Expose player to more stress and much more survival threats to increase fun
After a few droughts, the game becomes too easy. The game needs to throw many more survival threats at the player, to create an "air" of imminent extinction and demands that the player keeps constant attention. Compared to timeless Impressions Games classics like Caesar3 and Pharaoh, this game has very little stress. The game would be more fun with more stress.
All it takes is a large enough water reservoir (and tiered pumping), and around that continuous food/wood production and all threats to the colonies' survival are neutralized. This is true on all of the maps on hard difficulty, and the player quickly figures out how to beat the drought length build-up, up to the longest droughts.
Some ideas:
Unpreventable earthquakes.
Unpreventable lighting strikes, that cause a fire.
Landslides that destroy/bury buildings (preventable by trees).
Stormy weather, which effectively increases water from water sources (and requires the player to plan for storm drains).
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02 Jan, '25
Joe BobHighlighted comment
I too think that the droughts get too easy after a few of them. I think a major component that makes city building games fun and interesting are the constant concerns which, while they do not by themselves create a game ending scenario, when combined with drought and bad tides could dramatically complicate the situation. A mechanic that comes to mind is crime. While traditional crime would not really make sense in this game, a mechanic that could be implemented might be that beavers who are contaminated by the bad water behave erratically. This would increase the difficulty of the game linearly with the population size and make the generally speaking benign bad tides a greater threat. -
27 May, '23
Jamie CNo. This actually decreases fun. It's bad enough when the beavers go into a death spiral for some dumb reason. I wish there was a downvote button.