My Feedback on Alpha 20 Changes

Alright, so I have probably clocking in more hours than I should have on Alpha 20…

I have to say though, that the game is getting better and better :slight_smile:

Anyway, going into detail with the changes and how I feel about them. I will also point out bugs I have found.

Rescue

I find the time for hearthlings to recover is reasonable and the animations are really good. However, I found a number of issues with how other mechanics interact with the hearthling once they are recovering in bed.

  1. Since the bugfix that enabled hunger damage was implemented hearthlings that are recovering in bed will take damage if they didn’t eat shortly before their untimely mishap. Once they have recovered the blue heart they will beging taking hunger damage faster than they can recover it in bed, causing them to just die repeatedly. This could be fixed by having other hearthlings take up the responsibility of feeding the injured hearthling (a sweet animation opotunity), having these injured hearthlings able to get up to eat themselves, or just making them immune to hunger damage until they make a full recovery.

  2. Herbalists prioritize item creation, hualing and other actions over helping and healing injured hearthlings. I have only had once scenario where a herbalist managed to assist an injured hearthling in bed. This may have been a distance issue because my trapper was always placed in “her” bed and this was quite far from my herbalist’s house. Perhaps we can specifiy that some beds are considered “sick beds” were injured hearthlings will be taken to sick beds first before filling others.

  3. In some situations my military hearthlings would juggle an injured hearthling and eventually just leave the poor thing at the foot of a bed where it still didn’t make a recovery. This may have been caused by a tight space that was messing with pathing (was in the Ascendancy house for two) or having 25 hearthlings was putting stain on the AI and something went wrong.

Two Meals a Day

  1. This wasn’t a major issue in the early game, however I noticed that as the game progressed my food issues were becoming increasingly more difficult. I was struggling to increase my food value (to bring in more hearthlings) in the later stages of the game. Even with 5 farmers, 1 shepherd and 1 trapper I was struggling to more hearthlings every day. However this may have been caused by poorly placed storage that forced my farmers to walk large distances. I will do more testing.

Moods and Thoughts

This is a great mechanic. It made me as a player take more factors into consideration when planning my city and managing my resources. I actually got a cook and made the effort to upgrade beds and buildings as I progressed. So the emergent gameplay is undoubtedly positive but I simply found it too difficult to maintain happy hearthlings. They were almost always content. They were always cramped and I just couldn’t keep up with their simpler needs later in the game.

Although in my next game I will try and create boundry walls and larger, double story houses to see I this solves the space issues I ran into.

Rising Courage

I haven’t gotten around to testing this effectively in the early game. Later in the game it is pretty useless, but I suppose it is meant to be like that.

Overall I love the direction these changes are going and Look forward to more stuff to test :smiley:

Hopefully we can get a good discussion going, feel free to comment, add your opinions or disagree with anything I have said. All feedback is good feedback.

6 Likes

yes, rimworld does this exact thing, waiting for stonehearth to implement it

2 Likes

Yea, the lategame food struggle is real unless you devote vast swathes of land and 3-4 hearthlings to carrot/turnip agriculture.

It would be nice to have a better overview of what food you have, rather than just blindly stuffing chests. It’s also more challenging to give my hearthlings cooked food when they go for the nearby raw stuff first.

I don’t know. I currently have a population of 25 maintained by 2 farmers, a shepherd (providing eggs mostly), a trapper and a cook (although the cook works almost non-stop to maintain food level). Inviting more population is somewhat tricky but not impossible (my farmers are max level already). When I see I lack just a bit I make a quick “boost” by gathering berry bushes nearby (replanted them to keep as a reserve).

Carrot/turnip is good early on. Later I push for pumpkins / corn / wheat.
Late-game trapper usually provides more meat that the cook can process resulting in rotten jerky. Perhaps I need a second cook… Or more vegetables to maintain meat-based recipes.

That is your problem. Those crops are the least valuable. You need food that is worth more. A single roasted mutton is worth more than 50 berries. You need to use better crops.
Actually, forget crops, you need the cooked foods, use the crops just to get the ingredients.

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Hm. That’s what I’ve been doing, but I started adding turnip/carrots back in to get more veggie stews cooked. Maybe I should just double down and get a second cook…

My town have 31 hearthlings, 4 farmers and 2 cooks. I have one farm of each crop possible, some are full 11x11, others (like turnips) are smaller,depending one how useful or not it is. All together, it corresponds to an area of 6 11x11 farms.

I also have one shepherd with 4 sheep and 6 chickens, for the ingredients of some recipes from the cook. I maintain 10 of each food type.
Oh, and one trapper with a small field (I think it is the minimum size) for some meat ingredients too.

These are my “statistics”. You can scale it to your game and maybe adapt it to your strategies.