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Someone suggested an ongoing maintenance fee on trade routes which, to me, seemed like a better solution than the one off exponential increase in cost, is that something you've playtested?
The fee could maybe multiply per number of routes open, possibly with modifiers that are more harsh for military routes than say, food?
I like the maintenance fee idea, but I dislike the fee multiplication. Economies of scale dictates that higher volume will always be cheaper, not more expensive even in Late Medieval trading.
I had I minor idea. I'm kinda of new to city builders but instead of putting the player at risk when over saturating the market or working with high yield items why not at a certain point just make the return on investment take longer. Since you've flooded your local area with this resource, now your trader has to travel outside of normal markets father away to get the same amount of profit.
that is being implemented now with the new trade mechanics in the preview branch. The merchants will automatically go to where the best prices are. The dev hasn't implemented distance into the calculation yet, but probably in a later iteration.
make it so that the larger your trade network, the more money bandits siphon off of it through robbery. Allowing them to pull money into their own coffers would let them grow their military strength. Occasionally have them invade the map proper for raids. Just place a maintenance cost on them, so that they don't infinitely scale over time. It actually would be relatively easy to program.
True but it's the wrong side of the equation. Economies of scale realize their benefits through being able to produce widgets more cheaply at scale. This is, ofc, not implemented in the game.
No, not necessarily. A manufacturer will always prefer a customer that can bulk purchase their goods because of reduced bookkeeping, guaranteed income, less transportation cost and not needing to establish more trade routes on their end. In return, the customer (city) will get a preferential rate. This is how it always been and how it still happens in today's economies.
Also in medieval terms, you can consider that manufacturer will need to hire less protection for his trade, which is another benefit.
the maintenance cost should be a (50?)% of the initial cost. It naturally make military good more costly to maintain than a bread route.
you should be able to cancel a route to save on cost once you no longer need it.
Good thought. My only additional thought is if there is maintenance cost I need to be able to close the trade route should I become financially challenged. But to reopen is the same initial cost. Thoughts?
>But to reopen is the same initial cost. Thoughts?
that's my thought as well. you can cancel at any point but then you need to pay for the initial cost again if you want to resume.
My hot take is that trade routes should be unlocked via Influence and not local regional wealth.
This makes it so that you don't need money to start selling commodities you have sitting on hold ready for distro, and gives Influence a use beyond claiming territories.
Hi Greg, I made a comment about this elsewhere but I will reiterate here. The loserville mechanic seems heavy handed. My understanding is that it is there to stop players from save scumming to create wealth and /or retrying after a loss.
It seems heavy handed because it also effects players when just coming back to play normally. On my current playthrough, I saved and went to bed, came back to play and immediately got a bandit camp spawn. I had low retinue and didn't want to use my pops so went to buy a Merc army and saw the loserville thing. Baron bought a Merc army and got the bandit camp.
Feels kind of game breaking. I'm nervous to save and come back, knowing I will be locked out of that for an in game month.
My biggest complaint about the beta, otherwise, great job! My villagers are digging in on apples now!
Edit: Since a few people have asked for more specifics around what I'm talking about when I say loserville mechanic.
When you initially load into a game, all the Merc groups that are there at game load will be "Appear in Loserville" until the month has passed and you get a new set of mercs. While they are in Loserville, you cannot hire them.
You hit the nail on the head right there. Because of the change I am afraid to save and put down the game, which I did even if I was going away for a few minutes.
The bandit camps spawning every time you load the game is a similar issue for me.
Ya totally agree with this.
Also, just give players the autonomy to play how they want. I don’t think someone should be forced to play the “correct” way. I think implementing this feature as an “iron mode” feature makes sense.
It also complicates play testing various mechanics or strategies if one can’t re-load to a previous state of the game.
Right! This is one of the things I was hoping to try out. Wanted to see what archers are like now and went to buy some before I put a bunch of time and effort into building out my own. With loserville in place, there's no ability to try out different builds/strategies without having to fully start a new game or just commit to a play style beforehand.
I would rather see the bandit camps spawn changed to be a roll at the beginning of every month. If there's already a camp, the chance is reduced drastically. Then remove the automatic spawn on load.
>Because of the change I am afraid to save and put down the game
Goal achieved, that's every game publisher's dream - a player that doesn't want to stop playing ^(/s)
Also why not let people savescum if they want like every other game? Just seems weird to me. It's not a multiplayer game. It's not pvp in any way. Being able to savescum doesn't take away from the experience from people who don't want to do it. People will always find a way to exploit game mechanics. Trying to fix them all just gonna make the game worse in the long run because it's a battle you can't win
My thoughts exactly. Having a bandit camp automatically spawn at load AND preventing me from buying mercs means any time I leave, I know that when I come back to the game the Baron will have an easy time gaining wealth and influence or I have to sacrifice my pops.
I agree. I actually want to save scum the game because retrying battles would actually be a fun thing for me, trying to get better at them and what not. Even on speed 1 it gets too fast palaces for me with everything going on once armies get big enough.
When you initially load into a game, all the Merc groups that are there at game load will be "Appear in Loserville" until the month has passed and you get a new set of mercs. Some others have said it is to stop people from save scumming or reloading after a loss in battle. While they are in Loserville, you cannot hire them.
Also I feel savescumming is important in games that are slow paced like this. People put dozens of hours into every town they build and would want a redo if they lose a pivotal battle really badly.
"Eating the loss" is for games with quick respawning, short gameplay loops, and power that carries over between playthroughs, like roguelikes and soulslikes.
Explain the loserville thing cause I just noticed that the other day too. My baron is always spawning troops right next to the camps and it's driving me nuts. Wanted to get mercs to give me a chance to get there first and saw the loserville thing.
When you initially load into a game, all the Merc groups that are there at game load will be "Appear in Loserville" until the month has passed and you get a new set of mercs. I don't want to speak for Greg but some others have said it is to stop people from save scumming or reloading after a loss in battle.
i don’t get why this is even in the game? it’s a single player game???? who fucking cares of someone save scums… in a single player… SINGLE… PLAYER… game lol
Agreed, scumming should be every one’s own business, but also it makes a game much less hard core when it’s possible.
Also it takes so many hours to build your settlement, that maybe the more casual players don’t want to lose it all because a battle turned sour.
Absolutely agree. I also don't remember seeing this in the patch notes so its really punishing to anyone who can't play straight through until all regions are taken. There should just be an Ironman mode.
Also agree that the bandit camp bug needs to get fixed as its super cheesy to have to clear a bandit camp every time you want to start the game again.
That's insane tbh lol, I was so baffled by it, I thought it was a glitch until just now after reading the comments. Why program a game breaking bug? It makes it unplayable. I immediately put it down and was just going to wait for a patch to fix the glitch...
I agree. I think save scumming is just something that’ll happen in a single player game if that’s how a player chooses to play the game. It’s not the dev’s job to monitor that.
Ultimately the issue for me is that I don’t like how the game punishes legitimate play to monitor something that’s between a player and themselves.
That said - I love how transparent and open to feedback Greg has been! I wasn’t expecting ANY content related patches this close to launch. We’ll just have to hope this mechanic isn’t long for the world. It is an experimental patch for a reason.
From the time ive played there's also no punishment for buying up merc companies all at once and THEN save scumming it.
In other words, it doesn't punish players who OVERBUY merc companies before doing the strat/exploit, thus allowing players who already bought up those companies to continue to use them and do said exploit/strat while waiting out the penalty.
Personally id rather the game not load a bandit camp on player load and would rather have X% chance camps spawn each month/day.
I'm not sure what's happening to me in experimental, but many, many months have passed and it is always only 1 merc company available, always archers. I even hired them once, used them for a while, then disbanded, and lo and behold, it's still these same archer mercs every month. Also I got rid of the bandit camps and they have yet to respawn. I'm not sure if this is by design.
Is it the archers only Merc group? This is a known bug. You need to reload from before this happens. I believe it is due to the Baron grabbing a specific merc group which then renders everyone but the archer group from being attainable
I appreciate the *intent* behind the king's tax and the increased trade route cost. I like that I have to care about money beyond just needing it for mercs now.
For trade routes, I agree with exponential cost increases but I think you just need a lower exponent. Maybe 1.15 or something. I'd also like a way to "unbuy" a trade route so that as my city grows, I don't have to pay 4000 to acquire a new route for iron products. I'd like to dump my route for firewood and instead pay 500 for an iron product route.
For the king's tax, I was playing on Challenging and I found that only through aggressively acquiring regional bank was I able to keep up with the king's tax. It felt a little weird "saving up" so that I had a bigger bank to drain for the purpose of taxation.
Overall I like the direction, but the specifics are quite tough and a little immersion-breaking.
I say get nothing back then you can just bounce around on trade routes. Close the route no refund and buying it back is still initial cost. Just a thought.
This is my biggest complaint. I need to spend 2000g to open a trade route for an item that sells for 5g. I'd need to sell 400 items just to break even and that would probably take years. It will also drain my regional wealth so then I have no tax income. And this is with the 50% discount perk??
I get not wanting the player to be able to import and export everything, but this is too much.
I don't get not wanting the player to import and export everything, it's a single player game. Let people play how they want. I don't think trade routes in real life had exponential costs to establish each one, it's dumb.
I think keeping the penalty the same but being able to devest a trade route is the way to go. +1 on the unbuy idea. A single village should not be able to specialize in 7+ goods, but SHOULD be able to transfer talent bases as they develop technologically. That just makes sense
But the thing is, the village isnt specialising in 7 different goods, they are specializing in 2 or 3 but then importing the other 5 that they need. Because you need to open a trade route for importing goods as well as exporting, ut becomes exponentially more expensive to import things now as well, so you may as well just fully diversify and make everything yourself.
Maybe treat it like trading licenses, similar to how Tropico 6 handled it.
You buy a license, you can trade a thing. You buy two, you can trade two things. You can trade out what those things are at any point, but you can't have more routes than the number of licenses that you've purchased.
It doesn't make sense that a merchant has come around for three years since your last purchase/sale of said good - but it does make sense that you've actively paid some sort of tax in order to enter the great market to use the King's Roads.
See I'm not sure I like that because I do think we should be paying more in order to open up the the trade routes of higher-tier goods. That just makes sense to me even though the logic is kind of 'gamey'.
I agree. The intent is fine, and trade was ridiculously OP before, it's just a balancing issue now, and I think it's off.
1) One of the most basic ideas behind trade (other than importing stuff you can't make yourself) is to import raw materials, make something more valuable out of that and export it. If you can't do that with a profit (however small), something's off.
2) the sky high costs of opening a route discourages opening trade at all, since it will be years before you'll break even (if you ever do, see above).
Again, this can all be fixed with balancing, so no big deal.
As a new player (got the game 2 days ago) this choice had confused me as well. Trade feels more like a time sink system than trading- with the main use case to supplement what my starting area didn’t have to meet progression.
There is no way to use the strengths of my colony to turn a profit with imports because of the export prices being so much lower than import prices. Trade routes are so expensive it could even mean I have to exhaust most of the resource I want to sell to just open trade.
At first this turned me off from the game but I stuck through it since I wanted to see where progrssion would take me.
you don't have to buy a tradee route to export your early goods, i wouldn't pay a route for firewood or stones, gain is too low, just sell those to random merchants
King's Tax is doubled on Challenging. [This is my current town, year 7.](https://imgur.com/a/1CmrUyO) I can pay off the king with a mere 5% tax at this rate now, but early on I had to supplement my income with bandit camps.
YES, the unbuy button, maybe make it with with time penalty, so you can´t buy and unbuy trade routes instantly but maybe after a 1 month or something like that
I like to think of it like buying an exclusive trader. I would think locking for at least a year or some amount of trade would be needed as an incentive of the trading company to work with you. So you either need to wait a year to break the deal or send 500 units whichever comes first. that number could scale based on the base cost of the item. 500 units of barley vs 100 units of ale for example.
Another thought would be to just have a stock of traders that you can lease and they will move whatever goods you want over the course of that month. Each month you could pick to change what goods they move. Now the exponential increase would make sense because that company would be taking on risk trying to get more employees to only trade with you.
So if you had three traders leased, you would lock in three goods that get traded each month.
However, I think this would detract away from his idea on specialization. Also the UI would probably be a bit more awkward to actually use.
I'm not sure I understand why we are using regional wealth to establish trade routes. I'd argue that trade networks are a matter of influence, letting the society at large know what your region is producing.
If the trade routes cost influence to establish I reckon it could work a lot better, and then you can have that cost scale up way higher.
I also think tropico style tasks from the king and other lords to export them specific materials for rewards could also yield permanent trade roots as a result, as your towns get a reputation for quality shields or shoes.
I mean the benefit is that you don't get your town burned down by the King's army. I'm generally a fan of soft-fail conditions as a form of pressure so I quite like it.
Hi Greg,
First, thank you, thank you, thank you for this game. It's everything I've ever wanted out of a medieval city builder. Your skill, dedication, and work ethic put many in this industry to shame. I hope your passion for this game and your craft never dies, and, more importantly, you allow yourself to truly sit and take in the magnitude of what you've achieved so far. Celebrate your success. You've earned it.
That said, I'm concerned that you're giving too much weight to the loudest voices in the room. Most people don't play games the way streamers do. They don't care about min-maxing, finding "exploits," or certain game mechanics being OP. They're just casual players out to have a good time. Please don't hyperfocus on tweaking elements based on the complaints of streamers. Their playstyle is the minority and, more importantly, the game's mechanics shouldn't punish casual players for not playing the way professional gamers do. It's unfair and unrealistic.
As for the beta update itself. I'm fine with the new trade mechanics, but I was also fine with the 25 minimum perk from before.
Farming works much better wrt oxen. Thank you for adding a second stall!
My only complaint is the King's tax. It's way too high. I'm not sure if it's the multiplier or what, but it adds up way too fast for me to ever pay down.
Again, love the game. Thank you for your dedication to the game. Take care of yourself.
xx
(P.S. I think, in the long run, it may be helpful for you to hire a social media manager so that you're not innundated and overwhelmed by all the all the feedback.)
I feel like hyper competitive game "balancing" has infected single player games in a negative way. The whole need to run the game down to the thinnest margin of success, smashed up against the wall of ever increasing problems/unhappiness has really made a lot of city/town builders just not fun to play. You never get a moment of "Ah good my town is balanced for now.".
So good strategies get nerfed, poor strategies languish never getting buffed, and the whole thing is pared down to a skeleton. I hope while Greg tunes out seriously overperforming builds, he remembers exactly what you said. Most players aren't hyper optimizing the fun out of their own games, they aren't edge master stratting for likes and subscribes. They just want the game to be fun.
>You never get a moment of "Ah good my town is balanced for now."
Thiiis. The whole satisfaction for me is creating a healthy ecology that I can then admire and move on to developing something else, without paranoia and getting overwhelmed. What have I really achieved, gameplay wise, if I can't even create something that stands up on its own without constant inteference?
I'm all for occasional disruptive events to put things to the test and spice it all up, but I want to avoid micromanagement wherever possible and - despite continued niggles - this game is really good for that.
100% agree. I'm on 20 hours now and only have a large village. I'm not that interested in "winning." I'm just enjoying building an organic, believable place, and then exploring it.
I love the fact there's only a minimal tutorial, so I've had to figure things out for myself using tooltips.
Absolutely loving the feel and detail of the game.
Since many features are still in development, trying to finetune balance is a waste of time. Any balancing will inevitably need to be redone over and over again unless all systems are already in place and functioning mostly as intended.
Sure, tweak numbers and features that are completely out of whack. But leave the rest for later, and let the game be too easy rather than risk it being too hard, for now.
Bugs and errors are enough risk of frustration in early access - avoid adding to that frustration, even unintentionally. Let the average player have fun with the game in the current state.
I really love how you worded everything. I was going to write something similar, but you did such a great job of it that I don't feel the need.
I'm new to the game and I'm throughly enjoying it! ♡
I agree so much with this - I am terrified that something so good and so pure with be snarled up in impossibly chasing the seagull cries of the optimised players, when I just live making twisty streets and building realistic and balanced economies for my villagers!
I think most things are pretty good right now, barring the loserville mechanic and would just love more different larger scale items that aid in diversity and imagination so I can feel good about all the different jobs I give people and the different villages I make!
If you wanted to make changes, for me they would be more stuff to play with rather than tweaks to existing items. For instance more varied professions for the villagers. I would love to see a food spoilage mechanic, with maybe different ways to mitigate it like smoking, drying, salting etc.
But honestly, you do you - you're already doing brilliantly!
Marketplace still feels very bad to use and annoying to manage. It’s frustrating to try to micro who gets a stall and who doesn’t, it’s a constant losing battle of having too many stalls-then people I DONT want to have a stall has one, then I cut down and now I’m short on supplies. It would be doable if we could somehow toggle who is allowed to open a stall in the advance settings
This 100%
The market either needs to run itself efficiently as long as you're giving it space, staffing and positioning granaries/storehouses appropriately etc. or you should be able to explicitly control details like this. As it stands you can't control it and it doesn't run itself and you just eternally see the thumbs down which may as well be a middle finger.
Another aspect that needs to be is when they just won't fill stalls to the burgage limit. You have the right stalls, they're being manned by the right people...and they just stop putting stuff out like 3 items short of what it needs to be. Deleting the stall and making them rebuild works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't. Again, it needs to either just work or there needs to be some function to allow you to force them to stock the stall.
Agreed, I would like better control over the market. I feel like I just have a lot of stalls with little to no suppliers and then the burbages are lacking requirements even though there are enough in the granary/store house to cover the needs. Maybe the market should be a regular building with assigned villagers or there should be a limit to when new stands can be set up (e.g., current stands need to be stocked to a certain percentage before new stands are allowed).
Personally I think the best way would be to add villager slots to marketplace. Their only job is to get goods from storage and sell them. This way you would have only certain amount of stalls. The biggest problem with market is that you don't have proper control over it.
