Some Criticism of Lethis/Recommendations for Lethis 2

[JDCollie]

What I have played of Lethis I have enjoyed, but I feel there is some room for improvement. Given how long the game has been out, these are probably more recommendations for a future Lethis 2 (if the developer decides to make one).

1. Production/Consumption information - While buildings do provide basic information about how much of something they consume and produce, they give no data about how often those cycles occur. Similarly, the shop should provide consumption information so we know if we are producing enough to keep our houses leveled.

2. Maintenance warning information - The first sign the player has of insufficient maintenance coverage is a building collapsing. A warning such as "Warning: Building is falling into disrepair" say, a month before collapse, would go a long way towards making this less frustrating.

3.Tooltips - There aren't any. There is simply no way for the player to know what a building consumes and where it falls in a production tree without remembering / constructing the building. At a bare minimum, there should be a constuction tooltip that lists: Cost of building, number of workers employed, items produced, items consumed, whether or not the building requires maintenance.

Those are just a few things I really notice in the time I've played. I hope this provides some constructive criticism to work with in the future :)

[Redrusty66]

wow, saw this on bundlestars star deal, had it on my wishlist, talk a game crashing and burning. And this dev is announcing doing a 2nd one. According to the recent reviews this one is darn near unplayable from bugs and issues. Sad. Think we'll call this a big pass. Hey dev, how about you look at your reviews and fix your game?

[nobrainer]

Also played and enjoyed the game for what it is.

It is a simple game in the same line of the old-style Sierra/Impressions city builders like Caesar 3 or Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, but just with the "basics" of that genre.
Here's few more suggestions for a possible Lethis 2:

• Make the water important. Trade routes by sea would add more flavour to the economy. And waterfront versions of various buildings (granaries, storage depots, houses, etc.) would allow the player to be more creative when planning new neighbourhoods or industrial areas;
  
  
• Add different height levels to the terrain. Lethis 1 maps are nice but they "fall flat" on the lack on hills, mountains, or plateaus. The challenge of bringing steam to higher ground could be interesting. There could even be cave systems underneath the higher ground levels where there could be an abundance of mineral resources like iron, gold or gemstones but that would be a challenge to bring steam the the cave for the mines to operate.
  
  
• Don't be afraid to increase the depth of the game. Right now there's basically 4 "common goods" and 4 "luxury goods". That works okay but ultimately it is just too little for a game that wants to attract the city-building gamers. Don't be afraid to throw more product chains and resources at us gamers, we can handle it. The old city building games used to do it by introducing new production chains little by little throughout the campaign(s) missions. A few years back a development studio called Tiltedmill Entertainment (they had Chris Beatrice and many of the people behing the Sierra/Impression city builders working there) was working on a game called Medieval Mayor that was supposed to be an old style city building game with many production chains and other cool ideas. Sadly the more recent economic crysis of 2008/2009 took that studio down and the game never saw the light of day. They were thinking back then of trying different ideas for product chains, research trees, walker systems and so on and I think Chris Beatrice actually gave some interviews about some of those ideas back in the day. Maybe that material can be found and be a source of inspiration for Lethis 2.

Lethis 1 was a "simplistic" game that ended up not have enough meat to attract the niche market/community of city-building gamers. A future Lethis 2 needs to have more stuff in it to attract the attention of the community and even classic city building youtubers/streamers like Gamerzakh for example. The more attention it gets the more potential to be profitable.

[Redrusty66]

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom is one of my fav all time, it is installed right now on my computer where it has been for several years ,,ki, Making a clone of it, in a different settings would be fine, provided it WAS a working clone. I'm not sure what "basics only" you could be reffering to as all the sierra games were simple yet complex....not sure what could have been removed that would leave anything left at all..lol mainly though, you don't put out some facebook game and move on to the next when the reviews are full of serious issues. Have some self-respect at least. A bad reputation isn't gonna get you sales on your next mistake.It just doesnt work that was.

[Simon]

I haven't had any problems at all. I guess it depends on your system. Looking at the credits it was made by a team of 7 people I think, and if they didn't sell a ton of copies to expand the company, providing support would be understandably difficult.

Lethis is a bit simpler than the Impressions games - there are no gods, and no military (though the military wasn't exactly a strength of those games anyway). If Emperor was one of your favorites you should definitely pick up Lethis on a sale.

Here are some of my suggestions:

1. Instead of a mission list for the campaign, make it into a map where you unlock and select new cities. After you finish a mission, you should still be able to go back to the city you built (maybe have a "reset" button if you want to restart). This would make it more fun, when you don't feel like you "lose" the city when you finish the mission. This would also lend itself to branching paths.

2. Better indicators for problems that buildings may have. Some kind of hover info/icons maybe. I also think the "working animation" should only play when the building is actually producing, not just have sufficient workers as it is now.

3. Hotkeys for demolish, roads, roadblocks etc!

4. In the trading interface, you should be able to "export goods over 2000 units" and "import goods up to 2000 units", as an alternative to "import 2000 units per year". This would make it much easier to manage your balance of stocks.

5. Better economic balance. The price of goods should be higher, both for import and export. You should be able to make as much or more money from exports as from taxes. Right now you also earn way too much from taxes (this should probably change based on difficulty). You should not earn a net profit when you have low taxes and high salaries.

6. More impactful happiness system. Right now it doesn't have any effect until you get a riot at very high unhappiness.

7. Click on rubble to rebuild it (maybe a button in the info window).

8. Mark specific buildings as "low priority", putting them at the bottom of the worker priority. This would be very useful, because with farms only working during some parts of the year, you currently have to either have big unemployment during the winter, or have all your industry buildings getting disabled from lack of workers during the summer.

[Simon]

Originally posted by Sinsem:

I hope the devs see this thread. I think we have some pretty good and straightforward improvements here :)

[xNeariax]

Bit late to the party, but after playing for around 15 hours - which by the way, I'm enjoying a lot - there's just one thing I'd personally add that I'd like to see changed in a follow up:

Farmers! I don't remember if there was a similiar system in any of the old Impressions Games, but the fact that they don't count as workers with a job outside of farming season is.. a bit of a nuisance, honestly. Especially in combination with the happiness system as it is.

On maps with lots of farming going on it leads to a huge, sudden spike in unhappiness every time the season ends and in worst case scenarios to riots. Takes a fair bit of double checking and micro managing to balance. Might be a personal preference, but it doesn't seem ideal to me.