I decided I want my kingdom to be as awesome as possible (I always do). There’s only a limited amount of ores on the map, so I wanted to make sure I could collect/mine all of it (eventually). My plan was to build a huge fort in the middle of the map; but starting with that is inefficient (too much time wasted for miners/haulers to walk between middle of map to/from the corners of the map). For this reason I decided it’d be best to start with a temporary camp in one corner, terraform that corner, then shift camp to the next corner and do that area, and so on; then start building my fort in the middle after the “distant corners” were done.
The result? 45 hearthlings with most civilians trained to level 6 in at least 2 different roles (including 3 engineers) and most military trained to level 6 in 4 roles (either farmer, footman, knight, archer; or herbalist, cleric, footman, archer), everyone with the best equipment they can have, every recipe and role unlocked, all quests that couldn’t be postponed completed (all except the “gong quests” - was saving them for “end game”), all stockpiles replaced with golden vaults, etc. I hadn’t even finished 25% of the first corner, and didn’t build a single building - it was just a temporary initial camp.
Because that’s about how long it takes to unlock everything. After that you’re just playing with yourself, with no new roles or new recipes or new equipment to look forward to.
I didn’t realise building things unlocked new roles, new recipes or new equipment. None of my buildings have ever done these things. Do I need to use templates to unlock things?
Note that if you do build buildings (instead of doing a heap of mining like I do), it increases your kingdom value faster and unlocks everything even quicker. It literally makes the “nothing new after about 2 hours” problem worse.
I’m not saying buildings unlock anything, but the reason you think people get bored after two hours is obviously because you haven’t built anything. That’s the part of the game that so many people consider the “fun” part.
@Dwalus: Start a new world and continue working on that new world for at least 8 hours per day for at least 14 days. After the first “almost zero time” there is absolutely nothing to look forward to (other than buildings that you build yourself, which do nothing other than act as decoration).
Well, I’m seven hours into my current village and I’m not even close to growing bored. I still have plenty of things to unlock because I’m enjoying the game for what it is, a cute colonization management game that’s focused heavily on construction. That’s why most of the craftable items serve no purpose beyond aesthetic.
No thank you. I have both a job and a social life, and thus, no time to spend almost 60 hours a week on a single game. However, I have played well beyond two hours in numerous settlements in Stonehearth, and not once have I run out of things to do.
Do me a favor and try playing for enjoyment rather than just trying to grab all the minerals you can. Make a little city and see how much fun it is then. I can guarantee you won’t grow bored in two hours, and if you do it says more about you than the game.
Then do us all a favor and stop complaining about it. It’s like complaining about Minecraft having “no content” because you never build anything. That’s one of the main reasons people play it.
Building a small town is what you do when you’re learning how to play; and if I only wanted to build a little town (now that I am familiar with the game) I’d use “instant build” and templates and be done in less than 5 minutes because there’s no sense of accomplishment or achievement involved in “yet another little town, the same as all players build when they first start playing”.
I want to build something large/impressive - something that takes planning and skill and time. Something that takes a lot of effort. That is where the problem is: before I’ve scratched the surface I’ve reached “end game”.
And yes, it is fun to play. That’s why I want to play for longer. That’s why I want to build something large/impressive so I have a reason to keep playing longer. If the game wasn’t fun I would’ve stopped playing it after building my first stupid little town the day after I downloaded/installed it.
Friendly reminder! We devs strive to create a game that multiple people can enjoy playing, in various different ways. If you find it fun, we love hearing about it, and if you’re not finding it fun, and there’s stuff you’d like us to add, we’d like to hear about that too! Finding a balance between sandbox and guided gameplay is something we’re very interested in doing, but it’s a long process. The best way you can help us is not to argue about which way is right, but to explain what you want to do and how.
Don’t get me wrong here - I do find the game fun, but I also think there are ways to make it even more fun for even longer…
Things that (in my opinion) would make the fun last longer include:
a) Make the player achieve something (e.g. reach the next “tier”) before unlocking more advanced roles (e.g. engineer); instead of having all roles available at start of game.
b) Replace recipes as the game progresses. Maybe after defeating a certain enemy the recipe for “stone table” gets replaced with “fancy stone table”. Maybe after completing a very hard quest your turret recipe gets replaced with a cannon recipe. It doesn’t necessarily need to be any different other than appearance (same raw materials, same stats) - it’s just something different to look forward to and a reason to replace all your old/existing items with something else so they match.
c) Give everyone more equipment - things that are hard to create and can’t be purchased from a travelling merchant. At the moment, there’s nothing you can give a farmer, cook, trapper, shepherd, … (they won’t even wear upgraded worker outfits).
d) Let hearthlings keep some small bonus if they change roles after earning level 6. For example, if a farmer reaches level 6 they get to keep the “speed bonus” when they change to any other role. Add some kind of small bonus to all of the roles too (maybe masons get a strength bonus, for carpenters maybe it’s a defence bonus, for herbalist maybe it’s a natural health regen bonus, etc). That way someone playing the same world for a long time could rotate their hearthlings and have little hearthling improvements to look forward to for a very long time (how long would it take to train a single hearthling to level 6 in all 15 roles just to collect all the little bonuses? I’m guessing an entire week!).
e) Bury one and only one of something that can’t be obtained any other way in a random place deep underground. Even if it’s just something silly (“Shiny Copper Goblet of the Donkey King”) a player might spend 3 weeks digging just so that they can say they’ve found it (or have an “Oh my” moment if they stumble across it by accident).
