Just returned to playing this game after a few months of absence, and I really like how it has improved at several aspects, particularly villager efficiency and balancing of things like woodcutting.
However, one thing that seems to have gotten worse is how absolutely terrible pubs are. Villagers working in the same building now seem to have been placed in the same houses, which is good, but they also tend to get drunk together now, which is disastrous.
And because it takes villagers literally months to get sober again (which is WAY too long obviously), this means an entire production facility can be effectively dead for a good part of the year.
I noticed an entire bakery being drunk in early January (screenshot 1) and I decided to just find out how long it would last, and it took them over six months to get sober again, and not a single bread was produced for half a year until early July (screenshot 2). Might have been longer because I only noticed them in January.
The bakers were not unhappy or anything and they had no reason to be idle at any moment, my stores were full of flour.
So I think some major rebalancing of the feature of drunkenness is necessary, right now itâs almost cartoonish how bad pubs are, itâs as if Iâm watching some advert paid for by the prohibition movement. Of course, it was funny to watch them stumble around and pass out while dropping bags of flour everywhere, but as a game feature it just doesnât make sense.
I want to expand on this, because it is just one of several Game Design features that seem to have as their only purpose to royally screw over the inexperienced Gamer.
Pubs - completely worthless. Their only purpose seems to be to remove workforce through drunkenness or having a Guard or Soldier get drunk and run amok with the Medieval equivalent of an assault rifle. Also, since 8.3 a single Pub seems to be able to suck up all the output of a fully-staffed Brewery and then some. The one time I actually built a Pub I had to shut it down every 3 years to allow the Brewers to catch up.
Deep Gold Mines. Produce a tiny fraction of the Gold/worker that regular Gold Mines do. In fact, as many have pointed out, youâd make more Gold using the workforce to produce Candles, Furniture, Clothing or Tools and trading them in the Trading Post than you would having them piled into a Deep Gold Mine digging out half a nugget each per year.
Transportation. Any Resource, Storage or Production facility that is more than 20 - 30 tiles from where the material is supposed to be used is either going to suck up more and more of the workersâ time running the stuff back and forth, or will require Carts. But Carts only work for certain facilities, so you are stuck with workers that spend all their time running back and forth with a basket-load of Whatever. The entire transportation/logistics âmini-gameâ is a nightmare that only gradually becomes apparent after you start playing.
Raid Response. No amount of Alarms from the Town Center make the slightest difference to your suicidal townsfolk. I just had a pitiful little âraidâ by 30 Raiders. Killed 26 of them, but before they all charged into the arcs of fire of interlocking Towers, they managed to kill 4 Wainwrights, because, of course, every single wagon ambled right out the gates and into the raiders, ignoring common sense, the town alarm, and the bunch of people waving weapons and shooting at them. Short of micromanaging - picking out every villager heading out the gates and manually turning them around into the walled town - there is no way to stop them from throwing themselves into the nearest group of raiders.
It appears the devs want to balance the pubâs double bonus uniqueness, gold + entertainment, with some type of âpenaltyâ. The current occasional loss of productivity is a far better trade off than the prior solution of mass slaughter.
You can recover from a few months of lost productivity quicker than losing 10-20 villagers.
This soldier, appropriately named, passed out in the road during a raid, never delivered any damage and ended up in the cemetery. Had to laugh.
Situational comedy is fine, but I agree with OP: pubs are so bad, I simply donât build them. Itâs just not worth it to deal with the negative effects.
While it might be realistic that alcohol was a problem in medieval cities, in a game like FF it just doesnât feel good to build something and then be punished with negative effects like dead villagers or several months of productivity loss.
This âalcohol equals coma-drinkingâ-mechanic just doesnât work for me.
I think they could probably work a lot better if the âbar fightsâ mechanic was dialed back a bit. Or if there was a more reliable way to break them up, like an ability to set soldiers to âpatrolâ and police the neighborhoods.
One thing I thought of while playing that would make them a lot more interesting and worthwhile is if they could upgrade - ie. to a tavern and serve food, increasing their income, adding desirability like the bakery, and reduce violence as well as the time villagers are âintoxicatedâ and unable to work.
I thought maybe they could upgrade again beyond that to an inn to further reduce violence and increase income, this could also do something like passively increase the number of merchants you get in a year, and maybe improve their prices or extend the length of their stays.
In either case something should be done to make the pubs a little more worth building, or to make the violence something you can actually manage if you want to. Or at least, if they downsides persist, that something is added to more economically offset the productivity losses from violence and intoxication.
