Is it worth building a village over the ring now?

[jasta85]

So, I played the game at launch and had some fun with it but havn't touched it since then. One issue I had was that I felt there wasn't really an incentive to build a village over the ring with the seed, since you had to travel between multiple islands. I found it was easier just to keep the whole group together and travel to wherever the next objective was with temporary camps along the way.

If I built a village anywhere it usually meant having to split my people into 2 groups, one to defend, the other to explore which meant each one was weaker in dealing with enemies, it also meant my resources were split between 2 locations which made managing them more complicated, not to mention the ring is a really powerful item, especially early game.

So I'm wondering if anything has been done to incentivise building a village over the ring since launch?

[Gilmoy]

From what I've read recently, the Other Ring is still OP.
1 village isn't "better". Even 2 villages aren't "better".

The Ring game will almost surely win faster.
The Village game is probably harder, because you rely on good resource management to build up power the hard way.

Ergo, players on 200% often chase the Ring because it enables survival in a harsh world.

So you decide, at game start time, whether you'll play a Ring Game (or a 2-Ring Game ), or a Village game. They're essentially different games. Choose. Don't try to use pure math to compute which path is "more optimal", because I think that math will always lead you to 2 Rings. Choose villages because they're harder, and you want the challenge.

And yes, building 1 village means you split your group. It's easily feasible.

+ An optimal group is about 10 guys: 3 Physical goons, 3 Mental/Spiritual goons, and 4 all-challenge shooters. Fewer than that means you can't match up 1-v-1 against 3 Krakens or such, and their cornerbacks will sack your shooters and wipe you. More than that means your benchwarmers will never be top 7 to earn a spot in your hand (unless they do and bump out somebody better).

So if you have 15 guys, you'd want to split them into 10 + 5 anyways.

+ Each village gets the free demon, plus enormous stat + defense boosts from buildings. So 5 guys can fight like 10 guys, and work like 15 guys.

+ The village's best feature is simply that it does not move, and so you don't care about weight limit. You can happily stash 30k weight in your village.

Yes, managing 1 village means you always split attention between 2 groups. That can involve some extra micro. In practice, it's not so bad.

+ A village can be demon + 5 kids who grew up + 1 free Rat/Wolf that joined them. They quickly find their optimal distribution, something like 1 in research, 5 in gather, and 1 Master Craftsman who looks for composite jobs worth 1 turn of his time. You can go 20+ turns in a row and have zero moving parts in town. The only micro you need is that, every 5 turns or so, the MC jumps into 1 composite job, then back to gathering. Everybody else is on auto-pilot. So a well-tuned village imposes a tiny cognitive load.

- Actually, 1 village can imply three groups, if it has no Coal and you run out.

a) You can defer building the village until you sail to other islands and find Coal + some T3 resources. (N.B. building with 30 T4 Pure Stone gives you the maximal +3 gather range, so that's a good target for how long to wait. It's nice to never need to upgrade the Idol.)
b) Or build on your starting island with a friendly town + some T3s from Terrain Artefacts. You can often trade for Coal in town.
c) Or build a 2nd ship, usually a fast Sailboat, and send some of your town kids on Coal grocery runs. Then the village is demon + 1 guy + a Rat or so, and the coal ship is 4 young adults Warning: Your 2nd group is weak as heck, and cannot handle 6s and 7s on other islands, so run like mice from every threat.

Learn to love this kind of micro. If you think it's fun to manage the madness, you will probably greatly enjoy Thea 2.

[JODEGAFUN]

A full build up Village is an easy way to get top tier crafting, if you got legendaries with maximum power it is the way to go. I usually build one village late game to store all the trash and weaker characters (humans)and use it to get the most effectiv classes from new children (Elves, Orcs and Dwarf can get incredible powerfull if you get luck with the class, like orc matriach, ore pirate captain)

[qinlongfei]

One thing I find Thea 2 to be absolutely incredible over the 1st Thea (despite simplifying a lot of aspect over 1st game) is the viability of the 'nomad' playing style where you aren't forced to settle down in one spot. So long as you can manage your weight properly, playing an ever moving nomad is actually much more versatile compared to settle a village considering different resources from different island. Especially if you use Lorska's excellent BuildingOverhaul mod which let you build a lot of 'buildings' with a mobile camp.

Seriously hope if there's a Thea 3, the dev team would double down on this nomad play style and take inspiration from Lorska's mod.

