The recently green-lit game on Steam called Towns has been occupying my play space for the last 2 days. I was initially skeptical of the game but the premise had me hooked. Minecraft + Dwarf Fortress Light? It was amazing to find an accessible format to enjoy some of the charm of Dwarf Fortress without having to scale the vertical cliff that was the on boarding. I know that Towns is not Dwarf Fortress but I consider it a step towards learning to play it eventually.
Starting off I played through the tutorials to build up an understanding of the game, the tutorials were all setup in plain text missions, They were well written and allowed me to gain a solid understanding of what I needed to do in order to succeed with the game.
My first few towns did not end well. I didn't realize that my game did not pause when I hit escape so I left the game running in the background and went for lunch only to come back to a world full of ghosts and frog men. Finding my town full of monsters drew me in, I had no idea where these had come from. So when I got home I tried again, this time I mined downward quickly in order to try and build a large fortress but ran into spiders that made short work of my ill equipped villagers. Each game I had tried something different and learned a little that I could use to improve my game moving forward.
Skipping past a few more towns at the end of the night I had created a stable town of 25 (the starting population is 12) that was relatively stable. My focus had been entirely on ensuring the happiness of my population. each villager had a personal space. there were farms for wheat, fruit and wood. The main dormitory was a three story building constructed of scaffolding with a carved wood door. The village was functional but lacked heroes. So I began constructing a grant tavern to help recuit some top men to help take care of the monster I knew lurked bellow.
My game-play experience began to breakdown around this time. No longer focused on he happiness of my town I didn't have a reliable way to ensure that every citizen stayed fed. As the dungeon was cleared out from the variety of monsters by the adventures I also started to mine downwards. When switching between the mine and dig commands I would occasionally dig down faster than I built ladders trapping townsfolk in giant pits where they would start to starve to death. These trapped folks were still attentive to my desire to build things crafting road segments and scaffolding in the pit and attempting to bring them to the surface. This start to lead to incomplete and buggy feeling interactions. It was frustrating to try and lay out a new bridge but have many of the blocks simply never appear because the required worker was trapped five layers down. Without the ability to build new structures the town I had created started to fail; harvests did not happen on time and resources on the surface were left un-gathered. I started to feel punished for attempting to mine out the country side. In some sense my poor planning in orders was punishing me, without feedback on the villager status I did not notice the mistakes until they had already killed off some of th evillagers. These were some of the most passive villagers I had met in a video game in a long time. Most games will have the NPC cry for help when they get trapped or start to starve.
In a previous incarnation I had expanded my town slowly and occasionally lost a villager to monsters or starvation. The adventurers in my town managed to reach level 12 by killing off all the threats on the first level of the dungeon and everything on the surface. I figured that at level 12 they would need access to the next layer of the dungeon and proceeded to mine downwards. The next tier of monsters promptly made short work of my heros and proceeded to battle their way through my villagers to the surface leaving me with no one to rebuild the town.. Without a way to know how difficult a given monster was got many citizens and all the heroes were killed.
Overall I did enjoy building construction, having to think about building structure when creating new floors and roofs was an interesting and different concept for me. I started to think about how the town layout coudl be changed now that I understood a little more about the game. When building my citizen's barraks I leanred a lot about building a prototype building from scafolding. It ended up a 3 floor monstrosity and I had to jimmy in some temp scafolding stairs to ensure that everyone could reach their personal rooms floors up. The simple trinity of carpenter, mason. bakery became my starting move since I learned it was the best way to build a stable happy population. I'm not sure what the best jungle or snow opening is yet since I've only played on the normal terrain so far.
Starting near monsters sucks. On occasion a world will generate that had nearby surface monsters. I wanted the ability to tag zones as no go but my villagers ran off into the wilds to gather a resource when I called for trees. While requiring more mico the gathering process or setting up a a wheat farm was better to me because then I had made the decision that ended up getting them killed.
I enjoyed my time with the game and wanted to get my first impressions down. The game feels very rough at the moment, and reminds me of an early Minecraft. There are many complex systems under the hood that need a little tweaking to get them all harmonizing. If the develops keep working on polishing this game then it will be a very memorable and fun experience I look forward to seeing that progression with all the awesome things they have in mind added to the game. Overall it is worth a look if you enjoy simulation and city building games. It falls close to a game like stronghold or settlers in terms of intimacy with the added excitement of monsters.
For those who wish to check out the game;
http://www.townsgame.com/
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