Suggestion: Specialists & Automation

Farthest Frontier Ideas and Feedback
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Hi,

Been enjoying Farthest Frontier so before I start chipping in, keep up the good work!

One area of the game I feel could do with some attention though is concerning general maintenance of a settlement, particularly when the player gets to mid-game and beyond with larger settlements.

What I’m talking about here are the repetitive actions the player must perform in order to keep things running smoothly. Off the top of my head, here is a short list of examples:

  • Clear crop fields of disease.
  • Fertilize crops.
  • Repair broken structures.
  • Manually perform trades.
  • Manage production limits.
  • Moving resource collection zones.

Now I’ve seen a few of these elements posted in other topics along with requests for automation and while I’m totally on board with this, I can also understand that these systems are the bread and butter of a settlement management sim so we want the player to engage with them.

I’d therefore like to suggest a compromise…

Around the mid-game point when villagers are acquiring an education, I believe there should be a selection of ‘specialist’ roles which, if worked, will provide global benefits to the settlement including automation.

One thing this would achieve would be to add phases to the game so during initial colony development the player would need to take a more hands on approach to management but once they hit the mid-game, they have the option to automate elements of this allowing them to focus on things like defense.

Implementation…
Besides the individual automation systems, I think the general concept of specializations could be implemented by having a unique building for each specialist which, when selected, gives the players options for automation in that particular specialty. For QOL, these could all be linked to a page on the town center building where all specialists and things like production limits could be managed.

To add some balance, the devs could set high requirements for the construction of these buildings and/or education level requirements for operating them.

Ideas for specialists…
Horticulturalist - Automates the care of crops - Replace crops with work slots for a season to cure disease. Fertilize crops if below % fertility.
Engineer - Automates the repair of structures after a raid. Allows building of bridges if bridges feature were added.
Market Mogul - Automate trades.
Logistician - Controls production limits. Automatically moves resource collection zones for hunters/gatherers/etc. within a larger area (could just operate a larger area technically) if no resources have been found recently. Could also manage internal caravans between stockpiles in the settlement if this features were added.

Just some thoughts, feedback welcome.

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Depending on how deep the devs wanted to go in this direction, it could open the door for things like a tech-tree if a researcher specialist were added.

While I’m not suggesting this be used for unlocking buildings (the current system works fine imo), it could add further global modifiers such as better crop yields or soldier attack/defense stats. Something like upgrading hunting bows to longbows.

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LIke the idea, but needs a bit of linguistic ‘tweaking’:

Horticulture and its derivatives doesn’t show up until around 1670 - pretty far after the supposed period of the game. Other possibilities for the same purpose might be:
Master Plowman, Master Reaper, Master Farmer

Engineer, likewise, originally meant a maker of War Engines (catapults, battering rams, trebuchets, etc) so doesn’t help us much here.
On the other hand, a Joiner was a skilled woodworker or carpenter, Master Carpenter meant much the same thing, while ‘Builder’ was much more generic and didn’t imply any special skill.

There were dozens of terms for merchants, most specific to what they dealt in (Ironmonger, Greengrocer, Costermonger, etc) but there are a few ‘general’ terms that could be put in charge of Trade:
Chapman (a traveling merchant)
Master Monger
Reeve (a business manager of small estates, towns, shires, etc).

Reeve could also be used for the specialist who sets Production Limits - the word only took on a strictly religious component much later: it was originally strictly an administrator, and Chaucer describes the Reeve in his Canterbury Tales as “knowing exactly how much the manor should produce”, which ties neatly with the desired use in the game!

Somebody managing the carts, wagons and hauling of goods around the map could be a Drover, Cartman, Carman, Carter, Drayman, or Wagoner.

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Clear crop fields of disease.
Fertilize crops.
Repair broken structures.
Manually perform trades.
Manage production limits.
Moving resource collection zones.

Disease is already solvable with good rotation design. If you need to manually do this then spend time instead improving your rotations until they are stable. I doubt we will see any change to this as it already works really well imo.

I use a mod to auto spread fertilizer. I really hope they add this functionality to the base game. It isn’t an interesting task, just a yearly chore of doing exactly the same thing.

By ‘repair’ do you mean rebuild destroyed defenses? A little tick box on walls and gates to auto rebuild would be good. It becomes a brainless chore to rebuild the same gate after every raid. You can press x and select all the walls to repair with one click already, it’s not the worst. A more direct rebuild everything button/hotkey would be good though, or just some way to highlight every destroyed structure.

