I think the game is shaping up very nicely! The gameplay is smooth; I no longer see choppiness in the animations. I’m also pleased to see the farmer using a hoe instead of a hammer 
to till the land.
Now that we have the weaver and the trapper in the game, there’s more stuff to do! Needing to have the farmer plant milkweed, harvest it, then have the weaver use that to make thread, and turn the thread into cloth and have the carpenter use that to make a nice comfy bed… It adds loads of depth to the gameplay. With items requiring dependencies on other resources, you can pretty much be actively harvesting and building stuff non-stop now! And yet…
I found myself waiting. This is because at the start, I made all the profession tools and assigned my citizens professions. I went with 2 footmen because goblins seem to be like zerglings by travelling in packs. Which in the end, left me with 1 worker.
I set up a nice little house design and put him to work, but even though he’s got a much faster building animation (which is awesome), he was pretty much the only person working on it, even when my non-worker citizens weren’t building anything. So over the course of the hour, I hadn’t even finished my house.
An obvious solution to this is to have idle workers chip in an help out. However, once it gets to the point where all of your non-worker citizens are needing to do their jobs, the construction time slows wayyy down if you are stuck with only a couple of workers. Plus, my farmer was letting crops rot because he was taking too long to harvest and add more farmland.
Over the course of the hour, no caravans wanted to come by and join my settlement, so out of the boredom of waiting for my single worker to finish the house, I quit that session.
I’m under the personal impression right now that there needs to be some large focus on population growth. I know in prior livestreams, the devs didn’t want to really hit that topic because they were still in early development, and there have been threads on the general concept before, and the devs probably have some sort of workflow laid out, but I think this is something that should be at least partially implemented for alpha 5.
Currently, if I screw up with my professions, I get stuck waiting on construction. Or if I screw up with my defenses, I lose citizens and the gameplay slows to a crawl.
This is probably just an unreasonably long post to get to the point, but we need population growth that probably isn’t dependent on how appealing our settlement is to caravans.
Obviously the game is still in development. Alpha 4 is amazing. The animations are smooth, we can finally traverse the different tiers of the land… I love it. I’m even considering learning lua and getting qubicle for modding. But in the meantime, I’ll NOT be assigning my workers to professions right away so I can actually have a home within the first hour.
Also, we are almost at the point where professions will outnumber our workers so we’ll need larger populations to actually see how the impact of new features play out on the population.
tldr; I vote for priority on population growth.
Enough of the monologue. Does anyone share this opinion? Or perhaps there are some other game features that should take increased priority for near-future releases?
