Sorry for the poor English. Well, here goes...
Issue:
AI path finding, worker allocation and resource allocation starts to get buggy as the village hits 200 pop, even on small maps.
This is evident in winters, when the builders / teenagers trying to go to construction sites / schools and die of hypothermia, etc.
My fav map type - mountains ; has a lot of these issues when I expand all over the island and creating long winding paths on mountains.
Solution:
Allow us to
define a village boundary ( a "
Fief" - if you feudal-ly will
).
This should be a smaller area of the map, say around 100 sq tiles at start, which will
have a set of General info panels (Village info panel,resource limit panel and profession panel) and the limits and rules all to itself.
The AI, within this area, can be optimized to be quite efficient. All calculations for the ecosystem , path finding, res mgmt, etc done by
the AI, may then be limited over this small area instead of over the whole map.
A
new village can then be added some distance away by, say building a
village outpost, in an area not already inside the boundary of another village.
A building, say a newly constructed forester's lodge outside of a village boundary, should then get a drop down to assign it(the building,its AoE + a connecting pathway area) to a nearby village with which it could connect in the shortest possible route without going over another village's boundary. Of course, it(and it's surrounding work area + a "new" connecting area) should also be able to be assigned to another village via the same drop down.
Even the villagers should get assigned to only one particular village. They must also be able to quickly switch and go to settle in another village via a drop down. Also just like the pastures, village outpost can have the ability to move 1, half or all pop to another village (without any restrictions due to housing/res limits!).
The current builder profession can then be divided into two types - serfs and builders. Serfs will be engaged only inside the fiefs while builders can work anywhere on the map. Even then so, builders will be a part-of and live in a house of the fief assigned to them.
Each fief's info panels, building and villager highlighting should have different tints like light-orange,light-green,light-blue,light-yellow,light-purple,etc with something like gray for the dummy village (rest of the map) items (like bandit camp/ viking landing site etc).
Gilding the lily:
This feature request, if implemented, has so many many possibilities ...
The rest of the map, not in any village, can be implemented as a dummy village which can have its own ecosystem and interactions with the player defined villages. Like bandit camp's and wolf pack invasions,etc.
The fiefs can be assigned action group keys like CTRL+1,CTRL+2,etc to toggle between them. CTRL+TAB to switch back and forth like on a browser.
The village outpost (or any building/set of buildings the devs feel define a village center) can be used to redistribute resources from one village to another. This can see rise of villages which specialize in metal work, millitary, food production, forest industry, harbor commerce(via expeditions that take less time and act as res exchange just like in a market building but giving more and better random yields), textile industry, animal husbandry, etc.
The fiefs can have village specific events like harvest festivals (happiness and inc. in fall gathering speed), fairs( reducing bakery times ), hunting expeditions (in a ~40x40 area near it not in any other village to get hides), valentines day(pop boom!
) .....or great fishing expedition event to catch moby dick and bring tons of fish back!
I truly appreciate the consideration of a sustainable ecosystem by the awesome Devs. I feel that each village should be given an ecosystem panel to show herb/animal/plant species and impact on them due to the villages' human activity as well as allow for re introduction of an endangered/extinct species from another fief.
The fiefs' profession rotation should have the ability to be automated. With the reduction of AI computation and fief profession automation, not only the player's gameplay become easier, anyone can easily create kingdoms with 1K+ pops in every map play.
A possibility here is of introducing a Governor position which will stay in outpost and act as a visual way to depict profession automation. He/She will be going around his/her fief pausing and un-pausing buildings as per a controlling list of all buildings with min/max-temperature,min/max-resource-level to resume/halt operations. It would be soo awesome! The list could be a panel or accessible by the village outpost.
The fiefs definitely should have the capability to move pop from one village to another ( via the outpost method above). This should not have any limits. This is important and can come in handy due to disasters of hurricane, tsunamis, viking raids, etc. (if possible, viking raids/bandit raids should result in capitulation of the entire village to the aggressors swelling their ranks and making them more aggressive!!
)
Who knows .... an actual feudal system based on the fiefs , like a way for the gentleman/woman governor becoming a Sir on 50+ pop, Baron on 100+ pop and a big house, Count with a Keep I, Duke on Keep III , tavern and 200+ pop , etc, etc
In Conclusion:
Well, the awesome Devs can ignore all of the
Gilding the lily bits. Just getting us the basic fief management would be a huge shot in the arm to the replay-ability of the game.
With the basic fief system in place, the rest of it, I can dare say, be modded by us OCD people!!
I hope that the fief system would get due consideration of the Devs and Wizards of LIF:FV, since a feudal life can only be truly lived in a fief!!
I strongly believe that the fief feature could set LIF:FV a class apart from the similar games in the genre.
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One small thing I noticed is the lack of key-bindings. I hope the Devs wouldn't forget to allow players to reassign some keyboard shortcuts.
I noticed the AI bugs (like villagers getting sick and hungry at the same time and walking up and down the mountain's sloping road ) on a mountain map. Everything was going good till then. I had terra-formed many roads,hamlets and had beehives/pastures terra - elevated with their entrances converging near a hunter cabin to catch those bears. Was using the caravan + market to exchange wool for clothing , high-end tools and fruits/fishes/pies. All was going well until I tried to get my villagers on the next mountain and died my villagers during winter - the time to expand buildings.
Since on my laptop core-i7 this was happening with just 200 of villagers, I didn't want to continue playing on fearing that the lags would get severe or the AI would break.
I do enjoy mountain map a lot, specially the beautiful scenery. I only hope they make maps with even bigger and taller mountains!!
If this request actually gets fully implemented, that would be like LIF:FV v99.9999 something!!
Thanks for reading this loong request till the end! Good-day!