I have played Life is Feudal: Your Own a few years back and was excited to see that when I purchased the game I also got other games with it. I have never taken the time to play them, but I got them. Well, 2019 is here, so move over unplayed game library. I’m coming for you.
This time around I played Life is Feudal: Village Forest
I am a sucker for city builder games, even though I don’t believe that I am very good at them. The later, more stable part of my childhood allowed me to have a computer and Internet. (It is unimaginable now to think there was a time I wasn’t connected to the internet in one way or another, but the late 90s and early 00s were a different time.) Living in near to complete poverty as we were, we could not afford any sort of video games on our computer but that didn’t stop one of my brothers from downloading the Age of Empires demo, of which we played repeatedly for a couple of years.
The concept of Village Forest is perfect for me because it is the city builder without the conquest, which is all I ever wanted.
If you are only interested in my review you can scroll down to the end of the page.
Beginner Tips and Tricks
I had a steeper learning curve with Village Forest than I expected given that there was tutorial. I am currently on my eleventh village with 46 hours of game time and I have made several mistakes.
The first tip that should be followed is: play the tutorial. It was really helpful in picking up the key gaming mechanics. Personally I felt like it was slow and tedious, but it was helpful in pointing out that food and firewood were going to be needed immediately.
The second, and arguably most important, tip: go slow. I learned to keep my population to be bare minimum until I had at least 1000 meat in storage. My second village grew so fast that I lost 13 people to starvation in the second winter. Even with all the deaths, my food supply never recovered – in part because the vanilla food system is incredibly difficult to maintain.
Straight vanilla is beyond difficult on food production. There are several mistakes to be made early game, but not having enough of your population focused on food production is the most fatal. If you choose to play straight vanilla you will need at least 45 percent of your population focused on food collection or production with low populations. With a population of 48 people I had 26 people focused on gathering food (54 percent of the population) and I still had a low food reserves alert and by year 38 my village suffered from mass starvation and the game was over.
I understand that in the middle ages food collection/production was the major focus of survival, however I don’t think any person of any time eats as much as Village Forest villagers. If you want to take the game incredibly slow and difficult, stick to vanilla settings and you will find all the difficulty you need. However, I needed to be able to play through the game in a timely manner so I could write this article, and because I don’t have the attention span to put in 40 hours of game time just to have 12 nearly starving villagers living out of shacks. My needs are clear. Mods are a must.
I have a love/hate relationship with mods. I love using them, but I hate using managers to use them so I was happy to see that the mods are integrated into Steam. The food management mod that I am using is called Better Food. The mod manager shows a red exclamation mark, which leads me to believe that the mod wouldn’t work but it seemed to function just fine as far as I could tell. I am finding the game to be considerably easier on my eleventh play through now that I can actually focus on improving building and building roads. Constantly searching for food takes a lot of out of a population.
Early Game Tips
Find Stable Food Sources
The first two buildings I place on my map are food focused, a gathering hut and a hunting lodge.
With or without mods, gathering huts are a must. On the side of balance I think the gathering hut is a bit heavy handed as it produces 1-2 thousand units of fruits and vegetables in a single season, however you can barely complain when you know that everything is going to be consumed in one season by 12 people.
The hunting lodges provide several benefits. Obviously the lodges bring I meat and hides, but they also protect your villagers from animal attacks, and if placed properly you can avoid rabies. I did not know about the rabies thing until it was too late.
I strongly, strongly suggest using the Balanced Food mod, which increases the calories of each food item, to enjoy the game and bypass the constant threat of starvation.
Survive the Winter
Without mods, food is going to be the main focus of your population. Even so, you will need to sacrifice a villager or two to maintain a stock of firewood to stay warm. Villagers can and will die of hypothermia. The third and fourth building placed on the map should be a forester lodge and a lumberjack lodge. I dedicate 2 people to each building if possible, but drop the lumberjack lodge down to one person in the summer.
And that’s it. That’s your early game. Make sure you have food, make sure you have wood and don’t build a ton of houses or risk killing everything through starvation.
Mid-Game Tips
As you transition into mid game it is important to make sure that you have a good supply of stone, oar and clay as they are the main resources used to build. Stone and oar can be picked up on the surface, and are best procured during the winter by your gatherers who will be without work with all the plants dead. Clay however can not be picked up on the surface. Mines can be very expensive so it is important choose wisely. Without mods I chose a stone mine first, as stone is the most used item, however with mods I have chosen to drop a clay pit first. Depending on your mod of choice, be careful where you build the clay pit. If you are too close to the ocean it will fill up with water and be useless.
