I like the idea of settlers joining you when your town morale is high, but won’t somebody please think of the children?!
I think this sounds great, If it is a balance between happy members and abundant of goods it can work out great. I mean who wants to join a village where people are pissed off ahahahah
I thought that stuff was the job of the game master.
Wasnt the original goal t make it so taht uf you played aggressively, more wars happened to you more often/it got more difficult to keep it fun for you if you prefer conquest and fighting to building a city.
And if you preferred building, you would get attacked far less…
Therefore shouldnt we also have the option to kidnap people for our cause?
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I agree with you. There should always be a way to proceed and succeed, even if I, say, want to play as an evil tyrant!
I’ve played basically every town-based game I could find and Timber and Stone is approaching my favorite except for the migrant model – and its the migrant model that makes me not play the game any more. I like the idea of having migrants, but its too much of a black box and too random. Some games I would have a ton of immigrants, others I would have none, with essentially exactly the same build.
I would like to see more control over the migrants, like a list of factors that govern when a migrant will come, where you’re at with each factor, and a popup notification that tells you when a migrant is ready to join. Then, when you’re ready (not in combat, for instance) you can accept the queued migrants into the fold.
Just some thoughts.
I find the most difficult aspect of the migration model is when enemy strength is based on your unit total. You get a sudden influx of 4 or 5 units and you haven’t adequately prepared defences etc. and you then are attacked with an enemy that is far too strong for you.
This is definitely something that will make more sense when we get hands on with it, to see how it works, what it feels like.
The great thing about iterative development is that if a proposed system doesn’t work you can scrap it and try a different approach.
I guess my biggest concern would be in having some transparency in-game on whatever details of the migrant system you settle with. In Timber and Stone, I had to dig through forums to find out, at least in theory, why no migrants were inbound.
At the end of the day, you guys are making a game with specific rules. As long as the rules are known it can, and probably will, be fun. As soon as the rules of the game are obfuscated, it stops being fun and turns into a frustrating chore.
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I had to do the exact same thing :D, I’d definitely like to see how the whole system works when we get the chance to play with it, do we have complete control over whether a settler joins, how many migrants will come each time? That sort of thing.
I mostly agree with this, if rules and systems are obfuscated too much with games like Dwarf Fortress and it’s ilk, then it can be extremely frustrating as a player to figure out what the hell it is you are supposed to be doing here. But hand holding all the way removes that satisfaction that comes with accomplishing these things. Granted that Dwarf Fortress is renowned for being that incredibly difficult yet rewarding experience.
Like you said, things can be altered and scrapped should Team Radiant feel that it’s not working, or from our feedback if something is deemed to be too vague/ just isn’t working.
Obfuscate is a great word by the way.
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for better or worse, i would really love to try an approach similar to the Starcraft RTS model, where you can manually trigger/create a unit of a specific type (with an appropriate resource tradeoff)… just for grins… 
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You should have to build an outhouse, which you must then surround with foodstuff and then proceed to burn to the ground, and when the smoke reveals 
new settler!
I mean to me it’s quite a fair trade, new settler for x wood and y food…
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I can’t help but think about Black and White. You build a house and the population tries to reproduce enough to fill it. You could rank housing by comfort and decoration, to give families incentive to move in. Like a 1-roomer with a straw pallet might not attract anyone for a long time, while a 3.2 with lavish furnishings and decorations would spawn a new settler almost as soon as the paint is dry.
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The trouble with building houses like that is getting the game to recognise what is & isn’t a house when you start building custom structures.
The way Gnomoria and, I think, Dwarf Fortress do it is by settlement wealth. The more stuff you make, the more migrants (and raiders) are attracted to it. I think that’d work fine for Stonehearth… BUT I’d have a longer delay for additional raiders than for settlers. Ie, your regular raiders can attack at the same time as the new settlers, but you’ll have time to put the new people to work before they trigger additional attackers.