Should villagers leaving add impatience

[Urza]

I personally havent played with any villager-turnover strategies, not sure if they really exist or are viable, but considering the Forsaken Altar, and cornerstones like Ancient Pact or Canibalism all either directly kill or benefit from the death of villagers, I'm wondering why the mechanic of generating Impatience from loss of villagers exists.

[ACS36]

Yes, it should. Removing impatience from villagers leaving would only make the game all the easier and it's all ready really easy. The game lacks meaningful threats to the player as it is.

[Urza]

Originally posted by ACS36:

Yes, it should. Removing impatience from villagers leaving would only make the game all the easier and it's all ready really easy. The game lacks meaningful threats to the player as it is.

I think thats more of a reflection of difficulty level. Respectfully, thats a ♥♥♥♥ take.

Personally I'm not sure the game needs to be necessarily easier or harder, but should basically all forms of threat funnel into the single mechanic that is impatience.
I'm not really sure if thats elegant design, or overly simple.

But should losing villagers itself be a threat at all, or, besides just the loss of productivity; should the threat be a softer threat?
Beyond the mechanics that nearly encourage you to lose villagers, there are also Forest Mysteries like Services requirements that make it pretty difficult not to lose villagers of your 3rd species, whichever species that ends up being.
There are also a fair plethora of mechanics to speed up the rate of Newcomer gain, which as far as my understanding of the meta at higher difficulties goes, would basically be an active detriment if you actually accepted the Newcomers.

[LotusBlade]

Well, it does not matter. I am at prestige-4 and it feels okay to lose some villagers. I don't really care about higher difficulties with ridiculous punishments, game should not get balanced around p20 in a first place, it's just an extra game mode, nothing else.

-0,3 impatience is not a big deal and even if 10 going to leave, it is still managable, tho from 45-h playing it happened to me only once, so player has to really mess up in order to lose so much population. With human inside heart it is impossible to lose to impatience.

More often than not i end up sitting on extra reputation ready to be claimed, but simply not doing it due to 0 impatience in "bank" and have to either kill someone during storm on purpose or wait. And yes, killing on purpose can be super profitable - just block all their food needs, make 1 race go extinct and play with humans and harpies. +5 free resolve swing.

...

As for "leaving" rework, would be much better if they just settle in random glade and block it from being openable, like 3 people max cap for small glade and 5 for big. With some legendary corner stone to call them back.

[Urza]

Originally posted by LotusBlade:

As for "leaving" rework, would be much better if they just settle in random glade and block it from being openable, like 3 people max cap for small glade and 5 for big. With some legendary corner stone to call them back.

thats pretty interesting

[koboldlord]

Impatience from villagers leaving has a very important game function: it means your game ends immediately once you screw up incredibly hard, rather than lingering for a couple hours of real time in an unwinnable position while the impatience clock ticks incredibly slowly over the edge while you helplessly flail around with only a handful of workers left. Without that big impatience hit, the only way to shorten the timer and mercifully cut the game short is with a handful of unavoidable forest mysteries like grim fate, because otherwise you'll have to continue trundling on trying to get back in the game with your two surviving workers.

The impatience hit also makes good in-character sense, since your hideous bungling has resulted in the unnecessary horrible deaths of the Queen's precious subjects. She thought you were better than that.

The perks that give you resources for losing villagers are probably not good enough to bother with for your precious drizzle cornerstone, but if you get them a glade event or trader or something they can be okay. Sometimes you do lose villagers because of the dangers of the region, and getting back some resources makes it a little easier for the rest of your villagers to survive. If you buy the blood price contract off a trader, for instance, you could end up getting your amber back after one bad storm. You were presumably going to lose those guys anyway, and now you can afford some luxuries or fuel from the next trader.

[Urza]

Originally posted by koboldlord:

The impatience hit also makes good in-character sense, since your hideous bungling has resulted in the unnecessary horrible deaths of the Queen's precious subjects. She thought you were better than that.

extremely true

I still feel like all these cornerstones and mechanics revolving around villager turnover are still at odds with what is arguably -the- core system to the game, since its the only lose condition.

[DG]

Originally posted by Urza:

I personally havent played with any villager-turnover strategies, not sure if they really exist or are viable, but considering the Forsaken Altar, and cornerstones like Ancient Pact or Canibalism all either directly kill or benefit from the death of villagers, I'm wondering why the mechanic of generating Impatience from loss of villagers exists.

There is only one loss function for a settlement: queen's impatience. Given there is a plentiful supply of new villagers coming each year, losing villagers is in itself not a sufficient punishment for bad management so the impatience penalty is fine.

