(Feedback) Things I have problems with the Gameplay.

[Shiny_Stone]

1. Stock keep getting full. Where is the additional warehouses?? In what city building game where resource have a cap and it doesn't have warehouses??
2. "Can't build in dense forest"....come on, I can smack a Wonder in the middle of the forest but I can't do it with any other things? Just cut them trees, what so hard about it?
3. Can't demolish some buildings. Decorations such as park and village plaza can't be demolish. NOT EVEN ROAD. Like, IT JUST ROAD! WHY CAN'T WE JUST, I DON'T KNOW, BUILD OVER IT??
I can't build road directly myself but I can't even delete them!
And Cultural Buildings too ! The only I can get rid of them is progress to the next Era so it become ruined and demolish that way??? (Or maybe that can't do either. I have't try it yet.)

[Mr_H4ndy]

Hello,

Memoriapolis has a management aspect, that's why there is no additional warehouse. But you can increase your stocks by creating production buildings, by improving your city center or building the Horreum at Antiquity for example.

For the dense forest, you can use the deforestation workshop in the Middle Ages or build a farm that will remove the forest!

The goal of the game is to anticipate, therefore manage the space available, that's why you can't destroy the cultural buildings but only the production buildings.

I hope it will help you and thank you for your feedback!

[Shiny_Stone]

"deforestation workshop" ?
Where is that?? Maybe I haven't unlock it somehow...or you mean "cutting camp"????

[CapitalTwo]

Originally posted by Shiny_Stone:

"deforestation workshop" ?
Where is that?? Maybe I haven't unlock it somehow...or you mean "cutting camp"????

its something you have to unlock through gov policies in the middle ages, its very late game for something that needs to be available from the start if they're going to restrict building in dense forrest

[rkelly17]

Originally posted by Mr_H4ndy:

Hello,

Memoriapolis has a management aspect, that's why there is no additional warehouse. But you can increase your stocks by creating production buildings, by improving your city center or building the Horreum at Antiquity for example.

This game is great I really enjoy it, but I disagree completely with this approach to storage. Hellenistic and Roman cities had plenty of warehouses and production sites, like farms, often added storage, especially in good years and when the producer was producing for export. The Horreum is good, but doesn't hold nearly enough. If that is going to be the only warehouse, then make it upgradable. At least have new storage options in each age that can evolve (be upgraded) as the age goes on. The idea of creating more production sites in order to get more storage has a flaw: you also need to create more sites to create more raw materials for the additional craftspeople. In the end you have a lot of superfluous workers who could be put to better use.

[Jiro Dragonheart]

Originally posted by Mr_H4ndy:

Hello,

Memoriapolis has a management aspect, that's why there is no additional warehouse. But you can increase your stocks by creating production buildings, by improving your city center or building the Horreum at Antiquity for example.

For the dense forest, you can use the deforestation workshop in the Middle Ages or build a farm that will remove the forest!

The goal of the game is to anticipate, therefore manage the space available, that's why you can't destroy the cultural buildings but only the production buildings.

I hope it will help you and thank you for your feedback!

generally in management city builders, you are allowed to create more storage when needed. It's a realistic need for a growing city to create more places to store things. It seems a little weird to not be able to upgrade the massive building to store more stuff, or for us to be able to make smaller warehouses/stockpiles. Also how come cultural buildings left to ruin cannot be tore down? As well as homes.

[DeathMarkerr]

I like the game, especially the Age progression which is missing in most real-time city builder game nowadays, also the city building aspects which lets me focus on managing the city instead of designing every single bit of it. But to be honest it kind of feels like there are to many limitations that prevents from utilizing the entire map. Not sure what road-map the devs have planed but hopefully more contents will be introduced in future updates

[Pyro Hawk]

Okay, so going to chip in myself with the observation that I actually didn't find storage was too great a struggle. Nor was space to expand into, but then I already had grasped that the solution there was to build a farm in the location you wanted to expand 40-50 Cycles before hand so the Farm could build all it's fields and which you then demolish with the Farm to free up the area. Greatest concern I had with space to expand into was making proper use of my Towers but by the time that starts hurting, the City Centre is fully upgraded and I'm usually placing down Wonders.

Now, I'm not saying that I didn't struggle with storage on occasion but the most notable instances of that were when I didn't realise the Ancient City Centre needed more rubble and wooden beams to upgrade than a single structure of each allowed (which was relatively quickly solved by building more) and at the start of the Medieval Age when I wanted to repair buildings. The issue there of course being that you are meant to struggle repairing your cultural buildings initially, with easy repairs only meant to be a mid-late Age thing.