Automated trading is one of my big hopes. Mostly to shift the time limited focus of trading. I would rather not stop what I’m doing four times a year to attend trading, instead doing that same thinking a decisioning but at a suitable time. I see my role as the player to plan, not to execute.

Production limits are in the next patch, they are great!

You can already setup sustainable renewable wood collection if you are clever. At a certain point I just set a harvest stone order over the whole map to get it out of the way, and then just top up stone with whatever the traders bring.

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Good thoughts, the names I went for were just to get the message across but I like your suggestions.

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Think I need to look at farming a bit closer then maybe… I seem to be picking up new diseases every year even when filling season with work slots to clear. I’m using a spread rotation of clover/wheat, turnip/clover/work & clover/beans. No two adjacent fields running the same crop in any season and still getting new diseases every year. Maybe this is wrong? Would appreciate advice if so.

Also, thanks for news about production limits and thoughts on the other stuff… To be honest, the suggestion was aimed at trying to find a middle-ground between micromanagement and automation (making the player micromanage early game). E.g. I think just having an auto-repair button straight out the gate may take away some of the punishment of not defending your village properly. Would be nice to automate some of the micro in the mid-game tho.

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Completely agree about transitioning to automation as the game progresses. Like the auto fert spreading could require an upgraded composter, auto trade an upgraded trader, etc.

Crop disease is a bit like villager sickness. They will occasionally get sick regardless, the goal is to avoid it spreading and having a large impact. My current favorite setup is very basic, alternating fields running three straight years of peas > clover > turnips next to turnips > clover > peas. No disease lasts more than a season and never gets the chance to spread. It’s on a wastelands biome though, hense the massive over boosting of fertility.

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The Reeve might also fulfill the requests of some users for law enforcement – “shire reeve” is the root of our word “sheriff.”

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Now we’re getting into my other ‘favorite addition’ to the game: hierarchy in the population. Right now, the people in FF are a remarkably egalitarian group - inhumanly so, in fact. I would love to see a single figure who is The One In Charge - call him Shire Reeve, Sheriff (Old English Scirgerefa), give him a noble title like Knight, Marquis, Seigneur, etc. And then use the ‘expert’ titles we’re talking about here as his/her assistants to extend his influence on the actual work being done in-game.

It would allow the game to work in some ‘Role Playing’, add some characterization to the characters in the population besides just names on a pop-up, and also allow the gamer some more ways to control/guide/manage the late game when you are dealing with 1000+ workers, builders, laborers, craftsmen, merchants, etc.

Point being that such a Hierarchial system would require both Expert Workers and also Political or Official Government figures like the Shire Reeve, Reeve, or similar title.

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Good ideas.

The aborists should be automated. Automatically plant fruit trees.

Foragers, Hunters should look out of their zone if nothing to target.

All this manually stuff could be improved. Great game though

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I thought so to and then remembered the opening scene… the exact reason why the folks are now on the Farthest Frontier… So experts I’m on board with but the head honcho aspect, whilst I like it, flies in the face of the initial premise.

(Sadly I have no rig capable of playing Manor Lords…)

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I understand the initial premise of the game, but it’s not humanly possible. Human groups form Hierarchies. In fact, most groups of large mammals form hierarchies, even if only family-based. Even if the group started out as an amorphous blob of refugees, they will form some kind of hierarchy once they stop moving.
Mind you, the top of the Hierarchial pyramid doesn’t have to be the single Great Man familiar to European history. Most Native American groups carefully divided authority, so that women were in charge of agriculture, child-rearing, home building and maintenance, while men were hunters, warriors and defenders, and handled most foreign diplomacy. Among the Haudenosenee (Iroquois) in fact, the Long House residence belonged to the senior woman among the families living in it, and a man had to ask permission to enter his own home! Any question that affected home life and agriculture had to be decided by both the men’s and women’s councils to be decided.
The game could have a lot of fun with Hierarchy, just as, carefully done, it could play with Religion which is sadly lacking in a game with an otherwise-Medieval vibe to it.

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Human groups form Hierarchies.

This view is not really accepted by the experts. The debate is very much alive so I’m not saying it is universally rejected either, just that it is debatable. To give an example from the other side,

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Should have been more specific: Human Groups above a certain size form Hierarchies. By the author’s own admission, the hunter-gatherer groups he is talking about were composed of much less than 100 people each, including children. And even within those groups, with no formal titles or hierarchial structures, there were people who were listened to because of their perceived and evidentiary expertise in useful skills - informal Hierarchy of Knowledge.