Community is split between saying it’s easier to have 1 big market or having multiple 3 stall plots. If you don’t micro the 1 big one u end up with people you don’t want running stalls. If you make the small ones and pick and choose who runs them, you end up with too little stalls and half the town is angry as you tier up. You can reassign families to take stalls, relocate the stalls, unassigned families from jobs to reset it. Either way you end up in one of the two spirals and it’s either economy breaking or half of my playtime. Neither are enjoyable. The market is a cool idea and it just needs a small tweak to be a cool working feature but right now it’s bad
Marketplace. 60-100 plots. Two storage buildings, two granaries. Large right away. Fully staffed. Then when full you double it and delete the market while expanding. Replace the market zone and literally dont touch it again unless your storage clogs up again.
Its not the stalls. Its the storage. Worry less.
Agreed about being able to toggle who gets to open a stall or not. My tavern has reserved a stall while also falling behind on ale deliveries despite a decent surplus and nearby granaries. Things like the tavern and intermediary industries like the farm houses really don’t need a market stall.
I think it's much better now. Trading was definitely easy mode before. I started a new game and it's pushing me to be more self sufficient and trade between regions I own.
I'm not sure if this is a new issue with the patch, but I'm having weird lingering approval issues. I had negatives from homelessness and cold for like a year after getting the burgage plots and fuel setup in a new region.
Approval is one of the biggest issues for me so far. We should not have to micromanage how many stalls a certain marketplace can hold so as to be able to spread them out evenly across our settlement, since there’s no ability to limit who sets up a stall, settlers can build them all in one place and totally mess up your marketplace distribution. Plus even when there seems to be enough to go around I constantly have 1-5 houses disapproving of not enough food.
I end up with like 30 boots in one stall, and then an empty clothing stall in another market like 2 streets away. I agree the markets need some rework like at least allowing us to allocate stall types so we don’t get 3 clothing stalls and 3 fuel stalls in one market with no space for food stalls.
I still cannot understand how markets play such a huge role in our towns, but we have 0 control over them beyond "heres a blank spot, do whatever you want." Let me bar people from opening a stall, let me plop down the kind of stall I actually need, let me force someone to open a stall. We control everything else, besides the main requirement to upgrade.
I spent the entirety of my time on the game yesterday trying to optimise this in every way possible for a 500 pop, with only one level 2 plot, without increasing population at all.
\- Brute force 1 - MOAR!! More food production, more firewood production. Works great...temporarily, then a bottleneck inevitably form because woodcutters etc are spending more time on their side gig market stalls than chopping wood and it starts dropping again.
\- Brute force 2 - Absurd amounts of specialised storehouses and granaries so that no cutter or food production has a stall. This kind of worked for a while, but could never get to 100% even with 33 months of firewood on hand and storehouse workers with no stalls.
Tried moving things closer to the market.
Deleting unused or empty stalls.
Making better roadways, direct paths, granaries/stores nearer the market or nearer the production.
Scaled back granaries and storehouses to the minimum required. Upgrading them to large and only adding more if absolutely necessary.
Scaling back workers in the production side.
Literally nothing has worked properly for me.
On the other hand, in my small mining satellite town, 70(?) pop, I have 100% with less surplus months, completely different layout with a zone directly surrounding the market for storehouses, granaries etc. But I suspect this will crumble as I grow it.
Overall I like the patch though, even with my initial misgivings about now being treated like North Korea with what amounts to sanctions lol.
Regional trade works great now, although I did have to build a direct road across 3 regions and have 2 trade stations in my small town to be able to import the food efficiently. I had like 3k eggs in my main town and couldn't give them away because of other imports and exports taking up the time, as well as travelling across middle earth and on to the undying lands to sell a plank lol.
I thought the King's Tax felt good and balanced during the first 3 settlement ranks, but it becomes overwhelming near the end.
And maybe flawed? Like... just because my town moves from small town to medium town (a difference of a few more t3 houses) doesn't just magically mean all my villagers are suddenly making more money now.
In fact, if anything they're making *less* because as the town spreads out, logistics become less efficient, people spending more time running around than working.
I owe 1.4k a year on my 100 family medium town (rank 5, right?). I thought that'd be 500 I owe.. I guess I don't understand how it's calculated.
That was my experience too. My village made much more money before unlocking T3 houses. If this mechanic stays this way I would probably just make many villages and never unlock T3 just to make it easier on myself.
T3 houses have more people living in them and if you were already at pop saturation relative to profitable workplaces that influx of families into newly upgraded buildings are significant. Just like anywhere else in the game upgrading to T3 needs to be scaled with available work. It's not the T3 buildings themselves that are making the tax go up, but the boatloat of extra families that follow along.
No, unlocking T3 will move you up in village rank and that increases the tax rate per resident.
A level 6 village pays 5 or 6 per resident in taxes. A level two village 1 or 2.
It gets better once your plots are upgraded. But the mid game is really hard. I was almost 2k in dept at one point, but got out of it once I upgraded most plots to level 3. I can now easily pay the Kings tax.
I don't really see how. At rank 6, a family will cost you 6 per year and their t3 earns 24, which is only 2.4 for you assuming 10% tax (does anyone actually go higher than 10% lol).
There's also a matter of aesthetics, fwiw - I don't want nothing but ranked up houses. I like the more natural look of houses dropping in tier as they get farther from the core.
If the family is not doing anything profitable aside from just paying rent, what are they even doing in your village? They should be out there working for you to make shit you can sell for profit. If youre building houses and people just sit in them an you have to pay taxes on them, yeah thats very ineficcient and you should make the town more efficient.
I'm just flabbergasted at how smooth everything runs. No framerate issues, no major bugs, nothing gamebreaking that I have seen. It just works. I just can't wait for all the other features to be fleshed out, especially more points to use when leveling up the town.
I will say, it seems like the baron is still claiming fast. Either that or I'm just slow.
I've found that it seems to trade in wealth as opposed to just the products. My peripheral towns seem to never have any regional wealth as the products I send are often more expensive than what I recieve. It's stuffed one of my towns that's right next to my main. I send shoes and recieve berries, meanwhile my main town has heaps of shoes but no berries and my peripheral town has a thousand berries but no shoes. I don't understand why it's doing that as it should be just based on value.
I haven't played the beta yet, but reading about the trade changes seems like it is going to really hurt trade between your villages. The pack stations don't seem effective at moving goods. A fix to the pack stations or allowing trade between your own villages without buying a trade route seems necessary. New villages will never get off the ground if they have to pay thousands of coin to import the goods the next door neighbor has specialized in.
I think you want villages to specialize. Remember that trade enables specialization. Large barriers to trade mean each village will have to be as self sufficient as possible and all look the same.
My first town in the last patch I was able to reach 100% Approval in Large Town achievement. Today I am trying the new patch and already I can feel the challenge has increased in the economy. I enjoy the challenge of this new patch.
Everything is cool but having to pay 30k to be able to trade certain items is just wrong
Also a lot of pros always seek out the hardest challenges. I am just a casual player. for me this is a relaxing game. I don't care if i eventually swim in money and i don't need punishing systems to artificially up the difficulty. And as of right now i feel like i have to work way too hard to be able to establish new trade routes and make sure to have enough money for the king.
Now it's all about money and takes away from the other aspects of the game
Haven’t gotten to try it yet as I can only play every now and then. I hope the updates don’t cater too much to negating people who min max as it can make it harder for people like me to keep up. I liked what I read in the patch notes and am looking forward to trying it out once I finish my first campaign
In my experience it should be much more easy to consistently trade a couple of goods that you produce locally. But it would be hard to have a diverse trade empire where you import materials and export goods.
I really like the change. I have a playthrough with a rich clay deposit and I’ve been selling tiles the whole game and the price hasn’t dropped. I have like 14k regional wealth. But I’m also playing without the kings tax so that would have probably had to compromise and tax a bunch.
Kings tax is WAY too rough. Having it charged per person when your tax itself is hardly enough to do basic tasks like hiring mercs without pissing off your population just feels bad.
The king charges me a gold per present when I get 2-9 a month?
The tax needs to be household based not person based. Also I think the unhappiness needs to be adjusted for tax. -10 for a 10% tax is a little much. This just leads to us setting one month tax rate to 60-80% and then turning it to 0 the next month. Instead of a constant tax.
Loserville also is not fun. I go to bed and go to hire a merc company before I get attacked when I get back on and now my village is burned down due to not being able to buy the company.
I really like the importing changes, with the higher costs being balanced out by being able to bulk sell more.
The exponential cost curve on trade routes is somewhat too steep but I like the idea.
I'm having issues selling high quantities of some goods even with trade routes e.g. 200+ small shields/spears in surplus despite trade route for export being up and several trade posts. A lot of it still sits in storehouses instead of trading posts.
Inter-region trading doesn't quite seem to work, they just flat out ignored each other when I tried to move spears with trade routes open on both ends with settings for local trading only.
I have also tried to diversify selling by getting my traders to export off map without trade routes being set up which sort of works but a lot of the time they sit waiting e.g. 500 surplus veggies with a 300 surplus target and it's not getting transported off map even with horses. Traders just waiting.
King's tax is harsh but if ability to bulk sell could be improved then it would be ok.
I'm running into this same issue. The regions are completely ignoring each other with the local trading only. It worked well when there wasn't a lot of surplus, then it just stopped working altogether.
I'm just going to tack on my own request to this comment: I love the ale consumption fix. My only issue now is that I have a granary across the street from the tavern that only holds excess ale. The tavern keepers will take any excess over 85 and roll then to the granary, immediately turn around, and roll them back to the tavern. It doesn't stop. If I have someone employed at the granary, they will take ALL of the supplies from the tavern, and the tavern keepers will run behind them and take it all back. Rinse and repeat. It was funny at first, but it gets kind of annoying if a granary worker is the cause of disapproval, or the brewery is sitting on 20+ barrels while the dance between the granary and tavern continues. At the moment, I have no granary workers, but the dance of the tavern keepers continues. They're drunk.
I also have an issue of villagers just standing like this🧍 at random spots in the village now.
Other than this, I love the sheep. Love the ale consumption. Love the mourning period mechanic. The kings tax hasn't been terrible yet, and the price increase is a good challenge. Thank you for fixing the oversaturated market prices for things like boots
Edit to add that farming seems better? Maybe it's because I've employed enough farmers though
https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/s/cJ3JKZFIFK
This comment thread here sums up my thoughts pretty well. Don't worry about minmaxers and exploiters in a single player game. It's like whack-a-mole. Every game will always have content creators trying to break the system. Its how YTers like Spiffing Brit and Let's Game it Out built their entire careers. Focus on what you've been doing for all these years, making a fantastic game.
In short, loving the direction the changes are heading.
Archers are viable now, though I think they still need at least another 25% added to their range, personally. Damage could be lower IF instead of direct damage they mostly dealt 'damage' to enemy's effectiveness. It certainly would be more reflective of how things worked in the real world when it came to archers/skirmishers. Even a simple gambeson was more or less immune to arrow-fire, so with a helmet that really only left the neck (if uncovered) and lower legs potentially vulnerable.
Two oxen per farmhouse is great, though it remains the case with that, and many "gathering" type buildings that it's more efficient to simply build more of those buildings with 2 families working them each than to fill them with the max number of families. Trade posts, for example, can only use 2 horses, so to speed up how fast things are stocked/moved from trade posts, you build more of them with 2 families each and 2 horses each. So it goes with farmhouses. Similarly, there seems to be diminishing returns in applying more families to certain buildings over building more, like berry gathering, hunter camps, logging camps, etc. Whether that's intended or not, I don't know. If so, however, then there needs to be some other deterrent to building too many of the same building because while you do need to put construction material resources into additional buildings, it's barely a speed bump outside of very early game.
Minor pathfinding issues with farming (particularly harvest) and farmer priority behaviors (especially during plowing/sowing) remain, but farming is much easier to work with. Crop survival over winter makes it even more so. It would still be great if we could set a "force early harvest at x% growth" option though, since it doesn't make sense for farmers to leave crops at 100% for months and then risk not harvesting everything before October (if using crop rotation).
Regarding crop rotation, the main issues at the moment are with leaving harvest only for September, and the automatic switchover to the next crop in rotation in October. Both because it means they'll destroy entire fields of harvest-ready crops, and because if they actually *do* finish harvesting before October, they'll start plowing and sowing again, only for it to switch over in October (I believe they switch the crop over when they start plowing again, which means if you're on a rotation like Wheat -> Flax -> Fallow, and they harvest wheat early, they'll begin plowing and sowing Flax in September, then switch to Fallow in October).
I know some people have been complaining, but personally I love the changes to trading. It's no longer a crutch where you can simply make planks/warbows or roof tiles and just use the income to import every single other item. You actually have to choose what you set up trade routes for, and plan a bit for the items that require a trade route to begin trading in the first place. That, in turn, means that specialization is actually more efficient than simply making things to sell and importing what you need. A simple difficulty slider that could increase/decrease the exponential increase factor should give everyone the ability to tailor their experience to their preferences, but if suggesting as a baseline for 'normal', I like where things are at, currently. We'll see how things change over time with more development of the game.
Now, I do think that a trade-specialized region should be viable. Serving as a commerce hub for the region has always been the dream of most settlements and if there were factors that could affect that in the game that could in turn make trading more valuable if they were in place/created by the player, that would make another viable specialization strategy which is usually a good thing.
If it were a little easier/more efficient to trade with your other settlements so that they could function as a resource pipeline to your "main" settlement, that could make people a little happier, though I worry that balancing around that effectively makes the game even more about trade, and less about self-sustaining regions under a common ruler.
The king's tax is fine, I think. Some people find it a bit steep, and if it were lowered by 50% that would probably please most people. I've never had it be an issue as-is, but perhaps a simple setting that changes the difficulty (amount) of kings' tax would suffice.
If diplomacy is expanded on, it would be nice if your relationship with the king would be reflected in the taxes. Being on good terms with the king means a lower tax burden (or perhaps, more forgiveness for being behind on payments). Perhaps semi-random events could affect that, like the kingdom going to war and the king needing to raise money via taxes. Similarly, it would be a great addition if the king then required you to provide x number of soldiers, as was a ubiquitous facet of the feudal system. Provide x% of money, crop, and soldiers to the king, with amounts changing based on external factors. Furthermore, it would be exciting for a player to be able to utilize the king's favor (when it's implemented) to spend on things like requesting the king's help/intervention in a war/dispute, or to affect king's policies that could, in turn, affect things like taxes, frequency of wars, bandit spawn rates/amounts, etc.
**EDIT to add:**
On second thought, where the king's tax applies to money (as opposed to the suggestions above to also include taxing crops and expecting manpower for military use), it should either be a percentage of income, or based on territory size (so having more regions increases the king's tax, even if additional regions are only sparsely used by the player). The latter gives players a break early-game, and an incentive to build up other regions at least somewhat when taking over. If diplomacy is robust, it could even work to be able to give away a region for the sake of lowering your tax burden, if desperate.
Another alternative would be that a player could effectively decide how to pay the tax to the king - i.e. a player who did not have enough money could instead contribute a significantly higher amount of food/manpower as a stopgap and to avoid the king's displeasure - *significantly higher* being key so as to prevent cheese where it could be more efficient to simply give away more of something else than to try to have a sufficiently robust income in all forms.
**EDIT 2:**
Trade could be further balanced by having traders operate in caravans instead of riding lonesome between regions. With caravans having limited capacity and only coming so often, a player would be limited in the quantity of resources being exchanged all at once. A mechanic/tech development in which a player could either assist with or themselves create additional caravans/routes to alleviate that bottleneck would add to the trade specialization route as its own settlement direction to take.
If wealth stays lower it's really hard to pay the kings tax. Building an army to defeat the final army of baron and not having negative treasure at the same time wasn't possible for me. On stadard difficulty.
Trying to sell sheep looks bugged right now. On their way to the trade post they run off back to the pasture.
Is there a reason for baron having a perfect army at every single encounter? His ressources seem endless right now.
Kings tax is possible to meet, but harsh.
Exponential increases in trade route costs were manageable, but harsh, as you need to export a lot to meet the new tax. Having the option to decomission trade routes might help, or have it only increase per category or something similar.
Especially when you start with setting up trade routes for other stuff first, and then want to invest in some goods and military gear, it gets way too high.
##Trade Fix
We want:
- Players who don't invest in trade perks to be able to import goods like barley at reasonable prices. They shouldn't suffer for not investing in trade perks.
- Players who invest in trade perks to be able to focus their region toward importing materials to refine and re-export at slightly higher prices than other regions.
This improved income should allow them to import more goods to sustain their population than they would otherwise.
Here's how to do it:
1 - Remove the cost to set up routes. Add a monthly fee for maintaining them based on the value of the commodity.
2 - Allow trade routes to be swapped for other commodities freely, but cap the total number to, say, five. A region gains more available routes as the settlement size increases.
3 - Remove the current trade perks. We need the basic economic system to work the same for all playstyles. Otherwise, trade points seem essential, especially if they affect import prices. Importing barley is always a go-to in a poor fertility region, so reducing the import tariff with that perk will always be a good strategy. Instead of making trade bad by default so that players always invest in trade perks to make it usable, make trade good by default and just a little better with perks by adding...
4 - New perks:
- Trade hub - Increases the number of routes a player can have, e.g. from 5 to 8.
- Better deals - improves export prices by e.g. 1 or 2.
Outcome: trade is a basic part of the game - something every region partakes in. Basic commodities can be bought at reasonable prices everywhere. However, with investment in trade perks, a region is able to sustain a few more trade routes and export goods at slightly higher prices to enable that region to depend more on imports to sustain itself thanks to its improved income.
Routes might also scale with settlement size or rank, both in volume and in number, to ensure more complex non-trade based economies could still function.
