So, I've been absent on these forums for a while, waiting for the new update. Have to say, I am very unhappy with the changes to cities.
For starters, I am not sure what is supposed to be easier about my the "starter city." It had plenty of blazes and pigmen and while the buildings seemed smaller than in other cities (the small, 3 floor square shaped buildings only had 2 floors, for instance), there didn't seem to be anything "easier" about it. It seemed just as hard as any city I had visited before. Died to a dual brutish zombie pigman spawn. Fun.
As for the real meat of my dissatisfaction with the changes, buried cities are not fun. This applies especially to the deeply buried cities, but also to the less buried cities, just to a lesser extent. Not only is finding the buildings your looking for more complicated, but there is just SO much digging. So once you find your factory, you have to dig. A lot. And to do that, you have to clear out the surrounding buildings, which means more digging. And once you've dug out the surrounding buildings, then cleared them, then dug out your building of choice, you have to clean away the roof and then travel a bunch of blocks away to make the oodles of monsters inside the building despawn. Then you gata rush back, clear the spawners from your chosen building, and finally, you get to loot...a single factory building. All this makes city exploring extremely labor and time intensive. You run thru an insane amount of food and water, not to mention real life time, just to raid a single factory.
Now, I understand you don't have to do it this way. You can dig out a factory while the surrounding buildings are still churning out enemies. Or you could just dig a stairway into the factory. Sure, those are both options...if you want to be surrounded by dozens of monsters all the time. Sure, totally viable. In reality, the only thing you're going to get by doing that is a very serious case of the deads. Maybe I am just absolutely awful at minecraft combat, but fighting a room with 20+ monsters at the same time is not my idea of fun. Nor is digging hundreds of blocks of dust per building. Both are terrible options. Maybe this kind of play would be okay for super deluxe buildings, the kind that hold really high end loot or that are part of the end game. But every factory building? No thank you.
The big issue here is that cities should be an integral part of the game. I might have had better luck if I had sat around in my base for dozens of real world hours and ground out a set of diamond armor with enchants and laboriously put together and leveled a tinker's construct weapon via the crucible, but I shouldn't have to do that to raid my very first city. But as it stands, Brutal Pigmen 2 shot me in tough leather armor (which had the same armor value as invar in the last version of Crash Landing, just less durability) even while wearing a chestpiece. There's no way I can wade thru 2 of those at a time, let alone 1-2 of them with some blazes and creepers and skeletons and zombies thrown into the mix.
The worst part about all this is that burying the cities did almost nothing to limit my ability to "window shop" chests out of non-factory buildings. Many buildings had floors that were flush with the ground (the "hotel" style buildings were the ones that had that the most often), and even the ones that didn't have floors flush with the ground had floors only 2-3 blocks above it. That's a tiny hop for a jetpack (I had a leadstone one because of the early quest reward). And even without the jetpack, it's a moments work to build a makeshift set of stairs up to the chest, which you then grab from the outside of the building, and head on to the next. So yeah, if I am not mistaken, the main purpose of burying the cities (to prevent "window shopping") is almost completely defeated.
So yeah. The new version of CL cranks the difficulty up from "challenging" to "balls-to-the-walls insane." It's not difficult, it's dumb. And more importantly, it's not fun. Maybe I'm doing cities "wrong." But if the "right" way to do cities is to charge into a room that's literally wall to wall enemies, that's not good design, IMO. Minecraft's combat system isn't designed to allow you to go 20 v 1 and walk away alive. And if the "right" way to do cities is some sort of gimmick that I am overlooking, that's also not good design. Gimmicks are only fun when they are the sort of thing you do because you want to, not because that's the only way to get shit done.
Anyway, that's my rant. I'd love to hear if there's something I missing or what not, but as it stands, I think that unless massive changes are made to the way cities are spawned, I am done with CL. And that makes me super sad. This is the pack that reignited my passion for Minecraft. It's the pack that got me excited to play again. I've been waiting for this update with extreme anticipation. And now I feel that I'm just not able to play anymore. And that makes me sad.
EDIT: I know it's a long shot and that it'd be a lot of extra work, but maybe there'd be a way to have to separate versions of Crash Landing, one with buried cities and one without? I doubt this would be feasible, but I also doubt that buried cities are going away, and I'd love to still have a version of Crash Landing I would want to (and be able to) play.