I’ve been deeply enjoying my time with Farthest Frontier lately. The game’s depth and complexity have provided many hours of challenging and rewarding gameplay already. However, there’s one feature I believe would significantly enhance the experience: a “planning mode” similar to the one found in Prison Architect.
For those who may not be familiar, Prison Architect includes a planning mode that allows players to lay out their prison’s design without committing resources or making permanent changes. This feature has several key benefits that would translate well into Farthest Frontier:
Better Layout Planning: Farthest Frontier requires careful consideration of building placement to ensure efficiency and resource management. A planning mode would allow players to experiment with different layouts and designs without the pressure of immediate construction costs. This way, players can optimize their town’s layout for better productivity and aesthetics.
Resource Management: Planning mode can help in managing resources more effectively. By visualizing the entire town’s development plan, players can prioritize essential buildings and infrastructure, ensuring that resources are allocated wisely and not wasted on unnecessary constructions or poor placements.
Complex Designs Made Easy: As the game progresses, settlements become larger and more complex. Keeping track of where future buildings will go can be daunting. A planning mode would simplify this by allowing players to draft and adjust their plans as they see fit, leading to more intricate and organized town designs.
Enhanced Strategic Depth: Adding a planning mode would introduce a new layer of strategic depth. Players could devise long-term plans for expansion, resource distribution, and defense, adjusting these plans as the game evolves. This adds a satisfying layer of foresight and strategy, making the gameplay even more engaging.
Reduced Frustration: Nothing is more frustrating than realizing you’ve built an essential structure in a suboptimal location and have to relocate it, wasting time and resources. Planning mode can prevent this by allowing players to test out placements and ensure they are satisfied before committing.
Educational Tool for New Players: For new players, a planning mode can serve as a great educational tool. It allows them to understand the mechanics and best practices for town layout without the immediate consequences of poor decisions, thus providing a smoother learning curve.
As someone who personally enjoys spending lots of time with city layout and expansion, I feel like this feature could significantly improve this aspect of Farthest Frontier. I hope the developers consider adding this feature in future updates, as it would make an already fantastic game even better.
What do you all think? Would you find a planning mode beneficial in Farthest Frontier? Let’s discuss!
Oh my gosh, yes. Those are well articulated points and I couldn’t agree more!
As someone who knows nothing of just how complicated coding this game must be, I feel as though a basic grid overlay allowing one to visualize their city planning - with color coded footprints for types of buildings, say, or semi-transparent mock-ups of the structures, disregarding topographic constraints given that the player would terraform as needed - toggled by a hotkey and toggled off, like the fertility overlay for example, would be pretty simple to add to the game. It doesn’t seem like asking for the moon (or water gameplay for that matter…)
It would make the strategic forward-thinking of city expansion and layout a more tangible, engaging aspect of the gameplay, instead of a blundering hatchet job as you go along - speaking from my own experience!
All that being said, I believe one of my very favorite features of FF is the simple utilitarian elegance of the “Relocate Structure” button; it’s pure gold. It doesn’t even disrupt the immersion for me. Watching villagers dismantle and rebuild elsewhere feels genuine to the life of the town. I would be in despair without that feature…
I can only agree with you. The relocate structure feature is amazing!
Regarding the whole planning mode feature, I also believe it would be fairly easy to implement depending on the code architecture, but let’s have the developer deal with that.
All we can do is show our interest for this feature and hope they pickup the challenge to implement it
I truly believe this feature could be an amazing addition to the game. At least for players like us!
Don’t… we already have that? Press pause, place buildings down, then disable construction on each and then enable construction when it’s time to build?
While it’s true that we can pause the game, place buildings, and then disable construction until ready, this method is more of a workaround than a proper solution.
Manually pausing and toggling construction for each building is cumbersome and time-consuming. A dedicated planning mode would streamline this process, making it more user-friendly and efficient.
This tedious process is one of the main reasons I wanted to voice this suggestion on the forum.
However, your reply made me realize that adding the ability to “disable construction” directly in the building menu would be a nice touch and a step closer to an ideal solution, with minimal effort from the developers. This would mean that construction is disabled by default on all placed buildings until it’s enabled in the menu again.
What the planning mode would offer (which a hotkey disabling construction wont fix) is that your building plans could be laid without having to go and level all terrain first. If it’s a lumpy map, surely there’s going to be lots of places where your (construction disabled) building placements cannot be put until ground is leveled, which interrupts your urban planning “flow”. Best if there’s as little encumbrance as possible in planning mode so that the player can experiment freely.
I do like the hotkey idea though. That would be an easy way to bring “Planning Mode Lite” to the game.
I like the idea, though I wonder if it runs counter to the reality of how medieval towns developed, which was generally organic and haphazardly. It would add a layer of depth and satisfaction to the gameplay aspect of building our towns, though.
Until we get such a mode, my tip for planning towns is this: use cemeteries (construction disabled) to plot the locations of buildings you anticipate you will need in later tiers. Let’s say you want to plan out where your Guild Hall will go once you reach Tier 4. First, look up the size of the building you want on the Farthest Frontier wiki buildings list. In this case, it’s 4x5. Select to build a cemetery and lay out a 4x5 size plot in the place where you want your Guild Hall to be. Immediately disable its construction. Voila: you have now reserved the place for your future building and can plan and build around it. When you’re ready to build your Guild Hall, you simply scrap the cemetery and place down the real building.
When I start a new town, I plan out my entire citadel and central district this way immediately after I finish building the Town Hall. It’s imperfect, because trees/stone/terrain can get in the way of visualising the layout, but it’s the best we have right now. Here’s what it looked like after I plotted the Storehouse, Vault, Trading Post and Guild Hall around the Town Hall at start of game:
It’s the same principle with decorations and smaller buildings that you have access to early in the game. In the screenshot above, I have placed garden walkways in front of and behind my Town Hall in anticipation for how I want to landscape it once I have the resources.
You make a good point about medieval towns often developed organically and haphazardly, the current grid-based system in Farthest Frontier already introduces a level of structure that doesn’t fully capture that historical reality. Given this, a planning mode wouldn’t detract from authenticity any more than the grid system already does.
Thanks for sharing your tip as well. This is also how I mostly approach my planning, but it would be really nice if instead of the big “construction halted” hand icon, we had a building identifier icon. This way, I could have an overview without having to click each building and try to remember what I placed where. I actually plan most of my cities in Excel sheets since it’s grid-based…
That is how I lost a city. I had pre-relocated the temple to a new location (with construction disabled). The next day I loaded the last savegame, without knowing that all constructions resume when we load a savegame. The villagers relocated the temple while I was busy on another part of the city (It was a huge city), and before winter, all the houses around the old temple site got abandoned.
The villagers did not manage to relocate the temple to its old place in time, because apparently relocating temple requires resources, resources that I did not have.
