Rebalance the banners!

It isn’t a question right now that if you want maximum efficiency in your game, you are going to need all three banners, which means you are going to have to grind through the progression quest at least twice.

But if the devs really intend that the banners be “choices to consider” at the start of the game, then the balance really needs to be looked at.


Right now, the ultimate first choice is Banner of Cunning because it boosts the overall efficiency of the town by a lot!

Obviously you need to build roads for this, but that’s like the simplest thing and only has to be done once. After that, your hearthlings will spend a lot less time traveling between places and will spend more time actually working.

Banner of Vitality boosts plant growth and wood yield, but…

Unless your computer is buff enough to handle more hearthlings, you don’t need that much food, and even so, you would probably have enough spare workers to add an extra farmer.

As for wood… now that trees yield seeds, replanting them is the simplest thing so you’ll always have a steady income of wood. Besides, if you pick cunning instead, you can simply buy your wood from the massive hoard of gold it helps you generate.

Banner of Strength is likewise not so useful.
Unless you pop your town right on top of a mountain, your time saved on less mining will be spent on traveling between the mine and the town. (This can be circumvemted by popping crates near the mine then moving it, but that just adds micromanagement, which isn’t cool.)

With Banner of Cunning mixed with the new stall mechanism, you could theoretically hide inside a mountain, have 3 masons produce the highest value thing, pop a bunch of stalls, and live forever off food you buy.


Achieving a perfect balance is obviously not possible. Nor is needed anymore, since anyone who wants the best out of this will just re-embark twice to get all three. Still, something has to be done so there wouldn’t be anymore obvious right choices at the start.

Something like this perhaps?

Banner of Vitality

  • +20% plant growth
  • +20% faster harvest
  • +15% movement speed near plants
  • +5% Hearthling HP
  • 3x plant appeal

Banner of Strength

  • +33% mining yield
  • +10% off-road movement speed
  • +5% Hearthling muscles (more damage)
  • +2 bakcpack space per hearthling
  • no cramped environment thought

Banner of Cunning

  • 3x road speed bonus
  • 2x merchant stocks
  • +50% merchant gold
  • -50% stall cooldown time
  • -25% off prices at merchants (instead of higher sell value)
  • slightly higher chance for merchants to carry “quality” items
5 Likes

The mentality I see promoted is to think less about city builder style optimization and more about the building of a community. To this end, bundling multiple perks into 3 distinct banners is naturally going to mean many villages pick a banner for only part of their benefit. Even on hard, a village does not need to be maximally efficient to survive, so there is room to focus on the character of your village at the potential expense of mechanical bonuses.

Still, I think the banners potential to contribute to a villages identity could be improved. I’ve posted similar ideas about this in a your last related thread.

4 Likes

I choose Banner of Strength most of the time.
More ore and happy miners !!!

3 Likes

The problem with “building of a community” is that it basically went down the drain the moment a guy strolled into my town and urged me to pick three guys I like and restart.

Given that I am a sort of person who wants the maximum of everything, and wants it now, it leaves me with a question. Why am I supposed to care for these people if I am going to re-embark anyway? If from the start I know that I’m going to want all the bonuses, all the recipes, because I’m just so greedy, I am obviously not going to care for these cute little idiots I’ve got to deal with. I’ll have them sleep in the open, have them eat raw food, etc… until the moment I have the dream team with all the best things to start THE COMMUNITY.

I would much prefer if we did not have to pick between bonuses at all, but rather just the banner image, the “idea” that we prefer. And then it would be up to us if we follow the idea we chose, rather than being nudged by arbitrary bonuses to follow the path.

I would much prefer if we could cherry-pick our bonuses as we play. First unlock the ones we like most, and the difficulty would gradually increase as we unlock the rest. Each of these bonuses would become part of our banner, our heritage so to say.

What would be best is to have the ability to achieve everything without being forced to start over. And when we finally decide to re-embark we would carry over all the bonuses we unlocked so far. Perhaps unlocking more would be slightly easier through re-embarkment than with carrying on with the old community, thus still providing an incentive to start anew.

Perhaps if there were like one gazzilion different types of small bonuses (think of something like +1% speed, etc) which we could bind to our banner… and unlocking each would up the difficulty to unlock the rest unless we re-embark. This way both those who want to keep playing and those who wish to re-embark are satisfied.


This still leaves us on the problem of Hearths and Shrines. I still stand behind my previous suggestion on being able to build all three where only one can be active at a time (and swapping would induce a cooldown).

Furthermore I still think that locking Masterwork tier and Legendary weapons behind choice walls is a poor idea, considering that the third alternative is nowhere near the magnitude of those two. I’m sure TR could come up with something much better.

Sure thing we don’t need them, but man, life sure is so much easier with them. This is the primary reason I dislike being forced to re-embark to get them so much. I can’t help it, I am such a person who wants to have everything to make things simpler. Because… why would I be satisfied with one banner bonus, if I could have two? (Plus that notification keeps pestering me about leaving everything behind…)

I think a good solution to this whole banner fiasco could be something along what I mentioned above…

First we would pick a naked banner (no bonuses, just the “idea” we like). Then, as we progress along the game, Mer Burlyhands (or other NPCs) would come and offer quests to “bind a small sliver of power” to our banner.

There would be 5 random quests offered, each with a random reward. Three of them would be related to the banner we chose, these would come with slightly better rewards, the last two would be random.

These would be small tasks like, plant X oak trees in Y days, defeat a wave of goblins that comes in X days, spend X gold, sacfrifice X food to the bunny god, etc… and the rewards could range from small bonuses ranging from 0.1% to 1%, perhaps some more difficult tasks would reward higher bonuses.

The quests would grow in difficulty as we progress, but with a re-embark we could keep the current bonuses and reset the difficulty.

this is going to be a performance killer, (constant am i near a plant checks)
so i’d advise againt this one but im loving

these three for strenght as adittions.

for vitality how about they heal faster or something? (if we had stuff like sickness they could be sickness resistant)

2 Likes

raises hand

I tend to carve homes in the mountainsides, cliffs, and mesas. I still take the Banner of Vitality. I end up with more ore and stone than I can process in a timely manner. Without wood, the ore can’t be processed at all, so the banner of vitality makes everything grow faster which is a boon in smaller spaces that I usually have to work with.

4 Likes

Ehhhh IIRC it’s still placeholder, will be getting balanced down the line.

My desire/suggestion remains that any buffs are quite small, but there’s more of them to choose from as the game progresses. This gives the player more agency over time to shape their game.