The perks exist either as (a) insurance, so if your people start starving then hey, look, they stop starving because they are cannibals, or (b) you've got ancient pact so why not take cannibalism as well? I wouldn't change the central loss conditions to help some players understand the use of some perks.

[Crashtest]

As unfair as it can sometimes feel to be doubly punished from losing villagers (loss of manpower + impatience gain), I think losing villagers would be a little bit too painless if that wasn't the case. You get villagers for free every 10 minutes or so, so losing them would only be a temporary setback if it wasn't for the impatience penalty.

[Urza]

Originally posted by Crashtest:

As unfair as it can sometimes feel to be doubly punished from losing villagers (loss of manpower + impatience gain), I think losing villagers would be a little bit too painless if that wasn't the case. You get villagers for free every 10 minutes or so, so losing them would only be a temporary setback if it wasn't for the impatience penalty.

A temporary setback is still a direct penalty to the win/loss condition of the game, since its a timed game.

Originally posted by DG:

The perks exist either as (a) insurance, so if your people start starving then hey, look, they stop starving because they are cannibals, or (b) you've got ancient pact so why not take cannibalism as well?

Yeh this I definitely get and agree with, but I'm not sure they're balanced to that effect, considering they so often compete with intensely better perks, and insurance is inherently something you'd usually rather not have to use.
I do not however pretend I'm any kind of authority on the balance, I'm just opening the question.

[DG]

I wouldn't say that cannibalism was well balanced at all. There's another cornerstone that gives a food bonus for dangerous glades and to get the same food bonus as just two dangerous glades you probably need to cannibalise enough villagers to lose the game (on high prestige).

[Olleus]

Originally posted by koboldlord:

Impatience from villagers leaving has a very important game function: it means your game ends immediately once you screw up incredibly hard, rather than lingering for a couple hours of real time in an unwinnable position while the impatience clock ticks incredibly slowly over the edge while you helplessly flail around with only a handful of workers left. Without that big impatience hit, the only way to shorten the timer and mercifully cut the game short is with a handful of unavoidable forest mysteries like grim fate, because otherwise you'll have to continue trundling on trying to get back in the game with your two surviving workers.

This is very important. Villagers leaving is a positive feedback loop of horribleness (positive here means it reinforces itself, not that it's helpful). Normally positive feedback loops like that aren't great because they further punish the player for something bad happening: it's kicking them while they're done. Here, however, it's a way for the game to put you out of your misery.

It's interesting to compare it to a closely related, and interacts with, a negative feedback loop (negative here means it steadies and counter acts what drives it). High impatience makes hostility drop making it easier to keep villagers happy and accomplish your goals. This does the opposite of the previous loop, and makes this a little easier when you get close to losing, thereby giving the player a chance to recover while being in that fun high-tension state of nearly losing. But once you do start doing well again, reputation ticking up will make impatience tick down and forest hostility will rise and the difficulty with it.

At least that's the theory. Personally, I've never had the slightest worry about impatience in 150ish hours of gameplay.

[Urza]

Originally posted by Olleus:

Originally posted by koboldlord:

Impatience from villagers leaving has a very important game function: it means your game ends immediately once you screw up incredibly hard, rather than lingering for a couple hours of real time in an unwinnable position while the impatience clock ticks incredibly slowly over the edge while you helplessly flail around with only a handful of workers left. Without that big impatience hit, the only way to shorten the timer and mercifully cut the game short is with a handful of unavoidable forest mysteries like grim fate, because otherwise you'll have to continue trundling on trying to get back in the game with your two surviving workers.

This is very important. Villagers leaving is a positive feedback loop of horribleness (positive here means it reinforces itself, not that it's helpful). Normally positive feedback loops like that aren't great because they further punish the player for something bad happening: it's kicking them while they're done. Here, however, it's a way for the game to put you out of your misery.

It's interesting to compare it to a closely related, and interacts with, a negative feedback loop (negative here means it steadies and counter acts what drives it). High impatience makes hostility drop making it easier to keep villagers happy and accomplish your goals. This does the opposite of the previous loop, and makes this a little easier when you get close to losing, thereby giving the player a chance to recover while being in that fun high-tension state of nearly losing. But once you do start doing well again, reputation ticking up will make impatience tick down and forest hostility will rise and the difficulty with it.

At least that's the theory. Personally, I've never had the slightest worry about impatience in 150ish hours of gameplay.

I might be shooting in the dark here, but I feel like in your case maybe they should nerf toolbars. 😂