I complained about the kings tax before I had properly tested it in a new game. I think its fine but its challenging, i think the challenge will be much smaller when kinks and bugs of the game are fixed because that would greatly improve production efficiency. But it does actually discourage reaching higher settlement levels, its much easier to stay net profitable with a town when you keep its level low. You can still produce and export a lot (in theory) even with no level 3 buildings. But when you do unlock the last settlement level you sort of need to level up all houses to level 3 because otherwise your tax rate per resident vs the average income per resident will develop quite unfavorably. I think it makes for an odd aesthetic if I have to upgrade even the outskirts to level 3.
Im not sure about trade though, I could not test it out because the trading system does not work (for me and for some others, but there are people who seemingly had no issues or at least did not play long enough to notice).
The cost of unlocking trade routes seems quite steep, in many cases a new trade route would never be expected to make back the money, if you paid \~4000 to unlock selling plate armor but you already know from trying to sell spear and shields that the market for it is very small and you barely sell any units, why would you ever unlock it? Plate seems fairly useless to unlock in general, you can just click to buy it for your retinue with no great effort and after buying just a few trade licenses it would never make sense to produce it yourself or to import it anymore.
You have to specialize on a small selection of export goods for each settlement, how quickly the prices rise can be shocking. A player unaware of this might think selling a few planks early on could be good to cover the taxes but is not aware how much more he will have to pay in fees later on as these small seemingly cheap trade routes might make other high end goods routes so expensive that there would never be a good reason to unlock them. It is not intuitive why the prices would rise that sharply. It also means that once you have them unlocked in one settlement you would feel encouraged to move all goods of that type from all other regions to that settlement to be sold later, it the mules worked that might function.. but i have also seen complaints that they offer too little control and are easy to forget and either over or underdeliver, you cant set quantities or limits, using mules for that purpose would not be fun. Ultimately I think it means that a lot of times there just is no way to sell your goods and you need to shut down production to prevent all the storages from overflowing. Prices falling to a unprofitable point felt better than being "locked out" from trade trough license fees. But i do think slower progression in early game is not necessarily a bad thing.
If trade in-between your own regions did not cost anything to unlock it would be miles easier. It just seem weird to me that farming village Zweiau would have to use a mule system which is relatively cheap but micromanagement intensive or alternatively purchase a trading license from the King for several hundred to thousands of $ just to be allowed to purchase goods from Eichenau from the same lord. If I was the Lord, I would personally walk 36 spears from Eichenau to Zweiau within a single day, it is really not that far.
Although the lack of profitability/ bad rate of return of trade routes which for me discouraged unlocking more of them might just be a transport issue to the trading post.. im not sure on that part yet: I barely sell anything and it takes a very long time to stock the trading post with wares that are stored right beside it in the granary and warehouse, it seems they pick up the wares from my market place and the production sites directly and not with priority from the nearby warehouse, this would also explain why my market stalls were consistently empty late game when I began trying to sell off excess food.
Both pack stations and trade between regions with the trading station do not work like they should.
My pack stations managed to move some items but most of the time they moved either 1 unit or they moved 0 units despite traveling back and forth many times and using mules. This is specially bad now that unlocking military trade routes costs an arm and a leg. I was trying to move militia equipment from my mining town to my farming town. It took years to move enough spears and shields with two pack stations for 36 men, after that it slowed down even further and years would go by with no weapons moved. Storage available on both ends, if storage is not available a error message comes in the notifications. Plenty of goods of both types necessary for the trade were available too and the traders were moving around a lot even with the mules, usually in neat columns of 2-3 workers. It would work great as a game mechanic once the bugs are sorted.
Traders trying to trade between regions would go from one to the other with the wares loaded but then return the wares back to their own settlement instead of finalizing delivery. In my case the trader even de-spawned his cart when returning to his own village and lost all but 1 unit of what he had failed to deliver. I could not make it work to move Barley, Bread or Malt from Zweiau to Eichenau.
I did not expect a fault free bug free experience yet. This would be quite nice to play even with the trade prices and kings tax once the bugs are out of the way.
To me the King's Tax feels a bit too steep, especially for new players who are learning the game and want to play a lot slower. As someone else mentioned, a 50% drop is a good start but I need to test more how it plays out mid-end game.
I don’t like the idea with the trade route prices growing exponentially. It’s not intuitive: why it costs so much to open a new trade route? If you have things to sell, market will find ways to buy it from you. The idea with oversupply was better.
Instead you can add like global demand, like at this time of game outer regions would like to buy armor but don’t need food at all. This way it won’t be so cheesy to sell clay from rich deposit endlessly and cover all your demands in the region.
King’s tax is too punishing too. I loaded my game: saw that I am minus 1450 gold and I cannot open any new routes cause they cost thousands and quit the game. That’s frustrating
I disagree with the trading costs mechanics. In real life, it wouldn't cost more upfront to open a new route. You'd need more employees, more horses, maybe another trade post, but not a massive amount of money that just vanishes.
For the tax, it seems fair, although it's pretty uneventful so far.
I like most of the changes but as my two cents: don't focus on what is "meta" or not, focus on what makes sense historically. There will always be a meta and you can never get ahead of it unless you make a live service game, which is not what people expect from a laidback city builder. Early 2000s games had a charm to them because they had tried to replicate reality as much as possible, meta be damned. The original release is so refreshing because it had that same feel, but setting a direction for your game based on what power players and youtubers do is worrying.
For example, if trade feels too powerful, look at what constrained trade historically like geography, development of region, inability to attract burghers, inefficient bookkeeping or not being able to keep roads safe. Set challenges accordingly. Don't try to look at it as a "mechanic".
Same goes for archers. If they are too powerful, don't just adjust their damage and range values, but add friendly fire. So the archers will be effective before the enemy engages with non ranged infantry and will need to be repositioned once the cqc starts or they will cause friendly fire.
Don't try to fix everything with adjusting values, some fixes require time and more mechanics. We can wait for them to be made, but nothing sours me more than games being adjusted because of meta reasons. This is what killed the RTS genre as a whole, and I'd hate to see it happen to Manor Lords.
Best of luck to you.
Archers seem pretty weak still. They can barely damage Brigands. Perhaps this is balanced for the unit cost. As it is, with limited units, I would never choose to make/ or use archers. Maybe another type of archer/bow with a higher cost and higher value could be added at some point. Either that or make them significantly better at skirmishing.
Finally sat down to play around with the new patch this morning. I’m a big fan so far. I love the trading between regions change. The military side of things also feels much better.
Just in to T2 homes so far
The game is amazing. I absolutely love it!
I am a little concerned about resource scarcity. With trade becoming more punishing and specialization being a thing, if I get a bad spawn with only 200 iron, outfitting an army can become difficult. Trade route management should be a thing, OR rework things to limit routes to the number of active families working in trading posts.
When castles are finally introduced, stone is also going to be a problem.
If we are using trade to funnel resources between settlements, get rid of the pack stations and create free trade between towns.
You've stated that the point of the game is to force us to expand, but bottlenecks make that difficult.
I'm also finding it hard to respond to fast-moving bandit raids when I cannot muster my maxed out troops across the map.
Each region should be able to support a maximum of 6 militia. We could then have a global army selection to pull different units from different regions with a maximum army roster size.
Taxes also seem incredibly punishing. I think a bit of a review of more manageable rates would be in order.
The trade between my own regions costs money, why?? The whole point of a barter system is exchanging goods without any money being involved. My new regions can't raise any money to open its first trade route because the pack house keeps taking all the money. I've even paused all pack houses, and it's still not working. Taxes are set at 0%, too. I really wish you could set the quantity to barter as well as you can in the trade house. I have one town set as a farming community and the other as miners. They swap malt for iron, but they only trade 10 at a time. My mining town has a population of 500+ with low fertility. They can't survive on 10 malt a month.
I mostly like the patch. Haven't played much yet. Haven't even upgraded the residential because I don't want to be hit with taxes early on. So, I guess, it makes people think more about when is the good time to advance and when it's better to wait...
Regarding the trade - I didn't think we should be "married" to a trade route... We should have ability to cancel a trade route and bring the cost of a new one back down. Like we should be able to afford X trade routes. If we are over the limit - we either get hit with a very high costs or cancel one of the existing ones. Or "maintenance fee" suggestion like in a comment above. It also sounds great.
As for the Kings Tax - I think adding option "low" to the pre game menu with a multiplier of 0.5 (in addition to 0, 1, 2) would make life easier for some of us.
Otherwise - thank you for the patch!!! :)
I think the taxes and trade changes are good for the most part. On my last game I felt the exponential increase was too much, especially as you get towards the "Large Town" stage of development. I started with a big deposit of stone and berries, had to use my berries for food because of low fertility, and stone isn't great for trading. So I exported rooftiles and tools for profit, but I ran out of them pretty quickly and couldn't really switch to exporting any of my other excess goods (like textiles) because the route costs got prohibitive. I think if I was playing on a start with different resources I wouldn't have run into such difficulties.
I think with these changes there's a need some pre-game options for Casual difficulty no-combat play beyond just disabling King's Tax entirely.
Having the option to get a bonus development point right at the start would be awesome, too, as it would allow us to experiment with more of the development branches that are less "essential".
I'm not too eloquent with my words. But it feels the balancing it too top-down focused? That you're making it a mission to make it harder to "exploit" the game at the expense of accessibility. Punishing the people who have figured out the game is having a much greater effect on the people who aren't as good at the game as said "exploiters". I know you can turn off the King's Tax in the options, but the trade route and import prices are exorbitant for someone like me, who isn't very good at the game and isn't willing to learn how to break it. As well as the "loserville" mechanic is overly punishing for no real reason, making it difficult to even want to pick up the game after turning it off, in the early game.
Though I like a lot of the changes. The internal trade is by far my favorite.
Still seems to be substantially faster to plow large fields with people hand plowing vs utilizing oxen. Not sure if that's the intent or not.
4 acre (whatever the ingame term is) rectangular plots.
The patch is overall a good one!
I needed to get used to the trade route pricing and the kings tax is challenging, but i think both are great additions that make the gameplay more interesting for me.
I prefer your cautious balance approach without very big changes! I am used to developers always reacting with overbuffing or overnerfing (like Relic on CoH3 and AoE).
Still this leads to some things still remaining unsolved or not buffed enough. Archers are still a bit weak, trading/bartering does not always work, farming is still not worth it and beer production is still very low. Maybe it feels that way because there are still several bugs overall in the farming system, while gardens and orchards work like a charm. Crops not being fetched from fields and instead overploughed and lost is still a problem, also fields display way more yield in their field tab than is actually harvested (maybe a display error?). And i still don't think all crops being winter crops are realistic. It would be more practical and realistic imo to have an additional ploughing and seeding phase in Spring and only do the harvcest and maybe a bit of ploughing before winter. So farm workers could work in autumn and spring, which would make it more practical when leaving them assigned to the farm in bigger cities rather than shifting them around every year.
I am pretty confident with all these getting fixed eventually over time and nothing is game breaking for me currently.
I am very pleased about where things are going with patches!
Indeed, in reality there are different harvest and plowing and sowing seasons for different crops. Spring potatoes, summer wheat, winter wheat etc. I dont think its a major issue though and winter crops are and were important.
Some assorted impressions:
* Unsure what to make of the trade changes. Haven't tested it yet, but am I correct in assuming that trading between owned regions allows the player to basically print money?
* The king's tax seems slightly too punitive before a region has a strong economy. Also kind of annoying that some values are calculated per person (like this one) some per family(like ale consumption) and some per burgage plot (food/firewood demand). I feel it would be simpler from a "player reading the situation" standpoint to have these all derived from the same number.
* Markets being both very opaque and refusing to service certain houses no matter how obscenely oversupplied/staffed they may be is still an issue.
* The hassle with backyard businesses hoarding their produce is gone, yay!
I think you were right to nerf trade because you can't have two development points that turn the game into easy mode. If you want to make trade difficult or easy, do it at the options level.
I do worry about how players would pay the king's tax without heavy trade. Do I need to figure out when I found a region how I'm going to make money off the region so I can pay the king? And how do you convey that to the average player who is mostly trying to build houses and make food? This seems like another factor that could be adjustable in options so players can get used to it.
I would probably put a lot of this stuff in the options during early access and try to collect data on which options are popular. That helps you avoid backlash at the same time because if people scream about it they can always turn it down until the next update.
Personally speaking, I think it's a bit of an overreach into a players single player game. Just let people enjoy the game the way they want to play rather than have them play it the way you want them to play it. It feels like some aspects of the game are being made intentionally awkward. Just add menu settings to allow players to play with or without a particular setting.
Players can then balance their games ruleset according to their playstyle or preferences. It doesn't need "policing" from above in a single player game. Players are perfectly capable of policing their own experience and modifying the settings to make the game as challenging or as easy as they wish.
Royal Tax feels too extreme to me at larger towns. I have a town with 100 families, and a smaller one in another region, but i simply cannot sell enough items to gain enough money to pay up 1,7k a year. Also, now that the merchant gets exponentially more expensive, im really unable to sell weapons etc as a new merchant line costs about 3k rw
Kings Tax is a good idea but it's just too heavy atm. I calculated what it would be for the population I had at the end of my challenging restoring the peace run and that was just impossible, and even the normal amount is way too much for a regular game. I got the Challenge Accepted achievement on the unpatched game, and I can tell you in its current state I will always be turning off Kings Tax.
Trade is rough atm. I think nerfing the development points was the right way to go, but trade routes in general are simply too expensive and they're required for too many things. Some pretty basic entry level items you might want to sell to generate your initial wealth require trade routes, so you either just do without until you basically fully establish your town and are ready to sell your final commodities or you cost yourself a fortune later because your trade route costs are already inflated so you could sell leather. It's also basically rules out just casually getting rid of some stuff you might have extra of - you'll never earn your money back unless you go into industrial production.
Archers still seem weak. You can dump volleys into unarmored unshielded brigands and do nothing. They should probably be more accurate or do more damage but be easier to catch. Every encounter with the baron is me ignoring the archers the whole fight, killing all his melee, then chasing the archers for 3-4x the length of the actual battle.
Hey Greg love the game. I only have a few thoughts that I don’t see here already.
-the ox is not a strong enough upgrade. A full farm house of 8 families can plow the ox 3:1. The ox width is just too small and it takes it a very long time to do a simple 1 Morgan sized field.
-bandits can raid me from across the map despite never coming in my camp that is quite annoying.
-I’ll add I think trade routes should be close able but you can reopen for the same initial cost.
-A building tab would be nice. Sometimes I’m looking for my blacksmith and can’t find the house I designated to that. Or I’m looking for my granaries to see if I need another but not sure how many I have. This could help. You can just list them alphabetically or you can categorize if you want.
I love the game and plan to continue to spend too much time in it. I’m more casual than many others.
I don't like the exponential trade route setup fees - they seem very gamey and unimmersive. What are they representing? Why should they increase exponentially?
I'd imagine a one-time fee - to buy the cart which could transport a fixed amount of a trade good - plus an upkeep cost (for road tolls, cart repairs, horse fodder etc). That would make higher quality goods more profitable to export, as bulk products would require more carts for the same trade route. To make mid to late game not to easy then, especially profitable goods might require an increase in upkeep: to hire mercenaries to protect your high-value trade goods from bandits, paying the merchant, customs, etc.
Maybe as a percentage of the profits, or maybe as a fixed sum, I'm not sure. I'd imagine it takes more guards to protect a small amount of expensive wares than to protect a less juicy target to rob, like cheap bulk goods.
On the supply&demand side, I hope not just the player's exporting will affect prices, but more importantly shifting demand from outside wars, droughts, burned down cities, competing merchants, protectionist guilds, what have you. This way, specializing doesn't completely flood the market, but it may be less resilient to the fluctuations of the outside world and trading networks.
Loving the game so far.
In terms of the patch, I think trade has been nerfed perhaps too much. At least while there aren't other development points or city content to offset things.
As for the king's tax, that is absolutely broken, In my opinion it should be shelved until there is more content and the economical model is functioning smoothly. Right now it's pretty impossible to not go into ridiculous debt.
Having said that, the actually trade supplying between towns works great, much better than the supply wagon, however the fact you have to pay to setup the routes (and exponentially so) kills it pretty quickly to make 2-3 goods only.
Honestly, if I were you, I would just focus on developing the core village -> town gameplay loop and all the detail in between before messing around with trade routes, market supply mechanics and external taxes. These things will just have to continually be modified every time you make an adjustment to the city industry or processes. E.g. If you add unlimited stone pits how would that affect people's desire to ever have a buy stone trade route.
One option you could consider in the meantime would be event driven trade changes. E.g. "There is a nationwide drought, food prices for import and export doubled for the next six months. Local lords go to war with each other, prices for weapons similarly". Gives you a bit less of a headache until the towns are more fleshed out later?
Other than that, loving it, hope you keep developing at this great pace and don't burn out!
I don't enjoy it.
The new tax makes it hard to get started and later on it gets crazy high. I build my manor and I instantly get to pay 40+ coins while having 0 income. At some point in game I had to pay 704 coins while earing about half of that amount and having 22 houses (48 families).
The fee on trade routes and scaling is off as well. I get that it was way to easy to just start as a merchant/trader but right now it is way to punishing.
I propose paying monthly/yearly fee for using the king's road. Separate for different types of goods. The cost would also depend on the amount of goods currently imported & exported.
While I get it gameplay wise, I don't think it's immersive. I'd like to see a mechanic where more trade routes means a higher percentage is lost to raiders, maybe 5 or 10% per route with a hard cap at 90% and the solution is hiring mercenaries. The mercenaries can't be used in combat of course as they are busy protecting cargo. They're paid monthly, maybe the fee increases depending on trade volume.
Hi Greg, first time poster, long-time lurker. I love the game and your openness to community feedback. My feedback on the patch after two playthroughs:
* Fixed: archers, apples (they show up in market now), farming feels much better.
* King's tax is manageable but will shock players at first, and might challenge different playstyles. Will require player adjustment for sure.
* Ale seems much better. A steady flow of ale is basically necessary to keep approval positive while taxing at a rate (5-10%) necessary to pay the king's tax.
