The game should be shorter and harder

[tank fan]

there is way to much filler time by mid-late game you are just smashing pass turn waiting for it to resolve and it seems like i have hella of every resource these events are just 100%

[Sunflower Cat]

agreed. Plus playing a 5 hour long game just to loose in the last 5 minutes sucks. on my last play through I spent half the time just clicking next day and waiting on events or seasons to change.

[The War of 1812]

Here's how you get around this (or how i did). Play on Hard so that you have to make actual decisions and reference the Prophecy, and when the later stages get to be a long mashing of "next turn," go into the settings and change the gameplay to "fast pass turn" or whatever the setting is.

[Catman]

Can you give me more information about that? I am querying people that say this with:
- Difficulty they play with
- Rough turn around which they *complete all research*
- Turn they realize they have practically won.
I have some ideas, but I need information to decide on what is the best course of action,

Thanks!

[Catman]

I am sticking this to have some more data

[Serulin]

Originally posted by Catman:

Can you give me more information about that? I am querying people that say this with:
- Difficulty they play with
- Rough turn around which they *complete all research*
- Turn they realize they have practically won.
I have some ideas, but I need information to decide on what is the best course of action,

Thanks!

The game is very snowbally, difficulty just slows the curve in which you snowball

- Difficulty they play with

started on normal due to the warning, went to harder after I won

- Rough turn around which they *complete all research*

completed research really doesn't matter. On normal at least, game can be won with basically no burgeous, eggs and stew win the war for food with passive food income then it is a matter of dealing with domains with renewable passive domain income if possible.


- Turn they realize they have practically won.

when you get soup online to be honest. The game lets you spiral population and research speed to your hearts content, and only scales linearly. Everyone is too efficient such that having more population is always better assuming you have the places to put them to work and the patience to manage them. They only need food and housing. Normal colony builders would require clothing, recreation, etc.




Here is my thoughts, the game gives too much freedom to the user to break the curve. The player sets their own population growth rate and research rate. Games like Civilization/total war have exponential curves on required food to gain more population and thus expand. In my harder shaman run at mid autumn, I have like 90 people I think with a research rate of around 20 since totems suck since they are single unit only.

Winter is not harsh enough with eggs and soon to be soup to easily prevent starvation even with such a massive colony, and also unlocked onions allowing me to actually farm in winter anyway. In my first run, I stopped growth during autumn assuming winter would wreck a large colony, but it just does not have enough impact to slow early game expansion for it.



If I were you, I'd take a look at the game Against the storm. While you have scaled domain punishments and random events based on number of colonists, that game scaled the harshness of its storm season based on your colonists as well as your expansion. More wood cutters and more land grab for resources meant that their bad season would have harsher punishments so it forced the player to moderate their choices to not get bopped.

Being able to contribute to domain events when one is not pending also while interesting in a time management sort of way, makes them a bit easy. Problem with them is again player can expand without restraint such that I can have a bunch of people idling at each of the various domain buildings accumulating several hundred points of domain affinity.

[Catman]

Note that allowing players to snowball is by design, and I also had mechanics that made the game react to having larger villages, but they turned out to be really, really unfun, and I want to re-add them but they need more balancing on the experience. Events that appear with 100+ population would probably be a good idea (I had no idea people would consistently play with 100+ Pips)

Also, can you more or less tell me when you get soup online? What page roughly? Or what turn?

[Catman]

Please keep in mind that this is something for more experienced players, so it must be something *addittive*, and not a fundamental change in the game mechanics, otherwise many people (I have data on how many play hard and harder in respect to normal and easy) would find it suddenly too difficult.

[Serulin]

Originally posted by Catman:

Note that allowing players to snowball is by design, and I also had mechanics that made the game react to having larger villages, but they turned out to be really, really unfun, and I want to re-add them but they need more balancing on the experience. Events that appear with 100+ population would probably be a good idea (I had no idea people would consistently play with 100+ Pips)

Also, can you more or less tell me when you get soup online? What page roughly? Or what turn?

on this harder run, about to have it researched on turn 105. Will be online for winter by 115.

The reason I consider the game won at that point is how efficient it + eggs are. It is very easy to feed a full village indefinitely with seed gatherers, eggs and soup. You would not want to do the same with only eggs as a proper chicken coup setup takes a ton of space, the soup amplifies the eggs and reduces space needed. It is the last thing to automate in a village if you get enough reusable domain contributers online

idk how many other people play with, but last run I hit around 130 or so pips but had around 30 that sat idle, I just didnt need that many other than to build faster or perhaps take specialized burgeous jobs I barely touched.

[Catman]

Originally posted by Serulin:

Originally posted by Catman:

Note that allowing players to snowball is by design, and I also had mechanics that made the game react to having larger villages, but they turned out to be really, really unfun, and I want to re-add them but they need more balancing on the experience. Events that appear with 100+ population would probably be a good idea (I had no idea people would consistently play with 100+ Pips)

Also, can you more or less tell me when you get soup online? What page roughly? Or what turn?

on this harder run, about to have it researched on turn 105. Will be online for winter by 115.

The reason I consider the game won at that point is how efficient it + eggs are. It is very easy to feed a full village indefinitely with seed gatherers, eggs and soup. You would not want to do the same with only eggs as a proper chicken coup setup takes a ton of space, the soup amplifies the eggs and reduces space needed. It is the last thing to automate in a village if you get enough reusable domain contributers online

idk how many other people play with, but last run I hit around 130 or so pips but had around 30 that sat idle, I just didnt need that many other than to build faster or perhaps take specialized burgeous jobs I barely touched.

Very useful information, I got my gears working, I have a cool idea I want to test.

