Housing Downgrade Deconstruction Mechanic is the WORST

[RonEmpire]

First, great game minus the 3 crashes that I experienced during my live 16.5 hours stream,

For the most part the game was very enjoyable up until the housing upgrade/downgrade to tier 3 death spiral.

For context for those who do not understand or know what is going on.
The game has "conditions" that you must meet for houses to upgrade. It's automatically triggered and your builders need to provide the needed resources to upgrade once conditions are met. Great sure. Seemed okay at tier 2 from tier 1. Tier 2 was reasonably manageable.

This gets really bad at tier 3. Once you do paved roads. get say 4-8 citizens as an example. The upgrade to the houses happen. Builders stuck on remodeling refitting the upgrade because I was lacking glass and polished stone. Houses under construction for a very long time until I noticed what was wrong and missing. Large plots of area under construction.

Okay so when I got a few houses upgraded finally. And then the citizen left. Alert comes up and the house now wants to go downgrade. Okay. So I just need a new citizen then. I promoted a new citizen and then the tier 2 house across the street ends up wanting to upgrade and then goes through tier 3 construction while the tier 3 that was ALREADY built wants to downgrade to tier 2. The WORST part is I'm having to PAY for the downgrade construction cost. AND THEN pay for another upgrade cost across the street. this just repeats over and over across the entire kingdom. I even went as far as clicking one of the residents and promoted them to citizen and this did not even fix the problem. Absolutely broken mechanic.

So this sea saw up and down upgrade and downgrade spirals over and over wasting my resources over and over and then my entire town all got housing unhappiness and people suddenly leaving commoners too. I was hit was a massive shortage of construction materials across entire kingdom.

Ideally, houses should NOT be downgraded at all. Maybe have an icon indicating that it lost its bonus values.

If a house needs to be downgraded. Just get rid of the bonus it provides. change its status. NO cost in downgrading nor construction required. (why must they have to reuse NEW construction materials and rebuild a tier 2 from scratch when it was previous already built at tier 2.) If a building has been marked as having previous at tier 3 and paid for its cost, then it upgrades to that tier for free. and just construction time.



I've seen similar mechanic in farthest frontier which is absolutely the worst thing about FF. The main reason why I hated playing FF.

In Manor Lords, when conditions aren't met or lose their needs, people are just unhappy and you do NOT go through downgrade construction.

Here is my part 2 Gameplay episode (from the 16.5 hours stream):
(you will see the awful mechanics)

https://youtu.be/VVBJoZd7i9c
(if you view on my youtube channel it has chapter jumps to when it starts happening)

[Trent]

Downgraded houses make no sense. If anything, higher tier homes should fall into disrepair on their own if their conditions aren't met. Change their textures a bit and remove the bonuses like OP said.

[RonEmpire]

Keep in mind that i PAID 20 gold and another 100 to promote a guy to citizen status.. and then the citizen left. paid another 100 to get another citizen status that refuse to live in a perfectly nice built tier 3 home only wanting to upgrade a different home instead.

In real life if you can't afford to live in a mansion you don't ask a builder and PAY construction cost to tear down a house and rebuild a brand new crap home. You sell the house and move to a cheaper house and let somebody else who can afford it move in. Or you just let the house deteriorate over time and repair to a better status when you do come up with the money.

It's just absolutely ridiculous as soon as a tier 3 house got finished construction it gets torn down again right after and paying DOUBLE construction cost to bring it back down.

I think the thing that blows my mind is this is release 1.0 and the game has been in early access this long and NOBODY has made a fuss or an issue about this broken mechanic??

I didn't play EA long enough to see this late end game mechanic issue. Was this new to 1.0 ?

[Calamity]

Check to see who is living in the old house - there may be some serfs clogging up the slots. Boot them out and your new citizen will hopefully move in.

[RonEmpire]

Originally posted by Calamity:

Check to see who is living in the old house - there may be some serfs clogging up the slots. Boot them out and your new citizen will hopefully move in.

I tried this. And it didn't work. "hopefully" did not pan out.
I even promoted the villagers living in those homes to be citizens too.

like I said. WORST game mechanic that makes it no fun.

