Game feels too easy?

[DURR]

I've been playing on the most difficult settings in the game and still I end up "winning" the game (own all cities, buy all AI, finish all research) within 3-4 hours (I play on the fastest speed). I know you could argue there is no winning, it's an open-ended industry simulation game, but I figured I'd share my thoughts about the game anyways to see if anyone else feels the same. I thoroughly enjoy the game; it's what I've been looking for for a while now, but I feel like there's some things that are lacking.

First, the AI doesn't feel near aggressive enough, and I sometimes question their logic on their roads/ability to make efficient supply chains. Second, the only challenging part of the game currently is the first year where you're just starting to get a single supply chain up and running. Once you have successfully done that, it's just a matter of expanding on it and buying more, which happens way too quickly and easily.

After the first half hour of gameplay, the risk of going bankrupt seems gone entirely, and the price of all the buildings and networks becomes laughable. By the time I'm an hour in, I usually have 100+ million dollars, and own the majority of the map. From there it's just buying out any leftover AI, and finishing off all the research, which is what takes the most time, unless the AI does it for you before you buy them through the stock market.

However, by the time I do get to the "end-game" and have researched the final products to make and sell, it just doesn't feel like as much of an accomplishment anymore. I usually have close to a billion dollars, I've bought all the AI, and own the entire map by this point, so there's pretty well zero risk and it doesn't feel like anything matters anymore. I spent some time thinking about what would make it more of a challenge, or make the game longer, and these are some of the things I came up with:

- The upfront building cost of buildings should be more expensive.
- Add tiers to each factory, each has to be individually upgraded with materials and money to be able to develop the higher tiered products. Or more factories, with ones that produce better materials much much more expensive to build.
- Cities have traits, which dictate things like what resources are in demand, or add cost to certain productions/gatherers. Maybe the city has a "greener" population who dislikes heavy industry, but likes farming or fishing, because of pollution concerns for example.
- More permits! The default build permit that exists currently changes to only allow building networks (roads, rails, shipyards, etc) and gatherers. You then also need a production permit. You select and get the first one free when buying an unoccupied city, or when building your headquarters for the first time. Each production permit is associated with a factory, since each type of factory does a good job of separating the production chains. Buying a textiles permit allows you to build textile factories and begin to produce their goods. If you include the above city trait feature, different factory permits may be restricted or cost more/less. Limit the amount of permits a player can have in a city to the size of the city. A small town only allows one or a couple, a large metropolis allows most or all.
- Eliminate ability to build roads/rails everywhere, and instead follow the building permit rule.
- Add ability to trade with other AI so some of the players money goes to them for things I don't want to bother making, and vice versa, or again if above city traits of included, maybe certain productions aren't allowed in certain cities. Forces the player to branch out, or rely on trading with the AI, which adds to the feeling of an economy in the game.
- Add ability to buy and sell resources/products to/from the state through the shipyard.
- City size could dictate the workforce in factories and amount of trucks able to be deployed from a building. Growing the city becomes more important, which leads into:
- Supply and demand is more important to the cities. Change shops from being supplied when 1 resource is sold, to requiring 3 different resources/products sold. The city will stop growing or won't advance until each shop is selling a minimum of 3 products.
- Alternatively, the minimum required to advance/grow and gain more shops in a city could match the amount of shops are in the city currently. Each time a city wants to grow (I think it ticks at 50k population?), it requires all shops to sell # of products, where the # = how many shops are in the city. If this requirement isn't met, the city won't grow/gain more shops.
- Resources in shops should cycle in/out so it doesn't always stay the same. Over supply something and it risks not being purchased in a city for a while, something else will be in demand instead. Balance is important.
- Add in pedestrian traffic from and around cities (random cars)
- Certain negative events like getting fined can take a percentage of players (or the other AI's) total money, instead of dynamic flat values to combat with massive bank accounts.
- New businesses AI opponents can enter the game, asking to purchase a city permit off you similar to how the current AI do now. If you accept, a new AI opponent is created, and they build their headquarters in the city they just purchased off you or off another AI opponent. Their funds and research level is based off the players wealth/research level so they come in balanced to the players progression.
- Headquarters upgrades should have meaning, add purchasable upgrades to adjust chances of negative/positive events for your business in the city it's built, or entire map. Or upgrades which help prevent sabotage.
- Allow ability to sabotage others by sending them negative events for a price. The AI can do this to the player as well. Have different price ranges, with lower prices increasing your chance to get caught. If you are caught, you are fined, a portion of the fine goes to the targeted opponent.
- Add a new forced event with a decision, depending on what the player chooses, will dictate the chance of gaining a positive event, or a negative event.




And while I'm at it since this turned into a much longer post than anticipated, a couple QoL additions:

- Minimap would go a looong way.
- A button on each auction to jump to the city it comes from. Also ability to jump to other AI headquarters when looking at their names/info.
- Notification of which city upgraded and added a new shop with a jump to button. The fireworks are a nice visual, but I still have to stop what I'm doing, and try to find them before they stop. Pausing doesn't stop the fireworks, so you usually have to be quick. On a large map this sucks.
- Give individual AI and the player vehicles their own colour, so you know which part of the map/what AI they came from. (Like in Car Tycoon, the different colours of each vehicle were based on the colour of the player/AI)
-The request resource/trade route UI/functionality could use some work. Feels very simple, too simple. The ability to pull resources should be a per-resource thing instead of per-warehouse. More customization here would be nice.
- When selecting a destination for a product, clicking on the actual building on the map works the same as finding it in the list, when that "location selection menu" is active.