I’m arguing against the above quote of yours. I’m saying that people do expect players to play for more than two hours, and not everything can be achieved in two hours because players do like building the next biggest/best designed/coolest castle/city/cathedral in the game. These are very long projects as you found out, and it’s this competitive drive toward building that gives the game endless replay value. The combat campaigns aren’t the main focus of the game. They’re repetitive after the first time playing. The building is what makes the game take far longer than two hours or even two weeks to fully enjoy what Stonehearth has to offer. The combat and crafting are (at least currently) just supplemental features.
Yes; but during those first 2 hours there’s (almost constantly) some perk to anticipate and look forward to. You get your first cleric or engineer or cook, you get the quests, you keep getting new immigrants to train up, you get enough steel to make good weapons/armour, etc. After those first few hours there’s a sharp drop off. There’s still some things, but they’re much less exciting - your second cleric, your third archer. It declines from there until you reach your population cap and there’s no more immigrants and all your hearthings are level 6 in their selected role.
Then there’s nothing left but mining and building. No interesting little things that add to what you can already do, or improve your hearthlings further. All the added bits of excitement are all dried up and gone.
Well, that’s just a matter of personal preference. For me, completing a new building (especially one that doesn’t break the hearthling AI ) is much more satisfying than leveling up a hearthling or unlocking a new class.
It’s a huge (e.g. 150 * 150) fortress with layers dug down into the world almost all the way to bedrock; with pastures and farms and trapper areas on the top (on natural grass); and grand dining room, kitchen, crafting areas and bedrooms in lower layers; and entrance near the bottom layer with treasure room below that; with huge stair-cases and high ceilings and decorations and opulence.
For construction, it’s simply too large. I have to build in pieces - dig out one layer, build the floor in sections, build walls separately (with slabs). Add furniture and chests and workbenches last.
You’re saying anything that doesn’t require you to work the equivalent to a full-time job for two solid weeks is too easy? As I said before, many of us simply don’t have the time (or can’t justify the waste of time) required to build something so large. Besides, bigger doesn’t always mean better, since a well-designed structure is always better than one that’s simply large.
Mine wasn’t so much dependent on era’s but more of a way to introduce a new requirement in addition of just leveling a hearthling, other than just leveling a hearthling. The whole era thing on my part was nothing more than a example.
Another way may be something simple like when your town gets a certain wealth/score and you meet the requirements to get another hearthling, a new hearthling joins with a special class already -or- get a special Class changing items through special merchants that comes by when your settlement become a township or by royal decree you get a class changing item from the princess that your crafters can’t craft.
Edit: Oh! and I think the game is going fine but it never hurts to throw out a few suggestions… maybe it will spark another idea from TR or others that might be the next big thing.
I think something like this could work, it reminds me of the way Civ5 and Barbarian Encampments work. You discover a random technology, gold (loot), or information. Much like the way trading works right now, if the trading system was ever updated I could see the looting system being expanded to include things besides just looting gold, but rare goblin tech and recipes using a strange combination of materials and an odd production queue / method. Almost like a crafting quest requiring oddities that you would otherwise never think of being useful or bother stockpiling.
What I’d like to see is something similar where you would have a max level Farmer and retrain them to be an Engineer and suddenly you can build new technology dedicated to farming equipment. So cross-tech specific roles that require a particular set of skills to reach. Sure you could make this possible without training a single hearthling to know all this information and instead have a collaborative effort between a dedicated farmer and a dedicated engineer, but I think there should be a bonus set of tech (similar to fine objects) that adds more quality of life for and user friendliness to the player. This would be a super expansion of the current job tree.
In a strict technical way, all roles are indeed unlocked in the sense that you can see them, and if you had all the resources/tools on hand to enable a hearthling to take on the job, you could do so at the start. However, considering hearthlings have to level up and the meager resources each village starts with, there is indeed a progression built in before more advanced jobs are “unlocked”. In light of the time scale a village can exist for, that progression is a relatively small percentage of the total play time, but I think that’s more of a tuning/balance issue to be sorted out during this pre-release phase of development.
Some games take a “Research” approach to this concept (RimWorld, for example). Regardless, this is just trading in the current more subtle progression for a more hard gated one that IMO, breaks the paradigm that the devs seem to be (successfully) following.
Mod it in, and if it works well, it might get consumed into the base game.
I love the idea of having multi-class synergies. Some of the current perks’ descriptions even already lend themselves to this kind of idea. It would be great if the Farmer got to take some of their higher level perks up to Cook and could make better or more varied foods right off the bat if they stick out farmer to the end, whereas the farmer that jumps to coop at lvl 2 either won’t ever get those bonuses, or will have to work at cooking for much longer to figure out the cooler stuff of their class.
That is a delightfully insidious idea. That’s also idea fodder for another mod.