I lived streamed the entire thing so you can actually watch my VOD on twitch.
Will be posting this on my YouTube channel as well soon when I get a chance to cut up the long 16hrs up

[BIll Dauterive]

Originally posted by RonEmpire:

I think the thing that blows my mind is this is release 1.0 and the game has been in early access this long and NOBODY has made a fuss or an issue about this broken mechanic??

I didn't play EA long enough to see this late end game mechanic issue. Was this new to 1.0 ?

I would say this a new mechanic, mainly the resource part, I don't remember having to have glass to upgrade a house, although I used mods and built the houses at the level I wanted them, and there was only 2 tiers of houses before, one for serfs and one for commoners and citizens, but I think serfs could live in tier 2 housing, but I also think they would move to the acceptable housing, or you could manually move them, like I said tho I used mods which let me pick which tier I was building to begin with so my answer may or may not be helpful, I have not upgraded any villagers since I played in early access, and I don't really want to anymore until that problem is fixed.

[DasMoss]

Yeah its pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥, I get stuck in a feedback loop of wasting resources on upgrading and downgrading houses. I was having a lot of fun until I realized how terrible this system is.

[Lanthrudar]

Originally posted by Calamity:

Check to see who is living in the old house - there may be some serfs clogging up the slots. Boot them out and your new citizen will hopefully move in.

The player shouldn't have to micro this when the entire residential district and house building mechanic is AUTOMATIC other than zoning and adding desirability.

The game wants players hands off until it's critical and then we have to step in and fix the broken AI and mechanics for this through some convoluted band-aids? Hell no.

The issue is the lag time between the things getting flagged and the actions occurring, or something in how the game recognizes the need to change and when it actually kicks off the change. This is also visible if you have a villager who for a half second apparently get's stuck on an completely open building for some reason and you get the warning they are blocked, and you see them going through the route they were already supposed to do. Especially bad when literally zero has changed on the map, no new material or building changes, and this randomly pops up when all entrances/exits from a building are white, not red.

This also shows if you ever have the loop where villagers decide their house is too far away, then it's not, then it is, then it's not, then it is, etc. Warning flags/messages pop up but when you pause and check the villager screen within a second there are zero villagers showing as a warning or flagged as an issue.

The timings are off basically and need to be tweaked still. I guess we're now seeing a large enough player size putting the game through the paces to show all these issues that people probably got used to and had a work around or ignored before during EA.

[RonEmpire]

Originally posted by Lanthrudar:

Originally posted by Calamity:

Check to see who is living in the old house - there may be some serfs clogging up the slots. Boot them out and your new citizen will hopefully move in.

The player shouldn't have to micro this when the entire residential district and house building mechanic is AUTOMATIC other than zoning and adding desirability.

The game wants players hands off until it's critical and then we have to step in and fix the broken AI and mechanics for this through some convoluted band-aids? Hell no.

The issue is the lag time between the things getting flagged and the actions occurring, or something in how the game recognizes the need to change and when it actually kicks off the change. This is also visible if you have a villager who for a half second apparently get's stuck on an completely open building for some reason and you get the warning they are blocked, and you see them going through the route they were already supposed to do. Especially bad when literally zero has changed on the map, no new material or building changes, and this randomly pops up when all entrances/exits from a building are white, not red.

This also shows if you ever have the loop where villagers decide their house is too far away, then it's not, then it is, then it's not, then it is, etc. Warning flags/messages pop up but when you pause and check the villager screen within a second there are zero villagers showing as a warning or flagged as an issue.

The timings are off basically and need to be tweaked still. I guess we're now seeing a large enough player size putting the game through the paces to show all these issues that people probably got used to and had a work around or ignored before during EA.

Yes. I agree that players should haven't to micro manage this.

[MrJane]

Yup, I agree with all of this. The whole process of getting houses upgraded (building walls, patrols, etc.) is already tough and finnicky enough. Getting that downgraded and losing investments in your population is extremely frustration.

