Does this game still have a 60fps cap? (It does, the game timing is tied to fps, rookie mistake)
Edit: This game is unrefined.
It's very convoluted and explaining the many issues is a bit of a nightmare, proving how convoluted it is, but I'll try.
Why do I keep getting a message to build more decor items? There are literally no decor items. The only decor items you can build in a house are obelisk and campfires, both make no sense, but that's all we have. And despite that, I did that, and I still get this stupid message saying to turn on my decor map to see. In short, there are no decor items in the game, you probably meant to, or maybe it's several eras later, either way, I shouldn't be seeing this message the entire time I'm playing the game.
If you build flooring underneath objects like walls, beds, trade tent, it will allow you to do so. But why? Why would you build a floor under a wall? The game allows you to, but then it doesn't allow you to walk through the walls, beds, trade tent, to build it. Meaning, you will have a notification for inaccessible the entire game, unless you tear down your trade tent and rebuild it.
Trade tent and most of the micromanagement in this game is extremely tedious, fatiguing, and time consuming. You have to manually input every single thing you want to trade, which sounds reasonable if you don't play the game. But there are 100's of items, and many of said items have 5 different quality levels. Meaning, I want to sell all my common, low quality stuff, none of my good stuff. The amount of clicks to input each and every individual item, and then change the quality, while fighting a sub par interface is very taxing both mentally and for your mouse hand.
Given that this is a thing, why would I want low quality weapons? The way building items works is like this: You have to assign someone to a job like weaponsmith. Weaponsmith will go build weapons at the table. At the table you have to place orders for every single weapon in the game, and then you have this really shitty slider bar to change the quantity of items. You can either 'Craft X amount', or 'Craft until X amount'. Basically, there's no point for Craft X amount, but when you start you just want the standard 3. Your guy will build 3 clubs for example. 3 of your people will take those clubs, and now the weaponsmith will make 3 more. But, if you only want high quality, you would have to change your order to a higher number to reduce the micromanagement of the AI. You'd want to set to 10-15 to increase your chances of getting a high quality item. So you'll have to go back through all of your tables, and change your quantities up. If you leave it at 3, he'll probably make 3 low quality items. Which then forces you to micromanage your trade table for every single tool/weapon to sell low quality items. It's hard to explain because it's a terrible system.
Building procedures/pre requisition is absolutely horrendous if you're a human. This was not designed for the player to do these things, so why do you even have control over your guy? The lack of efficiency compared to the AI is a staggering difference, it's also not fun. Mining is not fun. Swing pick until you gas out, wait for stamina to restore, swing pick until you gas out. 10 minutes later, manually walking all the way back to your village to go to bed or sit on throne. Wait until stamina is max, walk all the way back to mine again. Not fun.
Building procedures/pre requisition part 2: Item pre requisites falls into the same pitfall, horrendous if you're a human. Let's say you want to build a fish trap. You first need logs. Then you need to build sticks. Then you need to build wooden parts. Then you need to build rope (at different station). But then you need to build fabric for the rope. And you need water for the rope even though you're using a bathtub (for some reason?). And every single time you don't have a pre req, and you click to build something, you get a BUMP noise, a delay, and then an on screen display saying what you're missing. Meanwhile, your AI is just bouncing back and forth like a pin ball doing circles around you. Not fun. Why even bother? Just wait 5 minutes and let your AI do it and relax, which begs the question again, why have a unit you control. Why not just make your character a 'God' that can take control of your peasants. You already do this by having control over telling them to fight or stand guard somewhere, what's the difference?
Storage: Nightmare, and unfun. Fortunately, they added an option to chests that says 'Bench Input' 'Bench Output', which means the accompanying chest you build next to work tables will change their internal filters to allow items to be stored there that: Are used by the table, and produced by the table. But, just setting each storage chest alone to this is taxing and annoying, not fun. Why do I have like 50 chests in my little 10 person village? Can you not see the error of your system that something as illogical as this isn't obvious? How many chests does a modern day 5 person home have? 0? It's a nuisance dealing with this, there are better ways to do it. Even if you made every table have an adequate inherited storage that automatically has the input/output assignment, that would take care of a lot of the storage issues. You wouldn't have to build this janky chest system where every table has 2+ chests to handle the overflow and the many prereq items. Then you could focus on having some centralized mass storage containers.
The game is not alive: This game is robotic itself, not just because the bots play 99% of the game for you, but it's basically on a timer. My house currently is just a big room with a bunch of beds, campfires, obelisks, and long term food storage. It also has a barrel that I have all my gold in. (Imagine how taxing and annoying it was, to disable gold on every single chest I have in my village, so that I can centralize my gold to 1 barrel). This barrel is at the back of my house behind all the beds. The house itself is land locked and all my work tables are outside, you have to walk through my village to get to my house, and past my beds to get to my gold. Yet, I get some lame alert saying I was robbed, and they took my gold and all this water and stuff. Meaning, there is literally 0 logic to your building layout whatsoever. There is no advantage to building for security, nor for efficiency, since the bots are going to do all the work for you anyways. The time you waste building an efficient and secure village is for nothing, so what am I doing exactly? You also continue getting pop ups for your <random storage> is on fire, and then you have choices. The only good one is to extinguish it with fire. Fun?
The attacks and combat hasn't proven challenging at all. Hit G which selects everyone and battle readies them, tell them to walk to whatever side the enemy is on, and then watch as they kill all of them and loot them. I don't even bother getting up from my throne anymore, trying to chase them down and swing is extremely annoying. I don't know if the bots are cheating, but they run way faster than I can. If I run towards an enemy, I'll have 0 stamina and can't even swing. And then walking back to my town through flood plains (which slows you down), not fun. The one time I died, which was in a 4-5 hour playthrough, was because it was winter. I kept getting this stupid alert for a wolf which is at the other side of the map. I wanted the stupid notification to go away, so I walk out there with my guys and kill the wolf. Walking back my character died because of the cold, game over. Ok? I don't think I even hit the wolf.
Advancement of eras and the pre requisites: To progress technology you have to learn a certain amount of technologies. It's not apparent when you start how you are getting these points, and I still don't understand why I'm getting talent points or other passive points that I spend. But you get the eras tech points by doing things from the era that you've already learned. So you learn the initial copper era, and then you smelt copper X amount of times before you can progress. This entire system is far too slow, progression is far too slow. Every time you have to over produce just for the sake of progressing the era. I don't need all this copper, I don't need all this bronze. I picked Druid, which are garbage at mining. I thought cool, I'll just not do much mining, get stone and that's it. But the game itself forces you to do an insane amount of mining to progress the eras, even though I have no intention of using much copper or bronze or steel or anything. I am now forced to solely for the purpose of getting better gardening. Totally asinine/arbitrary system that wasn't well thought out at all. And this is the straw.
Long story short, this game plays you, you don't play it. There are so many of these issues, I'm guessing the devs didn't do much playtesting, or only accepted playtesting from people that did an initial feedback of an hour or two. It's not like I'm trying to be mean but this isn't early access. The game operates as a time sink, overly inflated systems that are meant to be slow and arduous to lengthen game time. If everything was unlocked and you had access to everything from the beginning, would building a town even be fun? It's that false promise of the game that keeps you going, that eventually you'll achieve something, which I don't think you will, but I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze anyways.
Post edited June 10, 2022 by Swissy88