Very detailed ideas for late game, how to really double game longevity

Farthest Frontier Ideas and Feedback
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Hi, I’m opening a new thread to explain better my complex ideas for a solid and enduring late game experience.

So far, most of us agree there is a problem with game longevity after you reach tier 4. To be really honest, this is not a bias on FF’s developers, but it’s a sort of “hardcoded” bias of this specific type of games: I play city-builder games since Caesar III and I know how hard could be keeping players engaged once your city reaches a certain level. So here are my ideas which could double (and perhaps triple) the game’s longevity, giving also very challenging experiences. Some ideas have been already explained, by me and also by others.

Sorry for the length.

EARLY-MID GAME

Involving more resources and objects can help adding depth starting from mid game, and some of them will become progressively more important in late game, as explained later in this post. Here is my list.

Raw resources
Gemstones (extracted from rare gemstone deposits and/or imported); grapes (useful to make wine - can be possibly also included in the Food group, but in its own category).

Food
Onion (root vegetables); plum, cherry (fruit); walnut, chestnut (nuts); confectionery (made from flour and honey - and possibly milk or eggs - can be made in bakery; advantage is that confectionery is a very long lasting food).

Produced materials
Wool (from sheeps); marble (imported, useful to build marble statues and/or other decorative items/buildings).

Usable materials
Wine (produced in a new building - same usage of beer, pub can serve both); jewelry (made from gold ores and gold+gemstone, luxury item); wool coats (produced in tannery or in a new building - same usage of pelt coats, villagers can have one or another); silk robes (imported, luxury item); ivory wares (imported, luxury item); incense (imported, luxury item).

Crop field
Onion

Orchard
Plum tree; cherry tree; walnut tree; chestnut tree.

Livestock
Chicken (small amount of meat, eggs); sheep (medium amount of meat, wool, milk); pig (high amount of meat, possibly small amount of pelt).

New building
Wineyard; winemaker; jewelry factory; marble decorative buildings.

MID-LATE GAME

Mid-late game could include more upgrades for some buildings, like the rat-catcher (and, please, make it nice so you can mix well with houses and other brick-made buildings), the basket shop (same as the pervious one, let’s have a brick-made shop), the market (you can turn it into a grand building for tier 5 cities), and the storage buildings.

Tier 5 houses will need at least 3 luxury items.

LATE GAME

Late game could become the most interesting aspect of the game (instead of the typical deadline of city-builder games) by adding some intriguing features.

At first, when you turn your town center to tier 5 (maybe at 800 population), it could be renamed into Government Palace, giving it a grand-design and making it really feeling like a large residence for government, with a dome, green areas, etc. (there’s plenty of space for this in the current “town center” building area). This palace can unlock several high-level services, which are needed to transform your city into a true capital.

These new buildings are high schools (or universities), which give a boost in efficiency especially for high-level workers like medicians (citizens attending them are required to spend 3 more years at education - you can manage how many citizens can be educated at high level by managing the number of schools as usual); court houses, where justice is run and which requires someone who is educated only at high school/university, and which helps a lot in reducing criminality; bath houses, which use wood to heat the water and keep higher the health and especially the happiness.

Another important thing is public street lighting. Buildable candle lantern poles can be placed at roadside (and plaza-side, if technically possible), which won’t require a free cell available (collision-less). They provide light so they could give a +1 desiderability on a very small radius. You should be able to rotate the lantern pole so it will always be placed at the edge of the cell: this can be done by placing the mesh pivot at the center of the cell and the object itself at the edge (or at the corner). They might require 1 wood plank + 1 candle to be built, and (auto)maintenance could be consuming 1 candle once per year, when durability falls under 50% or so. This helps also to prevent abuse of lighting poles, because you have to keep materials available to maintain them (at 0% their light puts off and desiderability bonus vanishes, and you need to replenish them to make them lighting).

Once you have all of the above set up, your city is enough powerful to start exploring nearby regions to make colonies. An option to explore another map should be eventually given, which is “connected” to the city as “child map”, with which you can exchange resources and citizens, and which is randomly generated in a way to include some special resources not available - or which were available in low quantity - in the main map (for example, child maps could be richer in gemstones, making things easier to maintain a wealth and rich capital and grant a good colony development). Also map wildlife/raiders can be set differently (one could be a “pacifist-like” map, so with no predators and raiders, another could be a “vanquisher-like” map, and so on).

Depending on game development and the engine limit, developers could set the max number of available child maps to 2: in fact, maintaining 3 living cities (1 capital and 2 colonies) could be challenging enough for players, considering that you have to take care of all of them in the same way and at the same time, so you have to switch constantly between maps. Stats for maps (population, gathered resources) should be obviously shown independently for each map, but you can set resources to be exported (actually exchanged, for free) between maps using carts (see below).

To start new child maps (command available in the Government Palace), you need at least 1 high school/university, 1 court house (with a magistrate, meaning with work slot filled), 1 bath house and 10 lighting poles built.

