Minions are making this game a human ressources simulator

[Zodaick]

A have played this game for about a week now, and there's a couple problems I can't seem to find a way to work arround. All of them being caused by minions.

Cleaners don't clean.
I don't know how, I don't know why, but it seems that as soon as I unlock the second level and start building stairs, cleaners just stop doing their job.
They end up wasting their time talking in the hallway, going to sleep when they don't need to, and so on. Eventually some of them will clean the rooms and keep them in the blue, but they never ever clean the hallway. The only ones who do so are those freshly hired who will only do a couple sweeps before giving up on the idea like all the others.

Minions quit all the time.
At first I was like "Oh another dwarf quit my lair, they really came as advertised, they are anoying as hell". But then elves and human joined the movement are started quitting in mass. And it's actually close to impossible to really put the finger on why they quit. Some leave because they didn't get paid, others because they smell. In the end I just realised that most quit because they couldn't satisfy their needs. So I built more rooms to help with that. I built entire levels dedicated only to food and sleep and morale. And they still quit !! I read a few posts on forums that point out to a pathfinding issue, and this would seem accurate. Minions just don't go eat when they are hungry, leading to permanent quits. This makes it impossible to get high level minions because the higher level they get the quicker at quitting they become.

Salaries are a nightmare.
I'm not saying that I don't like paying salaries (I'm the bad guy after all), but paying salaries to minions is absurdly difficult. Reaching 100+ minions, I had over 30 dwarves whose single job was paying salaries. I had one treasure room per level with an average of 6 windows to give salaries each. Minions would completely ignore every level but the first, mass up there, making it way more complicated than it needs to be. This would always end up in 2 ways. Either the dwarves would eventually get tired/hungry/whatever and leave their post to go rest, leaving a massive amount of minions without salary, and most of them quitting. Or the dwarves in charge of paying salaries would be unable to go eat or sleep untill they are done with their job, which is impossible due to the mass at hand, and they would quit. Leaving a mass of minions wihtout salary that would eventually quit shortly after.

Elves came as advertised.
For anyone who enjoyed the original serie, elves being oblivious to traps was actually really a nice touch when I first saw them trigger traps. This would actually prevent me from stacking traps together (which I like to do in similar games) and at first felt like a nice mechanic to have to deal with. I couldn't just stack traps at the entrance door because any of my elves that would enter would get end up as compost, meaning that traps are here to weaken the ennemies for the guard that would alwaye end up being the ones that put an end to every invasion. Which I think is really good. However there is something that either needs clarification or fixing. It is said that elves are "most likelly" ("plus souvent" in french) to trigger traps. But from my experience this most likely chance is actually a 100% chance. Elves trigger litteraly anything that they come remotely close to. Leading me to refusing to use elves as cleaners since they are the one that reset the traps after they triggered, because for every trap they reset, they trigger 2 on the way.


This game is great. if a dev comes by I'll be happy to provide whatever info can help if it's not been done already. And I can't wait for the full release. Keep up the good work

[76561199511470151]

Thank you for participating in the playtest and giving your feedback here ! It helps us a lot to improve the experience ahead of the release. If you wish to share more ideas you can join Dear Villagers' Discord here : {LINK REMOVED}https://discord.gg/dearvillagers

[Sunday Driver]

I think part of the problem is we aren't given guidance on the size, shape and frequency of rooms. I've seen them complain and leave despite me having top tier rooms in the castle for all needs. I can only assume they don't go to them.

The treasure room is an example of how big and what size do you really need? It seems a corridor shaped room so you can have a bunch of those special doors and nothing else. A player will never really know this without guessing.

That's a good point on the elven cleaners. A bit of a trap themselves if they get you in a cycle of setting them off and resetting them...

[Bongoboy]

Well on the store page it does have the tags "Simulation" and "Management" so I would guess part of what you do is human resource management.

Maybe the game has some bugs still or you don't know how it works, I can't tell, but on release we will see more info from other players.

[moonlightavenger]

It's kind of part of the humor, I believe.

[Strifeboy]

Yeah I think the only issue im having is people not doing their jobs and I don't know why, like if you want to get the raid resource it says have 2 spys, but with 2 they never work you need 3 of them and this is the same for everything.

[jdpvagabond]

I love the management element in the game but yes, there are some serious pathfinding / AI issues that make it an absolute nightmare instead of a problem solving puzzle.

[Karalas]

I agree with the mass-quitting. I had to raid the second mission and my minions always quit due to unfulfilled needs before any of them reach level 3. I was able to put together a raid with level 3/2/2/2/2 and 84% of winrate.
I also got caught with the treasure room. I was expecting something like Evil Genius 2 where you need to add shelves, but here nothing to do... I'll have to remodel a bit my dungeon now...
The cleaning is also a raising concern now.

I wonder if there is a way to affect minions to precise part of the dungeon or at least at a precise floor. I got a kitchen in the floor 1 and nearly nobody cook there despite having precisely 5 stations for 5 cook.

[Bongoboy]

Originally posted by Karalas:

I'll have to remodel a bit my dungeon now...
The cleaning is also a raising concern now.

I hate to remodel the Dungeon. The controls for that are so clunky. Resizing a room is a literal nightmare, you have to sell allot stuff and try to make it as small as possible to move it. It would be allot better if you could just outright sell a room but some rooms can't be sold.
Also it feels like you are not supposed to have any non-room corridors, it feels like you are supposed to place rooms at each other. And then on the other side at the entrances it feels you are supposed to leave a empty room? Or you can't place traps.