Hello friends,
Coming up on 160 hours played, and figure it was time I chipped in to the EA discussion. I actually think this is one of the best games out there for this genre, the aesthetic, the economy, the constant balancing act of maintaining enough workers/labourers and choosing to expand on an industry. It’s just solid, and I love it.
Here’s my 2 cents on some areas that I feel need a little love. [I know a lot of these have been discussed, sorry for any double up]
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Immigration: Like a lot of people say, late game, I feel this slows down due to the way the core mechanics manage the chance to trigger a group immigration event. From what I can see, it’s having a good mix of enough housing and ample food supply. Is there a chance that the food lost (to indicate an excess) factors in to the rate of immigration? Naturally, as your city progresses, you have less waste due to preserving and cheese etc. I feel like once you start to perfect this system (lots of food, not much waste) the immigration slows right down. [Could be wrong, just an ape’s observation]
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Storage: Again, I can see people have discussed this many times, but I think having a way to quickly identify a particular item that’s having the biggest impact on storage [think at a glance view] would be very helpful. I’ll note here that I have heard the dev’s are working on improving the storage system, so no doubt something like this is already being thought of.
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Raiders: One QOL upgrade I would love to see is a new system that allows you to quickly identify the direction of incoming raider groups more easily. Currently, when you click the alert about raiders, it appears to simply cycle through/drop the camera to each raider in the sequence that they have spawned. This means a lot of the time, you have to click the alert upwards of 100 times (if the party is over 100) to finally have the camera land on the direction of the second, or 3rd group. This makes preparing your mobile defence difficult.
Saying all of that, I feel like it even devalues the prospect of setting up map-wide outposts as an early warning system. Without a minimap, you will still need to be slowly scrolling around to each area to identify the direction of the raider groups.
My suggestion here would be to replace the current system of tagging individual raiders as the anchor point for the alert with a group trigger that is attached to each individual party. Easier said than done, but if the engine allows for mobile triggers that are not fixed to individual units, this could be a major upgrade.
Very much looking forward to next public test, will be starting a fresh map as soon as it drops.
Cheers!