Hey everyone!
Two weeks ago, I mentioned that I would give you some more information about our plans for how to improve on the multi-village setups, so today I will tell you a little about our plans for the pioneer wagon.
Let me outline the problem first: When you are planning on creating an outpost at this point of the game, you need to run ahead to the area in which you want to place your new village, and put down a market. This market now gets added to the construction queue of your first village, and villagers walk toward it to deliver the materials it needs to get built. Considering the size of the map, this can take a good 5-10 minutes, during which you can’t place anything else in the area of the new village (cause every building needs a functioning market in range). So, the player usually runs off to deal with other things.
Sooner or later, the market is built, and the player returns, now queuing up all sorts of new buildings (warehouse, accommodations, maybe some towers, mines, etc). All of these again get added to the construction queue of the first village, and a lot more waiting ensues. This is of course very sub-optimal.
Our current plans for a solution is a “pioneer wagon”. This wagon would be built in a special building in the first village (with adequate cost, of course), and the player could decide on a certain amount of materials to load up into the wagon. Once the wagon is completed, it can be sent out to the position of the new village, and the player can place a market, warehouse, and 2 small houses straight away. The wagon will come with the initial 4 villagers who will live in the small houses, and these 4 villagers will also construct the buildings from disassembling the wagon. Once the buildings are completed, the materials that were loaded into the wagon will be added to the warehouse and/or the market, and the new village essentially starts with a small workforce, as well as some initial supplies for further building, which means that any new construction will now be added to the construction queue of the new villager and reduce waiting times.
The system of this pioneer wagon will hopefully make it a lot easier to establish new outposts, and creating and loading up the wagon in the first village should make it a far more interesting project to complete with your ally than the piecemeal approach to building a new village we currently have.
Combining this with the restriction of villagers not being able to travel between villages themselves mentioned two weeks ago, the logistics becomes more streamlined by having only warehouse workers/ox carts carrying goods from one village to another across the island - this will mean you will have a clearer inventory management, where the local villagers are responsible for their patch and the larger distances and deliveries are made by specialists with larger inventories.
I don’t plan on throwing this new feature into the version of the game that will be uploaded to the experimental branch, but I am contemplating whether to make at least a rudimentary version of it a part of the public version 0.8 considering how much it will improve the progression across the map.
Let us know your thoughts!
Until next week!