Stewards,
Thank you for all your support you’ve given County of Fortune so far, we can’t wait for you to see what’s coming off the back of all the incredible feedback you’ve given us throughout the demo.
It’s time for the second video dev diary for County of Fortune, which is all about BUILDINGS. You can watch the full video version to this below, but without further ado, let’s get into the basics of buildings
Before placing your settlement, you’ll first need to select the type of industry building you want your settlement to contain. Ideally, you’d want your first settlement to be a farm, or food producing building placed on fertile land, but you’re free to do what you want!
Once you’ve created your first settlement, the next ideal step would be to build a settlement with a logging camp, to produce Logs, and then another settlement with a Carpenters’ Guild, which then converts those Logs into Carpentry Points. Carpentry Points allow you to not only build, but also maintain new settlements, buildings, and roads.
After starting with these crucial buildings, the next step is to unlock extra building slots. In the Buildings tab, the first building is the initial building selected, but there’s also two additional spaces, which are currently locked. To unlock these, you need to fulfill your settlement’s Equipment needs.
Your settlement’s equipment needs are viewable in the Needs tab. From here, you’ll be able to see the needs of County of Fortune’s first social class: Peasants. And you’ll also be able to see that their equipment needs are Wooden Chests and Wool Tunics. Upon further inspection, Wool Tunics require first wool from a Sheep Farm and then a Wool Tunic Workshop, while Wooden Chests require logs from a Logging Camp and a Wooden Chest Workshop.
As we already have a logging camp, half of the requirements for producing Wooden Chests have already been met, so it makes sense to start here. From here, all you need to do is build a new settlement with Wooden Chest Workshop.
Whilst we’re here, it also makes sense to take a look at Building efficiency. You’ll be able to find this by going to the Needs tab. In the Needs tab, you’ll see a selection of different foods to choose from. For every new food we provide a settlement with, that settlement’s building efficiency increases, leading to faster production. This can work in an example where you might have a Carpenters' Guild but find that your building maintenance levels are dropping.
After producing some Wooden Chests, it’s time to supply them to a settlement by selecting it under Equipment in the Needs tab. And if we head over to the Buildings tab again, will see we have unlocked an additional building slot for our peasants. This can be used to start the production of a new resource, or say you have a Mayor that has bonuses for a particular industry, you may want to double down and build multiples of the same building. The choice is yours.
Once all the available food and equipment needs slots for the Peasants in your settlement have been filled, it can be levelled up, turning your small Hamlet into a Village! In a Village, you gain a whole new class of population: Commoners. Levelling up a settlement unlocks a new Commoner tier of Buildings and a new selection of Buildings for your Peasants and Commoners, granting access to new resources and industries to help you fulfil a new selection of needs for your newly unlocked class. Each new class you unlock has more complex needs, which will require you to create additional settlements and even regions, utilizing trade and strategic thinking to create and manage your resources as well as your logistical pipeline.
And if you ever find that you’ve built something you didn’t want, it’s easy to destroy buildings at any time, and you get back all the resources you used to build them. So replace them, move them, whatever you need to improve efficiency and adapt to your population's evolving needs.
Eventually you’ll level up your settlements further, unlocking new classes and buildings, leading to even more complex production pipelines and trading opportunities! Once you fulfill every need for all tiers of population class, you win the game!
Thank you for reading part 2 of the County of Fortune dev diaries! Feel free to come and join the County of Fortune Discord, or give us any feedback in the Steam forums!
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