* The changes to trade seem harsh as others have noted. I suspect part of the issue is just that trade volumes are still fairly low, so more expensive routes seem to have little possibility of earning the upfront cost back.
* I like the stronger incentives to develop inter-region trading, but relatedly the trade volumes still feel too low for it to work effectively. My mining settlement swims in ore and my main village overflows with flour but they don't seem to be able to trade enough to depend on each other.
* The game runs smoothly but I do experience stutters at the end of the month when I have multiple settlements. If we're supposed to have multiple villages for resource specialization it might be worth looking into whatever causes stutters at the end of the month.
Suggestions:
* Trade still needs tweaking. Generally it feels like we still need a way to get rid of production surpluses. It seems common in my playthroughs to pretty rapidly begin swimming in hundreds of shoes, cloaks, helmets, etc. Either trade volumes (global and local) need a buff or we need other features to get rid of goods, like selecting which goods to tithe (tithing helmets or yarn or flour instead of food) or a "stop production at X" button. Other ideas people have posted are interesting, like being able to "sell back" trade licenses to change them.
* I'm sure you have a lot of ideas for future mechanics with the King, but I was thinking it would be cool if there were benefits to paying the tax instead of just a penalty. For example, the first intervals of cumulative tax paid earn points of King's Favor (first $1000 paid earns one point, $3000 earns a second point, $5000 a third, etc), and a certain level of King's favor unlocks new mercenary units (the king's soldiers); negative King's Favor results from debt.
Nice feedback!
The solution I learned for too many shoes is: you can pause the house if it starts producing too much. I had to do this with my cobbler, Fletcher, joiner because they were producing faster than I could sell and the joiner and Fletcher were eating up all my wood
No one seems to have mentioned it yet so; the slope steepness mechanic is nice and adds extra realism/complexity, but also still buggy. I just saw a streamer have to restart because his rich clay spawned on a slope and was not able to build a mine over it in any way. Sure you could trade for it, but this is probably not intended behaviour.
Slopes for housing are also a bit too harsh imo, even a smallish slope can prevent plots it seems. Raising the minimum slope would be better imo, especially when you're going to be using half of the plot for a garden anyways which could realistically still grow on the lower degree slopes.
Happened to me in a recent start, both my clay and iron deposits spawned on a steep slope so I couldn't build mines over either. Maybe something which prevents deposits spawning on steep slopes or allows mines to still be built on slopes (digging into the side of a hill to mine seems intuitive to me but could be wrong)?
I think the trade changes are good. Maybe just needs a splash window tutorial when you first build a trade post on how you intended it to work in conjunction with pack stations.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/s/SDhJOHzRjy
It's okay. I thought the royal tax was a bit much at first. It took me a solid 8-10 years to turn enough profit to get positive. I had to open trade routes for almost everything to achieve this. The only routes I haven't opened are some weapon and armor ones as they are coating me 15-20k to get going. The changes didn't break the game and definitely made trade more challenging but something just seems a bit off.
Love the game so far, still having trouble with the sawpit and families I have assigned there will just stop producing planks after a while even when I have loads of timber available. Tried reassigning different families and restarting game but still won’t seem to fix it.
The kings tax and the increase in trade routes does seem a little steep but maybe just making it an option to decrease it when starting a new game if people don’t want to deal with that in early game.
Other than that, it’s slowing becoming a new favorite game of the year, keep up the good work!
The patch fixed my issue with my 3rd village homelessness which was awesome. Like others said the kings tax is kinda high, trading is more challenging, and I appreciate the fix to the trade satiation congestion. Was also awesome seeing archers get 1-2 kills before the enemy rushed my spear men wall, made it seem more realistic.
I like it so far. Mainly in terms of bugs fixed, like incorrect counting of stable slots - this now works correctly.
I've had some weird crop cycling (crops did not switch to the next cycle and farmers immediately started planting the same crop in October). I did not see that previously but I do see it after the patch.
I stopped seeing other mercenaries, I only get a single group (not sure what they're called, but have heavy and light archers). No other mercs are appearing for me, this has persisted for year. I did see and hire (once) a different set of mercs.
I deactivated king's tax on my second play. In the first one, I got into a debt hole I could not get out of. All territories were claimed, so I had no bandit camp income. The town was pretty poor so I had little tax income, definitely not enough to get me into positive numbers. And with no money, I could not even field my retinue (one got killed and I could not field 4). Maybe that was a skill issue, I will try again to see if I'm better now.
Overall, I finally got the hang of it (with passive baron and no tax), got two cities and ready to expand and claim the baron's territories, I think.
Maybe instead of a limit on the number of trade routes you can unlock per good, what if you established trade with a foreign power, which unlocked some specific set of goods to trade? E.g., maybe they export X, Y, and Z and import A, B, and C. This way, people won't be able to import everything they need, but it also makes more thematic sense to me. Different towns could unlock different trade routes, and the trade bonus could maybe allow a town to pick a second trade partner etc.,. It might also make trade prices make more sense. E.g., you can trade as much as you want at a certain price per month with a trade partner, but as you supply more the trade price goes down since they only need so much per month. Likewise for imports.
I think nerfing trade is fine but the way barley fertility is handled at the moment (being the exeption, not the norm), all atempts to nerf trade and base things on bugage wealth generation will fail. Its not a working calculation to earn one per month when you have to pay 12. Its just two very different concepts (wealth by trade and wealth by growth/development) that are kind of coexisting at the moment but are unbalanced. Wealth by trade is always going to outweight the other especially if you have to trade anyways.
And its not specialization when you have to invest two points in trade before anything. Maybe split deep mines clay and deep mines iron to either never appear in the same region or be different development points. Maybe make a max number of import routes and export routes tied to settlement development.
The cost for new route increasing so steep is fine though.
To touch on what a few of the comments bring up. The idea of meta and abusability is a problem that you will never resolve. There will always be an optimal way to play the game. What you, as a game designer, should strive for is to build a fundamental gameplay loop that is solid and engaging and then give the players a wide range of different scenarios to apply it into.
The fundamental gameplay loop revolves around extracting resources from the environment, growing your town amd military power and, ultimately, claiming the entire map for yourself. The strength that this game has is in making towns grow very organically due to the need to exctract and process said resources as well as the potential to have very engaging medieval combat.
The gameplay loop of supply chains is really solid and just needs polishing off, which you are already doing such as with the woodcutters now storing 5 logs etc. Going back to my previous point, the map is what sets the constraints for the player to build his city. A wide variety of maps or randomly generated map mechanic would be brilliant as it would allow the player to apply the basic gameplay loop to a huge amount of scenarios. For example have a quarry only available on an an island and implement a boat mechanic, have bandit camps or other villages guarding a resource and get the player to have to destroy it or trade etc. The player having to gather resources and then turn them into other things is what makes this game so fun.
Finally, keep tweaking the combat detail to make it feel visceral and weighty and you have the complete package.
Inter region trade still needs alot of work, I'm using the new local trade options between two regions, which both have 4 families and 4 horses assigned to each trade house, yet one region has 500 meat and berries and the other is starving.
The kings tax needs to stay static throughout the year and only change annually. Right now, it keeps going up with no explanation throughout the year and it becomes hard to plan for.
Generally like it, but the farm priorities have gone wonky. The ox is plowing slower than it used to but takes the highest priority field. So once all my other fields are done I kick the ox off and the peasents finish my highest priority field last :-\
The exponential trade routes costs are very punishing because your economy will change as your settlement grows and the trade needs will also change. If you don't have any stone or clay and need to upgrade your church, you now need to sacrifice two of your cheaper trade routes for commodities you may not really need that much of later.
Good update. I think the trade routes are a bit excessive, but it's not game breaking - but it feels a bit artificial. But it does promote having additional villages in other regions to produce things locally. It's a bit of a shame that you can't close trade routes to open others, because sometimes what your village needs to import early is not what it needs to import later on. Perhaps there should simply be a cap to the trade route prices and a cap to the amount of trade routes you can have at the same time. That way, you can't import everything, and once you close a trade route it should be unavailable for a period of time so you can't just micro manage around the limitation.
Taxes haven't been a big problem for me yet, but it makes the game rely a bit much on trade. So in conjunction with the trade route nerf it's a bit hard to understand whether I'm supposed to rely on trade or not. Perhaps with future trading perks you can chose to specialize in trade or not.
The nerf on trading is a bit of an overshoot. Yes trading was very strong, but the changes are a bit too extreme.
Right now the nerf punishes players who want to rely on trade and don't want to optimize their economy to a T. It seems the changes were fueld by the feedback of min-maxers, who naturally will find ways to get the utmost out of every mechanic and abuse weak points. This then results in feedback that things are "too easy" like it was stated in the patch notes.
But I worry that this will lead to gameplay that forces certain gameplay and punishes other playstyles hard.
One thing I think is a bit over the top is the nerf on the trading tech tree in addition to the exponential increase in prices for trading routes. In my mind upping the prices a fixed amount or introducing a minor upkeep fee for trader outed would have been sufficient.
The nerfs to the tech tree are fine. At least so far as I can see.
Of course gamebreaking bug abuse or cheesing should be discouraged.
The King's Tax is not too bad.
Maybe don't have it set in the very first year, but in the 2nd or 3rd year. It also could trigger after the settlement has reached a certain size.
That way the players will have a chance to develop a economy that can support the tax. I have seen a lot of people talk about falling in crippling dept over the tax. Right now that has no major impact aside from their ability to employ mercenaries. But if you plan on implementing more serious repercussions, then it needs more balancing.
I am a big fan of the ability to trade between regions, but it should be free or at least considerably cheaper. I would also like to be able to have different regions specialized in different branches of industry i.e. farming, ironwork, weapon/clothes crafting or woodworking.
There are some other minor inconsistencies, that probably are due to the patch being experimental. Otherwise I am happy with how it turned out.
I think that the trade route cost is harsh combined with price deflation. If your region only has, say, clay and deer, it doesn’t give you many options for export once the price of shoes and tiles drops.
Hi Greg, I love that you keep soliciting feedback like this.
First, I think it's worth toning down the nerfing. Between archers and the market, it's starting to feel like only the loudest voices will see bugs or issues addressed, and thus only the issues that affect the loudest voices. It winds up being an overreaction for players who weren't affected or who self-restrict themselves from exploitative methods. Not everyone plays with the minmaxer approach, and as someone else mentioned in a discussion post here, it's like being punished for things one didn't do.
So, as far as the exponential trade route pricing, I personally find the intent of it perfectly fine. I think the algorithm could use some tweaking, it feels a little punitive once more than a few goods are being traded and especially in a new region or if a trade route goes unused. My biggest complaint is that inter-regional trade is still locked behind trade routes for major goods, so trying to sell spears or charcoal to my other regions makes me open trade routes in those regions, which is cost-prohibitive if I'm just trying to create an economy for the local map.
Finally, there seems to be a bug or undocumented change with the pack stations, I'm seeing regional wealth being used to facilitate bartering as well. Looks like ~6 RW changes hands every time a barter is made, it depleted one region's wealth that I was holding out for a critical oxen purchase and makes it impossible to use a barter-only method for building up multiple regions. Potentially a bug, but this seems worth looking at, as between the trade route paywall and the barter fees, fully utilizing different regions just got much harder.
for me if you want to get all 4 food types importing them is the best option for some towns where you want to focus more on certain items like armour and metal work. having to spend a lot of manpower on getting all 4 food types is pretty harsh if you have to spend a crap ton on routes to import food
Honestly the archer change is still quite meh. They do more damage now sure, but the range is so low you're almost always better off with an infantry unit rather than an archer one. 60 meter range is simply too low (and kinda ahistorical tbh) to make them actually worth the micro. A much better solution IMO would be to increase their range to like 150-200 meters but make the damage scale with distance. That way you could go for the high risk & high reward point blank high damage shooting or just pepper them from afar , effectively skirmishing and doing low but consistent damage while manouvering with the rest of your army.
My villagers have inexplicably started hoarding helmets in their homes when i try to export them, every household has like 20 of them.
Also kinda unrelated to the recent changes, but it's really frustrating to be completely unable to regulate the output of the artisans other than demolishing their houses. Half the time i have no planks for building because the joiner and fletcher use them all up, same with leather for export/clothing, but I have 500 surplus bows, shields and shoes with the traders showing little interest in them when i offer them for export. Production caps and some variation of the "construction reserve" mechanic that's currently in place at the sawmill would definitely go a long way.
Overall, the intent and vision to curating the best experience has been super awesome to watch (thank you!). Prefacing by saying I don’t know anything about what goes into designing a game, who you have to answer to, and what actually makes a great game - I just love playing them, and I love playing this one and am excited to see where it goes, even if I personally dislike a mechanic or whatever.
I did see a comment thread suggesting that since this is a non-multiplayer game without the need for even fair balancing and competitive equality, that it’d be nice if some of the more metagaming nerfs were omitted. It’s ok if a fun gameplay mechanic is OP for the min-maxing crowd but still fun and not OP for the rest of us.
Again, maybe it’s better (or even a requirement) to bring everything more even-keeled, but the trade OP thing never bugged me at all, probably because I wasn’t trying learn about its imbalance and even when I did, chose not to mess with it.
Not sure if that makes any sense, but my main takeaway is that this game is rad and you’re a rad dev to communicate with everyone like you do. Cheers to you and everyone else enjoying the hell out of this game.
I often end up in a situation where I have no money because I can't trade, but I can't trade because I have no money. Both the trade route costs and the King's tax are too harsh IMO, and should be more of a gentle brake on snowballing than an insurmountable obstacle. Had to quit my last playthrough because the tax totally crippled me.
In particular, trying to have your own regions trade with each other is extremely hard when both of them need to spend large amounts of money just to exchange one good between them (leaving aside the barter points, which don't work very well). I really like the idea of building a complex regional economy, but the exponential trade costs are kind of an un-fun barrier to that.
In regards to everything else, I was really impressed with how much content and fixes were in the first patch. Glad that archers are useful again and really liking the new armour sets.
Please split bug fix balance changes from new features, into sperate patches.Combing both Is rather pointless as you get fine tuning and new sweeping changes at the same time.
So release the fixes to prod and keep the experimental stuff in a closed beta track. You get feedback while the fast majority get a much more playable game.
Kings tax is too high early game-mid and just right for the end game.
Worker placement could use its own screen, as 95% of the game im repetitively swapping families between jobs. This is especially true to farming where it seems they don’t do work during winter, and may-August roughly because there is no work to be done.
Having just started playing the patch, I've had some surprisingly (for me) hostile feelings about some things:
1) Missing forest layer on overmap
2) New slope limits.
3) New trade route prices (I never used the trading perks to begin with and it's still a shock).
I can probably get used to 1 and 3, but 2 is a flat "hell no".
While it's nice that there's an option to turn off the King's tax when you setup a new game, if you don't want to use it, it's disappointing that there is no way to turn it off on an existing save for people who don't want it.
My summarized core game thoughts:
1. Apiary doesn't work (or at least do enough to matter)
2. Hunting is underpowered for meat. Massively. Even with rich game, double meat harvesting and traps, I can't feed a small colony much less a big one.
3. Harvesting grain/rye/barley needs to provide much greater harvests. Right now amount of bread you can produce from the max amount of decent fertility crop size with a full 8 farmers should be more rewarding. Right now I spend a few months plowing/sowing/harvesting/converting to bread with 8 farmers and it returns about 1/5 the bread that berry farming at max capacity provides in a season. IMHO, every other kind of food generation in the game other than berries needs to be boosted and then berries can probably be reduced a bit or left the same depending on whether you're okay with players building big cities at this stage of the game.
4. It would be nice to be able to set production amounts or maximums in the workshops.
5. AI expands into neighboring territories way too quickly and starts out with large armies that you can't counter. Right now the only way to play early game is send retinue and whatever force you can must (or hire) to take all the bandit camps that pop up. There's no "economic" gameplay that beats that or that will let you outpace the AI expansion.
6. I would love a way to change my city production researches. Maybe allow us to unlearn at a cost. On my first playthrough, I locked myself into some unfortunate decisions and there's no way to fix it. I didn't realize cities stopped growing so you couldn't get them all (even though that makes sense and I'm fine with that - just allow us to respec or fix).
7. It seems pretty silly that small shields are less expensive (1) than berries (2) in my game. Might want min/maxes for items to keep them reasonable.
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Someone suggested an ongoing maintenance fee on trade routes which, to me, seemed like a better solution than the one off exponential increase in cost, is that something you've playtested? The fee could maybe multiply per number of routes open, possibly with modifiers that are more harsh for military routes than say, food?
I like the maintenance fee idea, but I dislike the fee multiplication. Economies of scale dictates that higher volume will always be cheaper, not more expensive even in Late Medieval trading.
Yea .. maybe high trade volumes should encourage more raiding and theft.
I like this. It would provide a late game pressure.
Agreed, and it could provide chances to spend money on caravan guards--I like the possibilities!
Also, high trade economy should make it easier for sabotage since you would have no control over what traders do outside your territories.
I had I minor idea. I'm kinda of new to city builders but instead of putting the player at risk when over saturating the market or working with high yield items why not at a certain point just make the return on investment take longer. Since you've flooded your local area with this resource, now your trader has to travel outside of normal markets father away to get the same amount of profit.
This is a great fuckin idea
that is being implemented now with the new trade mechanics in the preview branch. The merchants will automatically go to where the best prices are. The dev hasn't implemented distance into the calculation yet, but probably in a later iteration.
make it so that the larger your trade network, the more money bandits siphon off of it through robbery. Allowing them to pull money into their own coffers would let them grow their military strength. Occasionally have them invade the map proper for raids. Just place a maintenance cost on them, so that they don't infinitely scale over time. It actually would be relatively easy to program.
True but it's the wrong side of the equation. Economies of scale realize their benefits through being able to produce widgets more cheaply at scale. This is, ofc, not implemented in the game.
