Modders, Devs, People with style sense! I shall speak to you!

Hi! I just came here to basically share my thoughts on things that could be done or improved in this game. I know i sound like everyone else, but maybe something will go through to someone. So i will split this thing into a 2 categories: What to do and What to improve somehow (if it can be done that way). So, Let’s get started shall we?

What to do, to make my life better, and life of others better

  1. Maybe this was bringed on, at some point but: Mod manager and user creation manager to upload stuff like building plans. A place, in menu where you can just click, it will navigate to another menu, where you select mod/mods and click download, and the game will do everything for you. I think it would be great if we had one place “to rule them all”. Like a subsection on a main page, where anyone can upload their smod or json, and it will be availble for download in game itself. Something like Steam workshop, but i know there are copies that hasn’t been used with a steam, so having a place like this will be amazing, and it will make life for everyone simpler. But i know - storing, and dynamically serve data to clients will be quite impactful on costs, especially in first months, but you never know. The same deal goes with user creations, and you could do some sort of integration of both, because some building requires some mods. So for example - Im selecting nice building, etc. and it says something like this: “In order for building this template correctly you need to install mod X. Do you want to install it? Yes no.”.

  2. A ability, to select mods separately for each playthrough. Like example: Save 1 has enabled mods A, B,C and D. while save 2 have enabled mods A, C, E and Y. And here comes the question: “Why do you want it omg, if you dont use mod - then uninstall it!”. No, you see im a man that makes an actual effort to research things. To research how impactful on playthrough will be mod A, or mod B. Or mod A and B together. The ability, to just have my normal save with enabled some mods, and then straight up test worlds for another mods would be awesome.

  3. Making water actually useful or usable. Even for decorative purposes. So i could for example design a town square, with an actual water level in it. And maybe abilities to use water in other purposes - like, access to water could speed up a process of growing for certain plants.

  4. Hearthlings stats control. When starting the game, sometimes rolling certain stats and traits combo can be pain in the arse. So ability to control stats (Not traits! These should remain random and to make it more interesting - you could do traits reroll but only i’d say once per game start.) would be appreciated on the harder difficulty, because harder diffs are to beat, using your mind, so making a thoughtful decision about Hearthling X, to make him a little more buffed over others to serve as a protector. There should be an option just to select if you want Completely random hearthlings, or 7 hearthling starting at 1/1/1 with a pool of lets say we have a fixed amount of points (lets say 49, this will make ability to make all hearthlings 4/3/3) and we should give it a thought how to spend them well. How to make certain stats strenghten the traits that we rolled.

  5. Adventures. The point of the game, where you just sorta’ built everything you wanted and you maxed out the city is the point, where boredom appears. Lets change that. We have footman and knight classes - Lets make them useful more than ever! Introducing: Random adventures! Sort of dungeonish places, where you can send your troops from like second squad. That are completely Random. You would start from lets say Random quest, random request or just find one on your own. You would then send your squad in for an action. They will explore this place. They will ocasionally ask you a question “What should i do? Open the chest and take a risk, or leave it behind?” Where you will have combat grid (if there is a combat ofc) like in HoMM3. Where you control actually those troops, control their skills etc, making it to try beat the challenge. Also… Speaking of skills - There should be another class of worker added to the game - Trainer. Trainer will impact the game, by helping the Hearthlings develop new skills, and/or help them improve skills that they have. Like in ex. Trainer will have ability to teach knight a shield bash, a move, that knocks out a enemy for a short period of time. Another example - For basic peasant - Trainer could teach basic hearthling a skill, that makes him build stuff from wood 10% faster, or mine 10% faster. Not to make them OP, just to make replayability more consistent, because with Trainer you can focus on different playstyles. Ofc you will need to pay, every skill will cost, gold + resources and the cost should scale well with your overall wealth and how many things you have teached to everybody not just a particular hearthling etc. In exchange you get bonuses to your dear fellow minions.

And this all is a challenge. But not only for devs, but for modders too. I gave you basic idea. What you do with it - its yours.

And now the list of things that could be improved. Dont take this personally - Just there are really minor things that straight up annoys me

  1. Ambient volume slider - i love to hear things that my hearthlings are directly involved with. I just want to make this annoying owl at night to be a bit quieter.

  2. These hearthlings still can stuck while building. On a lamp that they placed on a wall, or on a freshly built wall, when the supporting structure has been dismantled by other fellow hearthlings.

  3. Make hearthlings task prioritization include some exceptions. Sometimes my hearthlings will be stuck. Why? Because i chopped some wood, then i ordered “Build This”. And then in the middle of construction i had no wood left in stockpile, there was like 80 logs laying on the ground 30 meters from my city, from frehsly chopped wood. But hearthlings still wont pick it up to build a building, because they are trying to build something but have nothing to work with. A proper game restart fixes this problem but still - sometimes annyoing.

Thank you for understanding my suggestions. Constructive criticism is always appreciated. If you want to have a proper discusion - feel free to hit here.
Also just a quick deal: If i misused some grammar form anywhere - I’m sorry, i do still learn proper English.

I’m going to say this is already in there when the mod manager is able to hot-load mods in the settings menu. Don’t even need to restart the game.

As stated multiple times…@Albert is on this. Hold fast, for you shall have your moats yet.

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More settings would be great, but I’d personally be fine with them just lowering the volume of some of these things to fit better. I don’t know if they have anybody who can do much audio stuff after their old sound designer left, though.

Chris’s changes to the building backend should fix most of these bugs, but we’ll have to wait for the new building editor before that gets released.