Suggestion: City Life Simplified
City life is one of the most ambitious and greatest promises of Conan Exiles Early Access campaign, and many players have begun to despair for fear that it will never come to fruition.
So I will propose what I think is an obvious (and fairly easy) method of bringing thralls to life to meet their players needs; these suggestions are obviously intended for post-launch, since content lock is in effect.
Thralls (ones that are not attached to a crafting station) get four modes:
Idle - The thrall will wander around a small area where they are standing (staying within the players “zone of control”… in other words, the zone in which crafting stations do not decay at an accelerated rate), and randomly interact with any objects placed in that area (sitting in a chair, sleeping in a bed, stretching, etc.) Thralls who are idle also toggle nearby light sources (torches, braziers, etc.) on at night and off during daylight.
Guard - The thrall will attack any non-passive NPC or player that wanders into it’s range, before returning to it’s original location. These guys actually keep their weapons equipped the whole time they are in guard mode (for visual purposes)
Gather - The thrall will either mine, chop wood, or forage (depending upon the item in it’s main hand) They will only do this within a limited range, and what they are actually doing is passively generating a resource and playing animation to look like they’re striking the resource object (or grabbing from, in case of foraging grass plants or whatever), but the object will not actually take damage or be removed from the game world (this makes it so that you don’t have the headache of random thralls pathing all over the map in search of resources constantly). Also, it should play the appropriate harvesting sound to enhance the illusion of work actually being done. The amount of resource they generate could be based on the quality of the tool… for example, maybe a stone pick axe generates 1 stone every 70 seconds, an iron pick axe generates 1 stone every 60 seconds, etc. Maybe it goes slower for iron. Whatever. You guys can find a good balance I’m sure. Have them stop when they reach 80% encumberance, or fill their inventory slots, or however you feel like doing it.
Follow - The same as follow is now, except it would be nice if the thrall actually helped in battle.
The four listed above I think would be sufficient; but just for the sake of due diligence, I’ll suggest a few more treats below that you could add that would raise the quality of life regarding thrall utility.
1.) Have a “thrall box” or have the ability to designate a box as “thrall access=true” or whatever, that allows your gatherer thralls to place stuff in when their inventory gets full.
2.) MAYBE have a 5th mode called “Harvest” in which the thrall gathers from stations such as fish traps or crops.
3.) The ability to set your thralls to a certain emote would be fantastic, and it would be nice to not have to resort to a mod for this, for stability’s sake. You could maybe set it either to stay in that emote (if it’s lounging or sitting or whatever) or just perform that emote when a player approaches. (example: a nice lady doing the “show-off” emote when you walk by, or a guard nodding impassively as you approach)
4.) We’re getting into the weeds now, but assuming you did EVERYTHING ELSE up there and still wanted to make thralls better, you could give the guards an idle stance (so your dudes could just stand around with their spears, or swords and shields, or whatever; rather than looking like they’re in a dojo waiting for their sensei to tell them to do something)
That’s about it. Thanks for reading. The game is a lot of fun so far.