I am playing this new game that’s a city builder. The idea is that you build… a city. A very modern, complicated Sim City. Think “the settlers” or “Anno”, but newer. It’s “Farthest Frontier” – find it on your favorite game distribution site.
I mostly like it, 10 hours or so in. What I am struggling with, is the user experience for finding the right building at times. Clearly there are buildings that produce food, goods and luxuries for your citizens, that help attract new settlers to come to your town. The game gives you suggestions about what to do, for example find an addition source of food or additional food type, or go and produce candles that improve quality of life for your settlers.
Of course there is a dependency chain to a number of these goods. You can’t just build a candle shop and then candles magically appear. But in order for the candle shop to be able to produce candles, you need wax and a few additional goods. In order to get wax, you need to build an apiary and have a few farmers that work on it. For that apiary, your town center must be Level 2 – and that in turn has its own requirements.
What I am missing is an overview of these dependencies. Nowhere in the game, or for downloading, there’s this dependency chain written down or browsable:
candle <- candle shop <- wax <- apiary <- town center lv 2 <- 40 wood, 8 shelter, market, 30 population, …
As a player, I may not know these dependencies, especially starting out new – or if I am playing my settlement for hours on end and rarely start a new one, when these dependencies become relevant. The game gives me some of the information. When I click on the candle shop, I can see that it produces candles and that it requires wax and another resource to produce. But it does not resolve the wax and the downstresm dependencies for me.
I remember this existed in Age of Empires II, as a printed version included in the bigbox of the game. You could put it next to you and follow along with the dependencies. I think they called it “technology map” in Age of Empires II, as it would show the buildings, weapons, advancements you could get.
I would be happy printing and lamenting this myself, if there was a prepared version as a PDF somewhere. Better yet, if this was part of the game, and only a few clicks away even better. I wouldn’t even need another overlay over an overlay, I’d be okay pausing the game and going to a different screen, and switching context. Ultimately, this only happens a few times in the beginning of a game and then even fewer as you progress – but still.
Bonus points if you can display the dependencies or technology map with color coding, so I can see which prerequisites I have completed already, and what I still need. Town Center Lv2, Apiary and wax show green graphs amongst one another, only the candle show shows red – which tells me I am good to go to build it, in order to produce the sought-after candles. This could make a fantastic DLC – buy and print-at-home for us retro games that need stuff to touch with the games they purchase.
FRICKELSOFT 