Discussion Settlements, Do you want a new one?

[Darrth Eugene Vader3]

I have not finished any of the settlements. I liked Japan, then Vikings and Mayans. I have completed:

1. Japan : 10 Times
2. Vikings 7 Times (currently doing the 8th)
3. Mayans : 3 Times

Have not tried Egypt or Mughal (and from the feedback will hold on that one). Planning to continue Japan and Vikings until complete their main buildings (Shinto Temple and Ygg Tree) to the top level and then move on to the Mayans and Egypt.

After the first four are done then I would be open for a new one if designed better, or try Mughal if it is fixed.
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Theme for an Australia & Oceania settlement could adapt or redesign buildings from the 2016 Summer Event as new Settlement buildings including:

• Houses:
  • Small Hut (2x2)
  • Fishing Hut (3x3 or 3x4 same or modified image from 2016 Summer Event)
  • Large Tribe Common House: 4x4
• Goods Buildings:
  • Introduce at least two (2) kinds of goods buildings:
    • Boat Type: Two (2) buildings of different shapes /sizes), Each boat would catch different species of fish or marine Life (see goods) depending on how long the production cycle is set.
    • Farms Type:
      • Fish Ponds (aquaculture farm)
      • Animal Farm: Pigs, Chickens, etc.
      • Farms of products grown at the islands can be added.
        • Palm Tree Plantation.
        • Psydrax odorata (also known as alaheʻe) field ( Native Hawaiians used the very hard wood of alaheʻe to make koʻi alaheʻe (adzes for cutting softer woods such as Erythrina sandwicensis), ʻōʻō (digging sticks), and oʻo (short spears). A black dye was made from the leaves),
        • Pineapples field,
        • Sweet Potatoes field
  • Insert a limitation that Boat Type buildings can only be built at or moved to expansions close to beach areas, Design the Settlement Background to allow this to work, for exaple atr the initial expansions two of them are "Beach side" expansions and some of the additional expansion slots include are also "Beach side". Player strategy must be consider where additional expansions are placed if more Boat Type Good Buildings are needed.
  • Goods buildings of the "Farm type" may or not have the limitation of which expansions are used to built or moved the Farms.
• Goods:
  • Marine Life: Fish, Crabs, Lobsters, Octopus, Shark?
  • Farm animals: Pigs, Chicken, others...
  • Land Products: Coconut, alaheʻe, Pineapples, Sweet Potatoes?
• Diplomacy Buildings:
  • Tiki Totems (1x1, modified image from 2016 Summer Event) - decoration, no road required
  • Moai (Eastern Island Heads), (2x2) - road required
  • Luau's Plaza (a place for large tribe reunions, modified image/size from 2016 Summer Event) - road required
• Road:
  • Sand trails

 

[drakenridder]

Oceania settlement

Polonysia settlement

Settlement
You are an honoured quest and got the huge honour to become an apprentice of an navigator. He likes to teach you and encourage to practice daily your navigational skills in the minigame. The main goal is to build your own cano.
Before you can build your own cano, you need help and the trust of the locals. Helping them out building up their settlement is a great way to do so. As most was destroyed by a recant flooding.

Mini game
Battleship variant

Easy - medium - hard
Goal: finding hidden islands on a map, like battleship you must guess where something is. Instead of finding ships, you try to locate islands.
On easy the main goal is to find 2 "islands" on medium 3 "islands" and on hard 4 "islands." However you have limited chances but on the sides making up the coordinations you can draw some clues where an island might be. This can be a star, a bird or swell.
Easy 5x5 field - 5 turns
Medium 7x7 field 5 turns
Hard 10x10 field 5 turns

Up on succeeding you receive a fixed amount of cultural goods. Which however are random.

The hints given by the map are also given by the quests. As you'll be reached about navigational guides.
Another variant can be a field with tiles. Each tile has a random symbol. Giving a hint of where an "island" might be. Like a bird flying or an specific star of cloud.

Currency:
Coins: shells
Goods: fish, fruits, wood and tools

Main reward:
House of navigation
A themed house (with cano builder). It provides the main city with random rewards. Among those rewards are some fragments of it's own set although it's rare (5-10%). It's output and even additional benefits can be unlocked with cano builder buildings.

Time reward
Cano builder
The cano builder is an small building that can improve the house of navigation, when attached to it. As they have the shackle skill like the winter train. It has 3 levels. At the third level you can choose to specialise it's improvements.

