Should I unlock factions?

[camelotcrusade]

I'm enjoying the game on Pioneer and pretty happy with the level of "pressure" so far. I see there's an option to unlock factions and I can afford it.

It kinda seems like more pressure but not much more benefit. Did you unlock factions and love it, or did you unlock it and regret it?

Would you recommend it for relaxed play or does it impact it too much? And can you turn it off?

[Garney]

Playing lazily and primarily on pioneer, I find factions to be an annoyance more than anything. Sometimes they're a distraction as I try to outbuild them and get frustrated that I can't beat them no matter what I try, or they've unlocked areas I need for achievements but which I can't reach.

So yeh, not a fan of factions here.

[Olleus]

They are, at worse, mostly pointless. At best, they're also mostly pointless.

Slight effects are: giving you more choices of trade routes, adding a modicum of extra strategy in choosing where to found settlements, and the possibility of a chunk of citadel resources at the end of a storm cycle. Think of it more as a high score board you can compete on than anything that actually effects any settlements.

Nothing to write home about, but nothing to bother avoiding either.

[Aestrea]

Why not? With no factions, your world resets, you get nothing. WIth Factions, if you are 4/4 dead last place, you get something when the world resets.

[Kyresti]

My experience so far is that unless you've obsessed with 'winning', they mostly exist to give a bit of lore and easy trade routes early to mid-cycle.

They're a little unpopular like timed orders, but IMO a lot more benign (and even helpful if your playstyle is commerce-heavy)

[Lorska]

A little trick:
If you get the faction upgrade right before starting the blight storm you get first place with 0 points, so the upgrade pays for itself immediately and you get some artifacts which are usually a bottleneck early on.

The one thing I don't know (cause I just unlocked them) is if you get vision from their cities too (I would think so) in which case there is no downside to them as you'll uncover the map faster, removing any relevance of potentially blocked tiles.

[Sultschiem]

Don't factions also help reveal more of the map?

[Garney]

Yes, they reveal the map, and sure you can see it, but you usually can't do anything about it.

[Eizo]

Unlock the factions, it makes the game more interesting (IMHO). You can still play the game in your own lazy non-pressure way, but you can also choose to trade with or compete for land with the other factions (the game tells you where and when they will establish a settlement somewhere, and you can block them by putting your settlement there first).

[Narandia]

Originally posted by Garney:

Yes, they reveal the map, and sure you can see it, but you usually can't do anything about it.

Except for treasure chests here and there. They also provide more trade partners and you still get a bit of a bonus at the end of a cycle even if you place last in the ranking so there's really not much of a downside to unlocking them.

[CyberDown]

Its more annoying than fun, but doesnt really impact how I play. I guess it just adds an extra NPC scoreboard you can try at by going out far in a straight line into much harder areas.

Other than that its never really mattered to me where I go, they dont seem to be greedy with resource nodes ect.

[itsthemarcel]

The factions annoy me a lot, its just something the devs put into the game as an idea but haven't done a lot of work on yet so it will hopefully change as the game moves through early access.

The factions are broken, I haven't bothered to look into it but if you play on pioneer they get a hidden score that is much higher than yours, even if they show as having the same number of towns or sometimes 1 less the "top faction" will often have double your score. The most annoying part is that the game gives them a random score but doesn't give you any indication how or why they got that score.

They are not balanced for your level, its just a random score the game makes up for them at a higher difficulty level.

[camelotcrusade]

Thanks for the input, guys. @Devs, It sounds like we'd enjoy being able to toggle then on and off once we've unlocked them. I'll put in a feedback and I encourage you to do the same if you'd like to be able to play games without them after you unlocked them.

I'll watch for this on/off feature before I enable them, or I'll wait until I'm bored how the game feels now.

[Cile]

The factions are just some extra meta currency (like the upgrades that gives +10% Citadel resources) and potential trading partners at the start of a cycle.

You can ignore them entirely and they won't hurt your gameplay. Even in last place you get some food, artifacts, and machinery at the end of every cycle, and if you're trading at all (which you should) your first settlement in a cycle will have 4 trading partners instead of just the Citadel. Well worth unlocking for those two perks.

They also give you a reason to actually care about the score at the end of a settlement and to try to increase it, but if you don't like the score board then ignore it. It's all benefit and no noticeable downside.

[camelotcrusade]

Finally unlocked the factions and I agree with the people who said they are not that big of a deal. As far as I can tell, the only thing I "lose" (other than a settle spot, of which there are plenty) is that if they would uncover a chest before I do, I lose the chance to open it.

On the plus side, they do give you someone to trade with and they reveal more of the map. On the minus side, you can't *do* anything with the map reveal other than plan to settle that way, and as others have said, the "scoring" is not very motivating... I'm always in third place by the end, sometimes in second early on, and never in first.

It would be nice if you could settle near faction towns and vice versa, making there be a benefit to watching them spread around the map. Is it a "gold rush" or not?

[LemonLemming]

I want to throw out my apparently unpopular opinion, I like the factions. Most of the time they don't really get in the way, they offer trade routes when you are just starting after a reset, the ranking at the end of a cycle gives you needed resources for unlocks, and sometimes it if fun to see one show a 6 or 7 and swoop in on a quick run to steal their spaces.

That being said, adding an option to toggle it to be more accessible to those who don't like it seems like an easy change.