After coming off of playing Foundation, and while jonesing for the Manor Lords castle update, I picked up another medieval village-builder: Farthest Frontier. I played this game while it was still technically in Early Access (and cheaper to buy), but its 1.0 release was only a month away, so I was basically playing (and reviewing) the release version. So for once, I'll actually have a review of a game out on the game's release! (Instead of weeks or months later, when everybody has stopped caring).
Farthest Frontier is another city-builder that's been on my radar for a long time, but I always figured that it would have a hard time competing with Manor Lords. Sure enough, I don't think Farthest Frontier is a good as Manor Lords, but it does have a lot of features and ideas that I really like, and which I would love to see ported or adopted into Manor Lords (and to other medieval survival city-builders.
I feel like the winters in Farthest Frontier look worse than they actually are.
Frontier fog
If anything, I think that fans of Banished should really like Farthest Frontier, as it feels very similar to that game. Both are grid-based city-builders, which stubbornly refuse to allow building on diagonals. One of my pet peeves with grid city-builders is when they generate maps that have diagonal features, and allow road-building on diagonals, but do not allow buildings to be placed on diagonals.
Both Banished and Farthest Frontier also put a large emphasis on logistics and trade. They also both have harsh winters -- though I did not find Farthest Frontier's weather or winters to be nearly as threatening as I remember them being in Banished.
Instead, Farthest Frontier plays up its "frontier" nature by including a fog of war that conceals potential threats and hazards. Even though the weather never posed as much of a threat to my village as I expected it to, I always had to be careful about exploring or expanding into the fog of war. You just never know what's out in that fog. Builders, loggers, hunters, or foragers who wander out into unexplored territory may run into bandit camps or wild predatory animals. If you send them out at the wrong time of year, they can also potentially get caught in a summer drought or winter blizzard, which could kill them from dehydration or cold if they can't get back to the village quickly enough.
The fog of war can hide dangerous wild animals or bandit camps.
Bandits and predators can also wander into your village or outposts from the fog of war, and can attack villagers, plunder resources, or damage or destroy buildings. You need to be sure to keep visibility of the perimeter of your village and satellite hamlets, and be prepared to defend it on a moment's notice. Watchtowers are therefore very important, but keeping them staffed takes precious population away from other jobs.
Villages in Farthest Frontier also never feel like they turn into full-blown cities or metropolises, like they can in Banished (and other games). Farthest Frontier actually has a hard cap on how high the population can get. This cap can be configured in the game's options (based on your computer's specs), implying that it's a technical and performance limitation (rather than a stylistic choice), and it defaults to 500 people. So unlike other games, you'll never fill up the map in Farthest Frontier (though you may have satellite villages all over the map). This limit may be a technical concession, but it does also contribute towards the "frontier" feeling of the game.
I've never needed more than 1 small cemetery.
Mild winters
I also just haven't found a medieval survival city-builder that competes with Banished's harsh, deadly winters. The only villager deaths I encountered in Farthest Frontier were villagers who were killed by animals or bandits, and the errant logger or forager who got caught out in a drought or blizzard, before I figured out how to utilize temporary housing.
To put things into perspective, in any game of Banished, I would have to build multiple cemeteries. In Farthest Frontier, however, I've never needed more than just 1 small cemetery.
There's a very nice calendar bar at the top of the screen that works almost identical to a similar calendar in Settlement Survival, except that Farthest Frontier's calendar does not show upcoming events like the arrival of traders or upcoming weather disasters. It's just there to show you the current season, and how much longer it's going to last.
As the seasons change, different crops and wild nuts, berries, and veggies go in and out of season. The crop rotation mechanics in this game are pretty complicated and robust, and eliminate a lot of the micro-management that might be present in other games. Different crops take different amounts of time to grow, and different tolerances for heat and cold. Fields also have to be periodically tended by workers in order to eliminate rocks, increase fertility, and even balance the amounts of sand and soil (sand being a resource that you can harvest or import). Every field can be assigned crop and maintenance cycles for 3 rotating years, meaning the fields can be set once and then left to take care of themselves, unless you actually want to change which crops are assigned to a field.
Managing crops is very simple, yet features a good deal of forethought.
