The game needs to introduce a social pyramid system. Let’s tie it to the level of the city center.
introduce a system of social classes with different needs and boosts.
So at the first level, all settlers are workers.
The second class includes classes such as: Burghers and landowners, merchants, artisans, security officials, soldier.
Each class requires its own types of resources to be happy.
Let’s say each craft or economic building gives N burghers and landowners and N workers - they give a class of ordinary and wealthy townspeople.
In addition, in my opinion, it is necessary to decouple gold mining from coins. There is gold as a resource - it can be sold, or it can be used to create luxury items (jewelers’ workshop).
Finally, crime - social inequality and discontent is formed a delinquent is created. - This could be either some kind of fine to production, or the flight of some settlers and the formation of a raider camp.
Actually it might be a good idea to introduce socioeconomics. Patron has tried to do it but it’s more trivial than a real deal. Instead of social classes, which would conflict with the main theme of escaping the tyranny of aristocrats, you can introduce wealth levels, similar to that of Tropico 6. A library worker should earn more money than, say, feces gatherer. A soldier lives in a shack, while an idle laborer lives in a brick mansion, for example, distorts the suppression of disbelief.
This game has the best graphics and gameplay features among Banished-class city builders imho, adding a few layers to increase the depth would make it the best ever since the legendary Die Siedler. Lineages and real families can and should also be a thing, I -without any background in programming- think it would not have big impact on performance. A random newcomer moves in with a family that has two unmarried daughters - it is not very realistic. Also, seeing the story of a family after a few generations would be interesting in the end game.
This is a common model of social behavior characteristic of a somewhat developed society. At a certain stage, society is stratified according to the abilities and available resources of the individual. Even in a communal society there is an unequal distribution of resources, what can we say about more developed and complex systems.
It’s just that under some social models, division in society is elevated to an absolute level and the economy is built on the oppression of one class over another. But under normal circumstances, there is nothing unusual in the fact that one individual has more resources available than another, if only due to different levels of material wealth.
In addition, social stratification among migrants arose quite quickly - just look at the fairly rapid stratification among migrants in North or Latin America in 16-19 centuri, the division occurred literally in 1-2 generations, although many had generally equal initial conditions within the same wave of emigration.
By the way, this can be played up by introducing a system of privileges for a class of society, thereby reducing or improving the level of discontent.
You can even play on historical precedents with humor - for example, increased taxation for farmers opens up a variety of reblochon cheese
The description of sociality sounds like anno… But is it necessary in this form? What goals/problems does adding it solve? Adding sociality may cost a lot of resources and make the game more difficult, but will it make the game more interesting? Now the game is not tied to classes, but there are levels of houses that require certain resources. If you tie it to classes, then the flexibility of professions will disappear. For example: there is a class of merchants, but I have a bad year and I need farmers to produce food, or I was attacked by enemies and I need soldiers. Will merchants take a rake and go to work the land like an ordinary peasant? If so, how will classes differ from the current system?
As for me, at this stage of game development, it is better to complement the existing system than to try to create a new class system. And spend resources on also changing gold. Because in its current form it really doesn’t work. And setting up a jewelry store sounds like the solution.
Replay value. How many iterations of monotonous gameplay will last the player - the standard scenario is to build N huts, collect N food, fight off N raider attacks.
Firstly, the social models chosen by the player will have their own advantages and disadvantages and make their own adjustments to the gameplay. - You can create an Amish community, a merchant city, an aristocracy, or even add cane, tobacco and cotton to the game of slaves - i.e. add the ability to buy workers.
If a climate modifier is introduced into the game, then there will be restrictions on the development of agriculture, and the player, instead of choosing what he thinks is more rational, will have to build a management system based on what is available.
These are additional game scenarios, which means the process is replayable.
I asked what goals/problems would be solved by adding classes. Answer: replayability? But adding classes will not solve this problem. Now you are developing one city and losing interest in the game. With the addition of classes, you will develop several cities: an Amish community, a trading city, an aristocracy. And as soon as you develop them, you will also lose interest in the game. Replay value in single-player games depends solely on the developers, how they will support the game by releasing new mechanics and DLC. Classes sound cool, but it would require changing half the game. This idea would be more suitable for DLS. At the same time, some ideas from classes can be added as separate mechanics.
Slaves can be added without classes. We will redeem slaves from terrible overlords and make them free people. This will fit into the game’s lore and solve a couple of game problems. Late stage population growth problem, growth too slow. And there are problems with coins, there are too many of them and nowhere to spend them. There is an incentive to mine gold and make coins from it. And regarding the weather, the developers are already working on something like this. Ideally, when such big ideas are proposed, they should be described in as much detail as possible. Perhaps the developers will not be able to implement the entire idea, but why not some points.
I’m not saying that the introduction of a social hierarchy will become an absolute something, but it will add variability when choosing a gameplay scenario. And yes, this could very well become the basis for DLC that will greatly diversify the gameplay.
This game legit needs this SO bad and anecdotally I have heard it from a lot of people I know who have played it long enough. I understand that it is what the villagers fled, but as they get so wealthy and distance themselves from what they left it makes total sense for them to recreate the very thing they escaped. After all why would grandchildren or great grandchildren born into this world in luxury have the same passion or ability to maintain what their ancestors started? Especially with such a rise in population? They never felt that pain, they’ve all had candles and big theatres their entire lives! So it makes sense they would recreate it to some extent. Even original colonists could be capable of substantial greed. Maybe it all happened on purpose by wealthy bad actors, maybe on accident by incompetence, but either way it becomes a huge endgame management system that could make the game replayable forever. The thought of managing that economy and the uprisings and everything else that could happen is really exciting. I would also say the game sorely needs such an end game system, especially since by then everything else is mostly figured out.
I’ll also say that it really adds a new layer to how you would plan your village and change layouts as time goes on. You’re now planning pockets of lower tier housing and shops to support higher tiers and whatnot and you end up with very diverse towns for more than just aesthetic reasons.So many players want to stop upgrades because they just want different levels of housing throughout their map because it looks good, well now they have an actual mechanical reason to create and maintain that! Enforcement plays a new role too for any future possible crime and punishment DLC etc…(crime makes a lot more sense when villagers are facing inequality) It’s basically a system that solves a lot of the issues people repeatedly bring up, though I think it is certainly more of a DLC than 1.0 at this point. I truly believe that this is what this game needs to reach that Crate standard of being a game a lot of people will constantly play for a decade rather than being a game you check out every couple years
This is a communist wet dream society, why would they want to bring the hassle they fled from? Laborers and Feces gatherers all living in Tier 4 manors is the best!
I really like about the game that it’s not just another game replicating our capitalistic dystopia. Would also be really complex to implement all the consequences: Assigning people with certain jobs to certain types of houses, calculating the reduction of happiness due to the injustice, including robberies, homelessness, in-town raids, a police to force the system onto the people by violence, jails, people leaving the town (as marcovchb stated).
But maybe the difference in desirability between the homes could influence the overall happiness, so if there are homes with a high desirability, people that live in houses with a low desirability could lower the happiness. This way social injustice could play a role with very little effort!