Started a new run on v67 but ain't super far in, got about 2k population so still early game.
Dondorrian city with about 300-400 human immigrants to work in the labs and help with farming which tbh might be a meh choice as got some juicy gem and green ore mines to make me money with which to import food stuff, but w/e, it helps.
Current map and city layout:
Main thing i immediately felt was the water system changes, on one side building tons of water pumps from whatever source of water you have on the map makes sense... On the other its fucking annoying and besides meaning you will have to build like 20 of those things (the 4 i have there can only barely reach the end of the fields you can see so to get a water line to reach my population centers would mean at least a dozen more with 4x12=48 employees who also gotta walk all the way over there) it makes supplying water to bathouses in city centers a serious headache.
Thankfully baths can operate now without a direct connection to a water source, but at reduced efficiency, so settled on that.
Otherwise seems to be some merc changes, probably to nerf how easy it was to just hire a ton of merc companies right off the bat and go on a conquering spree.
Most importantly, you can't hire mercs to defend your city against raiders who just spawn into your city and immediately initiate a combat with your garrison.
And this is where I got really frustrated with Songs of Syx combat. I don't remember it being particularly good to begin with but this run has been really atrocious.
I cannot explain why, but my ranged troops refuse to fire their weapons.
And it's not like i don't know how to use ranged troops, most of my runs has been playing the elves and relying on archers and crossbows to whittle down the enemy before melee is engaged.
But for whatever reason, my ranged troops just refuse to do anything now unless its a solar eclipse or something, don't understand why. I move them around and reposition them so there is nothing blocking LOS and even have them march so close to the enemy they can spit on them, nada.
And just when i think they are actually broken, suddenly they randomly loose a volley towards the end of the battle and kill like 2 dudes and i'm left struggling wtf is their insane logic.
As a result 1/3rd of my garrison is useless and i'm forced to charge into the raiders in melee, taking so many casualties it isn't worth it anymore as am playing dondorrians as my main race so losing 100+ trained soldiers is crippling (rewards got seriously nerfed too i feel, only got a few weapons but no money or ressources like used to be the case) and i reload and pay the protection fee instead).
Yet there have been times i've been forced to fight because the protection fee was stupidly exorbitive (might be a factor of my settlement mining so much gems tbh even if most of the profit goes back into imports) and in those situations i've had to resort to cheese and in doing so, found the combat system to keep collapsing.
So this one time i was attacked by 400 raiders, decently geared at that. My garrison is 300, but actually 200 because 100 are ranged and as discussed above, are so unreliable they basically don't count.
Seeing the situation i decided to take a page from total warhammer's book and "corner camp" my best 100 infantry in some crevice.
50 of those 100 got randomly stuck and started scattering, apparently becoming casualties.
Wtf.
Just as i was about to reload, 350 of the 400 raiders also did the same, scattering like units do when they are broken. Enemy count drops to 50 and they proceed to charge the infantry unit stuck in the crevisse.
A confused melee happens where i try to send my ranged dudes to shoot at the backs of the charging enemy, nothing happens.
But eventually my 50 dudes beat their 50 and i win with 90 casualties (most of that crevice unit got considered dead even though i could see on the map those fuckers were alive just like the 350 invaders were).
Conclusion: the city building autism is still fun but combat is still thrash tier and honestly, makes me miss the combat in games like pharaoh or zeus which were never considered its strongest element but at least it wasn't retarded like in this game.
Otherwise i dunno if its v67 related but holy fuck since when is accidents during jobs a thing? It is fucking cancer.
Every day i lose dozens of people+50-60 wounded from random bs. And there's no apparent way to mitigate it either via some tech or prop, you are just going to have to eat dick and as your population grows along with their industries this means a lot of losses due to attrition.
And i'm playing a mostly dondorrian city so let me tell you, losing 20+ in seconds go due to a chain of accidents is aneurysm enducing. You are dwarfs ffs, how are you so bad at mining?
Needless to say, building hospitals was an early game priority and why i have those 3 patchs of opiate farms.
A sideeffect of these various changes is I feel i need to have 50-60 spare workers at the very least and i imagine that number's going to go up with higher population, since it's entirely possible your workforce will get randomly crippled from a chain of events and you need a big surplus to fill the gaps and prevent an economic death spiral.