Hello everyone. I recently sat down with my family over a good Thanksgiving Dinner (we all play Stonehearth, total geeks all of us) and the current notion of soldiers just being your run of the mill Colonists came up. The general complaint that we agreed upon was the fact that soldiers just kind of did whatever they wanted without any real push unless you tagged an area for attack. There is no system for patrolling, there is no system for a barracks, no ability to really set their working hours, etc.
This all being said, I was wondering how people would perceive the idea of introducing a few additions to how soldiers in general are handled.
A list of ideas we threw together:
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Patrol Paths| While not 100 percent useful at the moment a feature like this would open the doors for the future batches of content.
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Guard Post/Posts| A dual idea here but one that may work well. A guard post would be a section that idle guards would stand, primarily two or so at a time, and just guard/live in the area until their shift is over. This means your wall now has someone guarding it instead of randomly walking around it. Add a few chairs, a table, a place to store some food, and now you have happy guards who will stand the tests of time. This system is also open to the idea of custom buildings such as watch towers and nests.
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Barracks| While we all know a Hearthling is most at home around your base with it’s many friends, sometimes they’re better off closer to the action. That being said I propose the ability to designate a Barracks location through a similar system to the Guard Post concept. I can prop a building, designate it for Soldiers to be the only ones allowed to sleep/function fully/rest there and they will now go there to fill their needs when they aren’t in the middle of a shift. Maybe I have a really tall wall that has a Barracks built into the side of it to keep my Soldiers close to the action and healthy, or maybe I have small buildings littering the random areas for soldiers in need.
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Guard Points (For Archers)| The Archer is not out yet but my hopes for the future are there. This small addition would essentially allow for creating a point where Archers will stand and hold guard, firing from their location on nearby threats. Maybe the Archer is posted in a watchtower that gives them better range and protects them, maybe they are guarding the builders who are dangerously far from their primary city, who knows what scenarios a proper guard point might be able to be thrown into.
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Bells| A silly addition to the game, but why not introduce a small standing bell that can be rung to aggro soldiers within a certain radius of itself in the form of calling for help. This of course can also be set up in a much more fancy way if the devs will it where a bell can be set to a group of soldiers and the tone changed to signify it calls a different group. Your Archer sees a warband coming full of undead, they ring the bell a few steps away and Squad 4 consisting of two swordsman and an archer comes running from the barracks to aid the archer.
These of course are just some silly ideas that my family agreed on being great additions for the sake of town defense and effort. Hopefully this could also allows for more combat additions to the game to solve the problem of five soldiers punching out one poorly equipped Zombie.
