Topic: Delivery quests: Could villagers point us towards the right person?  (Read 5709 times)


Lin

« on: April 16, 2018, 09:24:38 PM »
When any quest is available, villagers readily point us towards the quest giver. Would it be possible for the same system to be utilized when having to find a villager during a quest, like in the message delivery quest? The busy villagers don't seem to ever stand still, even at night, and the confusion becomes worse when two villages are close together - the system seems to be easily confused by that.

Case in point: My map showed a pointer for one village, after several rounds of searching I found someone with that name but a different profession, I went to the nearby village on a hunch, my map then promptly created a second pointer there, and there he was (that is, there he was after I searched the whole village 5-6 times, gave up, ate, fed my dog, made some torches, and searched again a few times). And then I had to go back to the first village and start the searching all over again. It wasn't my favourite type of busywork, but I guess ymmv.

I understand why the system would get confused between two close-by villages. But if there was a way to include a question for said person when I was in the right village, it would be a bit easier. Or if at least the villages had names, and I knew I was in the right one, that would at least be something.

After all these years, I still don't know why places have names but villages don't...  ;D

PALU

« Reply #1 on: April 17, 2018, 01:05:30 AM »
Geographic directions are limited to 8 directions (N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW) and distances are in integral km ROUNDED UP (and I don't think diagonal distances are longer than horizontal, so 31 tiles is 4 km both straight north and straight NE (instead of 5 [31 * square root of 2])).This system means two or even 3 villages can match the "directions", which is rather annoying.  I've proposed introduction of directions such as NEN as a past suggestion.

Yes, the ability to ask for people involved in current quests would help a lot. Even a simple branch gathering quest can be a pain when the quest giver has decided to go on a walkabout around a double village with 10 people having the same outfit.

And I second the suggestion for named villages, unless that actually wasn't a thing in the Finnish iron age.

Potential, completely speculative reason for a lack of village names: Slash & burn farming requires reasonably frequent relocation as the soil got depleted and the depleted area around the village grew, so villages would be sort of temporary (on a decades scale, probably). If the population of abandoned villages didn't all go to the same spot to form a new settlement, but rather split up and mixed, settlements might not be worthy of a name (but all settlements wouldn't be abandoned at the same time, so you wouldn't have that many options to join up with nicer people than the assholes you FINALLY got away from).

 

anything