Suggestions for v15

[moebius]

Because I want to involve you more in the development of Towns, I'm now starting this thread to collect suggestions for the upcoming version 15 of the game.
When everything goes as planned we will have a poll afterwards to decide what features to add

There are only two rules that apply:

1. Please do not suggest completely radical changes that would involve rewriting the whole game from scratch
2. The suggestion should lead to a more complete and finished feeling of the game

Let me give you each an example that would contradict one of the rules:

• "I want to have Towns now in full 3D" => This would obviously contradict rule #1
• "Please add aliens that fly around with their UFOs abducting townies and forcing them to work on their planet" => Contradicts rule #2 because it does not really fit the game nor make it feel more finished

I already have a few ideas of my own but I'm really interested to hear what you want to see in the new release. After all you have most likely spent already more hours in the game than I have - so you are the experts!

[ragnar]

This will be combination of things that needs fixing and new features, but that will not need new art and similar (also I dont suggest all of this to be in next version , but just throwing ideas ):

-Pathfinding options set on max (should be easy to do):
On default when starting the game the option pathfinding that is in options/performances CPU level usage for pathfinding should be set on 6. Not on 3(or 4). The problem is the way it works is it limits the number of action per time, so if you have more people, they will pause often if they have a lot of orders, and the game will feel broken on pathfinding 4. Most people dont know that there is a option to change it, and think the game is bugged. If on default it is set on 6, there will not be anymore problems like this

-Making it possible for townies when crafting to go to eat/sleep:
If you set something to be crafted (so lets say a table that needs 4 wood), townies will not stop crafting until he finish it. So if he gets hungry, and the 4 woods are all over the levels/dungeons he will starve/die from not sleeping. Fix is, if he gets hungry/sleepy he should stop to work, and go to eat/sleep. Some other should continue the work or should wait for one to finish eating/sleeping.
The game had similar problem with trading, people would not stop to trade items even if they are hungry, but that was fixed later (telling you this because maybe the fix is similar from the code)

-Terraforming:
This will probably be very hard. So, the thing we need is to be able to place dirt/sand/ice blocks so you can till it, plant plants, grow trees, farms and similar. Currently there are no options like that, all block that you place can not work like normal terrain that is generated on the beginning of the game

-Destroy/remove order for townies
at the moment there is no order where you can remove/destroy buildings, walls or anything. You need to do it manuely, with right click/ destroy item. Suggestion is to implement a new order for townie that will work like remove scaffolding order (or mine/dig that will work for player placed walls also), but just for placed blocks (so if you want to remove a wall, you can just order it for townies to do it for you)

-Barrels/chest/containers inherit the stockpile lists:
So if you place a barrel on a stockpile, it should have same list of items that townies need to place in them as the stockpile it is on. At the moment, you need to right click and set items for every barrel manually

-dungeon level limit for crafting
In citizen option when opened in the upper right corner there are two arrows for setting the limit for dungeon access for hauling/equipment of townies. That limit does not work, if you order your townies to craft something (they will still go for materials in the dungeon). So my suggestion is that the limit is also for everything (crafting, trading and similar)

-Dungeon level limit and priorities per townie group
At the moment you can only put global dungeon level limits for all townies, and its same for priorities . Suggestion is to make it possible to put it for every group of townies you make (for this you will probably need new interface additions, but art is already there)

-Townies(and guards) running away when low on health:
when fighting townies will fight till death. Suggestion when they are low on health, they should run away to personal room/hospital

-Fear mechanic (will need some brainstorming)
generally if townie and items he has are less effective than the monster he will fight, he should not start the fight in the first place. So if he is naked and the destination where he is moving is close to some monster that will one hit kill him, he should not run there to get the item (if he is a guard it should not count, they dont have fear and often you want to swarm some monster to kill them).

-item stacking on ground:
at the moment if a item drops over another item (like when killing monster)and there is no room in next block near it where to drop, the item will be destroyed (so lot of good items/weapons are lost). So suggestion is to make items on one block/grid be able to stack . Maybe when you kill a monster a new type of item will drop (a bag or something) that works like a barrel and that will get filled with items from monster you kill on that block.

-Message for townies stuck:
often when building a townies will be left on roof/wall and die from hunger. If it happens (so he is hungry but cant get to food, or want to sleep but cant get to his personal room) a message in the announcment should be that a townie is stuck.