The more widely-varying sizes of hunter-gatherers and agricultural groups in North America (see Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hamalainen and the references he cites) were also, compared to anything seen in Europe at the time of contact and since then, intensely egalitarian and collaborative, and that was also in comparison to the far more overtly hierarchial societies of Meso-America with their aristocracies and priestly classes. Furthermore, some of the cultures in North America had had similar intensely hierarchial societies (most notably, the Cahokia complex) and had abandoned them for a more egalitarian, non-hierarchial cultural norm.

BUT that did not mean they were utterly non-hierarchial, just that they were far less hierarchial than the cultures from which they were being observed. The hierarchy they did observe was that of Talent. A war/raid leader, if required, was recruited from those individuals who were good at it - elected by evidence of Success, not selected or assumed by some arbitrary criteria. Many of the observed much larger Native groups, like those smaller groups cited in the article, were also very critical of self-promotion or ‘individualism’: a tribal member first and last of all worked for the good of the tribe, not him/herself (an observation made decades ago by L. Sprague DeCamp, an anthropologist who had studied tribal cultures up close and personal before he became better known as a science-fiction and fantasy writer).

Point being that by the time our little village societies get over 100 inhabitants, some kind of hierarchy - informal, egalitarian though it might be - will become observable and could be modeled in some form to provide structure to the workforce. We don’t have to (and, IMHO, Shouldn’t) model the Great Man patriarchial and formal hierarchy of Medieval Europe, no matter how ‘familiar’ it seems: there are lots of other structures, as I pointed out already, and I think the game would benefit from allowing the gamer to explore them. If your village is under constant attack, you Might develop into a warrior-based, warrior-led society, but the evidence of the Haudenosenee indicates that that is not the only alternative . . .

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Love your reply. I have a philosophy background so a blanket claim like ‘hierarchy is inevitable’ is going to spark a questionable look. A group of humans less than a hundred in size seems exceptional, but was the situation we existed in for the vast majority of the past hundreds of thousands of years. In mammals hierarchy isn’t uncommon but far from universal, mostly running in parallel with sexual dimorphism, with humans being an interesting mixed case.

I terms of game mechanics I really like the way Frost Punk explored these kinds of questions and possibilities by giving you some options to explore either side of a few axes. I would love to see something like that added to FF eventually.

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My background is in history, specifically a writer of military history, but my sisters have their PhDs in Population Geography and Anthropology, so Where Are People On The Landscape? and What Were They Doing There? are questions I’ve gotten expert answers to over the years. Agree that when it comes to either Humans or probably more generally to Hominids, any blanket statement is questionable, but the organization of human society above the extended family seems to have required some kind of implicit or explicit hierarchial understanding to function for long. Case in point, Catal Huyok, an early city with no sign of hierarchy at all (all residences the same size, no central structures for display, worship, storage or meeting) which was completely (and peaceably) abandoned as soon as things got tough (drought, specifically) - and never re-occupied, which is why it is so well preserved. Other city-sites in the same region, which do show signs of some kind of hierarchial structure, survived. That, of course, is also a much larger group than any single hunter-gatherer group (Catal Huyok about 250 dwellings, estimated at 1200 people minimum) so I freely admit that there may be an Event Horizon below which no hierarchy is necessary or necessarily present, and above which it is increasingly required.
A you say, though, it would be an interesting cultural/political/organizational mechanic to explore in the game, but probably not until a Post-Release DLC at the earliest.

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I like to imagine my village might be something along these lines 5 19th-Century Utopian Communities in the United States - HISTORY

None of them worked out particularly well, but they do set a historical precedent for the attempt. :sweat_smile:

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Have heard of all of them. There were a number of very minority religious groups, many of German origin, which practiced, or tried to practice, a very non-hierarchial approach to community. Pennsylvania, where I grew up, was home to many of them when they emigrated from Europe, some well before the Revolution. The Moravians, Hutterites, and the best-known Amish were all in the spectrum of egalitarian worship and community.

I’m naming the next town I start Catal Huyok just for Grins . . .

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And so coming back round to the OP, or more specifically “specialists” I think we’re all kind of pointing in the same direction: we think they’d be a Good Thing™ in terms of FF… but not necessarily the Lord Mayor/Big Cheese (other than the Master Cheesemaker of course).

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