Good game but...

[B-Dog]

First off, I do love the game. I gave it a positive review (after they patched crashing) but after having a large city with a population over 500, the cracks are beginning to show. Some mechanics need to be re worked. It's almost as if the devs didn't expect people to keep playing past a population that large.

The economy becomes a chore at best and completely broken at worst to deal with. As others have stated already, the patrolling mechanics don't make sense. Your patroller will stay Idle "waiting for other patrolmen" only for them to walk in a group and barely fill the need the houses require. This combined with the massive increase in needs all around make it almost impossible to keep up with. You plop down more production buildings to keep up with the demand for x,y,z only for a,b, and c to now be insufficient. It becomes an endless cycle until all you're doing is replacing the villagers that are leaving because their needs aren't met. I'm able to keep them happy enough for the most part but I have to increase taxes so much to not be in the red that it just pushes them over the edge of leaving. This is even with trading with all available routes. Maybe it would balance out more if I wasn't stuck with just serfs and commoners low tax rate because God forbid I promote more than 20 citizens then the needs spiral out of control even quicker...

But I can deal with all of that but the real kicker for me is the disappearing of resources! Example being, a house starts upgrading. But somewhere in between it upgrading and the builders bringing the required materials, if the house has a need that's no longer met (temporarily) before it's finished building and it begins to down grade before finishing the upgrade, all of the already delivered resources disappear and it resets to the required matts for the down grade. This is a problem because I'll have a lot of houses upgrading at the same time, so it takes my builders just a bit longer to bring all the matts. So it just becomes a endless cycle and money pit of constant upgrading and down grading and in so doing, matts are going in the trash. At least have the already delivered matts go towards the down grade and/or refund the rest.
There's so much about this game I love, but after around 300+ population, it gets to be a impossible chore. I love that you have an unlimited population, so i don't want a nerf to that. (I have a 24 core cpu, I'm eager to see where I can push it) but there's a lot that needs tweaking and improving. Hope the devs see this. Great job but please don't stop fine tuning.

[Tyrax]

Originally posted by B-Dog:

I have a 24 core cpu, I'm eager to see where I can push it

Just a side note that the game runs on one core only, so it doesn't matter if you have 8, 16 or 24 cores.

[City Builder]

It's feeling more unbalanced the more that I play, so I abandon villages and start new hoping to see that something I did was causing an unbalance, but so far I don't see it.

[B-Dog]

Originally posted by Tyrax:

Originally posted by B-Dog:

I have a 24 core cpu, I'm eager to see where I can push it

Just a side note that the game runs on one core only, so it doesn't matter if you have 8, 16 or 24 cores.

Oh really? Interesting. I only assumed it was coded for multi core since the beginning of the game I'm only firing on one core but as my population increased, I'm firing on 4-5 cores. (I keep cpu usage on display) well in any case I'm determined to set it on fire lol.

[Omek]

You need to be careful with upgrading Serfs super early on, and even more careful when promoting to Citizens. They will cause that death spiral you described if your economy/supplies are not ready for them.

You can definitely setup more than enough income from serf taxes, and selling easy early game resources such as bulk Fish and Polished stone.

I don't upgrade people past their professions skill ceiling either. ie. don't make your fisherman any higher than Serfs.

Hope some of this helps, I definitely had that annoying house upgrade/downgrade spiral happen to me before I adapted how fast I upgraded my population.

[V_Cred]

Try using the edicts to solve part of the money problem, you can have one edict to lower the labor building upkeep and at the same time one that allows people to stay happy even with higher taxes.

[V_Cred]

Another tip is: don't promote villagers to citizens just because the job says that it is best suitable to it. They can perform the job even without being suitable for it, go slow, promote one or two, or even add a new production building of the same type and add commoners to it, this way you can double the output without having to promote citizens.

[B-Dog]

Thanks for all the tips guys. I do enjoy the game so I'm going to keep at it. Maybe it's the edicts I'm sleeping on.
Happy gaming

[AmesNFire]

Taxing your serfs early on and trying to sell stuff is a good way to secure your funding issues.
I keep regularly hitting my 1000 gold limit and mostly just struggle to have enough resources to do all the things I want without having to wait until one project is completed before beginning a new one.

The edicts are very useful, definitely grab those if you can.