Additional suggestion;
It's not necessary part of this culture but I think it would be a nice fresh twist to it.

Random events;
Every 12h there is an chance for an random event to occur. When an random event takes place it last for 12h. It's possible to go through days with no random event.
For the purpose of balance. I would suggest to reduce the chance for an event after one occurred for 24-36h.

Sailing trader
The trader offers 1-3 random trades for cultural goods at a ratio of 2:1. Example given to buy 10 goods you pay 20 goods.

Favourable weather
Due to good weather the harvest is exceptionally fast. Reducing time needed to produce goods & cultural coins by 25%.

Holiday
You can play a small game in which 3 shells are presented. You can chose 1 shell and keeping the reward inside it.

Bless of the ocean
Spawns a few "incidents" containing various amounts of additional shells (cultural coins).

Edit;

Battleship minigame clues
I feel like I should've given a bit more information about this concept. In battleship you have on the sides numbers and letters. Those are replaced by navigational symbols. Examples are: birds; swell; symbols of stars, or even clouds.
Two of the same symbols likely reveal were no island is. Two unique symbols together guiding towards an potential island likely reveal the location of an island. While an symbol guiding towards an island combined with an symbol that isn't guiding you to an island, contains likely an position with no island.
Examples for symbol combinations that likely revealing an island: swell + birds. Certain swells and birds might revealing the presence of an island. So, there might be one.
Symbol combinations that likely reveal the locations of no islands for example; swell + swell or swell + meaningless star. Those combinations likely lead to nowhere and should be avoided.

Learning to recognise the right symbols and combinations granting significant advantages in finding islands. As is the purpose and goal of this "practice" minigame. Although on hard it might become more tricky as meaningless symbols might micmic the right ones, far more so then on easy and normal. The bigger the play field the more space for symbols and opportunities to tricking players.

Cano builders benefits
Practically those can be whatever the dev. team wants. The sky is the limit and great creativity and combinational and customise potential are with their specialisation. Examples: att or def % for attack/defence armies, additional productions from house of navigation; improved output when certain random productions were made like extra fps/goods. Up to even maybe random units or guild power/goods.

Settlement & buildings
Some buildings can be build in the water but not on the small island itself. Giving an additional small challenge. EG goods build for fish is in the water but fruit on land.
Aquatic builds are according to the cultural architectural solutions. Most builds are fairly simple.
Off the grid a building, perhaps an house of navigation, gives excess to the minigame.

Ironically I’ve suggested it too when they where asking for new ideas. Ultimately they’ve settled for Mughal empire. Adding the second Asian settlement.

 

[Retired Guy]

Perhaps a Moon Base settlement, and have a choice on final configuration .. either current age goods, or attack "and" defense.. along with some FP, at least 100% efficient, either 3x3, or 3x4 .. The time reward could be a satellite providing a goods boost

 

[planetofthehumans2]

I would like them if the timed prices weren't such a charlatan to do on time. I aint got time to be checking in every 1 hour, every 4 hours, even every 8 hours on buildings. This is why the egypt settlement is great, you can just fight once per day to get the supplies needed to do goods buildings. The other ones are pulling nails out of the nail bed, everyone groans about having to finish vikings. Even I was ready to never do that settlement again halfway through. The timer is a significant stressor.

I'm not doing settlement on beta, I am on live the only two settlements I havent complete yet are japan and mougals. I'm doing mougals right now, I've only unlocked like 3 techs and I have 4 days left on my first run. I did it on beta but I actually did have to use diamonds to complete it and complete it on time, the crazy thing was I literally ran out of space to put decos and wasn't able to unlock the final tech.

The two inherently bad executions of the settlements are: the supplies productions and the requirement of smiles. This is always the complaints of every settlement. The supplies are always too low so it's difficult if not impossible to run goods buildings, and the need for smiles you literally have to destroy your city to unlock techs which, if you think about actually building a good settlement, the LAST thing that is productive for a settlement is destroying the city.

 

[DEADP00L]

what I hate most in the colonies is the principle of destroying and then building a temporary city to destroy everything and rebuild the previous buildings. All this to keep up with a thoughtless quest history.

but we had already said it before the Mughals and we saw the result of the taking into account of our feedback by the incompetent developers!

 

[Gedged]

Settlements are much better when you stop worrying about the time reward.
What annoys me the most is the need to build so many 1x1 culture things and then delete them.
Japan was the easiest but the buildings are outdated. I already sold my Dojos and the Shinto Temple will probably go in the next few months.
Egypt is my favourite as it is very laid back.
I promised myself that I would skip Aztecs but now I am doing it anyway.
I don't want any new settlements, but if they add something better than Yggdrasil I will do it.

