Hello everyone,
I’ve been playing Farthest Frontier for a few days, reached 200 population so far, and first and foremost, congrats for the devs for a great job. Especially for early access, the game looks complex and polished, but also quite intuitive to learn. Just like Grim Dawn did with hack-and-slash genre, FF feels like a combination of good solutions from other RTS-es and city builders, but also with unique touch, great immersion and some mechanics that seem so fitting and cool that it’s odd nobody thought of them before - e.g. taking control of your villagers and RTS-style microing them to repel a wolf or bear and withdraw wounded ones away from danger.
Here’s some feedback though:
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Settlers’ arrival rate in the early game seems too slow. I quickly reached population of ~100, I had ~500-700 food and houses for 30-50 more settlers, but newcomers were still rare, also occasionally some settlers died to bears or bandits before I could afford enough towers and soldiers, so getting to 150 to get the 3rd level of city center was a very long and tiresome walk. No way to produce iron, tools and weaponry (I had to buy them), lots of key buildings operating on 1-2 workers only or even had to be disabled and re-enabled regularly. It would be cool to have some extra way of acquiring new settlers, e.g. sending envoys/expeditions that would cost resources and after some time would return with extra settlers. Or at least show some estimation how many new settlers are expected next year.
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A forager could really use an upgrade with a larger working area. He exhausts his area in ~3 months, so either he’s idle for the rest of the year, or I have to manually move it several times every year, which becomes annoying when you have several of them. Also, a notification could be useful when forager exhausts his working area like a work camp has
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Farmers, foragers etc. become idle for winter - which is understandable, but perhaps they could join the laborers’ pool for their inactivity period? I unassign them manually for winter and re-assign for spring, it’s totally repetitive, so why not automate it?
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I didn’t notice workers using temporary shelters at all, even when the main ettlement was far away (EDIT: never mind, this time they used it once it was supplied with goods)
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One time I created a squad with 4 light infantry and 8 archers, sent them to attack a bandit camp, ordered them back to the barracks afterwards, but only archers returned and infantry remained in the field. This repeated even after I sent the archers again and back.
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Upgrade button sometimes looks active (although I can’t click it) despite requirements not fulfilled
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Build menu and building details menu overlap - I think when I open either of them, the other one should be hidden automatically
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Is there a way to force your laborers to pick certain resources? I destroyed the bandit camps, got lots of loot, but all my workers are far away and don’t seem to prioritize them (EDIT: ok, they took the loots shortly after once I created a road leading there)
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How to stop running animals? One of my cows escaped and kept destroying my crops. Farmers did nothing, pasteurs did nothing, I couldn’t even kill the cow and could only watch my precious crops getting destroyed. Yeah, I know, I should have put fences, but is there no way to stop the cow once it’s there? EDIT: every time saving and loading that save causes all cows to calmly return to their barns :P.
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There are some minor issues happening when you load a game. Some settlers leave the package they were previously carrying on the road (someone picks it up later). Also, sometimes two merchants appear just after loading, but one of them quickly disappears.
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Once 6 soldiers fell victim of my stupidity because I sent them to scout the map and they ran onto raiders and died far away from the settlement (BTW, attack-move would be nice here). The problem is, after a long time my laborers suddenly felt the need to bury them, kept leaving the village, reached a certain distance from the town and turned back. Soon others repeated the process. It stopped after I did two things (not sure which one helped, probably the latter): I went there with another squad and I gave the order to build a road to that location.