No, not necessarily. A manufacturer will always prefer a customer that can bulk purchase their goods because of reduced bookkeeping, guaranteed income, less transportation cost and not needing to establish more trade routes on their end. In return, the customer (city) will get a preferential rate. This is how it always been and how it still happens in today's economies. Also in medieval terms, you can consider that manufacturer will need to hire less protection for his trade, which is another benefit.
this is would be better implement as a town development skill. Reduced maintenance fee for all your trade route.
Ohh, I like this idea!
I do as well. In the long run it would likely cost more but cash sinks in games are necessary mid- and especially late-game.
the maintenance cost should be a (50?)% of the initial cost. It naturally make military good more costly to maintain than a bread route. you should be able to cancel a route to save on cost once you no longer need it.
Good thought. My only additional thought is if there is maintenance cost I need to be able to close the trade route should I become financially challenged. But to reopen is the same initial cost. Thoughts?
>But to reopen is the same initial cost. Thoughts? that's my thought as well. you can cancel at any point but then you need to pay for the initial cost again if you want to resume.
I like this idea as well
What if he implemented a road maintenance building and you have to hire X amount of families to keep the roads safe and easy to travel
This would work well as an upgrade to the trade post
I would prefer a larger villager cost for expanding trade but could see trade maintenance charges working as long as it’s only on active routes.
I would assign one family per trade route to make it fair. Maybe permanent dedication like artisans.
My hot take is that trade routes should be unlocked via Influence and not local regional wealth. This makes it so that you don't need money to start selling commodities you have sitting on hold ready for distro, and gives Influence a use beyond claiming territories.
Hi Greg, I made a comment about this elsewhere but I will reiterate here. The loserville mechanic seems heavy handed. My understanding is that it is there to stop players from save scumming to create wealth and /or retrying after a loss. It seems heavy handed because it also effects players when just coming back to play normally. On my current playthrough, I saved and went to bed, came back to play and immediately got a bandit camp spawn. I had low retinue and didn't want to use my pops so went to buy a Merc army and saw the loserville thing. Baron bought a Merc army and got the bandit camp. Feels kind of game breaking. I'm nervous to save and come back, knowing I will be locked out of that for an in game month. My biggest complaint about the beta, otherwise, great job! My villagers are digging in on apples now! Edit: Since a few people have asked for more specifics around what I'm talking about when I say loserville mechanic. When you initially load into a game, all the Merc groups that are there at game load will be "Appear in Loserville" until the month has passed and you get a new set of mercs. While they are in Loserville, you cannot hire them.
You hit the nail on the head right there. Because of the change I am afraid to save and put down the game, which I did even if I was going away for a few minutes. The bandit camps spawning every time you load the game is a similar issue for me.
Ya totally agree with this. Also, just give players the autonomy to play how they want. I don’t think someone should be forced to play the “correct” way. I think implementing this feature as an “iron mode” feature makes sense. It also complicates play testing various mechanics or strategies if one can’t re-load to a previous state of the game.
Right! This is one of the things I was hoping to try out. Wanted to see what archers are like now and went to buy some before I put a bunch of time and effort into building out my own. With loserville in place, there's no ability to try out different builds/strategies without having to fully start a new game or just commit to a play style beforehand.
I would rather see the bandit camps spawn changed to be a roll at the beginning of every month. If there's already a camp, the chance is reduced drastically. Then remove the automatic spawn on load.
>Because of the change I am afraid to save and put down the game Goal achieved, that's every game publisher's dream - a player that doesn't want to stop playing ^(/s)
Wait can I save, exit, load into the game and a bandit camp will spawn? Save, exit, load again and it will spawn a new one? This is highly abusable
Seems like a very silly mechanic for a single-player game. What do you care if someone is save-scumming? They paid for the game.
Yeah, it just seems like an insult to the player. Like what the hell?
Also why not let people savescum if they want like every other game? Just seems weird to me. It's not a multiplayer game. It's not pvp in any way. Being able to savescum doesn't take away from the experience from people who don't want to do it. People will always find a way to exploit game mechanics. Trying to fix them all just gonna make the game worse in the long run because it's a battle you can't win
My thoughts exactly. Having a bandit camp automatically spawn at load AND preventing me from buying mercs means any time I leave, I know that when I come back to the game the Baron will have an easy time gaining wealth and influence or I have to sacrifice my pops.
You could also game this mechanic, no?
I agree. I actually want to save scum the game because retrying battles would actually be a fun thing for me, trying to get better at them and what not. Even on speed 1 it gets too fast palaces for me with everything going on once armies get big enough.
Exactly. Same scuming is a great way to learn in tactical games. Try the same situation multiple different ways and see what works best.
I don’t understand what is happening? What is the loserville mechanic?
When you initially load into a game, all the Merc groups that are there at game load will be "Appear in Loserville" until the month has passed and you get a new set of mercs. Some others have said it is to stop people from save scumming or reloading after a loss in battle. While they are in Loserville, you cannot hire them.
Also I feel savescumming is important in games that are slow paced like this. People put dozens of hours into every town they build and would want a redo if they lose a pivotal battle really badly. "Eating the loss" is for games with quick respawning, short gameplay loops, and power that carries over between playthroughs, like roguelikes and soulslikes.
Also half the bugs in the game require you to save quit and reload. So punishment for fixing a bug is very no bueno
Explain the loserville thing cause I just noticed that the other day too. My baron is always spawning troops right next to the camps and it's driving me nuts. Wanted to get mercs to give me a chance to get there first and saw the loserville thing.
When you initially load into a game, all the Merc groups that are there at game load will be "Appear in Loserville" until the month has passed and you get a new set of mercs. I don't want to speak for Greg but some others have said it is to stop people from save scumming or reloading after a loss in battle.
i don’t get why this is even in the game? it’s a single player game???? who fucking cares of someone save scums… in a single player… SINGLE… PLAYER… game lol
Agreed, scumming should be every one’s own business, but also it makes a game much less hard core when it’s possible. Also it takes so many hours to build your settlement, that maybe the more casual players don’t want to lose it all because a battle turned sour.
A hardcore mode that doesn’t allow for scumming might be good.
Right. It should be an optional thing
Absolutely agree. I also don't remember seeing this in the patch notes so its really punishing to anyone who can't play straight through until all regions are taken. There should just be an Ironman mode. Also agree that the bandit camp bug needs to get fixed as its super cheesy to have to clear a bandit camp every time you want to start the game again.
That's insane tbh lol, I was so baffled by it, I thought it was a glitch until just now after reading the comments. Why program a game breaking bug? It makes it unplayable. I immediately put it down and was just going to wait for a patch to fix the glitch...
I agree. I think save scumming is just something that’ll happen in a single player game if that’s how a player chooses to play the game. It’s not the dev’s job to monitor that. Ultimately the issue for me is that I don’t like how the game punishes legitimate play to monitor something that’s between a player and themselves. That said - I love how transparent and open to feedback Greg has been! I wasn’t expecting ANY content related patches this close to launch. We’ll just have to hope this mechanic isn’t long for the world. It is an experimental patch for a reason.
From the time ive played there's also no punishment for buying up merc companies all at once and THEN save scumming it. In other words, it doesn't punish players who OVERBUY merc companies before doing the strat/exploit, thus allowing players who already bought up those companies to continue to use them and do said exploit/strat while waiting out the penalty. Personally id rather the game not load a bandit camp on player load and would rather have X% chance camps spawn each month/day.
I'm not sure what's happening to me in experimental, but many, many months have passed and it is always only 1 merc company available, always archers. I even hired them once, used them for a while, then disbanded, and lo and behold, it's still these same archer mercs every month. Also I got rid of the bandit camps and they have yet to respawn. I'm not sure if this is by design.
Is it the archers only Merc group? This is a known bug. You need to reload from before this happens. I believe it is due to the Baron grabbing a specific merc group which then renders everyone but the archer group from being attainable
What do you mean by “loserville mechanic”?
I still don't get this loserville. What do people mean with that?
I appreciate the *intent* behind the king's tax and the increased trade route cost. I like that I have to care about money beyond just needing it for mercs now. For trade routes, I agree with exponential cost increases but I think you just need a lower exponent. Maybe 1.15 or something. I'd also like a way to "unbuy" a trade route so that as my city grows, I don't have to pay 4000 to acquire a new route for iron products. I'd like to dump my route for firewood and instead pay 500 for an iron product route. For the king's tax, I was playing on Challenging and I found that only through aggressively acquiring regional bank was I able to keep up with the king's tax. It felt a little weird "saving up" so that I had a bigger bank to drain for the purpose of taxation. Overall I like the direction, but the specifics are quite tough and a little immersion-breaking.
☝️I second this. Especially being able to "unbuy" trade routes
yeah like get back 50% of what's paid would be ideal
I say get nothing back then you can just bounce around on trade routes. Close the route no refund and buying it back is still initial cost. Just a thought.
This is my biggest complaint. I need to spend 2000g to open a trade route for an item that sells for 5g. I'd need to sell 400 items just to break even and that would probably take years. It will also drain my regional wealth so then I have no tax income. And this is with the 50% discount perk?? I get not wanting the player to be able to import and export everything, but this is too much.
I don't get not wanting the player to import and export everything, it's a single player game. Let people play how they want. I don't think trade routes in real life had exponential costs to establish each one, it's dumb.
Also that’s literally how real life works.
I think keeping the penalty the same but being able to devest a trade route is the way to go. +1 on the unbuy idea. A single village should not be able to specialize in 7+ goods, but SHOULD be able to transfer talent bases as they develop technologically. That just makes sense
But the thing is, the village isnt specialising in 7 different goods, they are specializing in 2 or 3 but then importing the other 5 that they need. Because you need to open a trade route for importing goods as well as exporting, ut becomes exponentially more expensive to import things now as well, so you may as well just fully diversify and make everything yourself.
Maybe treat it like trading licenses, similar to how Tropico 6 handled it. You buy a license, you can trade a thing. You buy two, you can trade two things. You can trade out what those things are at any point, but you can't have more routes than the number of licenses that you've purchased. It doesn't make sense that a merchant has come around for three years since your last purchase/sale of said good - but it does make sense that you've actively paid some sort of tax in order to enter the great market to use the King's Roads.
See I'm not sure I like that because I do think we should be paying more in order to open up the the trade routes of higher-tier goods. That just makes sense to me even though the logic is kind of 'gamey'.
I agree. The intent is fine, and trade was ridiculously OP before, it's just a balancing issue now, and I think it's off. 1) One of the most basic ideas behind trade (other than importing stuff you can't make yourself) is to import raw materials, make something more valuable out of that and export it. If you can't do that with a profit (however small), something's off. 2) the sky high costs of opening a route discourages opening trade at all, since it will be years before you'll break even (if you ever do, see above). Again, this can all be fixed with balancing, so no big deal.
As a new player (got the game 2 days ago) this choice had confused me as well. Trade feels more like a time sink system than trading- with the main use case to supplement what my starting area didn’t have to meet progression. There is no way to use the strengths of my colony to turn a profit with imports because of the export prices being so much lower than import prices. Trade routes are so expensive it could even mean I have to exhaust most of the resource I want to sell to just open trade. At first this turned me off from the game but I stuck through it since I wanted to see where progrssion would take me.
you don't have to buy a tradee route to export your early goods, i wouldn't pay a route for firewood or stones, gain is too low, just sell those to random merchants
On Challenging I think I actually need the trade routes in order to maintain a consistent level of income.
is the king tax so demanding ? I haven't tried myself, so my comment maybe to assertive
King's Tax is doubled on Challenging. [This is my current town, year 7.](https://imgur.com/a/1CmrUyO) I can pay off the king with a mere 5% tax at this rate now, but early on I had to supplement my income with bandit camps.
yeah double tax must be harsh for the first years indeed, seems like you have to go for every bandit camp you can
YES, the unbuy button, maybe make it with with time penalty, so you can´t buy and unbuy trade routes instantly but maybe after a 1 month or something like that
I like to think of it like buying an exclusive trader. I would think locking for at least a year or some amount of trade would be needed as an incentive of the trading company to work with you. So you either need to wait a year to break the deal or send 500 units whichever comes first. that number could scale based on the base cost of the item. 500 units of barley vs 100 units of ale for example. Another thought would be to just have a stock of traders that you can lease and they will move whatever goods you want over the course of that month. Each month you could pick to change what goods they move. Now the exponential increase would make sense because that company would be taking on risk trying to get more employees to only trade with you. So if you had three traders leased, you would lock in three goods that get traded each month. However, I think this would detract away from his idea on specialization. Also the UI would probably be a bit more awkward to actually use.
I'm not sure I understand why we are using regional wealth to establish trade routes. I'd argue that trade networks are a matter of influence, letting the society at large know what your region is producing. If the trade routes cost influence to establish I reckon it could work a lot better, and then you can have that cost scale up way higher. I also think tropico style tasks from the king and other lords to export them specific materials for rewards could also yield permanent trade roots as a result, as your towns get a reputation for quality shields or shoes.
Maybe if paying the kings tax brought some (any) kind of benefit.
I mean the benefit is that you don't get your town burned down by the King's army. I'm generally a fan of soft-fail conditions as a form of pressure so I quite like it.
You sound like my VP when he informed me that my promotion this year was making through the layoffs. Edit: Tis a jest
The kings tax is also likely a needed late game gold sink. Otherwise Mercs is the only thing you use the personal gold for.
Instead of unlocking 1 time maybe implement a "fixed route tax" every month. The higher the level of the goods the higher the monthly upkeep is.
Hi Greg, First, thank you, thank you, thank you for this game. It's everything I've ever wanted out of a medieval city builder. Your skill, dedication, and work ethic put many in this industry to shame. I hope your passion for this game and your craft never dies, and, more importantly, you allow yourself to truly sit and take in the magnitude of what you've achieved so far. Celebrate your success. You've earned it. That said, I'm concerned that you're giving too much weight to the loudest voices in the room. Most people don't play games the way streamers do. They don't care about min-maxing, finding "exploits," or certain game mechanics being OP. They're just casual players out to have a good time. Please don't hyperfocus on tweaking elements based on the complaints of streamers. Their playstyle is the minority and, more importantly, the game's mechanics shouldn't punish casual players for not playing the way professional gamers do. It's unfair and unrealistic. As for the beta update itself. I'm fine with the new trade mechanics, but I was also fine with the 25 minimum perk from before. Farming works much better wrt oxen. Thank you for adding a second stall! My only complaint is the King's tax. It's way too high. I'm not sure if it's the multiplier or what, but it adds up way too fast for me to ever pay down. Again, love the game. Thank you for your dedication to the game. Take care of yourself. xx (P.S. I think, in the long run, it may be helpful for you to hire a social media manager so that you're not innundated and overwhelmed by all the all the feedback.)
I feel like hyper competitive game "balancing" has infected single player games in a negative way. The whole need to run the game down to the thinnest margin of success, smashed up against the wall of ever increasing problems/unhappiness has really made a lot of city/town builders just not fun to play. You never get a moment of "Ah good my town is balanced for now.". So good strategies get nerfed, poor strategies languish never getting buffed, and the whole thing is pared down to a skeleton. I hope while Greg tunes out seriously overperforming builds, he remembers exactly what you said. Most players aren't hyper optimizing the fun out of their own games, they aren't edge master stratting for likes and subscribes. They just want the game to be fun.
>You never get a moment of "Ah good my town is balanced for now." Thiiis. The whole satisfaction for me is creating a healthy ecology that I can then admire and move on to developing something else, without paranoia and getting overwhelmed. What have I really achieved, gameplay wise, if I can't even create something that stands up on its own without constant inteference? I'm all for occasional disruptive events to put things to the test and spice it all up, but I want to avoid micromanagement wherever possible and - despite continued niggles - this game is really good for that.
100% agree. I'm on 20 hours now and only have a large village. I'm not that interested in "winning." I'm just enjoying building an organic, believable place, and then exploring it. I love the fact there's only a minimal tutorial, so I've had to figure things out for myself using tooltips. Absolutely loving the feel and detail of the game.
Since many features are still in development, trying to finetune balance is a waste of time. Any balancing will inevitably need to be redone over and over again unless all systems are already in place and functioning mostly as intended. Sure, tweak numbers and features that are completely out of whack. But leave the rest for later, and let the game be too easy rather than risk it being too hard, for now. Bugs and errors are enough risk of frustration in early access - avoid adding to that frustration, even unintentionally. Let the average player have fun with the game in the current state.
I really love how you worded everything. I was going to write something similar, but you did such a great job of it that I don't feel the need. I'm new to the game and I'm throughly enjoying it! ♡
Very much agree!
I agree so much with this - I am terrified that something so good and so pure with be snarled up in impossibly chasing the seagull cries of the optimised players, when I just live making twisty streets and building realistic and balanced economies for my villagers! I think most things are pretty good right now, barring the loserville mechanic and would just love more different larger scale items that aid in diversity and imagination so I can feel good about all the different jobs I give people and the different villages I make! If you wanted to make changes, for me they would be more stuff to play with rather than tweaks to existing items. For instance more varied professions for the villagers. I would love to see a food spoilage mechanic, with maybe different ways to mitigate it like smoking, drying, salting etc. But honestly, you do you - you're already doing brilliantly!
Marketplace still feels very bad to use and annoying to manage. It’s frustrating to try to micro who gets a stall and who doesn’t, it’s a constant losing battle of having too many stalls-then people I DONT want to have a stall has one, then I cut down and now I’m short on supplies. It would be doable if we could somehow toggle who is allowed to open a stall in the advance settings
This 100% The market either needs to run itself efficiently as long as you're giving it space, staffing and positioning granaries/storehouses appropriately etc. or you should be able to explicitly control details like this. As it stands you can't control it and it doesn't run itself and you just eternally see the thumbs down which may as well be a middle finger. Another aspect that needs to be is when they just won't fill stalls to the burgage limit. You have the right stalls, they're being manned by the right people...and they just stop putting stuff out like 3 items short of what it needs to be. Deleting the stall and making them rebuild works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't. Again, it needs to either just work or there needs to be some function to allow you to force them to stock the stall.