 

[Beta-OD]

I do them, on my main, I'm in the 2nd to last in getting them done.

I'm okay if we so no more. I'd also be okay if they changed it vastly to be more interested and not such a time suck. I realize they want us checking in the game a lot but between everything else going on in the game, I'm not sure we need it.

I like the idea of doing something outside of the normal 'world' we play on but the play itself and rewards are somewhat lackluster (on the newest one at least). Too much of the same build, move, destroy, rebuild, lots of waiting, etc.

 

[Markus Stormrider]

must admit, the Mughal settlement is by far the worst one to play, followed closely by Vikings (which only sucks cuz of its difficulty). the 30 fp reward building of Mughals is still good though (especially with Blue Galaxy bonus applied)

 

[tunix]

I'm only on my second Mughal settlement, but it looks like there will be plenty of time left this time as well. I like that better than other settlements where the time limit is not enough.

 

[Retired Guy]

Here's an idea.... a "Jules Verne Settlement" .. with a time travel final reward... only available once you reach Colonial, or may Industrial era
- settlement based on a small town in France, perhaps a sailing town... settlement building being a time machine.
- For the levels, they would add "knowledge" based boosts to your city., increased knowledge giving you.. . coin boosts, supply boosts, goods production, military.. not cumulative like our current ones, but each level would provide a distinct boost.
- upon completing your Time Machine at the max level, you could opt to travel backwards (not sure about forwards?) in time (era).. so Let's say you're in Tomorrow, but really want to go back to Colonial.. you could do that.. you'd restart the Tech Tree at Colonial, any era goods buildings would be deleted, and any event bldgs reset to the Colonial era. Colonial would be as far back as you could go..
- you could go back to any era between your current one, and Colonial.. and of course, you'd have to restart\complete the settlement to travel again.

 

[drakenridder]

Here's an idea.... a "Jules Verne Settlement" .. with a time travel final reward... only available once you reach Colonial, or may Industrial era
- settlement based on a small town in France, perhaps a sailing town... settlement building being a time machine.
- For the levels, they would add "knowledge" based boosts to your city., increased knowledge giving you.. . coin boosts, supply boosts, goods production, military.. not cumulative like our current ones, but each level would provide a distinct boost.
- upon completing your Time Machine at the max level, you could opt to travel backwards (not sure about forwards?) in time (era).. so Let's say you're in Tomorrow, but really want to go back to Colonial.. you could do that.. you'd restart the Tech Tree at Colonial, any era goods buildings would be deleted, and any event bldgs reset to the Colonial era. Colonial would be as far back as you could go..
- you could go back to any era between your current one, and Colonial.. and of course, you'd have to restart\complete the settlement to travel again.

Complex but interesting. Do we keep our units and expansions? So, we can reuse expansions from the TT? That would be awesome way to bypass the diamond expansions.

 

[Retired Guy]

I think you'd have to give up the TT expansions, else it gets just too complex... ideally, clear x expansions, which would be deleted, and then travel back and repeat TT

 

[Kronan]

Maybe I'm thinking more strategically, but the game is called Forge of Empires. These are building blocks, as individual cultural settlements. What if there was a bigger overarching goal for full or even partial completion of these 5 settlements into creating a true Empire from them, and even any new future "building block" settlements?

Right now they're all individual, but if instead of going "to infinity" for 50FP, each settlement completes through a portal into a higher dimensional game of a single EMPIRE, from the union of all current 5.

It would do a number of things (and I'm not designing it here, just suggesting the strategy).
1) It would give a higher order of interest into completing each single settlement, for the opportunity to enter the SINGLE EMPIRE settlement in multiple places, to the players advantage.
2) The EMPIRE section is the Apex (currently). It would require multiple disciplines we have not yet seen: ambassadorial skills, intra and extra guild cooperating, for example.

Just thinking out loud on how to widen the strategic scope of ALL the settlement together as an ecosystem, vs create a new one at the level of view each one currently sits.

 

[xivarmy]

Maybe I'm thinking more strategically, but the game is called Forge of Empires. These are building blocks, as individual cultural settlements. What if there was a bigger overarching goal for full or even partial completion of these 5 settlements into creating a true Empire from them, and even any new future "building block" settlements?