[IronWyatt421]

Glad to know this wasn't just me. This was by far the most annoying thing in the game. It made me basically give up when I started getting citizens. I kept going into debt and losing thousands of resources every time things upgraded and downgraded. How did they not see this in playtesting???

[RonEmpire]

Originally posted by IronWyatt421:

Glad to know this wasn't just me. This was by far the most annoying thing in the game. It made me basically give up when I started getting citizens. I kept going into debt and losing thousands of resources every time things upgraded and downgraded. How did they not see this in playtesting???

Yes!! Glad i'm not the only one having this problem and realizing the bad design mechanic choices here.

I mean up until this point the game is fantastic minus the crashes. It can get you excited and happy giving good reviews cuz 12 hours will pass and you're satisfied and then BAM, everything comes crashing down and goes down the toilet.

After they deal with the crashes, this NEEDS to be addressed ASAP.

[RonEmpire]

Originally posted by MrJane:

Yup, I agree with all of this. The whole process of getting houses upgraded (building walls, patrols, etc.) is already tough and finnicky enough. Getting that downgraded and losing investments in your population is extremely frustration.

Not only do you LOSE your investments (building cost and paying for the promotions), you MUST pay MORE resources just to go down while also having homeless people with no happy bonuses.

You LOSE an entire building for a period of time since the tier 3 house is being deleted and a new tier 2 is being constructed AND you have to PAY another investment of materials.

[sakasiru]

It's not just the upgrading and downgrading, it's also the density. I have a watchtower full of patrolmen at the very end of an enclosed part of the city to make sure they patrol that area. What do they do? Leave the area to patrol a different quater first. And yes, everything is marked, but they rather patrol the part with the pretty paved roads I guess? Then their own quater degrades, people leave en masse and I'm out of thousands of ressources AND dozens of people.

Also why are they patrolling in groups? Makes no sense to employ four of them when they all follow the exact same route.

[RonEmpire]

Originally posted by sakasiru:

It's not just the upgrading and downgrading, it's also the density. I have a watchtower full of patrolmen at the very end of an enclosed part of the city to make sure they patrol that area. What do they do? Leave the area to patrol a different quater first. And yes, everything is marked, but they rather patrol the part with the pretty paved roads I guess? Then their own quater degrades, people leave en masse and I'm out of thousands of ressources AND dozens of people.

Also why are they patrolling in groups? Makes no sense to employ four of them when they all follow the exact same route.

OMG. YES. I was complaining about that patrol pathing issue too. I can get you patrol in groups of 2s for the buddy system idea. BUT when you got like 4-6-8 guys assigned, they're walking around in ONE big group.

Setting up multiple towers doesn't help. They need to have each tower be it's own PAINT path. Similar to Farming each having their own Paint Path. And then assign patrolmen to the towers individually.

This is another example of really bad design choice and not sure why its overlooked.

I have two separate forts and the coverage is just taking too long to reach both forts even with tons of watchmen and patrolmen.

[sakasiru]

Originally posted by RonEmpire:

Setting up multiple towers doesn't help. They need to have each tower be it's own PAINT path. Similar to Farming each having their own Paint Path. And then assign patrolmen to the towers individually.

Exactly! I was sure I have missed how to do that because all groups from all four towers I have started patrolling in the same district instead the ones where their tower is. Turns out no, I'm not the one who is dumb here, it's the game.

At the moment I have 250 villagers and I'm at a total brick wall. All my ressources get spent on this upgrading and downgrading, I can't do anything else but crisis management. And the worst thing is sitting there and watching it all go to ♥♥♥♥ again and again and you can do nothing about it because you can't tell your dozen or so patrolmen to do their fricking job for once. Then a whole district goes into lower density, people complain, expensive citizens leave, more houses downgrade, and by the time you have spent thousands of planks and tools and money to get them all up again and get more villagers to man all the jobs they have left your patrolmen decide to skip this district again.

I want either to be able to really micromanage them by setting routes and assigning individual patrolmen to an area or I want that damn game to not actively sabotage my village over and over.

This isn't fun. This is just frustrating at this point.