punishment for upgrading the production (ideas and suggestions)
Hello everyone. I just got to lvl41 and considering to stop playing the game. I played it instantly almost a year so I would like to write down my thoughts about the game to help developers and maybe other players with some ideas. I have to say that at the beginning it was really fun to play and when I started to trade I was so excited about it, that I made my own statistics about the trades. But it was worse and worse with higher and higher level. I mean that the village becomes more and more independent and needs so huge care about the production that it was more and more annoying. I read a lot of complains in other posts with rebuilding the wheat fields, water wells and mines. At the beginning I didn't believe it but it's true. I was very lucky that I managed to buy 4 water mills on Easter event and now in recent Halloween event 8 silos, but it's not enough. Feeding the 5 bakeries on lvl5 is too annoying. Another thing is with the swords and gold production - I got 2 gold smelter on lvl3, 1 iron sword weaponary on lvl5 and 2 steel sword weaponaries on lvl4. It consumes so huge amount of coal, that even 8 coal plants on lvl5 are not able to cover it (even buffed). And that was whole problem - with my friend we managed to cover the process running, but it was instant buffing each other buildings and huge rebuilding all mines, fields and wells to feed the production process. I think it was not a lot - those 5 bakeries are just the minimum to be able to make whole buffing available and also to make some adventures which consumes together over 3K recruits. And there was not point to do this at all - for making adventures you get some resources (from which only granite was needed) - but for what? more upgrades? this will lead to even higher productivity care. Experience themselves are also useless, because building those experienced building has no point. I built only exotic wood saw to make planks which are not possible to obtain in other way (of course trading - but they are too expensive).
So to get to some reasonable conclusion - the game play should be somehow adjusted. Rebuilding the fields and mines should be better to somehow automate to not care about it and focus the gameplay to something else. For me it would be more fun to have more daily quests based on some mini-adventures. But not just simply killing enemy camps - with current implementation it is not sufficient fun. Or maybe I just made it boring - the adventures are repeating very often so I wrote the amount of armies for all camps and then just automatically attacking them in specific order (the looses are so high, that there is no way to experiment about it). So for me it would be better to have some more tactical fights with some random points - for example making some relations between camps in the way, that if you attack one, another will be activate and they will attack you or join the armies, etc. So it will be important to think about the attacks, find proper pattern there etc. For example if it would be possible to set the general way to the camps and the map would be generated randomly with some built-in rules it would be up to the player to always find proper order of killing the camps with setting the paths of the generals to the specific camps. If there will be good base for the fighting system, it will be possible to generate the camps randomly and the fight will get some 'thinking' points there. I would like also some 'attacking and building' adventures. That you will help to clean some island and then also help to rebuild the economy there and the player could be rewarded instantly for such help some restricted amount of time (like 1 week). And more quests could be in such way just helping rebuilding the islands - I mean it would be just building there some buildings, but after building them, it won't be owned by the player - it will be just some miniquests on that island and according where the player will get in some limited time, the size of reward will be generated - but it must be also random, otherwise the player will collect sufficient amount of resources before the adventure. It could be even generated randomly according to the current player supply to make it always more challenging and forcing the players to trade for some specific resources. Like for example the player will have just 1000 tools and a lot of other building resources - then generate miniquests which consumes a lot of tools (but the reward must be equivalent - like for the adventure the player will use 20K tools and get special reward for it (I don't know what it should be - just writing all ideas :-)) But with such approach the trading system can be increased (more demands from all players playing the adventures will decrease the prizes and increase the amount of trades .. but rewards must be really motivating to buy such amount of resources for 'any' prize).
Now with the current state, the player are just punished for further progress: more upgrades => more time to handle the production due to instant rebuilding of some building => needs more resources from the mines => needs more tools for the upgrades => etc. Even if someone manage to balance the production perfectly, just one upgrade on one building will ruin it and then it is very hard to re-balance it again.
Anyway I really enjoyed the game, the graphics are so cute, that it was not possible to resist ;-) Keep doing great job.
Good luck to all settlers and big thanks to whole team making this game available.