Right now they're all individual, but if instead of going "to infinity" for 50FP, each settlement completes through a portal into a higher dimensional game of a single EMPIRE, from the union of all current 5.

It would do a number of things (and I'm not designing it here, just suggesting the strategy).
1) It would give a higher order of interest into completing each single settlement, for the opportunity to enter the SINGLE EMPIRE settlement in multiple places, to the players advantage.
2) The EMPIRE section is the Apex (currently). It would require multiple disciplines we have not yet seen: ambassadorial skills, intra and extra guild cooperating, for example.

Just thinking out loud on how to widen the strategic scope of ALL the settlement together as an ecosystem, vs create a new one at the level of view each one currently sits.

That sounds more like a punishment aspect than a strategic aspect. A number of players have opted to skip certain settlements just because they don't like them. The rewards for them being fixed, they can assert "well i'll live without that one" - and that's their choice. Another layer on top that forces you to do all the existing settlements to get new ones wouldn't be more strategic - it'd just make the earlier settlements more compulsory.

Which sounds right up inno's alley actually, so you may even get your wish

 

[Kronan]

Like @xivarmy for not only the really good chortle I had with your last comment, but for the other consideration.

Clearly I'm not designing it or asking Inno to fix what we consider tactically broken in the individual settlements, but trying to think 3 dimensionally on the whole CONCEPT of what it is. I find it myopic, to keep cloning individual settlement ideas, without a bigger shell to put them all in for a "higher value/higher purpose" than just a tactical completion.

Inno's really looking for us to put down big game roots, and settlements do some of that, but if they blow the top (or the endings...) off the current ones and extend the value of the idea they created, it has much more incremental value, IMHO.

 

[Ironrooster]

Here's an idea.... a "Jules Verne Settlement" .. with a time travel final reward... only available once you reach Colonial, or may Industrial era
- settlement based on a small town in France, perhaps a sailing town... settlement building being a time machine.
- For the levels, they would add "knowledge" based boosts to your city., increased knowledge giving you.. . coin boosts, supply boosts, goods production, military.. not cumulative like our current ones, but each level would provide a distinct boost.
- upon completing your Time Machine at the max level, you could opt to travel backwards (not sure about forwards?) in time (era).. so Let's say you're in Tomorrow, but really want to go back to Colonial.. you could do that.. you'd restart the Tech Tree at Colonial, any era goods buildings would be deleted, and any event bldgs reset to the Colonial era. Colonial would be as far back as you could go..
- you could go back to any era between your current one, and Colonial.. and of course, you'd have to restart\complete the settlement to travel again.

The idea is certainly different.
But why go back? why not just start a new city and bring it up to Colonial?
If you're going back why not go back to the end of the Age/Era with the tech tree completed?

 

[LastWarrior]

Well settlements are in now forever.
Do I like them? Hmmm some are good but tedious so leaning towards a no.
The rewards on the last one were just not worth the effort.

 

[Darrth Eugene Vader3]

The game should have a strategic plan for growth and innovation.

• Given the structure of the game in ages, new ages must be introduced from time to time to give long time Players new content to keep playing, not just to sit at end of research tree doing recurring quests over and over and over. One new age per year, is that enough?
• Events must continue and from time to they should be improved or changed by new ones. Changes not limited to new buildings, but also to format of the event, story, quest givers, mini games, extra rewards based on level of player progress in leagues( amateur, professional, others) etc.
  • Take Halloween event for example. After a few years with Riddles to solve, the format of the event was changed to storytelling and walking inside a library, now with a clown fair theme (clone of the Archeology event), continue with the fair/clowns for 2 more years and then change to explore / digging in an old cemetery?
  • Summer event have been a couple of years with the same pirate history. Could at least the story be changed?
• Side activities around the game like: Daily Challenges, Auction Dealer, GE should also have changes. Maybe for some of these not every year, but I would visualize a change to GE every 3 or 4 years. Some have suggested a 5th level, others to be able to follow an alternative route in the same level.
• GBG has recently changed by adding a 2nd map, and the current two maps are alternating in next seasons. a thrid map in 3 or 4 years? Mayor improvement in the Leagues system?

With Settlements Inno should have a strategic plan to grow/improve. Maybe five Settlements are enough, but re-evaluate them and decide every 4 or 5 years if discontinuing one and replace it with another, or keep the five if the feedback is good for all of them (not current state).

 

[MightyMouse0930]

World Second Largest Civilization/Economy = 0
Probably intended.

 

[Finkadel]

No.