Feedback after completing the game

[jeron]

1. Obvious quality-of-life improvements

1.1. Area selection, displaying its size.

Ability to quickly know exact area size will save a hell of a time when planning districts.

1.1.1 Another very cool feature for such selection would be displaying stats summary of all selected buildings: their total upkeep and workforce (and maybe production). That will really help in understanding a cost of production chains – and respectively, in resource management.

1.2. Navigate to supply source

Same as delivery posts have a loupe icon to navigate to a consumer building – consumers should have same icon to navigate to a supplier of each of its resources.

1.3. Don't reset buildings after moving

Applies to all houses (reset to level 1) and to trade post (which is especially annoying, to set it up every time).

1.4. Switch road type with hotkey

When road building mode is active, successive presses of the roads hotkey should cycle through road types.
Selected type should be shown near cursor.
Even better if when dragging a road, game would display its length and upkeep.

1.5. Avalanche preview

Clicking on a snowcap should enable an overlay, showing an exact zone to be affected by an avalanche.

Nothing is more annoying than to discover you mispositioned your snow barriers by 1 cell, and now half of your city is buried (and there is no space around to fit a mr. plow). Especially taking into account that affected area widens when avalanche power increases, so even perfectly positioned defences may suddenly become insufficient with time.

1.6. Warnings suppression

Along with disabling a building, there should be an option to suppress warnings icons for it – for cases when players know exactly that they don't need to supply more resources there.

Like, supplying 9 milk to 2 butter-beaters from 1 yak shack (in green zone) is enough for tea production. But then you'll get that annoying "insufficient supplies" icon on top of a carrier post and in a global notifications menu – which you don't care of whatsoever.

Such notifications distract from real problems, so personally I tend to overproduce resources, just to get rid of that annoyance. Which plays against the very essence of the game – a careful and efficient resource management.

1.7. Precise demand configuring

It may be an alternate solution for p.1.6, or an additional feature.
Every production building can have arrow buttons on sides of each product supply bar – allowing to specify exactly how many items it needs (and/or maybe same for production – how many items it wants to produce, adjusting demand automatically).

1.7.1 Same may apply to all delivery posts.
Sometimes one building is supplied with the same resource from multiple delivery posts. In that case, supplies are distributed in order posts are connected: the first that was connected delivers everything it can, than goes the next one (and this order may implicitly and unpredictably change when demand changes – which honestly looks like a bug).

This can easily lead to overspending resources on transportation: when some very distant post delivers most of resources, while there is a more close source, which lacks just a very few items.

If we could configure each route to deliver exact amount of items, this problem would be solved.

1.8. Stack buildings vertically

Applies to barley fields and yak pastures.
Stacked horizontally, they kinda join in a single building, in terms or road access – which is VERY convenient and cool. Why this doesn't work vertically?

1.8.1 Other farm / grower buildings may benefit from this mechanic too: chicken farm, goat farm, beekeeper, herbalist, cedar grove, maybe yak shack and hay dryer, and especially foresters (they already do join their snow protection zone – so it would be pretty logical if they also join their road access).

2. Balance and questions

2.1. Cost of delivery routes

I understand the idea of a longer route requiring more resources to maintain – but it's current implementation is highly questionable.
In particular, it feels very very odd when a seemingly not-that-long route requires more carriers than amount of items transported. Especially with yaks.

It gets to ridiculous degree: like, you want to deliver a bunch of hay from fields near your city to a distant region with yak utopias – and this delivery takes more than a half of yaks produced by one utopia (58 yaks per 32 hay in my case). wtf, seriously? I can build 4 utopias with that hay – and 1 of them will basically work for nothing, only covering expenses. It's a waste.

I think, it can be tweaked in a following way:
- cart post route never requires more than 2 carriers per 1 item, regardless of distance. It's pretty logical – one carries, second rests, then they swap.
- yak post route never requires more than 1 carrier per 1 item, regardless of distance. Yaks are strong. They can endure it.

This will easily solve absurd cases, like 17 men carrying 3 eggs.

