Jon Shafer's At the Gates

Jon Shafer's At the Gates

Zarkonnen 10 Jun, 2019 @ 3:43am
Bugs and Balancing
Bugs I perceived:

When buying olives from the caravan, the olives neither show up as food nor as olives in my inventory.

When my packed-up tribe was defeated by bandits, its icon changed to a "destroyed" kind of icon, but I was still able to move it.

Balancing:

As noted in the other thread, surviving past the first year or two gets really hard. Your population grows, and even if you have a buffer, one bad winter or the end of an important source of eg fish can spell doom.

Parchment is super-valuable. I'm able to buy a lot of stuff from the caravan just by having one trapper produce parchment and selling it.

Stone blocks appear to be very important to getting longer-term food production going, but it's hard to find stone, and hard to turn it into blocks.

You can't pack up with fishermen in your village, so I just have to convert them to eg trappers, then pack up the village, and turn them back into fishermen when I've unpacked. And fishermen don't need wood for their boats, which is weird.

Things I still find hard to understand:

The meaning of the supply icons. There's number of boxes, and there's colour, and I don't get it.

The food balance is absolutely critical information, and I really want an easy way to see what's producing food and what's consuming it.

Finally, two feature suggestions that I'd find neat:

The ability to banish a tribe for repeated crimes. They'd leave but maybe turn into bandits.

The ability to harvest a small amount of stone from stone ruins. A lot of buildings in 400CE were built out repurposed old roman stones, AFAIK. And it would mean stone, at least in moderate quantities, would be easier to find.

Anyway, I hope you find this useful feedback. Don't take this as a set of demands - I'm happy to be told that things are working as intended. I'm a game developer myself, so I know things take a lot of time, and there's a whole bunch of considerations individual players can't see. :)
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Showing 1-11 of 11 comments
Jon Shafer  [developer] 12 Jun, 2019 @ 8:21am 
Thanks Zarkonnen! Good points, observations and feedback. :) Added several things to my list.

- Jon
UAintSoBad 12 Jun, 2019 @ 1:08pm 
Are you not suppose to be able to build a fruit farm with a farmer?
Jon Shafer  [developer] 24 Jun, 2019 @ 9:16am 
You should be able to. If you can't and have enough timber it sounds like a bug, and if so please send a save file from when you're trying to build the structure to contact@conifergames.com.

- Jon
UAintSoBad 13 Jul, 2019 @ 2:41pm 
Jon i've tried several times and have never been able to build fruit farm anyone else this problem? Took screenshot but can't seem to send it to you.
Last edited by UAintSoBad; 13 Jul, 2019 @ 3:00pm
UAintSoBad 13 Jul, 2019 @ 5:49pm 
Without the ability to produce a capable fruit farm stone structure (winter proof, deplete prof) and the fact fisheries don't ever replenish spells doom to my civ down the road no matter what i train or do :(, wheat farms stay offline in winter to long and ensure starvation at some point, i've tried trawlers, tillers, briners, but without stable winter food spells doom.
Last edited by UAintSoBad; 13 Jul, 2019 @ 5:51pm
clayffo 13 Jul, 2019 @ 6:01pm 
Originally posted by tcmots:
Without the ability to produce a capable fruit farm stone structure (winter proof, deplete prof) and the fact fisheries don't ever replenish spells doom to my civ down the road no matter what i train or do :(, wheat farms stay offline in winter to long and ensure starvation at some point, i've tried trawlers, tillers, briners, but without stable winter food spells doom.

You have to transition into meat some time around 200ish. I have tried and you cannot forage your way to end game

Since animals are unreliable in the current caravan setup, you need to set up multiple ranches and have a shepherd or two to keep + animals/turn

UAintSoBad 14 Jul, 2019 @ 5:07am 
That is great but still way off course, most civilizations ate meat granted but most lived and thrived from grain, exp. wheat farms, etc. take away our present day grain farms and see how long our civ lives on meat alone!!
Last edited by UAintSoBad; 14 Jul, 2019 @ 5:09am
clayffo 14 Jul, 2019 @ 9:22am 
@tcmots

My most recent game that ended up with an unrecoverable crash at turn 420, I was producing about 4,000 meat/ turn with a demand of about 385/turn + meat is uninterruptible in winter

My farm products may possibly have survived me but it’s a close call with the winter penalty. I was +187 grapes, +187 olives, +34 wheat . I exhausted all of the fishing spots with my 2 boats

In one of the alpha builds maybe a year and a half ago, there were preserves. If you had +salt/turn and the top end preserver, you could turn any non meat food product into preserves . They acted as reserve food if you ran out. However, there was no penalty for just making preserves and nothing else. You could also sell preserves at the caravan

I was able to ramp preserves up to several thousand per turn. Food canning would be both historically accurate and provide an alternative to meat if you fancy farming
Last edited by clayffo; 14 Jul, 2019 @ 9:32am
UAintSoBad 14 Jul, 2019 @ 11:48am 
All in all this is a great game with so much potential, but my main thought was according to rules fruit farms was one of the jobs a farmer is suppose to do and it's not working, thanks for imput clay, very useful as i strive once again :)
UAintSoBad 14 Jul, 2019 @ 2:04pm 
nevermind just realized that their is indeed actually fruit trees in game tho
i've never seen any was confusing berries and fruit trees my bad!! disregard lol.
clayffo 14 Jul, 2019 @ 4:17pm 
Also the game has no mechanic for nutrition so food is food; not likely to change
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