That said, we definitely need better ways of improving storage than either building additional structures of a given resource type or upgrading them to the fifth stage and choosing the 'With Warehouses' specialisation. Because right now, I feel like some of them are forcing you to choose that Upgrade Specialisation no matter what for the single issue that limits the game the most.

Your numbers of 'free' Workers. Building more structures eats into your Worker count fairly quickly. Upgrading structures to the fifth level does so even more, particularly if you are more concerned with storage space than production rate and range like eventually ends up being the case.

Whilst allowing us to build more of the (current) Warehouse structure or being able to upgrade it is one solution, it does not personally feel like the best fitting one. Instead I would favour some way of unlocking a limited number of smaller storage structures.

I don't know how much storage these buildings would have, nor do I know what sort of worker demand, construction costs and structure number limit there should be. That would be all up to the developers to manage thanks to how closely it's tied into game balance. But having something which has the purpose of allowing us to 'waste' less Workers building production structures for the sole purpose of getting more storage when we're also having to be very careful managing our free Workers in order to repair and build the Cultural Buildings, get as many Wonders started as we can early enough that we aren't having Wonders either incomplete at the end of the Age or running down the clock to the last few cycles rather than saving them for the next Age and all the other things we could be using those Workers for instead would be very nice.

Having said all that, it does feel like one of the core game design elements appears to be making sure that every structure serves either multiple roles or has very low demand (I'm looking at the Decoration structures mostly there) which would mean that a 'Storage Building' who's only purpose is to grant more storage might stand out considering it would be either the only Service building which has multiple built of or otherwise lessning the value of that building. In which case, referring to the already existing 'lore' in the game of the various 'With Warehouses' Specialisations, perhaps those limited number of smaller storage buildings might have a tiny 'aura' which buffs production around them?

Not large, but something which means that you have to very carefully plan out where you are going to build the two or three per Age 'Storage Buildings' you gain (at least that's what my initial assumption for numbers would be) so as to maximise the benefit they give your production buildings. It would push further down the direction of creating 'Industrial Regions' you already go for with how you have most of the Production Buildings produce 'Disturbance' making you want them separate from your Neighborhood Districts and Cultural Buildings.

The relaxation on storage limits would also make it so that there's no longer as strong of a push to focus down the 'With Warehouses' upgrade path but instead perhaps we can go for the other upgrade specialisation at times. After all, if there's a limit to how many of these lesser 'Storage Buildings' we can make, then there will still be a point we hit a storage limit. A limit some people might prefer to get around by upgrading their Production Buildings for greater storage rather than the secondary effect because they're focusing their Workers towards non-Production roles so don't want to spend a bunch going 'okay, I'll just drop down a half a dozen more of that building then'.

As I said at the start, I didn't find storage too much of a struggle once I worked out what I needed more of. With the two stand out moments being 'oh yeah, that thing uses a lot of those' and 'well, I guess they don't want us repairing or evolving everything right at the start of an Age'. But it is also telling that at the end of the Medieval Age I ran around dropping a dozen or so additional Production buildings purely to increase my storage limit for a given resource so I could actually manage to repair everything as I couldn't just buy over-max storage for every needed resource from my trade partners. After having desperately prayed that I hadn't accidentally spent too many free 'Workers' on stuff that would prevent me getting all my Wonders started in time.

Or put another way: I definitely noticed that the only Production Building I felt like I had a choice on what Specialisation to go for was the Quarry, where I went Precious due to valuing collecting a second resource much less than getting some gems at all as I usually already had a second Quarry working that secondary resource by the time I was upgrading Quarries to Level 5. The Mine might have also have avoided that issue, but I didn't investigate that as I wasn't even looking at getting those to Level 4 by the end of the Medieval Age. And *both* of those buildings are the ones where you are likely to build a lot of already, thus drastically raising the storage limit, because they extract multiple resources rather than focusing on a singular good.

TL:DR Free Space is barely an issue once you realise you need to use Farms to clear it out out 50 or so Cycles before you build whatever needs that space. Storage meanwhile usually isn't a concern but it feels very awkward, odd and sometimes extremely painful to have part of the game be 'So I'm going to waste a bunch of my previous Workers on these low value Production buildings just because I need more storage'. When one of the core design concepts of the game appears to be 'every single Worker is precious'.

[Shiny_Stone]

Pyro Hawk got good points. It wasted resources to just do that.

And another big reason I have problem with this approach is "It doesn't make sense."
In all my life playing City Building game. It either have no limit in storage or have limit WITH dedicate storage warehouses.
I know the game try to be "Strategic" about it but it just doesn't make sense to me.
"Oh I need place to store wood." but instead of building warehouse for it. You build more saw mills. How that make sense??