Unfortunately, other work areas, such as foragers, woodcutters, and stonecutters require a lot more micro-management. Even though you can essentially set the behavior of crop fields for each season of the year, you cannot assign seasonal work areas to foragers. So as different wild plants go in and out of season throughout the year, you'll almost certainly have to re-assign where your foragers are working in order to assure a steady yield of something.
Similarly, you'll likely have to re-assign woodcutters periodically, as all the trees in their work area get cut down. You can assign workers to re-plant trees, but the re-planted trees will likely not grow and mature faster than the adult trees are cut down.
Trade is another mechanic that I feel requires too much manual baby-sitting. Unlike other similar games, you cannot simply set how much reserve of each resource you want to keep, and then automatically sell or buy to reach that reserve. Instead, you can set how much of a resource you want to stock in the Trade Post, and the workers will automatically try to fill the storage with those supplies. But when a trader actually shows up, you still have to manually select which resources you want to buy and sell, and manually click to buy or sell the resource. If you miss the notification that the trader has arrived, or don't go back to check that a resource you want to sell has been stocked, then you simply miss the opportunity to buy or sell that year.
Trade and foraging require too much micro-mangement.
I don't know, maybe I'm missing some automation functions, but all this tedious micro-management really slowed down the pace of the game for me, and was a consistent source of annoyance and frustration.
There's also a lot of progression milestones and unlocks that are tied to population, resource, and money thresholds. These lead to a lot of sitting around and waiting for those thresholds to be reached. If your village is already stable, then you have to just basically sit there and wait, with nothing to do.
Town center upgrades require a lot of waiting.
On the other hand, if your village is teetering on collapse, and you just need to unlock or upgrade this one building that will fix all your village's problems, then that can be immensely frustrating. You might be stuck trying juggling villagers between different jobs, and micro-managing resources for years of in-game time, and still feeling like you're making little-to-no progress towards that goal.
Defending your resources
Considering how much of an emphasis the game puts on building fortifications and defending your town from animals and bandits, I was also really disappointed by how poorly-realized the combat mechanics are. Military units don't really operate as a unit. They don't move and attack in formation. Most importantly though, bandits and animals just aren't that much of a threat, and are generally easy to deal with.
If animals and bandits aren't promptly dealt with, they will basically just attack villagers and buildings, and will raid a few buildings for resources. Bandits will often damage buildings, but I rarely saw them actually destroy a building. After scaring away nearby villagers, bears will start plundering a building's food supplies. Maybe on the higher difficulties, these attacks would be more disruptive, but on the standard difficulty that I was playing, they were always borderline trivial to deal with. Just select your nearby hunters, and have them start shooting the attacking bandits or animals, and they'll retreat without too much trouble.
The bandits have never felt particularly threatening to me, and their A.I. is trash.
Later, there will be larger bandit attacks, and you will likely need proper watchtowers and walls to deal with them. But again, I never got to the point where I felt like the Barracks and trained, dedicated soldiers were necessary to fight off the bandits.
And because this game is themed around creating small frontier settlements, there aren't any megastructures like castles to build -- nor would such structures really be necessary.
More about the logistics than the survival
Thankfully, the core city-building mechanics and logistics are solid. Harvester, processing, and storage buildings all work fairly well. I rarely, if ever, saw alerts that buildings weren't getting the resources that they needed (of if they weren't getting them, the game wasn't constantly harassing me about it).
There's even a supply wagon that every village starts with. This wagon stays with you through the whole game and doesn't really do anything. But it can be used as a mobile storage depot, which really helps getting satellite villages up and running more quickly. You can fill this wagon with lumber, stone, clay and other building materials, move it to where you want to build, and watch as your builders quickly get new structures up and running without having to trek all the way back to the storehouses in the center of your city.
The only resource that I had problems with was lumber. Woodcutting can move painfully slow, and logs are always in short supply early in any game. This lead to many buildings constantly complaining about not having enough lumber. But once a village gets big enough that I have enough workers to staff a second logging camp, these problems largely disappeared.
If you're looking for a city-builder with more military emphasis, then Manor Lords is definitely the way to go. If you're comfortable with focusing more on resources and crafting, then Farthest Frontier is probably more your speed. But honestly, if given the choice between Farthest Frontier, Settlement Survival, and Banished, I think my money is still on Banished.
The starting supply wagon can be used as a mobile storage hub.