-Order in building flat areas/roofs
at the moment when ordering to build a flat area in air that is connected to a wall, townies will bring the blocks and put them random in air (not near the blocks on the wall so they connect), so most of time, blocks will be in air and fall down. Suggestion is that they put blocks in order, so they are put one after another so they are always connected. Maybe a new type of order where you can set from where they need to start to build for the NxM area.

-Heroes economy/quests (will need a lot of brainstorming):
This is one of main features not implemented in the game. General idea is that heroes are fully controlled by AI, and you can only influence them indirectly. They should buy items/weapons from you (so there needs to be a option that you can sell items that you craft), pay you rent for rooms. You should give them quests (kill x monsters, clear dungeon level, defend area for x time...) for what you pay them coins and similar (if you played majesty games, something like that). But there needs to be a lot of thoughts put in this so it works good.

This was posted from ben, the ex townie developer (would love if he would still be here to work with you on the game)some time ago, also a nice list:

- make a proper, interactive and graphical tutorial system.
- solve the nagging issue of multiple items on the ground (the inability to have them, actually)
- solve the issue of level restriction not coming into play when townies check for items to craft.
- solve the starving en-route.
- solve ranged combat (which currently work based on LOS). enable ranged combat to work across gaps. enable refreshing of ammo.
- enable mass destroying of walls/roofs/blocks
- get rid of the farms. implement a breeding system for the animals. allow animals to eat on their own. get rid of mines as they are. introduce a better method of mining, even if it will still remain infinite.
- introduce the ability to craft more than 1 item per queue without using voodoo scripting workarounds that can fail sometimes (for example, to be able to cut trees into 4 logs, this will allow for a better fine tuning of the economy and will be able to make the building side a faster process (no more need for 1 stone vs 1 block)
- introduce a better system for having item states and attributes. meaning, fruit trees would not get destroyed and rebuilt as fruitless trees, same with the milking cows etc etc. this is something i wanted all along from the start.
- make all enemies exactly like heroes/townies = being able to equip with any weapon, have a name, level range, etc.
- introduce the fear system i talked about in the past.
- solve AI pathfinding quirks, when travelling the dungeon and when building roofs/high blocks
- introduce tools. introduce limited actions to tools. introduce limited actions to skills/effects.
- reexamine combat mechanics.
- make containers inherit the stockpile attributes it stand on. have the option to mass manipulate containers of each type.
- make water a semi interactive element. meaning, some creatures could cross it.
- allow for flying creatures (would pose a different threat on walled towns)
- terraforming, meaning, rebuilding terrain.

-- allow for heroes trading and heroes loot. allow heroes to stack up items.
-- more indepth events system, reexamining the gods system. implementing the recipe and shrine interface (so that the shrines wont have pre written options)
-- allow for "pre trading", meaning, to be able to tell what to sell to the caravan without it being there, so that when it comes, the goods get sold automatically. also have a "wishlist" buy option, so that if the caravan come and has the required item it will be automatically bought
-- introduce items larger than 2 tiles
-- introduce work and battle animations

[caffeinated]

Bugfixing:

-dungeon level limit for crafting
In citizen option when opened in the upper right corner there are two arrows for setting the limit for dungeon access for hauling/equipment of townies. That limit does not work, if you order your townies to craft something (they will still go for materials in the dungeon). So my suggestion is that the limit is also for everything (crafting, trading and similar)

To build on this, or to clarify, when building houses, sometimes the townies will run down into a buried town (dungeon) to retrieve an object (especially doors) that have been dislodged and given the red X. This is problematic if they are trying to retrieve an object in one of the high-level enemy hot zones. It's one of the reasons I've taken a break from the game. I can't really add new doors to new homes without watching my entire town get massacred first.

Additions:

Speaking of new doors, if you do get a graphics guy to help you, we could use some stone doors that stand two tiles high like the wooden ones. Wood and bone doors are too limited, and all of those halfling doors are useless since we don't have halfling townies. Glass doors would be a nice addition, too.

There are a few items, like containers and armory shelves, that still cannot be rotated. Again, may require a graphics guy, but the ability to rotate all objects is still incomplete.

Map Generation:

Islands don't have underground areas, so it's impossible to dig them up without immediately falling into a lake. Would be nice if all nonwater surface terrain has underground terrain, as well.

