Feedback Settlement feature

[DeletedUser7703]

With tweaks being made to the Viking Settlement, and spoilers already found for the Japanese Settlement, I propose that it's time to give feedback on the settlement feature in general. If you would like to reply to this post maybe you could include how far you played the Vikings on your Main server (or the server you played it the most times - up to you). If you stopped at a certain point, why you stopped, what you liked about the Vikings, what you disliked about the Vikings, any other information you think relevant.

To me the biggest feedback in the Viking thread was that players wanted the next settlement to be something different. If the Japanese is the same mini game as the Vikings with diplomacy whacked on top, I think there will be a lot of dis-appointed people.



On the live server I played the Vikings through 17 times, my main incentive was to get a level 9 Yggdrasil and 2x level 5 Greater Runestone after that I switched to doing the 25fp loop. I stopped at 17 times because after completing the Vikings so many times it became a repetitive chore - the impediments were not enough to make each play through feel different.

Things I liked:
Planning my viking settlement to make most efficient use of the space.
Strategy elements: (for example) working out whether it was worth disconnecting houses to fit more shrines in, how many expansions to unlock and what good to use to unlock them.
Yggdrasil (very nice reward, even better now)

Things I disliked:
The Vikings gave too much incentive to 5m & 15m collection times, IMHO this created bad play styles.
The biggest factor in speeding up your settlement was how often you could collect from your Viking settlement.
Very repetitive
Very repetitive (Ha ha!)
Felt like a chore
It was quite easy to come up with a solution that worked for most settlements. Example: I never built a mead hall, clan house or old willow (properly) once I worked this out for 1 settlement I knew I didn't need to even think about it for other settlements. If the variables could of changed (time, cost of goods for each building) so I had to think each time whether each building was worth building or not. (Note: if you found building a clan house worked for you - I'm not disagreeing with that, different playstyles etc)

Things that could of been done differently:
Ability to skip the unlocking of some of the buildings, would either have to unlock to finish settlement or a penalty for not unlocking.
Ability to upgrade the buildings, this would be done via some kind of tree with multiple routes, you can not unlock the whole tree you have to select a path and once you have gone down a path other upgrades would be unavailable. Make the choices meaningful.

Grim

 

[xivarmy]

Things I liked:
- rewards mostly... Both yggdrasil and the level 5 greater runestone were worthwhile, a couple of the emissaries were useful
- conceptually an activity based around city design (though many caveats to this, see next section)

Things I disliked:
- lack of depth to the city:
there is only one goal to design it for (make copper, turn copper into goods)
one way to unlock the techs
diplomacy encourages you to only have it when unlocking something and the fastest way to do that is to build a bunch of 'decorations' and then sell them after
while impediments serve to make your layout always slightly different, they're mostly something you can choose to just avoid most expansions that have them

- compare this to a bronze age city (something I've had fun planning for restarts before)
balancing coins vs supplies vs goods vs FP (all with multiple uses and ways to acquire them - i.e. spend coins on FP, unbirthday quests, unlock costs, construction)
a tech tree instead of a tech line (i.e. you can *choose* what you go for first to some extent - chalets? guilds/blacksmiths? fruit farms? slingers? goods buildings? taverns? - whatever you choose there's some stuff you'll also get along the way and a lot you can leave til later or will have to do without to get what you wanted sooner)
option to use a variety of recurring quests to supplement income - all of which will place different sorts of demands on your city layouts to take advantage of
(used to be) option to plunder your neighbors for more resources - still kinda hate that this got pushed to late iron age (and thus effectively early middle ages since most of your hood won't be activated til then).
option to get started on GBs early (obv not directly an option for settlements because you're just going to throw it away - but perhaps you could've been choosing to run early iterations of the settlements longer in order to invest goods to build up your x4 boost higher for reruns for instance - or to not lose as much time on reruns - or to reduce construction times on reruns - perhaps you could build extras of each good to leave with your current settlement that each convey a different bonus to next settlements or something)
happiness is something you need to decide how much you're going to design into your city and keep it, not a rare instantaneous need like diplomacy or something that builds up over time like forge points. You also have the choice between easily fit decorations or more efficient cultural buildings (which eventually win out - but in bronze age it is a real decision point) where in settlements you have as many copper-producers as you can use/fit and then make up the rest with temporary 'decorations'
while I detest taverns being in the game for the most part, in bronze age they're actually interesting because the buffs are still meaningful and you can only have one active at a time so it adds a layer to your plan for it

- ultimately even if there *was* depth to it, it would be a struggle to enjoy "restarting" 15+ freaking times! Especially consecutively (which even if there was multip!e settlements it'll likely make most sense to pick one to focus on til you have the maxed main reward from it)

It'd be best if there was a reason to restart the city but you could still keep earning (main) rewards at a slower rate by continuing to run your current city (example: finish now, or gather and spend these 1300 goods to unlock the next main reward, then finish now or gather 2000 goods to unlock the next main reward, then finish now or gather 3000 goods to unlock the next main reward - at some point it makes sense to restart so you can go back to gathering 900 for the questline and then 1300 for the first extra reward - but you can also choose to enjoy a rather large settlement with maxed out buildings and a well planned layout a bit longer).

Different impediments and goods needed does not change that much about the plan to accomplish the goal - you're still likely going for approximately the same number of expansions at each stage you decided on, just picking slightly different ones. You're still building the same approximate number of goods buildings vs shrines - just slightly different counts of specific goods buildings that are transparently matched to which goods were asked of you in the tech line. By your 3rd version of the city you're likely already done making changes to your strategy and are just repeating it ad nauseum.

- only real way to improve your performance significantly is to check in more frequently. it's fine that's an option. I've briefly run a hut city as part of my startup in bronze age on a new world. It shouldn't be the only thing you can do though.

 

[DeletedUser9169]

Things I liked:

- The Yggdrasil is a very nice building with a lot of forge points in a small space.

Things I disliked:

- The build times are good for people that are not not working but if you are busy the settlement will take a long time to build. Since I log in once or twice a day the Axe Smith may be built in the morning then it will be ten hours later before I log in again and start producing axes.

- It is going to take me a least a year or longer to the Yggdrasil to the maximum level.

- It is the same city multiple times.

Some Suggestions:

- We need more variety instead in the same thing 15 times.

- Have more types of buildings but when start a new city you only get some of the buildings so each city would be built differently than the previous city.

- When the Egyptian Settlement opens up add the the digging part of the Archaeology event where you might have a change to win something that can be used in the city.