And about the deforestation, I DON'T EVEN KNOW I HAVE TO USE FARM TO GET RID OF THE FOREST.
I been using Cutting Camp to slowly cut out forests...
Like, Why?? Aren't we human build farms in open area??? Like plain?
And I know we do deforestation to make farmland and the game did just that but then why can't we just deforest to make buildings like we do with the farm??
And then the "Being Strategic" card being pulls again.

I not telling you to do things though. It's your game.
I'm not a game developer so what do I know?
I just saying what I feel about it.

[Pyro Hawk]

Originally posted by Shiny_Stone:

Pyro Hawk got good points. It wasted resources to just do that.

And another big reason I have problem with this approach is "It doesn't make sense."
In all my life playing City Building game. It either have no limit in storage or have limit WITH dedicate storage warehouses.
I know the game try to be "Strategic" about it but it just doesn't make sense to me.
"Oh I need place to store wood." but instead of building warehouse for it. You build more saw mills. How that make sense??

And about the deforestation, I DON'T EVEN KNOW I HAVE TO USE FARM TO GET RID OF THE FOREST.
I been using Cutting Camp to slowly cut out forests...
Like, Why?? Aren't we human build farms in open area??? Like plain?
And I know we do deforestation to make farmland and the game did just that but then why can't we just deforest to make buildings like we do with the farm??

Happy someone appreciates the massive write-up I did. That said, I do feel like (as I said in my write-up) that I don't feel like this game should go in the usual direction of 'let me just spam storage all over the place, or focused in one location so the limit becomes almost meaningless'. Hence why I had the suggestion of granting us storage buildings that provide some additional storage for a low Worker count, but also have the number of storage buildings being limited to make sure that we do in fact have to get some storage from the Production Buildings.

Basically striking a balance of 'most of my storage is from storage buildings, but yeah I did make an extra couple of Production Buildings to bump it up that bit higher'. Otherwise we might end up in the other direction of getting grumpy about having to 'waste my Workers making yet another Production Building to boost income rates as otherwise it wastes too many Cycles waiting to build up reserves'. Or something.

There's a point of balance between the two out there and right now I am definitely enjoying the twist this game gives that mechanic to mark itself out as I don't feel it's done *badly*. Just not quite found the 'sweet spot' yet.

As for the whole deforestation thing? That is actually relatively historical. Sure, the open areas were the first places that ended up being turned into farm land but they also tended to be the first locations we built up villages and towns on as well. Which meant that suddenly the local villagers needed more clear land to produce food from, which meant clearing out some of the forest and turning it into farmland.

Slash and Burn agriculture, which comprises of going into a region of forest or jungle to chop down all the trees and then lighting fires to burn off the remaining vegetation, only to then come in and turn the ashen lands into farmlands is a *very* old method. The biggest issues with it in the current day is sheer scale it's done on, and the fact that people move onto a new patch of land after the initial few years of high yields thanks to the bounty the ash provides come to an end.

You know, if you are ignoring the whole 'destroying ecosystems', 'massive deforestation' and all those other things. Was not talking about those in this write-up, just the practical effectiveness as a method of agriculture in a purely agricultural mindset.

I think there's actually some information out there that suggests you can actually track the distribution of more advanced tools spreading across the ancient world by how large a population an area could support. After all, clearing trees for farmland with stone axes is a nightmare so they mostly stuck to existing cleared areas, altered the forest to provide useful resources and food or cleared it over generations.

Copper tools helps, but bronze is when it really gets good. Too bad about how expensive it is meaning the village might only have half a dozen good wood felling axes in it, and Ol' Johnny might not be happy about Larry wanting to borrow his good axe to clear some land for more farms considering Larry can't offer him anything particularly valuable for it.

Then along came the large scale production of decent quality iron tools and all of a sudden old growth forests, jungles and marshes are much less of a nightmare to deal with if you want more farmland. And you always want more farmland, because that means more people around and better odds that there's enough food nearby to allow the local region to limp through (in particular your family) when the crops fail *again* and a famine hits.

As for the speed of clearing, consider it the difference between 'I want good quality lumber so have to take care cutting down the trees, and I don't really care that much about the cleared land left afterwards' versus 'Okay, I need a bunch of cleared land for farms and I don't care about the lumber from clearing the trees, I'll grab my friends and family to clear off that patch over there I guess'.

[Shiny_Stone]

Oh yeah, you mention tool smithing.
We unlock iron in Middle Age so that mean iron tools are available so clearing forest is easier than the Ancient Age.
So I suggest that building in dense forest are only possible after the middle age AND after I have unlocked the production of iron.
Make it so it have a longer build time due to having to clear the area first.

Note: This logic do NOT apply to Wonder buildings because...
1. We can already place it anywhere in the forest in the current game build.
2. Those things are HUGE. We do NOT have enough open area to put it with that Middle Age restriction thing. It will just become annoying if it get the restriction.