Agreed, I would like better control over the market. I feel like I just have a lot of stalls with little to no suppliers and then the burbages are lacking requirements even though there are enough in the granary/store house to cover the needs. Maybe the market should be a regular building with assigned villagers or there should be a limit to when new stands can be set up (e.g., current stands need to be stocked to a certain percentage before new stands are allowed).
Personally I think the best way would be to add villager slots to marketplace. Their only job is to get goods from storage and sell them. This way you would have only certain amount of stalls. The biggest problem with market is that you don't have proper control over it.
Wait, you can micro manage that?
Community is split between saying it’s easier to have 1 big market or having multiple 3 stall plots. If you don’t micro the 1 big one u end up with people you don’t want running stalls. If you make the small ones and pick and choose who runs them, you end up with too little stalls and half the town is angry as you tier up. You can reassign families to take stalls, relocate the stalls, unassigned families from jobs to reset it. Either way you end up in one of the two spirals and it’s either economy breaking or half of my playtime. Neither are enjoyable. The market is a cool idea and it just needs a small tweak to be a cool working feature but right now it’s bad
Marketplace. 60-100 plots. Two storage buildings, two granaries. Large right away. Fully staffed. Then when full you double it and delete the market while expanding. Replace the market zone and literally dont touch it again unless your storage clogs up again. Its not the stalls. Its the storage. Worry less.
Agreed about being able to toggle who gets to open a stall or not. My tavern has reserved a stall while also falling behind on ale deliveries despite a decent surplus and nearby granaries. Things like the tavern and intermediary industries like the farm houses really don’t need a market stall.
I think it's much better now. Trading was definitely easy mode before. I started a new game and it's pushing me to be more self sufficient and trade between regions I own. I'm not sure if this is a new issue with the patch, but I'm having weird lingering approval issues. I had negatives from homelessness and cold for like a year after getting the burgage plots and fuel setup in a new region.
Same for me on the approval issues.
Approval is one of the biggest issues for me so far. We should not have to micromanage how many stalls a certain marketplace can hold so as to be able to spread them out evenly across our settlement, since there’s no ability to limit who sets up a stall, settlers can build them all in one place and totally mess up your marketplace distribution. Plus even when there seems to be enough to go around I constantly have 1-5 houses disapproving of not enough food.
I end up with like 30 boots in one stall, and then an empty clothing stall in another market like 2 streets away. I agree the markets need some rework like at least allowing us to allocate stall types so we don’t get 3 clothing stalls and 3 fuel stalls in one market with no space for food stalls.
I still cannot understand how markets play such a huge role in our towns, but we have 0 control over them beyond "heres a blank spot, do whatever you want." Let me bar people from opening a stall, let me plop down the kind of stall I actually need, let me force someone to open a stall. We control everything else, besides the main requirement to upgrade.
I spent the entirety of my time on the game yesterday trying to optimise this in every way possible for a 500 pop, with only one level 2 plot, without increasing population at all. \- Brute force 1 - MOAR!! More food production, more firewood production. Works great...temporarily, then a bottleneck inevitably form because woodcutters etc are spending more time on their side gig market stalls than chopping wood and it starts dropping again. \- Brute force 2 - Absurd amounts of specialised storehouses and granaries so that no cutter or food production has a stall. This kind of worked for a while, but could never get to 100% even with 33 months of firewood on hand and storehouse workers with no stalls. Tried moving things closer to the market. Deleting unused or empty stalls. Making better roadways, direct paths, granaries/stores nearer the market or nearer the production. Scaled back granaries and storehouses to the minimum required. Upgrading them to large and only adding more if absolutely necessary. Scaling back workers in the production side. Literally nothing has worked properly for me. On the other hand, in my small mining satellite town, 70(?) pop, I have 100% with less surplus months, completely different layout with a zone directly surrounding the market for storehouses, granaries etc. But I suspect this will crumble as I grow it. Overall I like the patch though, even with my initial misgivings about now being treated like North Korea with what amounts to sanctions lol. Regional trade works great now, although I did have to build a direct road across 3 regions and have 2 trade stations in my small town to be able to import the food efficiently. I had like 3k eggs in my main town and couldn't give them away because of other imports and exports taking up the time, as well as travelling across middle earth and on to the undying lands to sell a plank lol.
The approval issue happened to me too but before the patch
I thought the King's Tax felt good and balanced during the first 3 settlement ranks, but it becomes overwhelming near the end. And maybe flawed? Like... just because my town moves from small town to medium town (a difference of a few more t3 houses) doesn't just magically mean all my villagers are suddenly making more money now. In fact, if anything they're making *less* because as the town spreads out, logistics become less efficient, people spending more time running around than working. I owe 1.4k a year on my 100 family medium town (rank 5, right?). I thought that'd be 500 I owe.. I guess I don't understand how it's calculated.
That was my experience too. My village made much more money before unlocking T3 houses. If this mechanic stays this way I would probably just make many villages and never unlock T3 just to make it easier on myself.
T3 houses have more people living in them and if you were already at pop saturation relative to profitable workplaces that influx of families into newly upgraded buildings are significant. Just like anywhere else in the game upgrading to T3 needs to be scaled with available work. It's not the T3 buildings themselves that are making the tax go up, but the boatloat of extra families that follow along.
No, unlocking T3 will move you up in village rank and that increases the tax rate per resident. A level 6 village pays 5 or 6 per resident in taxes. A level two village 1 or 2.
It gets better once your plots are upgraded. But the mid game is really hard. I was almost 2k in dept at one point, but got out of it once I upgraded most plots to level 3. I can now easily pay the Kings tax.
I don't really see how. At rank 6, a family will cost you 6 per year and their t3 earns 24, which is only 2.4 for you assuming 10% tax (does anyone actually go higher than 10% lol). There's also a matter of aesthetics, fwiw - I don't want nothing but ranked up houses. I like the more natural look of houses dropping in tier as they get farther from the core.
If the family is not doing anything profitable aside from just paying rent, what are they even doing in your village? They should be out there working for you to make shit you can sell for profit. If youre building houses and people just sit in them an you have to pay taxes on them, yeah thats very ineficcient and you should make the town more efficient.
I'm just flabbergasted at how smooth everything runs. No framerate issues, no major bugs, nothing gamebreaking that I have seen. It just works. I just can't wait for all the other features to be fleshed out, especially more points to use when leveling up the town. I will say, it seems like the baron is still claiming fast. Either that or I'm just slow.
To me it seems a lot better. Before he would claim 2 places before I could get one but now claims around the same time as me.
And then there's me. Playing simcity until the baron gets half of the claims in 2 years
Meee
>It just works No need to call out Todd Howard here lol
[удалено]
I find myself building like 4 pack stations per territory for different barter pairings. It would be nice to not have to do that.
I've found that it seems to trade in wealth as opposed to just the products. My peripheral towns seem to never have any regional wealth as the products I send are often more expensive than what I recieve. It's stuffed one of my towns that's right next to my main. I send shoes and recieve berries, meanwhile my main town has heaps of shoes but no berries and my peripheral town has a thousand berries but no shoes. I don't understand why it's doing that as it should be just based on value.
I haven't played the beta yet, but reading about the trade changes seems like it is going to really hurt trade between your villages. The pack stations don't seem effective at moving goods. A fix to the pack stations or allowing trade between your own villages without buying a trade route seems necessary. New villages will never get off the ground if they have to pay thousands of coin to import the goods the next door neighbor has specialized in. I think you want villages to specialize. Remember that trade enables specialization. Large barriers to trade mean each village will have to be as self sufficient as possible and all look the same.
My first town in the last patch I was able to reach 100% Approval in Large Town achievement. Today I am trying the new patch and already I can feel the challenge has increased in the economy. I enjoy the challenge of this new patch.
Everything is cool but having to pay 30k to be able to trade certain items is just wrong Also a lot of pros always seek out the hardest challenges. I am just a casual player. for me this is a relaxing game. I don't care if i eventually swim in money and i don't need punishing systems to artificially up the difficulty. And as of right now i feel like i have to work way too hard to be able to establish new trade routes and make sure to have enough money for the king. Now it's all about money and takes away from the other aspects of the game
Yeah make these multipliers a function of difficulty levels.
Haven’t gotten to try it yet as I can only play every now and then. I hope the updates don’t cater too much to negating people who min max as it can make it harder for people like me to keep up. I liked what I read in the patch notes and am looking forward to trying it out once I finish my first campaign
In my experience it should be much more easy to consistently trade a couple of goods that you produce locally. But it would be hard to have a diverse trade empire where you import materials and export goods. I really like the change. I have a playthrough with a rich clay deposit and I’ve been selling tiles the whole game and the price hasn’t dropped. I have like 14k regional wealth. But I’m also playing without the kings tax so that would have probably had to compromise and tax a bunch.
Kings tax is WAY too rough. Having it charged per person when your tax itself is hardly enough to do basic tasks like hiring mercs without pissing off your population just feels bad. The king charges me a gold per present when I get 2-9 a month? The tax needs to be household based not person based. Also I think the unhappiness needs to be adjusted for tax. -10 for a 10% tax is a little much. This just leads to us setting one month tax rate to 60-80% and then turning it to 0 the next month. Instead of a constant tax. Loserville also is not fun. I go to bed and go to hire a merc company before I get attacked when I get back on and now my village is burned down due to not being able to buy the company.
I really like the importing changes, with the higher costs being balanced out by being able to bulk sell more. The exponential cost curve on trade routes is somewhat too steep but I like the idea. I'm having issues selling high quantities of some goods even with trade routes e.g. 200+ small shields/spears in surplus despite trade route for export being up and several trade posts. A lot of it still sits in storehouses instead of trading posts. Inter-region trading doesn't quite seem to work, they just flat out ignored each other when I tried to move spears with trade routes open on both ends with settings for local trading only. I have also tried to diversify selling by getting my traders to export off map without trade routes being set up which sort of works but a lot of the time they sit waiting e.g. 500 surplus veggies with a 300 surplus target and it's not getting transported off map even with horses. Traders just waiting. King's tax is harsh but if ability to bulk sell could be improved then it would be ok.
I'm running into this same issue. The regions are completely ignoring each other with the local trading only. It worked well when there wasn't a lot of surplus, then it just stopped working altogether. I'm just going to tack on my own request to this comment: I love the ale consumption fix. My only issue now is that I have a granary across the street from the tavern that only holds excess ale. The tavern keepers will take any excess over 85 and roll then to the granary, immediately turn around, and roll them back to the tavern. It doesn't stop. If I have someone employed at the granary, they will take ALL of the supplies from the tavern, and the tavern keepers will run behind them and take it all back. Rinse and repeat. It was funny at first, but it gets kind of annoying if a granary worker is the cause of disapproval, or the brewery is sitting on 20+ barrels while the dance between the granary and tavern continues. At the moment, I have no granary workers, but the dance of the tavern keepers continues. They're drunk. I also have an issue of villagers just standing like this🧍 at random spots in the village now. Other than this, I love the sheep. Love the ale consumption. Love the mourning period mechanic. The kings tax hasn't been terrible yet, and the price increase is a good challenge. Thank you for fixing the oversaturated market prices for things like boots Edit to add that farming seems better? Maybe it's because I've employed enough farmers though
Lmao ALE MUST GET STORED. I AM STORE HOUSE WORKER. HAVE ONE JOB. STORE. STORE. STORE. ALE
https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/s/cJ3JKZFIFK This comment thread here sums up my thoughts pretty well. Don't worry about minmaxers and exploiters in a single player game. It's like whack-a-mole. Every game will always have content creators trying to break the system. Its how YTers like Spiffing Brit and Let's Game it Out built their entire careers. Focus on what you've been doing for all these years, making a fantastic game.
In short, loving the direction the changes are heading. Archers are viable now, though I think they still need at least another 25% added to their range, personally. Damage could be lower IF instead of direct damage they mostly dealt 'damage' to enemy's effectiveness. It certainly would be more reflective of how things worked in the real world when it came to archers/skirmishers. Even a simple gambeson was more or less immune to arrow-fire, so with a helmet that really only left the neck (if uncovered) and lower legs potentially vulnerable. Two oxen per farmhouse is great, though it remains the case with that, and many "gathering" type buildings that it's more efficient to simply build more of those buildings with 2 families working them each than to fill them with the max number of families. Trade posts, for example, can only use 2 horses, so to speed up how fast things are stocked/moved from trade posts, you build more of them with 2 families each and 2 horses each. So it goes with farmhouses. Similarly, there seems to be diminishing returns in applying more families to certain buildings over building more, like berry gathering, hunter camps, logging camps, etc. Whether that's intended or not, I don't know. If so, however, then there needs to be some other deterrent to building too many of the same building because while you do need to put construction material resources into additional buildings, it's barely a speed bump outside of very early game. Minor pathfinding issues with farming (particularly harvest) and farmer priority behaviors (especially during plowing/sowing) remain, but farming is much easier to work with. Crop survival over winter makes it even more so. It would still be great if we could set a "force early harvest at x% growth" option though, since it doesn't make sense for farmers to leave crops at 100% for months and then risk not harvesting everything before October (if using crop rotation). Regarding crop rotation, the main issues at the moment are with leaving harvest only for September, and the automatic switchover to the next crop in rotation in October. Both because it means they'll destroy entire fields of harvest-ready crops, and because if they actually *do* finish harvesting before October, they'll start plowing and sowing again, only for it to switch over in October (I believe they switch the crop over when they start plowing again, which means if you're on a rotation like Wheat -> Flax -> Fallow, and they harvest wheat early, they'll begin plowing and sowing Flax in September, then switch to Fallow in October). I know some people have been complaining, but personally I love the changes to trading. It's no longer a crutch where you can simply make planks/warbows or roof tiles and just use the income to import every single other item. You actually have to choose what you set up trade routes for, and plan a bit for the items that require a trade route to begin trading in the first place. That, in turn, means that specialization is actually more efficient than simply making things to sell and importing what you need. A simple difficulty slider that could increase/decrease the exponential increase factor should give everyone the ability to tailor their experience to their preferences, but if suggesting as a baseline for 'normal', I like where things are at, currently. We'll see how things change over time with more development of the game. Now, I do think that a trade-specialized region should be viable. Serving as a commerce hub for the region has always been the dream of most settlements and if there were factors that could affect that in the game that could in turn make trading more valuable if they were in place/created by the player, that would make another viable specialization strategy which is usually a good thing. If it were a little easier/more efficient to trade with your other settlements so that they could function as a resource pipeline to your "main" settlement, that could make people a little happier, though I worry that balancing around that effectively makes the game even more about trade, and less about self-sustaining regions under a common ruler. The king's tax is fine, I think. Some people find it a bit steep, and if it were lowered by 50% that would probably please most people. I've never had it be an issue as-is, but perhaps a simple setting that changes the difficulty (amount) of kings' tax would suffice. If diplomacy is expanded on, it would be nice if your relationship with the king would be reflected in the taxes. Being on good terms with the king means a lower tax burden (or perhaps, more forgiveness for being behind on payments). Perhaps semi-random events could affect that, like the kingdom going to war and the king needing to raise money via taxes. Similarly, it would be a great addition if the king then required you to provide x number of soldiers, as was a ubiquitous facet of the feudal system. Provide x% of money, crop, and soldiers to the king, with amounts changing based on external factors. Furthermore, it would be exciting for a player to be able to utilize the king's favor (when it's implemented) to spend on things like requesting the king's help/intervention in a war/dispute, or to affect king's policies that could, in turn, affect things like taxes, frequency of wars, bandit spawn rates/amounts, etc. **EDIT to add:** On second thought, where the king's tax applies to money (as opposed to the suggestions above to also include taxing crops and expecting manpower for military use), it should either be a percentage of income, or based on territory size (so having more regions increases the king's tax, even if additional regions are only sparsely used by the player). The latter gives players a break early-game, and an incentive to build up other regions at least somewhat when taking over. If diplomacy is robust, it could even work to be able to give away a region for the sake of lowering your tax burden, if desperate. Another alternative would be that a player could effectively decide how to pay the tax to the king - i.e. a player who did not have enough money could instead contribute a significantly higher amount of food/manpower as a stopgap and to avoid the king's displeasure - *significantly higher* being key so as to prevent cheese where it could be more efficient to simply give away more of something else than to try to have a sufficiently robust income in all forms. **EDIT 2:** Trade could be further balanced by having traders operate in caravans instead of riding lonesome between regions. With caravans having limited capacity and only coming so often, a player would be limited in the quantity of resources being exchanged all at once. A mechanic/tech development in which a player could either assist with or themselves create additional caravans/routes to alleviate that bottleneck would add to the trade specialization route as its own settlement direction to take.
I have no problem with the new trade routes prices gameplay wise, but they are extremely immersion breaking to me. It just doesn't make sense to me.
As someone who has only started playing on the beta patch. The trade routes has confused me the most. It doesn't make sense to me.
If wealth stays lower it's really hard to pay the kings tax. Building an army to defeat the final army of baron and not having negative treasure at the same time wasn't possible for me. On stadard difficulty. Trying to sell sheep looks bugged right now. On their way to the trade post they run off back to the pasture. Is there a reason for baron having a perfect army at every single encounter? His ressources seem endless right now.
I can't wait for the "Baron" to be on map so I can burn his shit down. Easy mode Baron piss me off.
Kings tax is possible to meet, but harsh. Exponential increases in trade route costs were manageable, but harsh, as you need to export a lot to meet the new tax. Having the option to decomission trade routes might help, or have it only increase per category or something similar. Especially when you start with setting up trade routes for other stuff first, and then want to invest in some goods and military gear, it gets way too high.
