Behavior and Personality

I wanted to through this out there, but I think a behavior/personality type for each villager would be a cool idea.
Example:

Villager: Tom Riddle
Personality: Admirable (+2 Atk when defending village)
Behavior: Caring (Will be more likely to stay up and take longer shifts so others can sleep)

or

Villager: Jenny Craig
Personality: Demanding (Eats double rations)
Behavior: Mischievous (Will sometimes take random naps or will play pranks on other villagers)

the different personality types will add variety to the village and encourage players to actually make a choice instead of just accepting everyone that comes into the village.

Another idea would be to set tasks for them. I am pretty sure I have seen someone suggest this part before. Things like having farmers prioritize certain farm plots over others. Or the ability to set a patrol route for your guards instead of them wandering aimlessly. Setting a patrol from point A to point B would be more useful and would allow the guards to react to invaders sooner. Or a ‘guard zone’ function where they stand their ground but attack any invaders within their line of sight.

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Great ideas!
Lets hope the deverlopers do something like this

There are some downsides to this. For example, too many negative behavioural traits might make starter Hearthlings undesirable to the point of wanting to start a new game. I know that I already re-roll my Hearthlings until I get a 6/6/6 or at least close to that.

Given that especially with Rayya’s Children where you need to manage your resources properly having Hearthlings that eat too much or don’t do enough work will really mess up your play and might even cost you the seed. The important note is balancing those traits so everyone has at least some reason to be desirable, and traits need to also be balanced in such a way that they are powerful enough to impact the gameplay, but not so great that they make Hearthlings functionally worthless.

It’s certainly a good idea to add depth to the game, and I like the idea of Hearthlings that behave differently, like perhaps some are just Night-owls and like to stay up late and sleep through parts of the day, but I am wary of the cruel hand of RNGesus.

I believe this will eventually get added to some extent. Last year, there were little contests to write personality statements for the hearthlings, some of which you can see in the journal feedback. I’m fairly certain @Tom said they’d like to tie these into the units’ personalities and abilities somehow in the future.

With this in mind, here’s something I think could be added relatively easily but would liven up the game world: what if these personalities affected the hearthling’s appearance and animations? Case in point, the idle animations. Right now, they’re pretty uniform and boring. But what if for the Insufferable Academic (you can find old examples of some of these personalities in the old Writer’s Workshop threads), they cross their arms and look around impatiently or pull out a book and start to read? It wouldn’t really affect the gameplay, but it’d be an easy aesthetic addition.

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I think this idea is great! A lot of games do something similar (first one off the top of my head is Timber & Stone). None of the traits are so drastic that you would restart the game if you got all bad traits, but they are enough that you do think about it while playing.

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That is were I think it just comes down to taste. I want to play for social realism so the prospect of having hearthlings that are actually useless seems fun to me. I personally don’t roll for a 6/6/6 combo cause that also is boring. I don’t mind everyone starting with a 1/1/1 start so long as there are ways to level it up. Normally I try and get three hearthlings with a single 6 stat rather than one hearthling with all three.
As for undesirable traits, I think you should make it changeable due to circumstance.
Example: someone who is mischievous may become more responsible if their deeds resulted in an injury or death of a friend. Like people, the hearthlings should be able to grow and ‘learn’

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