While the idea of building upkeep is a good one, the execution in the game is poor. (Was it beta-tested at all before adding it to the new update?) First, if barns and trading posts are going to require upkeep, the town needs an engineering office. There should be a town employee(s) whose responsibility it is to ensure that shared structures do not fail. Second, this is a frontier town. The residents of a home in a frontier town know to upkeep their own structures. I shouldn’t have 1/4 of all my residences become uninhabitable in the blink of an eye. This part of the upkeep idea is VERY bad. Hunters, residents, fisherman, etc. would all know how to upkeep the facility in which they live and live/work.
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I agree completely.
I will continue to play but upkeep is a game breaker for many people. I’m sincerely hoping it gets looked into and fixed soon.
I concur. I can have 20 builders with not so much activity, and a failing structure will still not be repaired. I have suggested before that villagers in a medieval society would know how to maintain their homes and would get about repairing them. Alternatively, the icon indicating the need for repair could be made hot and programmed to summon a builder or two from what they’re doing to come repair the structure. Structure upkeep would not take that much time away from whatever tasks builders would be called away from and seems to me to be more important because of the “domino effect” a failed structure can cause.
I have been struggling a lot with repair and upkeep, but today I think I might have figured it out. It seems to be tied to the underlying desirability of the area.
I was fixing some abandoned house by raising desirability and with in just a few months ALL of my repair and condemned issue were fixed. Including barns/theaters/markets.
That option is not always available, if you have other troubles or crises to take care of, too, or early on when you don’t have a lot of builders or resources. It would certainly be valuable to improve desirability when you can, but for immediate deterioration of a building, you need repairs quickly. There’s no time to get about improving desirability, and if you don’t have the resources to do so, there goes your building. I’ve suggested in another post that the icon above a structure indicating it needs repairs should be made hot, and should summon a builder or two to come and repair the structure now.
Im not sure you have to “improve” desirability to get it fixed, as much as get it back to where it was before things were going abandoned.
But if it is like you say, then it is for sure a bug/issue
When buildings start deteriorating before one has made “improvements” to desirability, then one is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. There’s no option to improve anything that ain’t there; that tends to be my problem. I don’t have time, gold, or resources to up the desirability of all my homes; just enough to get the Town Center raised to Tier 3. That takes long enough. And it’s even more difficult to get the Town Center raised to T4 because you have to improve the homes even more. All those desirability improvements take space! I don’t think it’s a bug, it’s just the way it is when you have to get the first essential buildings built or you have no food, no firewood, no resources. Improving desirability is not an immediate issue at that stage of the game – it’s enough to get the villagers you do have fed, clothed, and housed. In fact, I’d much rather have the homes leveled up by accumulating the resources and labor to build the upgraded structure. Have home upgrades you can build with increasing levels of resources required. Then all this desirability business would not be necessary. Or maybe all this deterioration stuff could be delayed until there are more resources to handle it? Right now, it’s just a mess.
And I still think making the “needs repair” tooltip hot, which would summon builders to do the repairs, is the best solution.
Hey, Nater. I tried improving the surroundings for a couple of civic buildings (barn and a smokehouse), and it worked. By upgrading the roads and planting trees, both structures became viable. (Which is dumb. Something tells me that if I were a slumlord and owned a building in disrepair, I wouldn’t be able to bring it up to code by placing a few planters in front of the building.)
But, that idea failed miserably on a residence. I had one home in a neighborhood that suddenly was in disrepair as in the building was suddenly only 54 percent viable. I planted a bunch of trees behind the home. (It already had a planted boulevard in front.) When that failed, I added a park. Nothing worked, and the building was condemned.
To add insult to injury, you can neither destroy the condemned residence (as would happen in real life) nor repair it. What a joke, albeit a very unfunny one.
What is especially irritating is that a building that catches fire repairs itself once the fire is out. If the building is destroyed, which happened to me once when, apparently, the villagers were liquored up and uninterested in fighting a fire, you can rebuild afterward. Why does a semi-burned building magically repair itself but an aging building in need of repair just slides into ruin?
Something is broke. Which is too bad because I enjoy this game, and the graphics are spectacular. But, I will be taking a break, perhaps with an adult beverage in hand, until this problem is remedied.
OP, I don’t really have a problem with the desirability buildings, I just plan them in as I am going, or move houses to fit them in if needed. I didn’t need to raise desirablity above the previously levels, just get it up to the level needed for those houses. like if you had needed 35% to get to homestead, then that was the level it needed to be at to be fixed, which half makes sense. You’re not going to fix up a home if no one wants to live in it.
A “Repair” button would be nice.
Wink,
hhmm… It did work for me, even restoring the condemned ones. Did you raise the desirability high enough for the lvl the house was at? if it fell to 54% then it was probably built to the level of 65% (Large house I think). I had to get mine back up to the level they needed for the bracket, like getting it back up to 65%. You can remove a condemned house by selecting Clear (or using hotkey C) and dragging the box around it, then clear it. That is what I did to my pubs and one healer that were condemned. That defiantly needs to be addressed to make it simpler, but it is possible.
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