Hello to the team at Crate Entertainment, and thank you for a truly wonderful game. I’ve really been enjoying Farthest Frontier and am impressed by how far all these Banished-style city builders have come.
As the game stands, however, I believe the current trading system has a few points of friction that hurt the player experience, both in terms of micro-management and long-term strategic depth.
1. Quality of Life & Workflow Issues
The current process for handling traders is clunky and punishes the player for trying to make quick, necessary trades. These issues mainly stem from the manual transfer process:
- Trader Departure Risk: When a merchant arrives with a great deal, we must manually click to initiate the transfer and then wait for the trade post staff to stock the items. During this indeterminate window, the trader can simply decide to leave, resulting in a lost trade and wasted effort. Transfering items is not a fun part of the game, and doing it in vain is even less fun.
- Slider Precision Problem: The transfer amount sliders are often unmanageable. Due to the high min/max values possible, particularly with bulk goods, there is often a huge discrepancy between the merchant’s inventory and our own. This results in the target adjustment area being condensed to just a few pixels, making it extremely difficult to set a precise selling or buying amount.
- Backward Stock Management: The “Keep in Stock” feature is implemented in reverse of typical strategy game logic. What most players need is “Overflow to Trade Post.” This would allow us to set a minimum stock threshold for the village (e.g., “Always keep 20 tools in town”) and automatically send all excess (the overflow) to the Trade Post inventory, minimizing repetitive clicking and dragging before a trader arrives.
2. The Bigger Picture: Dynamic Trade Potential
This leads to a more philosophical critique. It’s fascinating to see which features from banished carry over into new titles, but it’s saddening that the weakest and most static element of Banished—the outside map trading—is often carbon copied. (This is true for Ostriv, Foundation , Manor Lords and all of them really) Right now, trade is reduced to static, micro-managed interactions with a couple of ever repeating vendors. I believe the trade system has the potential to become one of the most compelling and strategically deep elements of this type of game.
A well-thought-out trading system could introduce truly interesting and intricate complexities, moving beyond the current static one-time bulk exchanges. A dynamic market that followed the logic of supply and demand could see the price of goods fluctuate depending on how you interact with it. This system could also open up the game for “Soft Multiplayer” features, similar to the auction house in World of Warcraft. You could set up yearly trade quotas with other villages (or players); failing to fulfill these contracts could lead to getting attacked, while making another village dependent on you could lead to them coming to your defense. For instance, younger villages could specialize in cheap raw resources, selling them to more advanced towns that use those materials to refine and sell high-tier goods, offering a genuinely distinct and rewarding play path for every settlement size. You could strive for a monopoly on some good or try to corner the market in different ways. And in failing this you always have the warfare option. Possibilities are endless!
Thank you again for the hard work on Farthest Frontier. I hope this feedback was valuable!