I’s been more than 60 hours of gameplay for me, through many cities and different building attempts. I have compiled a (very) opinionated list of things I’d suggest improving, that constantly get into my way.
Revisit farms
So, this is an interesting mechanic. Early in the game it’s hard to get it right, as you don’t have enough workers to make available for the farm. Then, suddenly, there are plenty of workers by also plenty of food. As you move further, farming is never enough. No matter if you build 10 or 1000 farms, you’ll always struggle to get enough food (and food variety) for everyone. So I’d like to suggest revisiting this mechanic, make it more consistent and all. Here I’m also considering revisiting the arborist, which becomes a huge trouble as you grow more and more.
Compost disposal
It has been mentioned multiple times on this forum. And here again. It’s really an interesting idea but becomes a huge nightmare as your city grow. Not only because you have to keep manually assigning the disposal into farms over and over and over again, but also because you need to place them quite far, and then they complain about too much travel distance.
Storage workers
I remember playing a very old game called Zeus: Master of Olympus. There we had this very very nice mechanic where you assigned a worker to the storage facility and you would determine:
- Items accepted (others can drop them there, no one will actively fetch) and max quantity
- Items requested (actively fetching them) and max quantity
- Items forbidden
This would greatly help on the overal gaming. Not only it makes the game more natural and closer to a real case, but also it would make things easier to move around, keep stocks all around your city and ensure proper distribution.
Trees and coal
Well, this is always tricky. I understand that we have limited resources (exactly like we have on real life) but it feels not only harder in the game, but unbalanced. You need coal, lots of it, to keep producing things, but coal mines are not so frequent and trees are required for firework, for plunks, and for coal… and they run short quite fast.
More workers to the trading post
We have at most 2 workers at the traiding post. But if you consider a city not too big, it’s hard to fetch items on-demand and fill in the trading post so you’re able to sell those.
The stocking management would help, but even that would not be 100%. More workers would fetch resources faster and maybe get back in time, before the mechant is gone.
More workers on the market
Similar to the trading post. Sometimes it take quite some time for only 2 workers to cover the entire boundary of the market. 3 or 4 workers (max) would greatly help.
Pacific mode to allow aggresive wildlife (optional)
Simply because sometimes you don’t want raids and army and so on, but you want all the other challenges in place.
More road modes and revisited bonus
Increase the roads from 2 levels to maybe 3 or 4 levels:
- Dirty (no speed bonus)
- Clay (5% speed bonus)
- Brick (10% speed bonus)
- Stone (20% speed bonus)
That would make it more fluent with the game, use proper resources and would be closer to the real deal. Also, revisit the road shortcut to use the new modes as you evolve your town center.
Steel
Not only cast iron and iron tools and so on, but evolve them into steel, stronger armor, weapons and tools, not to mention stronger buildings and so on.
More field crop options
It’s way too limited. Similar to Banished, offer the option for more seeds and crops (and maybe seeds can be traded as well). Also, provide a way to collect seeds from crops so you can re-seed your field and/or sell them.
Chicken, Pigs, Goats and so on
Because medieval times were not only about cows, right?
Church
It was a critical institution on medieval days, it’s important up to today and makes total sense to have it on the game, no matter which religion the player is from. Just makes both historically sense. And can add bonus. You might do like SimCity and offer 2 or 3 different churches or like FrostPunk and declare that a single religion should be in place and destroi others.
Laws and rules
This is an interesting mechanic to add behavior to the city through laws and more.
For instance, the tax % from citizens, or the number of days a worker will be on the field, or if citizens are allowed to gamble or not… this can be quite interesting to explore.
Roads fix - single block and joints
If you try to build a road of 1 block to complete a missing piece, you can’t. You have to destroy a larger piece and create it again.
Mounted units
Mount on horses, to make them more agile. Not necessarily a mechanic for ground unites to be able to achieve, might be a new type of units. This will make armies more efficient to cover larger distances.
More control over the weagon
You should be able to determine their focus on specific areas or buildings, for instance, to make them dedicated to reload temporary remote shelters, or to focus on mines.
Proactive workers
I feel that the workers are Millenials.
They complete mining and that’s it. They stop. And nobody goes there fetch stuff. A weagon needs to get it all and drop on a building right besides it. And then other workers fetch from there.
Similarly, a foundary worker does nothing more and won’t deliver the cast iron anywhere. But as we don’t have active fetching from a storage, you rely on free people to go there and move things around, which might take quite some time, specially if you place all your production into one spot to make things closer to it (but somehow workers are never close to it).
Auto-refill workers slots
If a worker die of illness or due to an attack you need to manually fill in the slot again. This is pointless. Just rearrange someone else to go there and fill in the slot automatically.
Loading time on game open freezes
Takes an interesting amount of time to load the game on I9 10900KF + SSD M.2 + 32GB RAM. It just stucks while loading the saved game… Not critical (hence why it’s a suggestion to look into, and not a bug report), but I’d say: keep an eye as this might be impacting others unnecessarily.
Refugees/fugitive mechanics
Like on Going Medieval or Banished, this mechanic adds more thrill to the game. You can accept people that can bring in deseases (which happened in reality), but not only that: also add fugitives, that might or might not be chased after (and then you have to decive to hand them back or fight to defend them, over the cost of the city morale).
City morale
We already have the mood, which is an interesting starting point.
- A good morale (happier workers) increases production rate and speed.
- Bad one (angry workers) increase fights, beer consumption and reduce production speed and output
Research facility
For new technologies (eg: new production ways, new fields, new weapons, …), instead of them been freely available at all game stages (just pending the town center update and some building requirements)
