A Steam guide I was reading said they generate money as well.
Lol, the campaign isn’t the typical ‘extended tutorial’, it’s much harder than that. I’m stuck already in the fourth mission, where I can forget about the trade goal, I couldn’t get enough food for my people.
Or maybe I didn’t grok the game systems and that’s why it feels so hard.
I haven’t played beyond the 2nd mission in the campaign yet, but in skirmish making use of fertile land, land with deer, and land with fish along with silos and upgrades becomes real important. There are some research items that help lessen the impact of some things on your food stockpile. What level are you playing on?
I’m playing on Normal. The map is setup to have a bit less food for the player than the previous ones.
I think maybe I should have rushed some mines to then upgrade the few food resources I had, that was my mistake.
I think that is my problem. I am still trying to put it all together so I can be successful. I thought I was getting there, but it’s really easy for things to go awry and then I am constantly trying to dig myself out of a hole.
I’ll say it again, single player really needs a pause. Not so much give orders, but just so you can look around and read all the texts.
Ok, completed. It was easier on the second attempt, as you know what to expect.
Campaign is kind of tough once you get further in. Had to restart number 3 twice and I am at a loss on how to deal with 4. I don’t know if I am not expanding fast enough, maybe I shouldn’t have troops on that one. Just don’t know how to make money fast enough.
Yeah, the campaign is tough, I dropped it on the fifth level because while doable, it started to feel more like a puzzle, as the only way to do the objective before dying was doing exactly following a specific series of steps. On to the skirmish.
<15 minutes later, I inadvertently sabotaged my own nation>
Mmm actually let me comment a bit about the game:
"Northgard? Hah! Moar like ‘negative feedback loop, the game’!!
It’s a pretty good game, very enjoyable when you hit a groove with it, but at the core of its game design it has a questionable system, the relationship between happiness, food, population, and health. As a a minimum, it’s something interesting to discuss.
You see, if you play just right you won’t have problems.
If you expand slower than you should, and you will hit a wall, as the happiness requirement increases with time halting your population growth, which at the same time that lack of new people makes hard to get the resources needed to ‘get over’ that wall you hit in your expansion.
Conversely, if you expand faster than you should, maybe combined by a blizzard in the worst moment, you will consume more food than you should before hitting the next resource or short term goal that you were planning. With no food, the happiness goes to the negatives… and go lower and lower, -5,-6,-7,-8…
-No happiness means no pop growth that could help you fix the situation, similarly to the above.
-After a minute in that situation, the disease starts, and when it happens, it happens to most of your village (because when there is no food a villager, there is no food for anyone), with everyone losing health slowly. And of course your healers can only heal one unit at a time.
-Wounded units have -20% penalty to production, which also doesn’t help get out of the ‘hole’.
So this innocent looking and slowish RTS is more hardcore and harsher than it seems, full of negative feedback loop traps you have to be aware of.
So does this net out to a fairly narrow path to victory?
Well, four narrow paths. It depends on which of the four victory conditions you’re attempting. Or five if the fifth victory condition appears on your map.
-Tom
I need to bump it up to medium again and see how it goes. I’ve won fame, wisdom, and domination victories in easy skirmishes now.
The strong point of the game for me is the variety given in a RTS game thanks to taking some features of other empire-building strategy games, like random maps with different resources and random events.
-Every game can be different depending of what resources you will find nearby. It isn’t the same a forest than a swamp, or a shipwreck or a field with a iron mine. Given how interdependent are some of the system (as I described before), it can have a pretty big effect.
-Same with the neutral enemies guarding some of the provinces. Some will be empty, others will have wolves, or draugs, or valkyries.That will affect in which order you conquest them each time. Some could have a ruin that helps you gain fame points, others a wolf den that spawn enemies. Some of the factions could even benefit of having a wolf den as they gain food killing critters (so you don’t destroy the den, but instead ‘farm’ it).
-Now add the random events, like blizzards, earthquakes,or draug portals.
-Neutral factions that you could find like the kobolds and the jotuns.
-Finally, having 4-5 ways to reach victory (conquest, technological, fame, trade, special map province to conquer) gives you different ways to compete.
I’m starting to see the value of the campaign more. It’s like a clan sampler pack where you get to play the different clans in scenarios specifically designed to accentuate their strengths. It can still be annoying, I had to play scenario 5 3 times to beat it, but I enjoyed 6 very much.
I’m starting to dislike this game now, for the simple reason that the peon management sucks.
I have a burning building, and a peasant next to it, but he can’t fix it without being told?
Everyone else can do their jobs but not the peasants.
one thing I like is I can convert a forester into a healer just by moving him to the right building, but if that forester is right next to a burning building, or a construction site, he has to first become a peasant…which inevitably means traipsing oh so slowly half way across the map to find a hut to then come back and do the job…
Plus if I’ve allocated a peasant to do something, and then I find another peasant nearer the objective, that 2nd peasant can’t help or take over from the first peasant.
And why can I only build one tower per sector?
Needless micromanagement that inflates the difficulty of the game and increases the frustration.
Conquering is also pretty slow. I occupy an enemy site, control shifts to me…or rather away from the owner, so it becomes neutral, and then I have to colonise it…
I’m past the refund point simply on account of everything taking so long here. 4 hrs in an I have done 3 campaign missions.
Which brings me to my last point, there needs to be a restart mission option, instead of exiting the mission and clicking to start it again, and sitting through the unskippable cutscenes. Unskippable cut scenes…seriously, f*ck off.
There is a good game somewhere here, and I started having fun, but then I found myself babysitting peasants like this was Warcraft 3 or something. When things start coming together the time just sinks away…
That’s why I could never get into. I started a non-campaign game as suggested here, and it was more challenging, but still not really fun. Mircromanging peons, and their little territories, was tedious.
Cutscenes can be skipped. Iirc, after hitting ESC a little dialogue box popped up in the corner asking if I wanted to skip the scene.
I totally get a lot of your issues, and I swear I’ve almost deleted this game 3 times now. But I keep going back into it, and somehow manage to progress. I’m on campaign 8 now.
I honestly think micromanaging your peons is one of the main gameplay elements that was intentional from the devs. You literally have to reassign workers in winter time to off-set the lower food production and wood issues.
However, that said, your points about having to tell a peon to put out a fire, or send a worker back to the home grid to make them a peon again are both valid concerns that should get addressed.
As for the restarting missions with unskippable dialogues, I’ve just gotten into the habit of creating a save game immediately after that stuff plays out and before I start putting up my first buildings. Then if a restart is necessary, I can avoid it all.
I put in about 10 hours playing skirmishes, but haven’t been back to it in the past couple of weeks. I agree that some of the peon micro is ridiculous.
This I can understand, as it simulates using your manpower. I get that. I like that. i can take a woodcutter and send him directly to the market and he’ll become a merchant.
Why, therefore, with peasants do i have to send them to a peasant building to transform them first?
Why can’t I send my merchant directly to the burning building and have him transform into a peasant?
Huh? You totally can. You may first have to stop the peon you’ve sent, if the building is full.
Yeah, I mean, mechanically, peon micromanagement is pretty much the only gameplay.
Because only peasants can repair buildings. So you have to turn them into peasants. You’re thinking about it the wrong way. The burning building isn’t what makes them a firefighter. The town hall is.