Please consider greatly speeding up day / night cycles (or looked at another way: not enough to do)
Hey! I love the concept of the game! I'm excited to explore the world and the lore from the perspective you've written it - it's gonna be great and is already an obvious labor of love.
I've (tried) to play through the first suggested map 3 times now, and in all 3 times I found myself on full-speed fast forward just doing nothing and waiting for my choices to be implemented because I was missing one thing or another. Trees to grow, crops to get planted, water to come in, stairs to be built.
If you're collecting analytics about how players play, then there shouldn't be long periods of players making no decisions and doing nothing - there should always be SOMETHING to do, even in resource-constrained situations where you don't have enough wood or beavers or whatever.
In light of all that, my suggestions are:
* Greatly speed up day / night cycles - get to player choice results faster, which also makes FF more meaningful / useful
and/or
* Add more optional micro-management tasks
Comments: 8
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09 Dec, '21
Gin Fuyou AdminThanks for feedback, devs are looking for feedback what you could possibly be interested in doing while your maples are maturing? General ideas are fine too.
For example I had a suggestion to add some kinds of explorations (see "Exploration system and scout parties"). Maybe just more decoration stuff to fiddle with? -
09 Dec, '21
LocaneThanks for the reply Gin.
I think exploration and scouting parties would be a great idea! But maybe not for reasons that are obvious at first blush, and there would need to be a reason to do it - currently there's no fog of war (or even a minimap for that matter), so there's not much to "explore" as it were.
To be a sufficiently micromanage-y task, scouts would need to be selectable and individually orderable. Click on the scout (or the party of scouts) and right-click move them to a destination, same as in basically every RTS or building sim.
That functionality adds options for a world of potential features that could require micromanagement: -
09 Dec, '21
Locane* An individual beaver talent system that is not automated. Some beavers might be better at science, some cutting wood, some growing trees - assigning a beaver to a particular task would be a huge benefit to prevent game loss.
* Gathering berries, cutting trees, or harvesting from specific places (say you want to build a path through there, or a plant is about to die and you want to get the food out of it before it does
* Send builder beavers to specific buildings you want them to work on (which would incidentally eliminate the need for the building priority system)
* Sending haulers to collect resources from a specific place or building
* Beaver wars / defense against carnivores?
Outside of adding some kind of other interactive functionality to the game, we're pretty limited in what we can do. If we map the ways the player can interact with the game right now, it's: -
09 Dec, '21
Locane* Place a building or path
* Place crop / wood cutting zone
So currently, activities that are meant to "fill the gaps" of waiting for something to happen, without adding new functionality, would need to be doable in one of those two ways.
I could see adding think-tasks like having certain crops / trees grow better if they are next to other crops / trees, or buildings receiving bonuses when grouped or near certain other buildings.
The problem with those suggestions is that you can very easily lock yourself in to the "right answer" design paradigm, whereby there is a "correct" solution. When your game is Solved, or even just aspects of it, it becomes less and less fun.
Actually, I feel like the game is suffering from that already - there is a correct build order for each map, and deviating from it means probable game loss that you have to wait 10's of real-life minutes to even see. -
11 Dec, '21
JPI think it would be cool if I could 'help' my beaver community in some way. Especially in early game, you can quickly establish the basics of your first district, then you just sit and wait, staring at the screen over multiple day/night cycles. Sometimes I just get up and go make dinner and let the game churn. To stay engaged, perhaps there's some minor things that you could interact with.
1. A few times a day you can pick a beaver to motivate, and it gives that beaver a boost to work speed.
2. Fishing mini-game that can help you out with extra food. (fishing with explosives for later in the game :) )
3. Choose a bench and switch camera view to see the world as if I'm sitting on the bench and allow me to look around with the mouse.
4. Allow me to choose the colors or styles of buildings, or choose the color of bushes or whether they have berries in them.
5. A few times a day allow me to fertilize some garden or tree squares to help them grow faster.
6. Allow me to help harvest crops -
12 Dec, '21
richardi would say add more speed up options instead of speeding up the game maybe a 5x and 10x
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05 Jan, '22
DrEvilHomerHopefully they add more early game projects. Little things to keep you busy. I am a couple hours into my first real play through and am starting to get bored. I am playing an app game on my phone while I wait for time to go by, that isn't what you want your players doing with your game. Once I realized I was playing my phone more than Timberborn I saved it and closed the game, came here and am trying to upvote suggestions to keep the early game interesting. More food options would be nice, give each a tiny bonus to give you a reason to pick one over the other. This would add something to do building more smaller plots or looking how to make lots of big plots. Add free (science free) decorations that may or may not add bonuses. You could adjust the happy scale for decorations to offset this. Decorating is a time sink. Add water leisure options as well to allow for more early building that don't break the late game. Cute little game, just early game is lacking a bit.
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26 Jun, '22
ADDDDDDDDEven when you have goals in the tutorial, playing on 1x speed is too slow. I shouldn't be running through the tutorial at ">>>" speed. Then the tutorial just ends and you're left with no further steps to take and still you're running the game on ">>>"; to wait for the drought to end or to wait for the beavers to actually build a dam. I quit before discovering what the dam did during the drought period because ALL I was doing was waiting and I can't afford to wait longer, 71 minutes in, gotta get my Steam refund. Maybe if the beavers were interesting to watch this would be different, but it's disappointing to see that they only walk up to things and carry logs. Was hoping for more cutesy adorableness.