To reach new maps, you can select a number of citizens (maybe from min 10 to max 30), resources (preserves and confectionery are particularly helpful here), and materials like stone, wood, planks, etc. To send them, you need to build storage carts (you could send the cart available since the beginning, if you still have it, or build new ones - we need storage carts to be buildable, maybe in a max number of 2 or 3, in the wagon shop or in a new custom building). Then, fill the storage carts with everything needed, and go start the new colony. Storage carts can be used also to exchange resources between the capital and the colonies. A cart could take maybe half month to reach the other map, and up to 1 month if you send it during winter.

I don’t know how much if this can be implemented, but I think if this is really possible, Farthest Frontier could become close to something which would look like the ultimate city builder game.

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Really wonderful ideas. Its obvious that you are an experienced city builder. I wonder if FF react to this topic

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Some very nice ideas, some of which dovetail with some things I’ve been thinking about - glad someone wrote them down!

Some comments:

The game can make use of a ‘medieval’ bit of nomenclature. At that time, a ‘goldsmith’ was someone who worked in any precious metal, including gemstones. So, an added Profession of Goldsmith with his shop could work Gemstones, semi-precious stones (they didn’t make the same distinctions we do now) and Gold into Jewelry, or Decorated Objects (bejeweled Swords, engraved/inlaid Hauberks or Plate armor, etc), all of which could provide new Luxury Goods for High Tier housing.

High Schools or Technical Schools come quite a bit later than the ‘medieval-ish’ period the game is set in. BUT Guilds started up in the 11th century, and they regulated apprentice training and grading of artisans and workers in their various trades. We could divide up the current Professions and Trades in the game into several Guilds:
Leather Guild: Cobblers, Tanneries
Chandlers: Candlemakers, Soap Makers
Ironmongers: Armories, Blacksmiths, Foundries
Miners: All Mines and Quarries, Sand Pits, Clay Pits
Mercers: Clothing of any kind of cloth: linen, wool, cotton (imported)

Then, at a High Tier (4 or 5) you could build a Guild Hall for the appropriate Guild(s) if you have reached a ‘trigger’ for it - a certain number of people in the relevant professions or a certain number of Buildings serving the appropriate Production. The Guild Hall would provide guidance and extra ‘expertise’ for those professions, allowing production of Luxury metalwork, clothing, leather goods, etc.
The apropriate High Tier Town Center, I suspect, would be a Town Hall instead of a Residence requiring a Heirarchial aristocratic population - they seem to be trying to avoid anything like that, but it can be ‘worked around’: a Town Hall could be required to provide licenses to establish the Guilds and all that goes with them, or to organize ‘Colonial Expeditons’ to new Maps.

I like the new maps/colonies idea - reminds me very much of Anno 1800 with its ‘regions’ with new and different Biomes. I suggest that could be one of the features of such a system: if your original map is, say, Idyllic Valley, the ‘colonial maps’ could be any of the other types: Alpine, Lakes, Highlands, etc. - and each map could have 1 (or more) Unique Resource(s) on it not available on the other maps, which could be one rally good reason to colonize in the first place, and also implement inter-map Trade of your own in addition to the ‘external’ Traders.

My only concern, because it is a real problem with Anno, is how much pressure the extra maps will put on the systems trying to play the game: I understand they are already worried about the extent that the ‘finished’ game will max out many typical gaming computers, and doubling or tripling the extent of the maps/areas the systems have to render is a serious potential problem - I remember well my old system dropping to single-digit Frame Rates whenever I tried to go from region to region in Anno 1800 last year!

Just a note: confectionary, or any food including egg and milk products, is very perishable, not less. That’s why modern mass-production sweets use artificial chemical products to mimic the effects of eggs and milk in their products: it extends the shelf life beyond the week or so they would have with natural dairy or egg products in them.

On the other hand, at High Tier a new preservation capability could be added of Sealed Barrels - barrels specially treated with caulking and sealed with Wax in which all kinds of perishables: fruit, vegetables, meats, baked goods - could be kept for a loooong time. These might even be required to haul foodstuffs from one map to the other without massive spoilage.

The Wine Grape is pretty particular about the terrain: right slopes, rainfall, sunshine, etc. so this could be a High Tier product requiring both a lot of manpower to care for the vines and Just Right conditions to produce drinkable Wine - a very High Tier luxury product. For the ‘lower tier’, though, the Apples already in the game could be processed with an Apple Press into Cider, which is both a popular drink (hard or soft, was served in Pubs) and it helps prevent Scurvy (and was used for that by the French Navy before the Napoleonic Wars - much easier to come by and store than the British Royal Navy’s ‘limes’ used for the same purpose)

Adding 4-wheeled Wagons like the original Town Center Cart into the game as buildables for Colonization (or Trade between maps) might also be the way to ‘sneak’ Horses into the game as draft animals for the new vehicles. Just a thought.

