Greetings feudalists!

Since multiple requests are collected in this post, it's almost impossible to vote (except you like or dislike all of them). Since I don't see many people taking votes here anyway, I think it's better to just comment the sh!t out of it. The main reason why I post everything together in the forum is to have a permanent link to the collection.

I love this game for its potential, but it really bugs me that it is constantly developes in the wrong direction (from my point of view, that is..) I hate living in a rectangular shaped fortress, where every building is neatly arranged next to each other with perfect square angles on cleanly flattened ground and no imperfections. All that in a game which theoretically allows full terraforming and endless creativity.
It bugs me that the fights feel anything but immersive. I can‘t claim that an „immersive“ style would be more fun, but -at least for me – I know the current style is not.
It bugs me that both character creation and skill trees don‘t allow much individuality.

I need immersion and an rp-ish mindset to play this game, which just isn‘t there atm. It feels like a dull browser game like Tribal Wars, only with fancy graphics.
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Character Creation

Faces, Hair and Beard Styles, Voices, Tattoos. More. Especially faces.. Three only? I see plenty of clones. Plus though I see the reason of specific names it was really tiresome to find a lore friendly name which wasn‘t taken. Later in game it was all the more annoying to find players creating characters (and guilds) whith nonsense-names apparently to make a mockery of lore.

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Crafting Skills

(That's controversal, I guess. Keep in mind the goal is more diversity in character builds.)
All Skills should be completly Standalone, which means that you don‘t need the (former) lower Tier-Skills to learn complex Skills.
My idea is, you still benefit from learning related Skills by earning Shadowskill-Points. For example: if you have Construction at 60 or higher, you earn 15 Shadow-points for Masonry and 5 for Architecture. 60 in Masonry will get you further 15 for Architecture. Going for Architecture still require you to learn from zero, but you won‘t spend any skill points as long as you have shadow skill-points for it.
More complex skills require more skill points to learn, but you have overall more skill points (1000 for example, which will result in the same amount of skills that can be learned as shown below). Shadow points ignore the higher demand of points from complex skills.

Artisan is pretty much useless. Klining for itself is useless to, could be included in smithing. Household could be split and included in cooking and tailoring. No need for four skills each skill tree, those feel like placeholders to fill the ranks anyway.

Artisan: 20 SSP → Construktion
5 SSP → Masonry

Construction: 15 SSP → Masonry
5 SSP → Architecture

Masonry: 15 SSP → Architecture

Forestry: 20 SSP → Carpentry
10 SSP → Bowcraft

Carpentry: 20 SSP → Bowcraft
15 SSP → Warfare Engineering

Bowcraft: 15 SSP → Warfare Engineering

Hunting: 10 SSP → Procuration
20 SSP → Animal Lore

Animal Lore 10 SSP → Procuration
20 SSP → Warhorse Training
and so on… you get it.

Masters of their Craft achieve the best quality products even with ~q85 materials, but the crafters outfits are only aesthetical and have no effect.

Considered T1 (required skill points x1)
Artisan, Mining, Farming, Gathering, Hunting
Considered T2 (required skill points x2)
Construction, Material Processing, Forestry, Carpentry, Klining, Forging, Herbalism, Procuration
Considered T3 (required skill points x3)
Masonry, Precious Prospecting, Bowcraft, Weaponsmithing, Cooking, Healing Animal Lore
Considered T4 (required skill points x4)
Architecture, Jewelry, Warfare Engineering, Armorsmith, Tailoring, Alchemy, Warhorse Training
(as everything else, that‘s brainstorming – most likely needs balancing)

old style skills like Artisan → Architecture at lvl 100 would need
100 SP for Artisan
160 SP for Construction (80 SP x2 + 20 SSP from Artisan)
240 SP for Masonry (80 SP x3 + 20 SSP from Artisan and Construction)
320 SP for Architecture (80 SP x4 + 20 SSP from Construction and Masonry)

this leaves 180 skill points for other skills.
OR allow to max one skill of each „Tier“ that are totally unrelated without remaining points.
OR allow to max more han four skills if exclusivly simple skills (T1/2)
Could be balanced with more or without additional skillpoints. This could also be balanced by including swimming, riding and stuff as equal skills which would then use the same points. that‘s not the point, though.

