Hi Jon,

I am enjoying the game, but I am a little disappointed by the lack of emphasis and importance given to foraging, nomadism, and the pre-kingdom phase of the early/mid game.

I suspect the intention is for the player to forage out their starting area, moving slowly over the map towards new sources of resources while scouting for a good place to settle permanently - building some temporary timber buildings on particularly important resources, and eventually settling down in a resource rich area and building many permantent stone buildings.

Sadly, this doesn't seem to happen in practice for a few reasons:

• Movement is very slow, and it is expensive to have the settlement moving (rather than training) for long periods of time.
  
• Making the settlement water-mobile is far up the tech tree (at the same level as stone buildings!)
  
• The map is very resource rich - the player's starting area is usually quite sufficient to sustain them, and migration is not necessary.
  
• Because it is very time consuming to identify resources, the player must make a serious investment to even begin inhabiting a region.
  
• The difference in cost between timber and stone buildings is very narrow, it is possible to skip timber buildings all together. Timber buildings also don't bring much benefit over foraging.
  
• It's possible to game the degration system - the player can forage a resource until it has 1 degration point left, and then return later to build a stone building on it. Resources in practice are never used up at all.

I would like the game mechanics to change so that more emphasis and importance is placed on the pre-kingdom phase. The player should control a tribe that is nomadic/semi-nomadic by necessity. As the game progresses, the player should increasingly be able to stay in one place, until eventually they can found a kingdom and become settled. To achieve these goals, I propose the following mechanics:

• The base speed of all units should increase - to perhaps 4 or 5 tiles. All civilian units should have an upgrade (for 5 horses) that increases their move speed even more.
  
• The basic explorer should gain an extra ability - when it moves, it automatically leaves a special kind of road called a 'trail' in every tile it passes through. Trails act like paths, but decay after 3 turns, or when snow falls. Trails are not placed over snow, nor over streams.
  
• The settlement can train clans even when moving.
  
• The settlement gains an ability to construct rafts to move across water, with cost in time and timber scaling with the size of the tribe.
  
• plants/animals no longer require identification.

The above changes would drastically increase the mobility of the tribe. Mass migration to new lands would be practical. The relative importance of winter and of rivers would increase. Continuing on:

• Plants would have a degration time of 6 turns. A timber building would increase the time to 12 turns, and Stone would remove degration. However, the degration level would reset every spring, once the tile warms up. It would be possible for a building to be temporarily abandoned without destroying it.
  
• Animals would also have a base degration of 6 turns, but would slowly recover (perhaps 1/4 as slow as they are harvested?) when not foraged. A forager could continue to hunt a degraded animal spawn for increasingly reduced resource yield and increasingly slowed recovery. Timber and stone ranches would continue to work as currently.
  
• Minerals would degrade in 12 turns, but (naturally) would not reset in Spring. However, after foraging exhausts a mineral, a timber building could be build to harvest for an additional 24 turns. Stone buildings could harvest permanently.

The above changes would *require* the tribe to stay mobile. In the foraging phase, the player could perhaps adopt a circular migration pattern around 4 sets of resources - or perhaps a directional migration away from the steppe or the tundra and towards richer lands. Timber buildings would lessen the requirement to stay mobile, but only stone would remove it. This pleasantly reflects the practices of real nomadic/semi-nomadic tribes that adopt circular migrations (following available pastures), or practice slash-and-burn agriculture. The next few features increase the relative cost of stone buildings:

• Farmers, miners and loggers would require tools to train, and would not be able to build stone buildings. A higher tier of profession (or perhaps an upgrade to the existing professions?) would be required to make stone buildings, and would require steel tools.
  
• The caravan would not carry stone and cut stone until a later upgrade level.
  
• Stone buildings would additionally require boards to build.
  
• Possibily - a cap on the number of stone buildings tied to the number of nobles, or some other similar limit representing the tribe's level of sophistication/civilization (and gated by expensive resources!)

The above changes would increase the gap between timber and stone buildings, making the former relevant. Building in stone would be a late-mid/early-end game stage, done once the player has found an ideal place to settle permanently and begin building up in earnest to take down the Romans!

I hope you consider these suggestions as I think they would make the game more interesting, and increase the feeling of playing a migratory tribe as opposed to a regular civ-style society.

I'm looking forward to seeing what direction you take the game in in the next few months.