Just wanted to share some thoughts based on a new game and what I am seeing. I am sure I don’t have all the information concerning the mechanics behind the expected behaviour so this might not be an issue at all but here it goes just in case.
I have a population of 625 at the moment and all housing except 3 homes are T4.
Just a moment ago my global entertainment score was about 60%.
The only entertainment buildings I have are Festival Poles and a Theatre.
I was about to add pubs or libraries but in my experience in other games I saw pubs more of a disturbance (people getting intoxicated too often) and libraries too expensive (production chain requiring too many workers, buildings and space) so I decided to try to add another theatre instead.
The entertainment score went straight to 100%.
While I loved that this worked and I was able to avoid the trouble of adding pubs and libraries, I can’t stop but to wonder if this behaviour is expected.
Should we be able to reach a global entertainment score of 100% without using all the different types of available venues? Villagers seem happy nonetheless. I guess what I was expecting is the higher the tier of the housing is, the more “picky” they would be to meet their needs.
You said you didn’t want to add a pub or a library, so you decided to add another “library” instead. Did you mean to say you added another “Theater”, and that increased your entertainment score to 100%?
Longer answer - While requiring all of the different types of venues in order to achieve peak entertainment happiness seems like a sound theory, it can make game play feel rigid and inflexible. Some people may not want to build pubs because they don’t want to deal with intoxicated workers not doing their jobs (I’m looking at you rat catcher -.-) or they may not want to build libraries because they don’t have the labor or space to invest as you mentioned. Additionally, it makes the gameplay just that much more formulaic. “I need to have 1 of x, 2 of y, 1 of z” - which is boring. Pharoah is a game that goes this route, and the result is you build every city on every map the exact same way, because you need to have ‘x’ number of each entertainment type, ‘y’ number of temples, etc. Not having to adhere to that in games like FF, allows city builds to be more flexible and organic.
I think that the developers’ intention was to make the minimum level of decorations/decorations. And all that is above is to realize the players’ fantasies of decorating their cities.