I still thoroughly enjoy the game as it is, and hope I don't come off as negative with my take on the game difficulty or suggested changes. Maybe some of these changes are already planned, I didn't notice them on the trello though, or tried to expand on things that might be added. If you made it this far, thanks for reading. Would like to hear others thoughts as well.

[Alex, Master Penguin]

Awesome suggestions! I'll thoiroughly review all of them, but the first impression is that some are already planned and coming (or already done and coming in the next patches).

The difficulty thing is easy: just increase it! I bet you'll feel differently when you play on Veteran. Also, I feel you're mixing difficulty with complexity or content. The big 1.1 patch was just released last night. Did you try it?

[DURR]

I did try it out, played it all night haha. I love the addition of the stock market, and ability to buy other opponents completely. Made the feeling of beating the map more complete. Also the change to warehouses was great. I've been playing on Startup difficulty and still find that once you figure out the "formula" to what works, and which city to start in based off what the stores are selling the game becomes easy. Maybe it needs more randomness? More disasters thrown in or AI takeovers to disrupt the formula for success I've stumbled on. A couple make or break disasters would be nice, like blight for a couple months reducing all farm growth to -90% or something.

Either way, I'm still enjoying the game, and looking forward to more upcoming patches!

[Alex, Master Penguin]

As a spoiler/hype, in 1.2 we'll add Dynamic Events which could seriously change what happens. Basically it's a "hey man, something's about to happen, so if you don't react, something very bad will fall on you". Example:
Starvation. A town is dying and about to shrink. Send 25 units of any food to it in less than 3 months. If you do: cash reward and pop boost +10%. If you don't, pop -25%.

Also, the "click building to select target" is almost done :)

I love QoL suggestions, so keep them coming!

[Tzan]

In the starvation example, dont have a button to click and just buy your way out. Although buying from the Sate in not hard either.

[Alex, Master Penguin]

You can't buy food from the state

[Tzan]

Ah, I havent actually bought anything from state in over 30 hours of play.

[Rambo Burrito]

Originally posted by Tzan:

Ah, I havent actually bought anything from state in over 30 hours of play.

I've mostly always sold to the state until I saw Alex mention that it basically wasn't worth it. It may be worth it on my small map that I'm running now because my town is basically at the edge of the map where the state runs off into. However, there are events that drastically reduce the price of imports and exports from the state, and that's the time to really give in.

[rileythom]

seed husbandry and maybe some sort of repeatable environmental research would be cool post game mechanics, maybe :)

[Eeeeek!]

The "I have ridiculous amounts of money, and nothing to spend it on" problem is unfortunately very common in games. Some players might get upset if they aren't seeing an increase in wealth every turn, so designers ensure that money keeps rising. What designers forget is that in the real world, there's an effectively infinite number of things a person might want to spend money on (or invest in for non-monetary returns, or donate). Game worlds lack that. Adding more things to spend money on that increase your profits isn't the answer, since that just makes your wealth increase faster. Negative events that reduce your money aren't fun. Reducing the rate of growth of wealth might just make the game tedious, since you'd have to wait around longer before having enough money to fund a project.

I think what's needed is some creative ways to spend money that provides pleasure to the player, but which don't improve the player's wealth-generating ability. Buying new 'skins' for vehicles and buildings seems to work for some players, but it wouldn't work for me.

Maybe investing in research opens up new, more interesting business opportunities. Not more profitable, just more interesting. You could win the game by growing and hauling wheat and wool, but if you sacrifice some (a significant portion of?) your wealth in research, you might gain the option of selling fancy shoes, or opening popular sushi bars, supplying them through a more interesting set of resources scattered around the map. More expensive and challenging to develop and supply (more small sources, more intermediate businesses) with higher revenue. Not a significantly higher rate of return overall, but more personal satisfaction.

When I think of games with satisfying economic systems, Imperialism 1 comes first. In the early to middle part of the game, you were always short of several resources, and had to decide where best to invest what little you had. In each turn, you could buy resources (logs, cotton, etc) and sell finished goods (furniture, clothing), but you had limited shipping capacity. If you sold 6 clothing, you wouldn't have room to buy resources; if you bought 6 wood, you wouldn't have room to sell clothing. Everything affected everything else, and you were always wishing you had more of this or that. Around mid-game, you suddenly had money left over each turn, which quickly rose to ridiculous levels, and you didn't have shortages of anything, and the game became boring. I do wish other games would capture the feel of desperate shortages that the early game of Imp1 had. Imperialism2 simplified the economic system, and it was boring from the start.

[Alex, Master Penguin]

Many thanks for your thoughts. I'll buy Imp1 to see exactly what you mean and see if something similar can be achieved