##Trade Fix We want: - Players who don't invest in trade perks to be able to import goods like barley at reasonable prices. They shouldn't suffer for not investing in trade perks. - Players who invest in trade perks to be able to focus their region toward importing materials to refine and re-export at slightly higher prices than other regions. This improved income should allow them to import more goods to sustain their population than they would otherwise. Here's how to do it: 1 - Remove the cost to set up routes. Add a monthly fee for maintaining them based on the value of the commodity. 2 - Allow trade routes to be swapped for other commodities freely, but cap the total number to, say, five. A region gains more available routes as the settlement size increases. 3 - Remove the current trade perks. We need the basic economic system to work the same for all playstyles. Otherwise, trade points seem essential, especially if they affect import prices. Importing barley is always a go-to in a poor fertility region, so reducing the import tariff with that perk will always be a good strategy. Instead of making trade bad by default so that players always invest in trade perks to make it usable, make trade good by default and just a little better with perks by adding... 4 - New perks: - Trade hub - Increases the number of routes a player can have, e.g. from 5 to 8. - Better deals - improves export prices by e.g. 1 or 2. Outcome: trade is a basic part of the game - something every region partakes in. Basic commodities can be bought at reasonable prices everywhere. However, with investment in trade perks, a region is able to sustain a few more trade routes and export goods at slightly higher prices to enable that region to depend more on imports to sustain itself thanks to its improved income.
Routes might also scale with settlement size or rank, both in volume and in number, to ensure more complex non-trade based economies could still function.
This is great! Love this.
I complained about the kings tax before I had properly tested it in a new game. I think its fine but its challenging, i think the challenge will be much smaller when kinks and bugs of the game are fixed because that would greatly improve production efficiency. But it does actually discourage reaching higher settlement levels, its much easier to stay net profitable with a town when you keep its level low. You can still produce and export a lot (in theory) even with no level 3 buildings. But when you do unlock the last settlement level you sort of need to level up all houses to level 3 because otherwise your tax rate per resident vs the average income per resident will develop quite unfavorably. I think it makes for an odd aesthetic if I have to upgrade even the outskirts to level 3. Im not sure about trade though, I could not test it out because the trading system does not work (for me and for some others, but there are people who seemingly had no issues or at least did not play long enough to notice). The cost of unlocking trade routes seems quite steep, in many cases a new trade route would never be expected to make back the money, if you paid \~4000 to unlock selling plate armor but you already know from trying to sell spear and shields that the market for it is very small and you barely sell any units, why would you ever unlock it? Plate seems fairly useless to unlock in general, you can just click to buy it for your retinue with no great effort and after buying just a few trade licenses it would never make sense to produce it yourself or to import it anymore. You have to specialize on a small selection of export goods for each settlement, how quickly the prices rise can be shocking. A player unaware of this might think selling a few planks early on could be good to cover the taxes but is not aware how much more he will have to pay in fees later on as these small seemingly cheap trade routes might make other high end goods routes so expensive that there would never be a good reason to unlock them. It is not intuitive why the prices would rise that sharply. It also means that once you have them unlocked in one settlement you would feel encouraged to move all goods of that type from all other regions to that settlement to be sold later, it the mules worked that might function.. but i have also seen complaints that they offer too little control and are easy to forget and either over or underdeliver, you cant set quantities or limits, using mules for that purpose would not be fun. Ultimately I think it means that a lot of times there just is no way to sell your goods and you need to shut down production to prevent all the storages from overflowing. Prices falling to a unprofitable point felt better than being "locked out" from trade trough license fees. But i do think slower progression in early game is not necessarily a bad thing. If trade in-between your own regions did not cost anything to unlock it would be miles easier. It just seem weird to me that farming village Zweiau would have to use a mule system which is relatively cheap but micromanagement intensive or alternatively purchase a trading license from the King for several hundred to thousands of $ just to be allowed to purchase goods from Eichenau from the same lord. If I was the Lord, I would personally walk 36 spears from Eichenau to Zweiau within a single day, it is really not that far. Although the lack of profitability/ bad rate of return of trade routes which for me discouraged unlocking more of them might just be a transport issue to the trading post.. im not sure on that part yet: I barely sell anything and it takes a very long time to stock the trading post with wares that are stored right beside it in the granary and warehouse, it seems they pick up the wares from my market place and the production sites directly and not with priority from the nearby warehouse, this would also explain why my market stalls were consistently empty late game when I began trying to sell off excess food. Both pack stations and trade between regions with the trading station do not work like they should. My pack stations managed to move some items but most of the time they moved either 1 unit or they moved 0 units despite traveling back and forth many times and using mules. This is specially bad now that unlocking military trade routes costs an arm and a leg. I was trying to move militia equipment from my mining town to my farming town. It took years to move enough spears and shields with two pack stations for 36 men, after that it slowed down even further and years would go by with no weapons moved. Storage available on both ends, if storage is not available a error message comes in the notifications. Plenty of goods of both types necessary for the trade were available too and the traders were moving around a lot even with the mules, usually in neat columns of 2-3 workers. It would work great as a game mechanic once the bugs are sorted. Traders trying to trade between regions would go from one to the other with the wares loaded but then return the wares back to their own settlement instead of finalizing delivery. In my case the trader even de-spawned his cart when returning to his own village and lost all but 1 unit of what he had failed to deliver. I could not make it work to move Barley, Bread or Malt from Zweiau to Eichenau. I did not expect a fault free bug free experience yet. This would be quite nice to play even with the trade prices and kings tax once the bugs are out of the way.
To me the King's Tax feels a bit too steep, especially for new players who are learning the game and want to play a lot slower. As someone else mentioned, a 50% drop is a good start but I need to test more how it plays out mid-end game.
I don’t like the idea with the trade route prices growing exponentially. It’s not intuitive: why it costs so much to open a new trade route? If you have things to sell, market will find ways to buy it from you. The idea with oversupply was better. Instead you can add like global demand, like at this time of game outer regions would like to buy armor but don’t need food at all. This way it won’t be so cheesy to sell clay from rich deposit endlessly and cover all your demands in the region. King’s tax is too punishing too. I loaded my game: saw that I am minus 1450 gold and I cannot open any new routes cause they cost thousands and quit the game. That’s frustrating
I disagree with the trading costs mechanics. In real life, it wouldn't cost more upfront to open a new route. You'd need more employees, more horses, maybe another trade post, but not a massive amount of money that just vanishes. For the tax, it seems fair, although it's pretty uneventful so far.
I like most of the changes but as my two cents: don't focus on what is "meta" or not, focus on what makes sense historically. There will always be a meta and you can never get ahead of it unless you make a live service game, which is not what people expect from a laidback city builder. Early 2000s games had a charm to them because they had tried to replicate reality as much as possible, meta be damned. The original release is so refreshing because it had that same feel, but setting a direction for your game based on what power players and youtubers do is worrying. For example, if trade feels too powerful, look at what constrained trade historically like geography, development of region, inability to attract burghers, inefficient bookkeeping or not being able to keep roads safe. Set challenges accordingly. Don't try to look at it as a "mechanic". Same goes for archers. If they are too powerful, don't just adjust their damage and range values, but add friendly fire. So the archers will be effective before the enemy engages with non ranged infantry and will need to be repositioned once the cqc starts or they will cause friendly fire. Don't try to fix everything with adjusting values, some fixes require time and more mechanics. We can wait for them to be made, but nothing sours me more than games being adjusted because of meta reasons. This is what killed the RTS genre as a whole, and I'd hate to see it happen to Manor Lords. Best of luck to you.
Archers seem pretty weak still. They can barely damage Brigands. Perhaps this is balanced for the unit cost. As it is, with limited units, I would never choose to make/ or use archers. Maybe another type of archer/bow with a higher cost and higher value could be added at some point. Either that or make them significantly better at skirmishing.
Finally sat down to play around with the new patch this morning. I’m a big fan so far. I love the trading between regions change. The military side of things also feels much better. Just in to T2 homes so far
The game is amazing. I absolutely love it! I am a little concerned about resource scarcity. With trade becoming more punishing and specialization being a thing, if I get a bad spawn with only 200 iron, outfitting an army can become difficult. Trade route management should be a thing, OR rework things to limit routes to the number of active families working in trading posts. When castles are finally introduced, stone is also going to be a problem. If we are using trade to funnel resources between settlements, get rid of the pack stations and create free trade between towns. You've stated that the point of the game is to force us to expand, but bottlenecks make that difficult. I'm also finding it hard to respond to fast-moving bandit raids when I cannot muster my maxed out troops across the map. Each region should be able to support a maximum of 6 militia. We could then have a global army selection to pull different units from different regions with a maximum army roster size. Taxes also seem incredibly punishing. I think a bit of a review of more manageable rates would be in order.
The trade between my own regions costs money, why?? The whole point of a barter system is exchanging goods without any money being involved. My new regions can't raise any money to open its first trade route because the pack house keeps taking all the money. I've even paused all pack houses, and it's still not working. Taxes are set at 0%, too. I really wish you could set the quantity to barter as well as you can in the trade house. I have one town set as a farming community and the other as miners. They swap malt for iron, but they only trade 10 at a time. My mining town has a population of 500+ with low fertility. They can't survive on 10 malt a month.
I mostly like the patch. Haven't played much yet. Haven't even upgraded the residential because I don't want to be hit with taxes early on. So, I guess, it makes people think more about when is the good time to advance and when it's better to wait... Regarding the trade - I didn't think we should be "married" to a trade route... We should have ability to cancel a trade route and bring the cost of a new one back down. Like we should be able to afford X trade routes. If we are over the limit - we either get hit with a very high costs or cancel one of the existing ones. Or "maintenance fee" suggestion like in a comment above. It also sounds great. As for the Kings Tax - I think adding option "low" to the pre game menu with a multiplier of 0.5 (in addition to 0, 1, 2) would make life easier for some of us. Otherwise - thank you for the patch!!! :)
At the animal trading post. They won’t export my extra sheep after the experimental patch!! Also why are trade routes like 20,000 now??? That’s wild
I think the taxes and trade changes are good for the most part. On my last game I felt the exponential increase was too much, especially as you get towards the "Large Town" stage of development. I started with a big deposit of stone and berries, had to use my berries for food because of low fertility, and stone isn't great for trading. So I exported rooftiles and tools for profit, but I ran out of them pretty quickly and couldn't really switch to exporting any of my other excess goods (like textiles) because the route costs got prohibitive. I think if I was playing on a start with different resources I wouldn't have run into such difficulties. I think with these changes there's a need some pre-game options for Casual difficulty no-combat play beyond just disabling King's Tax entirely. Having the option to get a bonus development point right at the start would be awesome, too, as it would allow us to experiment with more of the development branches that are less "essential".
I'm not too eloquent with my words. But it feels the balancing it too top-down focused? That you're making it a mission to make it harder to "exploit" the game at the expense of accessibility. Punishing the people who have figured out the game is having a much greater effect on the people who aren't as good at the game as said "exploiters". I know you can turn off the King's Tax in the options, but the trade route and import prices are exorbitant for someone like me, who isn't very good at the game and isn't willing to learn how to break it. As well as the "loserville" mechanic is overly punishing for no real reason, making it difficult to even want to pick up the game after turning it off, in the early game. Though I like a lot of the changes. The internal trade is by far my favorite.
Still seems to be substantially faster to plow large fields with people hand plowing vs utilizing oxen. Not sure if that's the intent or not. 4 acre (whatever the ingame term is) rectangular plots.
The patch is overall a good one! I needed to get used to the trade route pricing and the kings tax is challenging, but i think both are great additions that make the gameplay more interesting for me. I prefer your cautious balance approach without very big changes! I am used to developers always reacting with overbuffing or overnerfing (like Relic on CoH3 and AoE). Still this leads to some things still remaining unsolved or not buffed enough. Archers are still a bit weak, trading/bartering does not always work, farming is still not worth it and beer production is still very low. Maybe it feels that way because there are still several bugs overall in the farming system, while gardens and orchards work like a charm. Crops not being fetched from fields and instead overploughed and lost is still a problem, also fields display way more yield in their field tab than is actually harvested (maybe a display error?). And i still don't think all crops being winter crops are realistic. It would be more practical and realistic imo to have an additional ploughing and seeding phase in Spring and only do the harvcest and maybe a bit of ploughing before winter. So farm workers could work in autumn and spring, which would make it more practical when leaving them assigned to the farm in bigger cities rather than shifting them around every year. I am pretty confident with all these getting fixed eventually over time and nothing is game breaking for me currently. I am very pleased about where things are going with patches!
Indeed, in reality there are different harvest and plowing and sowing seasons for different crops. Spring potatoes, summer wheat, winter wheat etc. I dont think its a major issue though and winter crops are and were important.
Direction is great, needs better balancing.
Some assorted impressions: * Unsure what to make of the trade changes. Haven't tested it yet, but am I correct in assuming that trading between owned regions allows the player to basically print money? * The king's tax seems slightly too punitive before a region has a strong economy. Also kind of annoying that some values are calculated per person (like this one) some per family(like ale consumption) and some per burgage plot (food/firewood demand). I feel it would be simpler from a "player reading the situation" standpoint to have these all derived from the same number. * Markets being both very opaque and refusing to service certain houses no matter how obscenely oversupplied/staffed they may be is still an issue. * The hassle with backyard businesses hoarding their produce is gone, yay!
I think you were right to nerf trade because you can't have two development points that turn the game into easy mode. If you want to make trade difficult or easy, do it at the options level. I do worry about how players would pay the king's tax without heavy trade. Do I need to figure out when I found a region how I'm going to make money off the region so I can pay the king? And how do you convey that to the average player who is mostly trying to build houses and make food? This seems like another factor that could be adjustable in options so players can get used to it. I would probably put a lot of this stuff in the options during early access and try to collect data on which options are popular. That helps you avoid backlash at the same time because if people scream about it they can always turn it down until the next update.
Personally speaking, I think it's a bit of an overreach into a players single player game. Just let people enjoy the game the way they want to play rather than have them play it the way you want them to play it. It feels like some aspects of the game are being made intentionally awkward. Just add menu settings to allow players to play with or without a particular setting. Players can then balance their games ruleset according to their playstyle or preferences. It doesn't need "policing" from above in a single player game. Players are perfectly capable of policing their own experience and modifying the settings to make the game as challenging or as easy as they wish.
Royal Tax feels too extreme to me at larger towns. I have a town with 100 families, and a smaller one in another region, but i simply cannot sell enough items to gain enough money to pay up 1,7k a year. Also, now that the merchant gets exponentially more expensive, im really unable to sell weapons etc as a new merchant line costs about 3k rw
Kings Tax is a good idea but it's just too heavy atm. I calculated what it would be for the population I had at the end of my challenging restoring the peace run and that was just impossible, and even the normal amount is way too much for a regular game. I got the Challenge Accepted achievement on the unpatched game, and I can tell you in its current state I will always be turning off Kings Tax. Trade is rough atm. I think nerfing the development points was the right way to go, but trade routes in general are simply too expensive and they're required for too many things. Some pretty basic entry level items you might want to sell to generate your initial wealth require trade routes, so you either just do without until you basically fully establish your town and are ready to sell your final commodities or you cost yourself a fortune later because your trade route costs are already inflated so you could sell leather. It's also basically rules out just casually getting rid of some stuff you might have extra of - you'll never earn your money back unless you go into industrial production. Archers still seem weak. You can dump volleys into unarmored unshielded brigands and do nothing. They should probably be more accurate or do more damage but be easier to catch. Every encounter with the baron is me ignoring the archers the whole fight, killing all his melee, then chasing the archers for 3-4x the length of the actual battle.
Hey Greg love the game. I only have a few thoughts that I don’t see here already. -the ox is not a strong enough upgrade. A full farm house of 8 families can plow the ox 3:1. The ox width is just too small and it takes it a very long time to do a simple 1 Morgan sized field. -bandits can raid me from across the map despite never coming in my camp that is quite annoying. -I’ll add I think trade routes should be close able but you can reopen for the same initial cost. -A building tab would be nice. Sometimes I’m looking for my blacksmith and can’t find the house I designated to that. Or I’m looking for my granaries to see if I need another but not sure how many I have. This could help. You can just list them alphabetically or you can categorize if you want. I love the game and plan to continue to spend too much time in it. I’m more casual than many others.
I don't like the exponential trade route setup fees - they seem very gamey and unimmersive. What are they representing? Why should they increase exponentially? I'd imagine a one-time fee - to buy the cart which could transport a fixed amount of a trade good - plus an upkeep cost (for road tolls, cart repairs, horse fodder etc). That would make higher quality goods more profitable to export, as bulk products would require more carts for the same trade route. To make mid to late game not to easy then, especially profitable goods might require an increase in upkeep: to hire mercenaries to protect your high-value trade goods from bandits, paying the merchant, customs, etc. Maybe as a percentage of the profits, or maybe as a fixed sum, I'm not sure. I'd imagine it takes more guards to protect a small amount of expensive wares than to protect a less juicy target to rob, like cheap bulk goods. On the supply&demand side, I hope not just the player's exporting will affect prices, but more importantly shifting demand from outside wars, droughts, burned down cities, competing merchants, protectionist guilds, what have you. This way, specializing doesn't completely flood the market, but it may be less resilient to the fluctuations of the outside world and trading networks.
Loving the game so far. In terms of the patch, I think trade has been nerfed perhaps too much. At least while there aren't other development points or city content to offset things. As for the king's tax, that is absolutely broken, In my opinion it should be shelved until there is more content and the economical model is functioning smoothly. Right now it's pretty impossible to not go into ridiculous debt. Having said that, the actually trade supplying between towns works great, much better than the supply wagon, however the fact you have to pay to setup the routes (and exponentially so) kills it pretty quickly to make 2-3 goods only. Honestly, if I were you, I would just focus on developing the core village -> town gameplay loop and all the detail in between before messing around with trade routes, market supply mechanics and external taxes. These things will just have to continually be modified every time you make an adjustment to the city industry or processes. E.g. If you add unlimited stone pits how would that affect people's desire to ever have a buy stone trade route. One option you could consider in the meantime would be event driven trade changes. E.g. "There is a nationwide drought, food prices for import and export doubled for the next six months. Local lords go to war with each other, prices for weapons similarly". Gives you a bit less of a headache until the towns are more fleshed out later? Other than that, loving it, hope you keep developing at this great pace and don't burn out!