If standalone skills aren‘t your thing for whatever resaon, leave the skill trees, but make it reasonable. Farming is standalone, procuration follows either hunting And/Or animal lore but breeders aren‘t necessarily hunters. Warhorse training follows animal lore. You don‘t need cooking skills to be a good tailor. Jewel Crafters don‘t necessarilly have to dig the ores up themselves, stuff like that.
Main aspect is, more flexibility and diversity. You don‘t need to plant trees to be a master in bowcraft. You may still benefit from knowledge of woods in general if it comes to anything related to woodworking, hence the shadowpoints in the described idea above.

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Combat Skills:

You can wear any armor you like. Armors won‘t grant buffs for specific weapons, you do however get debuffs in speed when wearing heavier armor. Padded or Leather armor allows you to move quickly and to swing your weapon or draw your bow faster than heavy armor does. (you still need the required strength points on top).
If you have ever worn a chainmail, those things are pretty heavy. I‘d imagine it to be significantly harder to even hold your bow or sword up and hence it should drain more stamina to shoot or hit with heavy armor. Drawing a bow should be impossible in plate. Whilst archers are more or less forced to wear light, crossbow is not and melee fighters should have the full range of armors at choice.
Light armor grants significantly less defense, but your hits are faster and therefore stronger.
Padded gives more defense against blunt damage, but little against pierce or slash. leather is a light allrounder, significantly weaker than metal armor. Chain can be worn on top of padded or under scale armor and its main defense is against hack. Padded can be worn under plate armor. Scale is more resistent against pierce and blunt dmg than plate, but less against slash. Plate are absolutely resistant against slashing damage, and recieve a smaller amount of dmg output as blunt until the armor is damaged enough to let the blade through.

Weapons can go blunt when the durability drops. Hitting metal armor drains more than non-metal.

Not wearing a helmet is dangerous. A hit or an arrow to the head most likely kills you on spot. Enormous blunt damage on the head (even while wearing the helmet) at the very least makes you unconcious. Broken legs and arms hinder or significantly weaken your ability to hit, draw, block or move. Attribute points in Willpower weaken this debuff! You can bleed out easily if you don‘t tend to your wounds. Running and fighting further quickens the bleeding.
Hit by an arrow the shaft will hinder most of the bleeding for the moment, but the longer you keep moving with the arrow inside, the more dangerous the wound becomes. Pull it out at the right time.

The main aspect of this suggestion is More diverse combat builds: No armor restrictions. You trade moveability for defense. Try to develop the combat away from the routine Run-up → hit and turn → crouch away → repeat. It looks and feels like two circus performers who swing on those devices hanging from the ceiling and are hitting each other when they meet in the middle before swinging on to their apex, where they turn and again and again and again…

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Trade post

To encourage trading instead of building a vassal-guild in every single region, you need trading post, that actuall fullfill their purpose. Since guild-trade posts are considered conquerable outposts and on top of that offer a safe storage for loot in case enemys raid you, almost everyone build walls around it. Therefore either make it a regular building again and remove the TP inventory plus allow to sell and trade out if the character inventory instead. OR distribute a bunch of neutral Trading posts like those in green zones everywhere on the map, where trades can be done.

Building and City layout: (most important I‘d say)

No more flattening the ground for buildings. Instead add a foundation for each building of around 3-4 layers of ground (3-4 shovels). In the construction window, you can move the building up and down (the foundation can reach under the surface). You can start construction when (1) the ground level does not stretch above the foundation (up until just above where ground and building met until now with flattening); (2) the underside of the foundation is fully submerged underground and (3) the ground level under the door (or opening in case of primitive shacks or small stables) is about the same like with flattened ground.
Shacks, small stable and stuff would need longer support logs instead of a foundation. The extensions must meet the same criteria as the foundation.
This way you can build an immersive feudal village whilst ensuring all buildings are accessable. Also, barely anyone uses the rotation besides n*90°, because it requires a rediculous amount and shape of tiles – that would be fixed too.
All tiles that touch the foundation would be blocked for further terraforming.

