Suggestions & Feature Requests

Opening Seals Doesn't Feel Any Different

• Done

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Kyle Leising

The idea of having long expeditions to repair weakening seals has a lot of merit - it adds a dash of cosmic horror to the world (to me, at least. Holding off the apocalypse forever in a world ravaged by storms.)The issue that I'm facing, is that the current system for the final expedition to repair a seal doesn't actually deliver on that feel. The Seals could be replaced by anything and mechanically it would be the same; it could be collecting tickets to redeem at the Storm Circus, or Fruits for the Storm Farmer's Market, because the 'debuffs' that are on the special end-of-cycle Seal map don't have any flavor to them. Maybe it's just a bug or good luck, but in every Sealed map, which is supposed to have less Fertile Soil, I've won each game with 3-4 different farming buildings because I found so much soil. I didn't even realize there was a malus on Trade Route time until my third town in a Sealed map. It's possible that the debuffs are more pronounced on higher difficulties, and I cleared P20 before moving to the experimental branch. But to me, if the narrative conceit is that we are gathering seal fragments and then venturing into a particularly dangerous area in order to repair a seal, we need to actually *repair a Seal* in the course of the map. My suggestion for how to reinforce this would be having a special glade event, like a 'Sealed' Glade that has some event that's even more dangerous than a Forbidden Glade, which we must complete in order for the town to be successful; there could be a pool of them, requiring a significant number of advanced resources, or the sacrifice of several villagers. The details I trust you to handle, given that I like how most Glade Events are balanced already. But, in summary: In the current experimental branch, settling on a Sealed biome doesn't 'feel' any different than the settlements that preceded it, and the mechanical feel reinforcing the narrative conceit of repairing a seal currently doesn't exist. I would strongly recommend introducing a more pronounced, mechanically obligatory curveball in order to reinforce the intended feeling.
Anyways, thanks for reading this, I'm past 260 hours on this game now which is a fair bit for me. Hopefully this was helpful.