Stonehearth YAY
I was VERY excited for the release of stonehearth, and when i finally got my PC working we were already in Alpha 8 I had already missed a fair bit of the Alpha but upon looking at the road map i realised that there was still a long way to go. As an avid city builder player, especially towns, which is very similar to this I was interested to see how stonehearth racked up against similar titles in this kind of genre, and I must say I’m very pleased, its great fun, the Ai is very smooth, NPCs carry out tasks in a fluid and logical motion, and once you get the hang of it, it becomes very easy to play. However like all new games there are problems and lots of little small issues, but there are lots of good things.
The AI and Crafting
First of all the AI is very nice, characters handle tasks very well, and very rarely have I had problems with the AI straight up just not responding to what I want to happen. At times I can give an order and have to wait a little while before the order goes through and actually see people performing the task, however this is due to backlogs of orders and impatience. However, sometimes the crafting systems interaction with this AI can have problems, for example if something you don’t have the materials to craft what is at the top of your priority list then your crafting stops and you can just be stuck sitting there yelling “CRAFT SOMETHING U POTATO” at your screen, which is not ideal. I think that in order to solve this problem characters should be able to bypass tasks if the resources required are not present in a stockpile allowing you crafters to continue working on some other meaningless task like building fences, until stone becomes available for them to make a chisel (just an example).
Combat System
First of all again Love it, the goblins are awesome, characters respond and defend the town in logical ways and the goblins do pose a significant threat to your town. Overall very good system, loved the changes in alpha 9 except 1 thing, Footmen take too long to level up now, I had one character the veteran solider from 5 attacks who was still level 1, and only half way to level 2, Meaning that i didn’t end up with strong footmen that had abilities to make them stronger. Also Villagers seem to get to 1/4 hp then run away, instead of logically waiting on regen and can just get turned on and die. Other than that awesome
Furniture
I really like all the different types of furniture that the game offers, however that said it can be quite annoying to try and build houses for carpenters and houses for masons, if no one keeps their bed…