That covers my suggestions. Everything else that I would like to see, like wineries/breweries and education centers, would require new graphics, so those can probably wait.

[Smiling Spectre]

Can I ask for proper "End Game" options? Right now I see several possible options (that can be ticked on game generation maybe?):

- Kill them all. Game ends when there are no more initially-generated monsters. I.e. after cleaning last dungeon level.

- Explore it all. Game ends when everything was explored.

- Find the ultimate artifact. At the deepest level, of course.

- Destroy the biggest evil. I can imagine level boss for every dungeon level, biggest of all other monsters at the same level. And when you killed last one, you win!

Also, for development of the same idea. Could it be possible to have "infinite dungeon" ladder, as game mode? I.e., when I finished previous dungeon, score of my dwellers (like, say, most of my heroes and 10-20 best citizens) along with the reasonable amount of existing tools and equip taken along to next, more advanced map with stronger monsters? This mode also would require Hall of Fame to be able to boast about your best achievements.

[Yurii_asdfg]

p.s. i have 100+ hours in "towns" and have written some mods.

so, 2 things from me - bugfixs and new stuff


bug fixs

1. ability to place terrain on "air" block. people call it terraforming. so far, with current modset you can only replace terrain block, but not air
2. remove raw food as "can be eaten" at all. it has no purpose and only breaks gameplay.
3. add mass unlock for everything. so far we cannot relocate stuff without baby sitting and million clicks. in fact, add mass unlock not only on one layer, but on all layers at once
4. fix error with misplaced items. when top block drops after you remove block under it this blocks gets red cross and towns will not use it unless you right click for "unlock"
5. fix bug when towns will die on road from hunger.
6. fix bug when towns will collect earlier dropped items instead of closest ones. that's insane at all
7. fix bug when towns will drop harvested/made item on free tile instead of putting it into chest that is next to it! to not make "haul" operation useless, make some radius for self smart haul, let's say 3 tiles in radius.
8. fix defense buildings. add strength to them. so far they are useless against sieges, the most useful are water lines so far. doors are useless, they must block enemies always, not only when you put it to locked, or add option "locked for enemy only"
9. fix heros weapon pickup. make available to set them armor and weapon manually, remove autopickup or make it optional
10. decrease required crops. 1 wheat = 1 bread. and so on. it will make game more simple. in fact, economy should be revised. by default, game looks like neverending eating. sure, mods, but
11. 1x1 zones. mod again, but by default it is 3x3 what is stupid. it must be by default.
12. notification windows. make better separation, so damage from heros will not interfere with damage by towns. example, cripple shot from elf hero
13. tree regeneration. if you cut all "wild" trees, you will not be able to get new trees from young trees on your tilled zones
14. trading bug. sometimes towns go into infinite loop by dragging same item all over again, until trader leaves
15. make description of items. amount of happiness, type and amount of damage, duration, etc. we are able to read it from xml files, i was able to hardcode it into mod, but that's ridiculous
16. make equal and higher walking speed for roads
17. add ability to relocate heros rooms
18. add list of heros and prerequisites
19. as far as i played, level limiter for towns pick up doesn't work
20. remove hero limit
21. fix menu items. no need to have 4 items for wood cut for each type of tree, etc.
22. remove auto butchering and milking/eggs for wild animals at all. i wrote mod for it, but it is stupid to have towns that run across a map to pick up wild animal because of it in fresh game
23. fix bug of unlocking fire if it placed on zone. remove ability to place it at all if it is forbidden by design, but not disable it after it was placed. this bug leads to things like - noone can cook on it, it cannot be renewed automatically, only manually.
24. range shooting across river, "seeing" enemy on tile above or below, ability to use range weapons. so far archer towers are non existed.


new stuff

1. animation of actions. also show specific action icon above towner during that action, better if with timer like erasing circle. animation on locked structures that are used by towns, as they are locking them before action
2. add button to wear set of armor and weapon, expanding ability to clicking for every items or auto pickup
3. make sense of tavern (like a list of quests) or remove it at all
4. make sense of arena (like achivements) or remove it at all
5. add tracks that they are not so repetitive, easy and relaxing
6. add ability to keep some amount of animals alive for eggs and meat, by now they all get butchered
7. more variation of skins
8. statistics. how much food was eaten last day, how grew happiness, etc.
9. skills for towns. they must do stuff faster and better (more fill %, more collected, less in time, etc)
10. mutiplayer?

regards

[exelsisxax]

Allow all items to drop on top of roads and all objects to be built on top of them so that the road tile can stick out from underneath.