This would actually allow us to use the full potential of the terraforming and building.

Unsolved is the necessarity to build and play efficiance-orientated to even survive. (rectangular base to make it fit into one single fief)

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Alignment

Copy & Paste an older post
what is the purpose of alignment, if bandits can simply declare war on every other guild existing to avoid alignement loss and thus increased death penalty? Is there actually any charakter with negative alignment in game? (Except for those who collect it for showoff, of course) I feel like this isn‘t well thought trough or an idea abandoned after players found a workaround. Thus I'd suggest to make guild chose whether to be a guild or a bandit clan by e.g. use positive preparations for a guild monument and negative preparations for a clan monument. Bandit clans would automatically have war standings with every other guild or clan, so no more spamming the system-chat with war declarations and hours of safed time for bandit leaders. For regular guilds war declaration needs to cost little coin, so that it‘s impossible to use the guild monument instead of the clan monument for bandits, but not enough to discourage the actual wars. The bandit clan-members would suffer a smaller alignement loss for bad actions, but a loss nonetheless. Either that or just get rid of the alignment system.

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Ressource scarcity

Rare ressources are halfheartedly implemented. It makes no sense to allow certain trees or crops in one region, don‘t allow those in the neighbouring region to its left and allow them again in the 3rd region to the left again, while all of them share the same climate. Though I do understand that the world is too big and trading would be immensly tiresome if certain goods are exclusive for the high north of the map only, for example.
My suggestion is to get rid of regional ressources and change the rare ressources to the following:
wood for example: trees grow everywhere. Birks are pretty much carefree, whilst conifers grow faster in the north, slower down south and the quality is capped at maybe 75. All trees give individual boards. Best wood for bows comes from elm, so only those regions can make best quality bows without trading (while lacking other regions) You can however build bows from other boards (actually logs would make more sense, but that‘s another topic) but the quality of the bow is capped again if you use birk for example.
In case of animals: you can breed them everywhere, but if it‘s not their home region (hairy cows in the north and so on) the quality is capped again. Home region is also the only place where you can tame them.
To ensure there isn‘t one perfect place for a settlement, where you reach every regional advantages, you could have different hotspots like conifers in the noth, elm, maple and appletree in the south. Gems are exclusive for certain regions. You find copper everywhere, but only certain regions have best quality, whilst best silver can be found somewhere else.
For higher Tier armors or certain buildings (which is now handled blueprints and regional ressources) you instead need those best quality materials to build or craft them. That means, though you don‘t have materials with regional traits, you still need to trade with regions where this material is produced or found with the required quality to proceed.
So: required is not hardwood boards from Shin-Shin cakmet, but oak boards with quality 95 or more.


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3rd Person Head angle

If you play in third person, you naturally view down from above, so that you can see the ground, too. That means your character constantly stares at its feet, which is especially annoying when interacting in groups of players, where nobody is looking each other in the eyes. Adjusting the angle would be both easy (I assume) and contribute a lot to the rp-ish feeling.


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Bow Crafting and Archery

I‘d like to see a bow crafting station, where you place a whole log (or building log if you prefer). The crafting would need various steps to complete the bow. Each steps has a chance to ruin the bow, depending on the type of wood, quality of wood and skill level.
Instead of using a rope, include a recipe for bow crafting to make a string out of fibres.
When shooting, the arrow doesn‘t rest on the back of the hand where it is supposed to be. Instead it hovers under the bow, which makes no sense at all.



All this to ensure that immersive feudal feeling in the game, like mentioned above. If that‘s not your thing anyways and you don‘t feel the same way, that‘s alright. In that case value the ideas wheater or not they interfere with your current experience. I‘d guess except for the compat idea, they shouldn‘t. You can still build and play efficiancy-orientated as before, learning exactly the same skills, building square-angled citys and all.

Thanks for reading and have fun playing!
Best regards