Street Lighting is pretty ‘High Tier’ for a Medieval population. As far back as 400 BCE oil lamps were placed outside urban villas in Greece and the Middle East, but they were private, belonging to the families that owned the villas. The first Public Lighting post-Roman in Europe was in London in the 15th century - right at the end of the Middle Ages, and in one of the largest cities in Europe at the time (and a Capital at that).
More appropriate to the period might be Fairs with jugglers, dancing, street theatre, etc, held periodically so the population could ‘blow off steam’, or a Bath House, which were common from the 12th century on even in western Europe and from the 8th century in eastern Europe, Byzantium, Russia, and Scandinavia: a Public Thermae (hot bath) would contribute to Health and ‘Luxury Living’ but require brick or stone construction and constant supplies of water, firewood, herbs and soap.

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Thanks a lot for the reply.

At first, I agree naming is important. I just threw out my ideas, but of course treir names matter. I like particularly your idea of Guilds, which would sound much more like Middle Age than schools/university (first university was in the Reinassance). A proper Guild system could be implemented to grant high-level of education needed for special professions which is that of a magistrate (or a judge, let’s call it like this for now, but we could find a proper name for it).

The concern about performances when having to do with colonies is… well… concerning. But I heard (after specific question times ago) that the game’s engine has room for a massive optimization; no idea what the threshold is, but if this could be doable, would be amazing.

The only point where I disagree is about confectionery. Here where I live (an island in the Mediterranean Sea, where heat - and insects - is more a problem than frost) traditional food includes tasty sweets made by flour, honey, egg, and milk (among other natural things, like almonds). They’re dried up in ovens and I can assure you they last veeery long, up to one year and more. Our grand-grandparents (before the Chemical Era) were used to store them in wooden chests with a proper “lock” which prevented insects to infest them. Confectionery made in late summer were able to last to the next summer without any problem. Recipes for these sweets come probably from the Arabic invasions of the Mediterranean, so back to the 9th century.

I agree wine will be both expensive in terms of manpower and a sort of “luxury” product. Again, here wineyards are common and my family had run wineyards for generations. You can make it up but you need strong knowledge of what you’re doing. Making wineyards available since tier 4 would address this.

Using apples for cider is also a good idea.

Both street lighting and Fairs are good to this game in my opinion. Fairs have also the value to make the city feel even more “alive”. Also, my idea beyond public bath houses is exactly what you mean: it’s an expensive building to make it run properly. So, a high-end thing, the “ultimate building” I’d call, for a new capital, and requires a strong supply chain to be set up… exactly what a capital city is expected to have.

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I suspect the difference between my experience with milk/egg confections and yours is the Honey. Honey is a natural antiseptic and preservative - a late Medieval French physician discovered its antiseptic properties by accident when he poured it over a wound and the victim recovered, the Honey having acted similar to a modern antiseptic bandage!

This is actually even better: having to combine Milk and Eggs with Honey - all already in the game/on the map - is much better than using Sugar, a sweetener that would have to be imported to from another Biome to manufacture ‘sweets’.

  • And just a note: Universities date back to the 10th and 11th centuries - Oxford in England was founded in 1096 and the University of Paris started in 1150 - 1180 CE, BUT the early European universities mostly taught religion and the classical ‘liberal arts’ - nothing really Practical except Law and medicine (like the medical school and library at Cordoba in 950 CE) - which makes the practical education, training and licensing/examinations by the Guilds more useful to us as a game mechanism.
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And Guild Halls should provide points to desirability and happiness.

I would hope the colonies and “child maps” would be optional rather than compulsory. I’m slowing down in my old age. :grimacing:

Excellent idea!

As regards confections, whether long-term or short-term, they could also be a happiness item.

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Aside from each Guild Hall acting as a sort of ‘prestige’ desirability bonus to nearby housing, I was thinking the appropriate Guild Hall would also provide a City-wide bonus to the productivity of the appropriate Production Chains/Buildings. For instance, the Leatherworker’s Guild would boost production of Tanneries and Cobblers and possibly be required for a Tannery to produce a special Luxury good: Tooled Leatherwork, for High Tier housing.

Confectioner was an actual Medieval title, and the Miller’s Guild (Bakeries, Mills) when its Guild Hall is built, could allow you to build a Confectioner’s Shop and produce pastries and confections from Flour, Honey, Milk and Spices - a very High Tier Luxury good.

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I would hope the colonies and “child maps” would be optional rather than compulsory. I’m slowing down in my old age.

Yes, up to you if start it or not.

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I really love the idea of ending the game by founding colonies and setting up a trading empire with different regions.
It feels like a very fitting end for this game, because that’s more or less what ended the power of the nobility and the clergy in the middle ages: the rise of important trading cities and rich merchant houses, like the Hanseatic League in Northern Europe and cities like Genoa and Venice in Southern Europe. The dream of every medieval settlement would be to become a rich, prosperous city like those, to have a merchant fleet (or merchant caravans for land-based cities) and control trade routes throughout the world.
The game would start with the player escaping from a hopeless, stagnant feudal society and it would end with the player entering the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. I love it.

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