Allow equipment tags to function so that an item can take up multiple slots, or be assigned to a slot without consuming it. (this is goddamn annoying to mod currently)
Remove all the blunt5 type damage effects, and just allow us to define new damage types, and put damage resistances for each type in the effects and on armor.(again, so amazingly convoluted to do this currently)
remove the isometric bounding box for all graphics. It is currently impossible to display two handed weapons, shields, or any monster that isn't very rectangular without chopping a whole lot of it off.

Give us a way to create terrain blocks inside air blocks. We've got the terraforming mods ready for you to ship with the game, they just can't create blocks yet.

the hero run away effect needs to work for townies, and be one of their default behaviors.

real combat animations. the headbutting is just silly.

Multiblock structures/ items larger than 2 tiles.(again, you can do multiblock, but all the effects you need to do makes it clumsy and irritating)

[Badger]

BEER!

BEER! BEER! BEER!

[YetiChow]

BEER!

BEER! BEER! BEER!

seconded

The big ones (besides beer) IMO are doing something about combat, terraforming, item clumsiness, and the fairly arbitrary outcomes of the tick cycle. The first two are things that can probably be started and give some shiny new improvements fairly quickly, while working towards bigger goals - for example, make livings no longer stack in a single square (or ideally make it so they can pass each other but not occupy the same square) and give everything better targeting options and you've immediately added tactical, design, management and 'realism' attraction in one swoop to something that many players are frustrated with.

Item clumsiness is a much more general problem; stemming from Ben and Xavi's different ideas on how they should work. Personally I'd go with Ben's late suggestions on the matter, reworking items to have "states" instead of variant items... of course, that's a huge job and requires a lot of refactoring, but again small steps with visible improvements will both shore up the game and bring back favourable attention.

The tick cycle is a bit odd, partly because the hardcoded stuff (automatically assigned tasks like eating or combat, some other decisions made by the game about what to do with various livings, the <maxAge> and drop mechanics and more I can't think of) don't always line up neatly. One day is a certain number of ticks at a certain speed for example, but the foods give a (semi-random) fillPCT which lasts for a (semi-random) time and then the townie has to travel to the (somewhat randomly) chosen food; poor rolls and decisions can snowball into starving or stuck townies. Again, it comes down to mismatching ideas; but much of the derpyness may be able to be solved without any real refactoring - for example, if you changed the eating mechanic from "X amount of time since the last meal based on its quality" to "3 times a day, with higher quality food giving bonuses or better performance" it might be a bit more artificial but it would be simpler, more intuitive, and probably easier to maintain code-wise. There's still room for some randomness, but instead of making the whole thing a series of random and semi-random values piled on top of each other you could make it one stable value (number of meals each day) with a bare minimum of modifiers (food quality, how long a townie can be late for a meal before they miss it and get negative effects, how many meals they can skip before they starve) and significantly cut down the hassle.

Terraforming has a rather big speedbump with the way _Air cells work, but if you can get through that then it's a much-requested feature and doesn't radically alter anything else - IMO it's a good place to start, and you can use the opportunity to do any cleanup code-wise required on terrain blocks; you may even be able to get the graphics sorted at the same time.

Good luck with v15, looking forward to whatever you do

[miljan02]

I would like to see:
-terraforming,
-item stacking,
-a way to order your people to remove or destroy blocks you placed,
-selling items to heroes,
-quests for heroes.

[Jon_jon13]

A little bugbear for me (if it hasn't changed since I played) is that messages aren't displayed as text anymore, you HAVE to hover over the icon to see anything, and said icon might be flashing for "spammy" messages and you don't care to even look at it anymore, and you might miss an important message in the same category as the spam is happening.

It's just an Interface upgrade, but I'd like to have the option to configure different kinds of messages to appear as text like when you hover over the icons, also make some other messages flash the icon, and some other just have no effect at all. I doubt anybody will complain about having more options, and information management is important in the game

I won't try to agree with everyone else's suggestions, because they are all for the most part obvious improvements for the game anyway. I just wanted to add this little personal "problem" on the list.