[Serulin]

Originally posted by Catman:

Originally posted by Serulin:

on this harder run, about to have it researched on turn 105. Will be online for winter by 115.

The reason I consider the game won at that point is how efficient it + eggs are. It is very easy to feed a full village indefinitely with seed gatherers, eggs and soup. You would not want to do the same with only eggs as a proper chicken coup setup takes a ton of space, the soup amplifies the eggs and reduces space needed. It is the last thing to automate in a village if you get enough reusable domain contributers online

idk how many other people play with, but last run I hit around 130 or so pips but had around 30 that sat idle, I just didnt need that many other than to build faster or perhaps take specialized burgeous jobs I barely touched.

Very useful information, I got my gears working, I have a cool idea I want to test.

Btw am at 90 pips on that run. Getting close to where I will cap out. Even now having like 10 just fover the map in cobblestone each turn for lack of use for them until I get advanced tools online. They come in handy for building or planting for now

[Pingcode]

On normal I think I also realised I was on a won game around the start of year two, yeah. If not in Spring, definitely by Summer when I was mostly just stockpiling resources and standing up the high tech production chains. By then I was running all four domains constantly using passive* methods, building up to 100% well before each chapter's doom.

I didn't ramp up to the super high numbers like Serulin did, but did use both an Actor and a Doctor once the threat got high enough and I could comfortably support their production chains.

Adding to the comment on passive production - I mostly avoided field-based and butchering-based production too after a while, since it was a real pain to have to manually restock things whenever the village harvested them to zero. Passive producers were much simpler since you could just let them keep running without intervention while focusing on other things

Edit: I didn't complete all research - I started pulling away researchers once I no longer had any I intended to use. I left the school running right up to the apocalypse but mostly for want of anything better to do with my scholars while I didn't need the University

[lethminite]

So as was alluded to, there is a difference between "i've won" and "I'm confident i'm going to win"
Ignoring the first play through, where you are unlocking and learning everything. The point i'd say "I've won" is when i've built a 30+ generator for all '5' domains., or a couple of 20+ generators, and have a stable economy to back them up. I don't have to be able to run them all at once while making a profit, but be able to keep them on for ~10+ turns when needed.
At that point, my only job is to reseeding fields, and watching to make sure I don't accidentally turn something off. Sure, maybe it generates more than 30 threat (~90 is the max for 200%?) but that's only one domain. If i've got enough food saved up, could just run the Apocalypse off the banked food, destroy everything and build a few more 30+ things to manage the threat.
My 200% game got downgraded, so I haven't won on 200%, but I'd guess that's around summer year 2?

Being confident i'll win, I would agree is cauldron up and running, assuming I can also build big houses. which is just before first winter.
Eggs + cauldron is OP and needs a nerf. 2 workers on seeds, 2 on eggs, 3 on cauldrons, 1 on water. 8 people, makes something like 50 food, 100% of the year. Expand to 50 through winter, then with farming crops in spring, easy ~90, get bread online, and build a bank of flour, and you'll never run out of food.

Omens might cause some issues if they hit the wrong buildings, or people, or i might screw up and forget to get a big building operating in time, but at that point the game is on me to lose.

I think the big problem, is so much of the tech tree is available as you unlock more stuff. Why can you get milk and wool from sheep (yes, in RL sheeps milk is a thing, but why in the game)? Why can you do both in a single run? The game feels might tighter on the first play through, but as you unlock more stuff, you just end up with so many options, like getting the choice of 3 different crops, plus a tree, plus 3 different types of hunting, plus a few different types of animal pens, all at once.
First play, you had 1 crop, and white meat, and that was basically it until year two.

Also it feels really weird that food just keeps forever, and they don't go off, so you can just stockpile ~2000 food if you have 10 food groups. It might be worth making some food perishable, only lasts the turn (or few turns, or season), while others can be stored, or even just at the end of each season you lose ~50% of your stored food. Maybe not into winter, as it's cold enough that it stays cool.

[Don J0rm[A]´n´@1N3N]

Maybe there could be a speed-up setting that makes everything faster by certain amount percentage. Like: Instead of having 8 pages of prophecies in total, you have only 4 pages but buildings produce 50% more items than usually etc. So people could finish their runs faster but still enjoy the game as "fully" as they can.

[Catman]

Originally posted by Don J0rmA´n´@1N3N:

Maybe there could be a speed-up setting that makes everything faster by certain amount percentage. Like: Instead of having 7 pages of prophecies, you have only 4 pages but buildings produce 50% more items than usually etc. So people could finish their runs faster but still enjoy the game as "fully" as they can.

This is very hard to balance. I'd like to do that, but the game really becomes unstable with that (I tried several times during the years to reduce number of turns)

I have an idea that could help reduce the amount of turns, as the issue is with *good players*, so I am thinking of a sink that allows you to shorten the play time as a mechanic during the game.

[Deadweight]

The game is definitely too long, even on fast mode it takes *hours* to finish a run.

Hard mode simply slows the snowball, as others have said, condensing a few events would certainly make it harder to store up a thousand odd points of protection prior to an event coming along.

The core issue I have is the research tree. So many runs I've abandoned due to a really poor layout...

Sometimes things converge so awfully you just need a restart. Mountain springs with ponds on a map with barely any present.

The worst one is the hemp / herb / seeds triangle. It seems to happen cruelly often that I have a papyrus maker for paper, hemp needed for medicine, the hemp version of the wood cutter and my only form of collecting hemp is the field collector or the forager. I get the seeds field and the seed extractor meaning my entire output is pretty crippled.

I'd love to see some more variety in protection chains of buildings and maybe a *little* logic or opportunities to be flexible when it comes to production chains.