Heavier Town management

[Bluddy]

So this thread on Steam suggested something that I think is worth considering for a next game.

Right now Zombasite has very primitive town management. You place people in houses (for some reason they don't go into houses themselves), and you can rebuild houses in quests.

It would be worth considering a full melding of the town-building genre into ARPGs. This would mean actually building houses, expanding the settlement, assigning NPCs jobs in town, and having a full economy of sorts. Protecting incoming caravans etc. Basically mayor + protector.

It also might be worth scaling back some things at first to accomplish this: other clans can be taken away, because getting them to build effectively might be too hard.

[corfe83]

I like this idea. I used to like the concept of the Tilted Mill game "Hinterland", but unfortunately it had way too simple of an implementation (and the combat and items were a repetitive bore compared to Zombasite)

If Soldak's next game was like Zombasite, but with way ramped up city building, I would really enjoy that.

[Shadow]

It would definitely be interesting.

I believe I have actually had a few suggestions in the past to completely focus on the town building/NPCs relations part.

[cliftut]

It might be out of genre partially, but it would be very interesting to have a game in which you don't personally do the adventuring, but instead you build the town and supply directions and perhaps some limited direct control that you have to pay for. This would leverage and show off the simulation and living world aspects from a perspective with more overview.

One possible way to satisfy the hack'n'slash aspect would be that you could temporarily control one of the members of your town at a time, maybe each person would have some sort of cooldown or limitation for how long they could be controlled so you would have to rotate. It could be a deity-avatar type relationship, and if you wanted you could limit which characters could be directed based on their relationship with you, being maybe some minor deity or a being created by a god or something.

Maybe one twist could be that you have overview knowledge and YOU are the one that supplies the quests (or some of them) that your townspeople and champions try to complete.

Anyway, just some