Hey everyone!
None of the work done recently has been particularly glamorous (continued optimisation and bug fixing, as well as lots and lots of planning), so I’ll instead use this post to talk about a topic that has been on our mind for a while: Inter-village logistics.
As some of you know, you start with a market by your port which allows you to build other buildings within a 300m radius (which is defined by a blue hue on the ground). If you try to build outside of this area, you get warned you are outside of the market range. In order to build a satellite village, you must first build a new market to define a new build area.
At the moment, all logistics are handled in the same “pool”. So while villagers take into account how far they have to walk in order to do a task, they aren’t stopped from working on tasks that are far, far away. As a result, we often end up with villagers making a hike across half the island in order to deliver some materials, or to construct a building that’s already had its materials delivered to it.
With the size of our current maps; this can really impact your logistics by sending idle villagers, construction workers and warehouse workers across the terrain to deliver building materials or collect from production buildings. While we have seen this lead to really busy and vibrant ‘shipping’ routes where villagers keep flowing between the main base and the forward operating base - it also causes bottlenecks of deliveries in the home base and causes issues especially with food deliveries.
As an example, there may be 3 farms from which food needs to be picked up, which the remote village desperately needs. In an ideal situation, the villagers would first collect food from all of the closeby farms, then take half of that to the remote village. However, that isn’t what would happen: Once a villager picks food up from the first farm, the food is now scheduled to be delivered to the other village, and the villager makes his way over there. Picking up from the other 2 farms gets delayed, and the villager ends up bringing a lot less food to the remote village.
We have not fully decided our approach to cleaning this up yet, but are thinking of creating defined villages under the hood of the game - which are formed by linking markets. If you have built an additional market in an overlapping range with the first one, then their joined spaces grow the perimeter of the village and logistics operate within that boundary.
However building a market without overlapping ranges means that it gets counted as a separate village, with its own pool of logistics. We are considering moving goods between the villages with an ox-cart equivalent, which can be scheduled regularly and carry vastly more goods - or wait for certain rules that can be defined for delivery (e.g. deliver all bread over 50, but wait until at least 100 are available). These carts can then handle transport between villages and the current system of logistics of idle villagers and warehouse workers will remain within the confined areas of their villages to manage the movement of goods cleaner.
We also have some thoughts for how we can make development of new villages a lot more intuitive and coop-focused, but more on that next week.
Until next week!