Hi Devs!
I appreciate the quick work on pushing patches out, but the thrall income reduction is causing complete chaos in coop play.
I’ve only about 14 hours of coop play with random players, so I’m not an expert, but right now every match I’m playing in is bottling hard by around wave 10.
The most basic resource structure, a lumberjack, requires 4 thralls. A hovel after the current patch, creates 4 thralls. That is already an issue, considering there is a finite amount of food on the map, so you are very limited in the amount of hovels you can create.
In coop, your hovel gives you two thralls. Meaning you need two hovels just to work one lumberjack. Those two hovels require four food.
The average yield of a hunters hut, after the food research, if 6 pieces of food. So 3, after it’s split with your ally. Hunting huts also require thralls.
After hitting the most basic and necessary economy structures, you have very few thralls left over to train into troops or work other structures.
Take the engineers guild for instance. It needs 15 thralls. So 8 hovels worth of workers eating their way through 24 food.
It, as upkeep, requires 5 stone. So since you are playing coop, that requires a stone income of 10. So you are looking at two quarries just to scrape by. Quarries that need quite a few thralls.
So you have exhausted an entire shanty town of peasants to create and maintain a single building that by itself, does nothing.
You research the amazing camp follower tent. It needs thralls.
You want to go to the next tech tree? Oh boi! I hope you have the thralls to maintain another two iron mines, a stockyard and the workshop itself, and all their food.
The new change has turned coop matches into thrall bottlenecks where you both hit a wall and cannot proceed.
My last map we were playing with max resource deposits, and by wave ten had booming economies, cleared the map and killed the guardians, and had a small but respectable army of a dozen troops each.
And then we decided it was time to plonk down an engineers workshop.
And we couldn’t. In fact, we couldn’t really build anything. There were no thralls! Our tent towns were built around wheels of pain. We even did the cardinal sin of upgrading as many hovels to dwellings as we could afford without destroying our lumber income.
There were no farm plots left, and all the wood spots of 6+ were taken, and +4 lumberjacks are hardly profitable now.
We spent several waves with 2000 gold and maxed resources unable to do anything to get out of the thrall shortage.
I’ve had a few games like that now, and it’s honestly, game destroying.