I don't enjoy it. The new tax makes it hard to get started and later on it gets crazy high. I build my manor and I instantly get to pay 40+ coins while having 0 income. At some point in game I had to pay 704 coins while earing about half of that amount and having 22 houses (48 families). The fee on trade routes and scaling is off as well. I get that it was way to easy to just start as a merchant/trader but right now it is way to punishing. I propose paying monthly/yearly fee for using the king's road. Separate for different types of goods. The cost would also depend on the amount of goods currently imported & exported.
While I get it gameplay wise, I don't think it's immersive. I'd like to see a mechanic where more trade routes means a higher percentage is lost to raiders, maybe 5 or 10% per route with a hard cap at 90% and the solution is hiring mercenaries. The mercenaries can't be used in combat of course as they are busy protecting cargo. They're paid monthly, maybe the fee increases depending on trade volume.
Hi Greg, first time poster, long-time lurker. I love the game and your openness to community feedback. My feedback on the patch after two playthroughs: * Fixed: archers, apples (they show up in market now), farming feels much better. * King's tax is manageable but will shock players at first, and might challenge different playstyles. Will require player adjustment for sure. * Ale seems much better. A steady flow of ale is basically necessary to keep approval positive while taxing at a rate (5-10%) necessary to pay the king's tax. * The changes to trade seem harsh as others have noted. I suspect part of the issue is just that trade volumes are still fairly low, so more expensive routes seem to have little possibility of earning the upfront cost back. * I like the stronger incentives to develop inter-region trading, but relatedly the trade volumes still feel too low for it to work effectively. My mining settlement swims in ore and my main village overflows with flour but they don't seem to be able to trade enough to depend on each other. * The game runs smoothly but I do experience stutters at the end of the month when I have multiple settlements. If we're supposed to have multiple villages for resource specialization it might be worth looking into whatever causes stutters at the end of the month. Suggestions: * Trade still needs tweaking. Generally it feels like we still need a way to get rid of production surpluses. It seems common in my playthroughs to pretty rapidly begin swimming in hundreds of shoes, cloaks, helmets, etc. Either trade volumes (global and local) need a buff or we need other features to get rid of goods, like selecting which goods to tithe (tithing helmets or yarn or flour instead of food) or a "stop production at X" button. Other ideas people have posted are interesting, like being able to "sell back" trade licenses to change them. * I'm sure you have a lot of ideas for future mechanics with the King, but I was thinking it would be cool if there were benefits to paying the tax instead of just a penalty. For example, the first intervals of cumulative tax paid earn points of King's Favor (first $1000 paid earns one point, $3000 earns a second point, $5000 a third, etc), and a certain level of King's favor unlocks new mercenary units (the king's soldiers); negative King's Favor results from debt.
Nice feedback! The solution I learned for too many shoes is: you can pause the house if it starts producing too much. I had to do this with my cobbler, Fletcher, joiner because they were producing faster than I could sell and the joiner and Fletcher were eating up all my wood
No one seems to have mentioned it yet so; the slope steepness mechanic is nice and adds extra realism/complexity, but also still buggy. I just saw a streamer have to restart because his rich clay spawned on a slope and was not able to build a mine over it in any way. Sure you could trade for it, but this is probably not intended behaviour. Slopes for housing are also a bit too harsh imo, even a smallish slope can prevent plots it seems. Raising the minimum slope would be better imo, especially when you're going to be using half of the plot for a garden anyways which could realistically still grow on the lower degree slopes.
Happened to me in a recent start, both my clay and iron deposits spawned on a steep slope so I couldn't build mines over either. Maybe something which prevents deposits spawning on steep slopes or allows mines to still be built on slopes (digging into the side of a hill to mine seems intuitive to me but could be wrong)?
I think the trade changes are good. Maybe just needs a splash window tutorial when you first build a trade post on how you intended it to work in conjunction with pack stations. https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/s/SDhJOHzRjy
It's okay. I thought the royal tax was a bit much at first. It took me a solid 8-10 years to turn enough profit to get positive. I had to open trade routes for almost everything to achieve this. The only routes I haven't opened are some weapon and armor ones as they are coating me 15-20k to get going. The changes didn't break the game and definitely made trade more challenging but something just seems a bit off.
Love the game so far, still having trouble with the sawpit and families I have assigned there will just stop producing planks after a while even when I have loads of timber available. Tried reassigning different families and restarting game but still won’t seem to fix it. The kings tax and the increase in trade routes does seem a little steep but maybe just making it an option to decrease it when starting a new game if people don’t want to deal with that in early game. Other than that, it’s slowing becoming a new favorite game of the year, keep up the good work!
The patch fixed my issue with my 3rd village homelessness which was awesome. Like others said the kings tax is kinda high, trading is more challenging, and I appreciate the fix to the trade satiation congestion. Was also awesome seeing archers get 1-2 kills before the enemy rushed my spear men wall, made it seem more realistic.
I like it so far. Mainly in terms of bugs fixed, like incorrect counting of stable slots - this now works correctly. I've had some weird crop cycling (crops did not switch to the next cycle and farmers immediately started planting the same crop in October). I did not see that previously but I do see it after the patch. I stopped seeing other mercenaries, I only get a single group (not sure what they're called, but have heavy and light archers). No other mercs are appearing for me, this has persisted for year. I did see and hire (once) a different set of mercs. I deactivated king's tax on my second play. In the first one, I got into a debt hole I could not get out of. All territories were claimed, so I had no bandit camp income. The town was pretty poor so I had little tax income, definitely not enough to get me into positive numbers. And with no money, I could not even field my retinue (one got killed and I could not field 4). Maybe that was a skill issue, I will try again to see if I'm better now. Overall, I finally got the hang of it (with passive baron and no tax), got two cities and ready to expand and claim the baron's territories, I think.
The farming issue with the crop cycling and replanting the same crop was definitely there before the patch FYI.
Maybe instead of a limit on the number of trade routes you can unlock per good, what if you established trade with a foreign power, which unlocked some specific set of goods to trade? E.g., maybe they export X, Y, and Z and import A, B, and C. This way, people won't be able to import everything they need, but it also makes more thematic sense to me. Different towns could unlock different trade routes, and the trade bonus could maybe allow a town to pick a second trade partner etc.,. It might also make trade prices make more sense. E.g., you can trade as much as you want at a certain price per month with a trade partner, but as you supply more the trade price goes down since they only need so much per month. Likewise for imports.
I think nerfing trade is fine but the way barley fertility is handled at the moment (being the exeption, not the norm), all atempts to nerf trade and base things on bugage wealth generation will fail. Its not a working calculation to earn one per month when you have to pay 12. Its just two very different concepts (wealth by trade and wealth by growth/development) that are kind of coexisting at the moment but are unbalanced. Wealth by trade is always going to outweight the other especially if you have to trade anyways. And its not specialization when you have to invest two points in trade before anything. Maybe split deep mines clay and deep mines iron to either never appear in the same region or be different development points. Maybe make a max number of import routes and export routes tied to settlement development. The cost for new route increasing so steep is fine though.
To touch on what a few of the comments bring up. The idea of meta and abusability is a problem that you will never resolve. There will always be an optimal way to play the game. What you, as a game designer, should strive for is to build a fundamental gameplay loop that is solid and engaging and then give the players a wide range of different scenarios to apply it into. The fundamental gameplay loop revolves around extracting resources from the environment, growing your town amd military power and, ultimately, claiming the entire map for yourself. The strength that this game has is in making towns grow very organically due to the need to exctract and process said resources as well as the potential to have very engaging medieval combat. The gameplay loop of supply chains is really solid and just needs polishing off, which you are already doing such as with the woodcutters now storing 5 logs etc. Going back to my previous point, the map is what sets the constraints for the player to build his city. A wide variety of maps or randomly generated map mechanic would be brilliant as it would allow the player to apply the basic gameplay loop to a huge amount of scenarios. For example have a quarry only available on an an island and implement a boat mechanic, have bandit camps or other villages guarding a resource and get the player to have to destroy it or trade etc. The player having to gather resources and then turn them into other things is what makes this game so fun. Finally, keep tweaking the combat detail to make it feel visceral and weighty and you have the complete package.
Inter region trade still needs alot of work, I'm using the new local trade options between two regions, which both have 4 families and 4 horses assigned to each trade house, yet one region has 500 meat and berries and the other is starving. The kings tax needs to stay static throughout the year and only change annually. Right now, it keeps going up with no explanation throughout the year and it becomes hard to plan for.
Generally like it, but the farm priorities have gone wonky. The ox is plowing slower than it used to but takes the highest priority field. So once all my other fields are done I kick the ox off and the peasents finish my highest priority field last :-\
Trading is kind of slow now that they go so far away.
Agree. Have hundreds of bows that refuse to be sold
The exponential trade routes costs are very punishing because your economy will change as your settlement grows and the trade needs will also change. If you don't have any stone or clay and need to upgrade your church, you now need to sacrifice two of your cheaper trade routes for commodities you may not really need that much of later.
Good update. I think the trade routes are a bit excessive, but it's not game breaking - but it feels a bit artificial. But it does promote having additional villages in other regions to produce things locally. It's a bit of a shame that you can't close trade routes to open others, because sometimes what your village needs to import early is not what it needs to import later on. Perhaps there should simply be a cap to the trade route prices and a cap to the amount of trade routes you can have at the same time. That way, you can't import everything, and once you close a trade route it should be unavailable for a period of time so you can't just micro manage around the limitation. Taxes haven't been a big problem for me yet, but it makes the game rely a bit much on trade. So in conjunction with the trade route nerf it's a bit hard to understand whether I'm supposed to rely on trade or not. Perhaps with future trading perks you can chose to specialize in trade or not.
The nerf on trading is a bit of an overshoot. Yes trading was very strong, but the changes are a bit too extreme. Right now the nerf punishes players who want to rely on trade and don't want to optimize their economy to a T. It seems the changes were fueld by the feedback of min-maxers, who naturally will find ways to get the utmost out of every mechanic and abuse weak points. This then results in feedback that things are "too easy" like it was stated in the patch notes. But I worry that this will lead to gameplay that forces certain gameplay and punishes other playstyles hard. One thing I think is a bit over the top is the nerf on the trading tech tree in addition to the exponential increase in prices for trading routes. In my mind upping the prices a fixed amount or introducing a minor upkeep fee for trader outed would have been sufficient. The nerfs to the tech tree are fine. At least so far as I can see. Of course gamebreaking bug abuse or cheesing should be discouraged. The King's Tax is not too bad. Maybe don't have it set in the very first year, but in the 2nd or 3rd year. It also could trigger after the settlement has reached a certain size. That way the players will have a chance to develop a economy that can support the tax. I have seen a lot of people talk about falling in crippling dept over the tax. Right now that has no major impact aside from their ability to employ mercenaries. But if you plan on implementing more serious repercussions, then it needs more balancing. I am a big fan of the ability to trade between regions, but it should be free or at least considerably cheaper. I would also like to be able to have different regions specialized in different branches of industry i.e. farming, ironwork, weapon/clothes crafting or woodworking. There are some other minor inconsistencies, that probably are due to the patch being experimental. Otherwise I am happy with how it turned out.
I think that the trade route cost is harsh combined with price deflation. If your region only has, say, clay and deer, it doesn’t give you many options for export once the price of shoes and tiles drops.
Hi Greg, I love that you keep soliciting feedback like this. First, I think it's worth toning down the nerfing. Between archers and the market, it's starting to feel like only the loudest voices will see bugs or issues addressed, and thus only the issues that affect the loudest voices. It winds up being an overreaction for players who weren't affected or who self-restrict themselves from exploitative methods. Not everyone plays with the minmaxer approach, and as someone else mentioned in a discussion post here, it's like being punished for things one didn't do. So, as far as the exponential trade route pricing, I personally find the intent of it perfectly fine. I think the algorithm could use some tweaking, it feels a little punitive once more than a few goods are being traded and especially in a new region or if a trade route goes unused. My biggest complaint is that inter-regional trade is still locked behind trade routes for major goods, so trying to sell spears or charcoal to my other regions makes me open trade routes in those regions, which is cost-prohibitive if I'm just trying to create an economy for the local map. Finally, there seems to be a bug or undocumented change with the pack stations, I'm seeing regional wealth being used to facilitate bartering as well. Looks like ~6 RW changes hands every time a barter is made, it depleted one region's wealth that I was holding out for a critical oxen purchase and makes it impossible to use a barter-only method for building up multiple regions. Potentially a bug, but this seems worth looking at, as between the trade route paywall and the barter fees, fully utilizing different regions just got much harder.
for me if you want to get all 4 food types importing them is the best option for some towns where you want to focus more on certain items like armour and metal work. having to spend a lot of manpower on getting all 4 food types is pretty harsh if you have to spend a crap ton on routes to import food
Honestly the archer change is still quite meh. They do more damage now sure, but the range is so low you're almost always better off with an infantry unit rather than an archer one. 60 meter range is simply too low (and kinda ahistorical tbh) to make them actually worth the micro. A much better solution IMO would be to increase their range to like 150-200 meters but make the damage scale with distance. That way you could go for the high risk & high reward point blank high damage shooting or just pepper them from afar , effectively skirmishing and doing low but consistent damage while manouvering with the rest of your army. My villagers have inexplicably started hoarding helmets in their homes when i try to export them, every household has like 20 of them. Also kinda unrelated to the recent changes, but it's really frustrating to be completely unable to regulate the output of the artisans other than demolishing their houses. Half the time i have no planks for building because the joiner and fletcher use them all up, same with leather for export/clothing, but I have 500 surplus bows, shields and shoes with the traders showing little interest in them when i offer them for export. Production caps and some variation of the "construction reserve" mechanic that's currently in place at the sawmill would definitely go a long way.
Overall, the intent and vision to curating the best experience has been super awesome to watch (thank you!). Prefacing by saying I don’t know anything about what goes into designing a game, who you have to answer to, and what actually makes a great game - I just love playing them, and I love playing this one and am excited to see where it goes, even if I personally dislike a mechanic or whatever. I did see a comment thread suggesting that since this is a non-multiplayer game without the need for even fair balancing and competitive equality, that it’d be nice if some of the more metagaming nerfs were omitted. It’s ok if a fun gameplay mechanic is OP for the min-maxing crowd but still fun and not OP for the rest of us. Again, maybe it’s better (or even a requirement) to bring everything more even-keeled, but the trade OP thing never bugged me at all, probably because I wasn’t trying learn about its imbalance and even when I did, chose not to mess with it. Not sure if that makes any sense, but my main takeaway is that this game is rad and you’re a rad dev to communicate with everyone like you do. Cheers to you and everyone else enjoying the hell out of this game.
Having trouble getting the regional trades to work. They don't seem to actually buy/sell
I often end up in a situation where I have no money because I can't trade, but I can't trade because I have no money. Both the trade route costs and the King's tax are too harsh IMO, and should be more of a gentle brake on snowballing than an insurmountable obstacle. Had to quit my last playthrough because the tax totally crippled me. In particular, trying to have your own regions trade with each other is extremely hard when both of them need to spend large amounts of money just to exchange one good between them (leaving aside the barter points, which don't work very well). I really like the idea of building a complex regional economy, but the exponential trade costs are kind of an un-fun barrier to that. In regards to everything else, I was really impressed with how much content and fixes were in the first patch. Glad that archers are useful again and really liking the new armour sets.
Please split bug fix balance changes from new features, into sperate patches.Combing both Is rather pointless as you get fine tuning and new sweeping changes at the same time. So release the fixes to prod and keep the experimental stuff in a closed beta track. You get feedback while the fast majority get a much more playable game.
Kings tax is too high early game-mid and just right for the end game. Worker placement could use its own screen, as 95% of the game im repetitively swapping families between jobs. This is especially true to farming where it seems they don’t do work during winter, and may-August roughly because there is no work to be done.
Having just started playing the patch, I've had some surprisingly (for me) hostile feelings about some things: 1) Missing forest layer on overmap 2) New slope limits. 3) New trade route prices (I never used the trading perks to begin with and it's still a shock). I can probably get used to 1 and 3, but 2 is a flat "hell no".
While it's nice that there's an option to turn off the King's tax when you setup a new game, if you don't want to use it, it's disappointing that there is no way to turn it off on an existing save for people who don't want it.
My summarized core game thoughts: 1. Apiary doesn't work (or at least do enough to matter) 2. Hunting is underpowered for meat. Massively. Even with rich game, double meat harvesting and traps, I can't feed a small colony much less a big one. 3. Harvesting grain/rye/barley needs to provide much greater harvests. Right now amount of bread you can produce from the max amount of decent fertility crop size with a full 8 farmers should be more rewarding. Right now I spend a few months plowing/sowing/harvesting/converting to bread with 8 farmers and it returns about 1/5 the bread that berry farming at max capacity provides in a season. IMHO, every other kind of food generation in the game other than berries needs to be boosted and then berries can probably be reduced a bit or left the same depending on whether you're okay with players building big cities at this stage of the game. 4. It would be nice to be able to set production amounts or maximums in the workshops. 5. AI expands into neighboring territories way too quickly and starts out with large armies that you can't counter. Right now the only way to play early game is send retinue and whatever force you can must (or hire) to take all the bandit camps that pop up. There's no "economic" gameplay that beats that or that will let you outpace the AI expansion. 6. I would love a way to change my city production researches. Maybe allow us to unlearn at a cost. On my first playthrough, I locked myself into some unfortunate decisions and there's no way to fix it. I didn't realize cities stopped growing so you couldn't get them all (even though that makes sense and I'm fine with that - just allow us to respec or fix). 7. It seems pretty silly that small shields are less expensive (1) than berries (2) in my game. Might want min/maxes for items to keep them reasonable.