[Lorska]

Unfortunately, even if you use my reworked buildings, the power level of the ring outclasses them. Which I think is okay cause making everything broken isn't a great solution either.

With my mod I'd say:
Full village lategame > ring on broken class > mobile village lategame >> ring on normal class > early mobile village > early village

Without it:
Ring on broken class >> lategame village > ring on normal class >> early village

[Heau]

I'd be very curious to know what all is considered a broken class by different people. In a separate thread maybe one day.

On topic, the main reason why the ring is so good, especially on higher difficulty, is because it is available really early, and marks a major decrease in the odds of dying to roaming parties attacking you on their terms.

With an example - if you started with a STR and an INT class, or even just STR, and have reached the point where you can deal with ~red5 and yellow5 but are still really at risk of dying to purple 2, well the ring gives you that buffer for this to be extremely unlikely. Roaming parties forcing you into a purple 3 or purple 4 fight against your control are basically safe thanks to the ring. Even a ring on a rather bad class will generally provide this buffer. It reduces a lot of the variance from RNG across playthroughs.

[utilityguy]

The Problem with the village is how time consuming it is compared to the ring, especially if you're the type to always wanna go for creating the best equipment possible for your followers--which leads to a lot of time investment for resources, Village leveling up, and such, which in turn makes the world harder depending on the setting of world progression.

The amount of time it takes to do good with the village is really what kills it. But, I do villages to experience the village only events, so shrug.

[the_charch]

that would be my one and only complaint about the game too. for something that seems to partially be based on creating villages it is one of the worst tactical/ strategic decisions. that is a lot of coding and work to make something that is just... not so great? bad, the word is bad, I love Muha, but this issue I would call a design flaw.

[the_charch]

great game, tons of fun. with mods you can change a lot of things you don't like.

[XenoReaver]

Number of times I've built a village = Every game.

Number of times I've built the Other Ring = Once and never used it.

[the_charch]

me= 0. i do like the mods, and as i said i love the game(s) and Muha and unlike many other games they give the players lots of options. . still won't change my mind it is a flaw. the only one i have seen, which is unheard of tbh. but that is a personal opinion more about the meaning of a word in a dictionary, so little use for discussion.

[Lorska]

Oh I've been whining about villages being bad for ages. I think most of the community considers the ring EZ-mode, so it's mainly being used for quick runs, achievo runs and similar things.
There's also people who just want to see all the events, so villages would tie them down too much and the extra stats make certain events easier to do.
It is a bit unfortunate that the actual benefit of villages in vanilla comes so late (due to high tier resource requirement) that you'll always have something so strong by then so you can abuse the ring anyway.

Broken classes are the ones that get access to very high base stats coupled with some form of AoE or just any advanced race magic class. Prime example would be elves in general and elven mages in particular.

Edit: I believe the biggest design flaw for villages is actually that there is nothing to spend your second seed on.

[the_charch]

i think if you could easily migrate a village it might negate some of the issues, but that is why I am grateful for all the hard work from the dedicated modders.

[the_charch]

you change what you can and give us more options

[Heau]

Originally posted by Lorska:

Broken classes are the ones that get access to very high base stats coupled with some form of AoE or just any advanced race magic class. Prime example would be elves in general and elven mages in particular.

Oh I meant more I'd be curious about where different people place different classes that aren't so insane as elf druid/mage or brutes. Like Tainted Shaman, Runemaster dwarf or even craftmen dwarf as well as some of the demons. Basically anything that might be hard to achieve concensus over.

Elves are over the top because you can grind woodlands events for a ton of fairly reliable extra stats. I had an elf child on a nomad game not long ago hit puberty on like 11 mysticism and 16 destiny unbuffed largely from those events.

[qinlongfei]

Originally posted by the_charch:

i think if you could easily migrate a village it might negate some of the issues, but that is why I am grateful for all the hard work from the dedicated modders.

On the point of 'migrate' a village, that's why I like BuildingOverhaul mod by Lorska so much. Aside from unable to trigger actual village events and obviously still having a weight limit, it pretty much provide most, if not all benefits and function of a vanilla Thea 2 village.

That's why I say the actual dev team could really take the inspiration if there's a Thea 3. Obviously, Thea isn't supposed to be Battle Brothers. But I thinking the ability to slowly upgrade a moving camp with more function really help with the nomad play style.