Hi Stewards!
And welcome to another post about our post-demo improvements. This time, it's a big one — Mayors.
Mayors and their bonuses were one of the most discussed parts of the demo. We know they also caused quite a bit of frustration for some players, which is obviously not what we want.
At the same time, we didn't want to completely redesign the system. One of its main goals was to make you actually care about who governs each settlement — and judging by the feedback, that part definitely worked.
So instead, we've rebalanced the system.
Negative mayor bonuses are gone. In practice, they mostly created frustration without giving you many interesting ways to deal with them.
We've also completely removed the penalty for swapping mayors between settlements. It didn't really make much sense, and we actually want to encourage you to move mayors around when another settlement would benefit more from their bonuses.
To support that, we've also merged new and existing mayors into a single selection window. Swapping mayors between settlements was always possible, but the option was easy to overlook. Now it's much more visible and easier to compare whether hiring someone new or moving an existing mayor is the better choice.
Removing negative bonuses also allowed us to simplify the comparison UI and add clearer recommendations, making it much easier to spot when a good hire or swap is available.
The goal is still the same: mayors should matter. We just want choosing and managing them to create interesting decisions rather than unnecessary frustration.
Thanks again for all the feedback — and stay tuned, we still have plenty more improvements to show you!
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