trade routes can help to make up for missing resources or allow my village to specialize in certain items rather than always needing to produce everything myself to have a steady source.
All in all, fantastic game when playing with a 500 villager limit, but its more fun to keep going into the thousands.