I just see this whole town system making groups even a worse problem than before. Sharing isn’t bad but it does end up being a popularity thing. Sharing with the buddies you have in town but not with the strangers who joined your town. People are people tho and Eco exposes people for who they really are
Doesn't seem worse to me if their influence is limited to a town and they get strangers hitting their plans - all while the majority of non grouped players is in other towns, unaffected. None of our systems can fix human attitude, but we can limit its influence. Imo, it's in opposite getting way better.
I like the idea of different towns and generally giving groups the ability to have their own town. I hope the Immigration desk will be accessible from the start cause I want to make a really neat town with friends and only accept people we want in our town.
We purposefully did not do that, as towns aren't intended to be friend-groups per se (like companies on White Tiger), but administrative areas of _general_ cooperation. You will be able to make these restrictions, but you will need the desk and a few materials for it - so usually if you found the town outright, you can't change it immediately, but it only needs maybe half a day or so if you wait to start off with it. It's on purpose to limit group power and delay it a bit - and the factor that we intend towns to be spaces anyone can join and work together, no matter if premade group or not. As usual, anything can be changed on private servers to personal desire as well, so there will be servers for everyone.
I find it reassuring that a major complaint about Eco is that communism is too effective to be allowed to compete in a fair market.
Just that there actually is none. If you managed to get so many random people into a town and then on top actually have them forgo their money and trading to do communism out of nowhere, I'd call that you won the game. I've not seen anyone win the game on playtest.
You can turn off the settlements system for a legacy mode that is only supported for singleplayer, though. New interlinked features may not be supported with that mode going forward.
I do, however, not agree with your assessment or conclusion of it. The system actually empowers the so far solo / loosely grouped players by incentivizing government and settlement creation as a core gameplay part and strengthens their ability to stand against groups that now get limited in size due to the town mechanics. So the advantage of groups is actually decreasing, not increasing. It also limits their government powers upon other players severely.
Market and economics play as much role as before - the system still works as before, you can still and now even must - due to the claim restrictions at your own place disallowing you to go super far - set up shops / resource gathering and get property in other towns, only now you are incentivized to talk and cooperate (which is Eco at c...
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