Make cottage and stone houses actually feel worthwhile for their price

[porphyra]

I don't know if others feel this way, but upgrading tents only really save space, and that's definitely something you need later on, but it just feels really lacklustre that it's basically the only thing you get out of upgrading houses. You do get a little more money, but that's offset by the increased energy cost.
I feel like a stone house should be more energy efficient than a tent, at least when it comes to pure survival, not less.

It just really feels like a chore to put down so many tents etc.
It's the most boring part of the game IMO and though the campaign has some other flaws, it's honestly the thing that annoys me the most.

My suggestion is to either make the upgrades cheaper, or to give more of a bonus than just space saving such as significantly increased gold income, or perhaps double down on the space saving and have a cottage fit three times as many people, and a stone house six times as many.

And either way, lower the energy maintenance.


It's a general problem with upgraded variants of buildings, the upgraded versions doesn't really feel worth it for the cost and high maintenance, even when taking space saving into consideration.
Advanced mills in particular feels like a trap with their insane maintenance compared to the energy they give, without the wiki I wouldn't have known how bad they were, since you can't actually see stats of stuff in the tech tree before researching and using them.

Just my 0.02

[Guts]

You only get so much space per map. That's why better houses are a thing. If you're playing right, you'll run out of space and still want to go further, so you then upgrade your buildings more.

[Andrewbh2003]

cottages are actually OP with upgrades you can get there energy cost down to 1 meaning same as tents + with a market/bank its legit OP plz help

[H@dron]

Its been the same since it was only the survival mode. It adds to your population the bigger the houses are, a good chunk more gold per house, and most importantly a lot more workers, which = more soldiers. Energy really isn't a problem. Expanding into basically a city has always been part of this game, using space efficiently has always been part of this game.

[porphyra]

But is it fun, or just busywork? it feels like the latter to me when I play the campaign, and as I mentioned whatever increased income you get is more than offset by having to invest gold in more energy.
My suggestions were a QoL thing to make repetitively building houses take up less of your time

Cottages do get more efficient with tech, but Stone house, not quite as much, but that requires you to choose the right tech and skip other important tech instead.
I just think out of the gate Cottages and Houses should be better without needing tech to make up for their ineffectiveness, maintenance-wise.

Just my opinion when playing through the campaign and hitting those population goals.


On another note, I also noticed that when upgrading from cottage to stone house, you don't actually get refunded any of the spare wood (stone houses cost less wood than cottages) making it more efficient, if you need stone houses and still have some tents, to just delete a few tents at a time and build a stone house directly in its place rather than upgrading them twice, which seems a bit clunky.

Could use an option to upgrade directly from tent to stone house, or just for that wood to get refunded.

[Rainbow]

I think cottages are op stonehouses should be buffed.

[Qiox]

Originally posted by porphyra:

But is it fun, or just busywork? it feels like the latter to me when I play the campaign, and as I mentioned whatever increased income you get is more than offset by having to invest gold in more energy.

You said it, but it is absurd and not in any way true. The extra gold far outweighs the additional energy requirement.

[H@dron]

Yeah, the gold outset for an energy mill is a once off thing, whereas the gold obtained from a cottage or what not occurs at regular intervals. Furthermore, and this is from playing survival , if your defense (units or tower type defenses) are costing tons of other resources you can buy these at the market. The one resource I have never had trouble with is gold. With market I can basically buy whatever I need mid to late game. But I do use cottages or stone houses. Also with banks etc you only have a limited zone of influence, which you want to have covering as many houses as possible, also, seeing as how houses is something you always want to defend at all costs, the smaller zone they are occupying the easier it is to defend. I see you're point but it really hasn't phased me much to be honest, and if it feels like busy work to you then I'd imagine building less of them would be a more attractive option to you. You can of course opt to just build gazillions of tents :D

[Atlanter]

I think cottages are fine. You have to consider:

- Most of the time you don´t have enough space for tents only.
- Thanks to the higher density you can get more from a single bank or a single market.

But the advanced mill is way to expensive.And the upgraded farm is expensive, too.

[Xuhybrid]

Placing down tents takes a second. A fraction of the time actually spent playing the game. Also, if they were always better in every situation, you'd have no meaningful choice of whether to make more tents or start upgrading tents. You've clearly only just started playing the game if this is considered a valid issue for any of the reasons you listed.

[Guts]

Originally posted by Atlanter:

But the advanced mill is way to expensive.And the upgraded farm is expensive, too.

Never use advanced mills, but upgraded farms are like the cottages. Useful once you start getting low on space.

[Panfilo]

Is Power Plant more practical than Advanced Mills?

[Guts]

Originally posted by Panfilo:

Is Power Plant more practical than Advanced Mills?

YES. Power plant is way better than advanced mills. You should have the extra materials to burn by the time you're considering upgrading mills. Never upgrade mills unless you have to. The upkeep on advanced mills isn't worth it. You might as well use gold to buy materials to burn in the power plant, as that will be cheaper than upkeeping advanced mills.

[asdf]

Tents are better if you have space for them, but you won't have space for as many tents as you should want to have. Space is not some trivial consideration - space efficiency is extremely important. A smaller base means you don't need to cover as much area to defend it, it means you don't need to clear out as many zombies to make room for it (especially significant on higher difficulties), and it also means that you have more room to fall back if a zombie wave starts breaking through your walls.. and of course, if you have a base spanning the entire map then you can get to a point where you're literally just out of space.

Stone houses aren't as necessary (but still useful in some cases and shouldn't be ignored), but cottages are pretty much mandatory and definitely don't need any extra incentive to build them. Probably the only research that's more important than cottages are farms pretty much.

[ShaTiK]

The base building is pretty much the same as in the survival - you want to maximize the effect of market/banks, which you can only have 3 each. Plus you want to use fertile land for farms - so compact 'cities' centered around market/bank pair is still go-to. Bank is a bit less important I think in early to mid game, since you need big population either way, but still market bonus reduces a lot of food needs.
So I think cottages are good, and with tech tree upgrade for energy they become equal to tents. The only tricky part with them is to not to rush to upgrade them all - each one is 12 wood while you would need wood for everything, from walls to farms. Sometimes it's better to hold off the upgrade and plop more tents, mills and farms. But it's still a good idea to maximize markets first and only then start ploping cottages all over the place.
Also, I don't think you can complete 'lowlands' mission without cottages - the space is extremly limited in this mission

[snuggleform]

Originally posted by ShaTiK:

The base building is pretty much the same as in the survival - you want to maximize the effect of market/banks, which you can only have 3 each. Plus you want to use fertile land for farms - so compact 'cities' centered around market/bank pair is still go-to. Bank is a bit less important I think in early to mid game, since you need big population either way, but still market bonus reduces a lot of food needs.
So I think cottages are good, and with tech tree upgrade for energy they become equal to tents. The only tricky part with them is to not to rush to upgrade them all - each one is 12 wood while you would need wood for everything, from walls to farms. Sometimes it's better to hold off the upgrade and plop more tents, mills and farms. But it's still a good idea to maximize markets first and only then start ploping cottages all over the place.
Also, I don't think you can complete 'lowlands' mission without cottages - the space is extremly limited in this mission

Yeah I really wish I had known this starting out that the market/bank are so influential in maximizing housing setups. Because it's an optional tech I happened to miss it.