Mid game populations mean an even higher need for food. At this point I have at least two small fields, one for oats and one for potatoes. Potatoes feed the people and the oats feed the chickens. The game starts with a handful of oats, however that isn’t enough to keep the chickens alive for a year so it is important you time the chicken pasture correctly. Wild animals, particularly foxes, love to kill your chickens. Make sure you place your pen within the bounds of one of your hunting cabins to provide protection. I have seen a mod that will allow your herdsman to kill wild animals as well, although I cannot attest to the quality of said mod as I have not used it.
So, now that I have more food sources, a clay pit and a stone mine I move on to preventing health problems. This took me nine tries to experience. In the sixteen year plus signs started showing up above the heads of my people like Sims characters. I have several hours of game play in at this point and was confused as I had never experience this issue. Turns out the plague was running rampant through the population and there was no way for me to stop it. By year seventeen, my population was dying of starvation even though I had 7,000 units of meat in storage and I lost more than half my population.
I gave up.
As soon as you have one extra person, build and man a herb gatherers hut and dedicate the first bulk of your resources to a healer’s shop. Healer’s shops aren’t cheap, in fact I learned that you need to focus on the healer early because my tenth try didn’t make it past the fifth year before everyone died of rabies (avoid the hunters lodge mod, it did nothing to save farm animals or prevent rabies). The expense attached to the healers shop lead me to believe that it was a late mid game, even end game, item. Ignore the expense and rush for it as fast as you can.
After the healer’s shop is up and running I place a school. I don’t think this is necessary this early, but it does allow your villagers to be more productive, meaning you need fewer people focused on food after a couple of generations pass and everyone is educated.
End Game Tips
Two of the larger buildings should actually be late mid game, but I am putting them here because they aren’t important to survival, but are important to advancements.
Ports allow you to build a ship and send out expeditions for new resources. You can choose between bringing back new seeds, animals or orchard plants – none of which are that exciting.
The cows are important to gain milk production and the sheep are important to get warm clothing, but other than that I don’t see a real reason to explore unless you want to be a completionist. I used a mod that allowed me to gather milk from the sheep so I didn’t stress too much about getting the cows. What you bring back from an exploration is completely random within the category you chose to send the expedition for specifically.
The castle, or keep as the game calls it, seems cool and does allow for research to increase productivity and such, but it doesn’t increase technology beyond the middle ages. That would be my one complaint – I would like to see a way to move into a more technically advanced society with machinery.
The castle buildings also allow for a larger barn and market for storage and a blacksmith that allows you to produce steel tools. I started using the barn and market for storage throughout my village as well as I kept running out of space with the generic buildings. I didn’t care for the accountant building as it does nothing but provide a confusing and very small graph. Hopefully it becomes more useful in the future because the building looks cool.
Larger fields and pastures are a given. As your population grows you will need to be able to produce more food. Cows are fantastic for meat production but take forever to reproduce so the larger the pasture the better. Also, using the upgraded watch towers at the entrances to the pastures protect your animals better than hunters can — I’ve lost many, many chickens to foxes.
After you have made everything bigger and better it’s time to make things pretty. Other than sending out repeated expeditions I didn’t see anything of value to do. Everyone was fed and healthy so I made things pretty using the Town Decorations mod. It was fun, I’ll admit, but didn’t add much to the game play.
My Review
In general, this game is okay. I love the idea of surviving without having to fight or conquest, but it falls short on development. Even advancing to steam punk levels of technology would make this a better game. It seems that development was put on hold for Forest Village, but as of September 2017 the developers say they are back to work – however increasing technology doesn’t seem to be on the docket as of yet.
The vanilla game is not balanced very well. Food consumption is stupid high, even with a variety of foods available and sicknesses can come on fast. If the healer is going to be needed as early game as is currently required, then the expense to build the healer should be lower than it currently is at this time.
The diversity in play options is really cool. I love being able to switch between a bird’s eye overview and a first person interactive game style. The sensitivity is a huge change and took some time to adjust to, but it was fun to actually hunt and build in game instead of simply playing “God”.
Overall, I enjoyed playing Life is Feudal: Forest Village after I added balancing mods, but even then the fun was short lived. I hate to be the one to complain about a free game, but it wasn’t enough for me to say you should purchase it on it’s own. That being said, I will keep watching the updates on this game because I will happily come back to play more when I can advance beyond simply surviving.
My Ordinary Chaos 
Leave a comment