2.2 Stacking snow barriers

Multiple rows of foresters increase a power of avalanche they can handle.
Multiple rows of snow barriers don't. They always have power of 1, regardless of rows amount. Why?

2.3 Random challenges

Those random "bad weather" challenges feel like annoyance rather than a real challenge.
95% times it comes down to following:
- oh, I need to get 100 more people living within monastery walls
– ok, on pause build 25 T1 houses on any empty plateau and surround them by walls
– objective completed
– destroy everything, get back to play
Why even bother with such "challenges"?
It can only screw you if you're completely out of money and income to build everything in time. Which never ever happened to me in 100+ hours.

And speaking of time – having time-based challenges in a game which stays on pause like 99% of playtime feels weird.

It could be a real mechanic with 2 tweaks:
1) If bad weather actually affected your city: like, lower productivity of some food production, increase cost of transportation, empower avalanches, etc. So you have to both fulfill the objective and somehow keep city operational in these new conditions. And no timer needed.
2) Challenge requirements must be met constantly. Dropping it will get penalties back. So you won't destroy everything you added after challenge completed.

2.4 House needs

After house is leveled up, it doesn't care anymore of what needs exactly are fulfilled. It only counts their total amount.
For example, if it's a T2 lowlanders house and total of 6 yellow needs are fulfilled – it won't care of absence of food.
idk whether it's bug or feature. I found it even interesting that in lategame you can fully drop food supplies for big settlement, replacing it with comfort and spirit, thus freeing lots of resources for a new settlement. But honestly, it feels more like a bug.

3. Phantasies

3.1 Cliff extenders

Obvious suggestion for this kind of games with a limited build space.
I would give a LOT for an ability to add that one missed cell that prevents me from fitting a required building in my almost-perfected layout.

It can be some high-tier building (let say T6).
It should create 1 cell on the edge of a cliff, allowing to build on top of it.
It should have some reasonably high upkeep (10? 15? Should be more costly than a snow barrier).

Maybe, these extenders can even stack, forming whole platforms – of some reasonably restricted width, to prevent abuse (like 3-4 cells maximum?).

3.2 Utilizing snow caps

I imagine another high-tier building, that can help harnessing avalanches even more.

Obviously it should be at least T6 – as it's even more advanced than avalanche inducer. Respectively, upkeep and workforce also should be comparable or higher than inducer has.

It should be built on top of a snow cap – just like any mine.
It should decrease avalanche power by 1 – down to zero included. Like, workers carefully clear snow, so nothing at all remains to fall.
And it can also produce some related product, like ice, as a component for some other high-tier products – like promethium cold drinks or even ice cream (we have milk, butter, honey, and some odorous herbs – add smth cold, and it seems pretty enough to cook an ice cream).

Actually, the Smothered Flame map allows to import a unique product – compressed snow. So maybe developers even already have plans to implement something like this in future, who knows.

[adam.jenkins.1993]

Regarding 1.3: Don't reset on move. Whilst appreciated I recently had to use that exact feature when I massively screwed up a supply line. Early game thought I had enough artisans to force through an upgrade whilst paused, then upgrade. I think I was missing maybe 4 houses, but I wasn't certain. If they do this, I would like a downgrade feature.

[gRRRz]

Originally posted by jeron:

1. Obvious quality-of-life improvements

[

1.6. Warnings suppression

Along with disabling a building, there should be an option to suppress warnings icons for it – for cases when players know exactly that they don't need to supply more resources there.

Like, supplying 9 milk to 2 butter-beaters from 1 yak shack (in green zone) is enough for tea production. But then you'll get that annoying "insufficient supplies" icon on top of a carrier post and in a global notifications menu – which you don't care of whatsoever.

Such notifications distract from real problems, so personally I tend to overproduce resources, just to get rid of that annoyance. Which plays against the very essence of the game – a careful and efficient resource management.

I'd prefer a way to be able to setup how much of a ressource you want an industry to produce (with reduced workforce if the output is reduced).