Hi everyone,
In Weekly Update 87 (so quite some time ago), I mentioned my plans for the pioneer wagon. Back from holidays, I am now finally working on it, so let me give you the rundown.
To start, let me recap what the pioneer wagon is going to be: The pioneer wagon will be a unit that allows you to more efficiently start up your outposts/new villages. You will be able to create it in a dedicated building, fill up with resources and villagers, and move across the map. Once you have decided where you want to place your new village, you can “activate” the wagon, place the blueprints for a market, a warehouse, and 2 small houses, and the wagon will “unpack” to construct these buildings - without taxing the logistics of any of your other villages.
This solves a big problem the game has at the moment, which is the slowdown when it comes to expansion - and often the death of your home village logistics (and therefore your villagers) when you try to expand. With the wagon, there will be no strain on your home village logistics until you have at least some logistics in your new base - which should help to reduce the stress created by distances between the villages.
So what will it take (me) to create the wagon? Firstly, I will need to create the new building, let’s call it the “wagon maker” for now. This wagon maker needs to be set up a little differently from any previous buildings, as it creates a unit but isn't its accommodation - so I will need to create new functionality for it (as well as the model). The wagon maker building will ideally also function to create the ox carts which will ferry goods between your villages in the future, but I will not focus on that for now.
Secondly, I will need to create the functionality for the wagon (the model is already finished, see today’s image). The movement and “unpacking” for the new village should not be too difficult, but creating a system in which the new villagers will spawn from the port and remain in the wagon in a sort of stasis until they have created their own housing may be a little more challenging. While the model is finished, it will also need some animation and will need to be set up to adjust to slopes, etc - so that will also take a little while.
And lastly, I will need to adjust the logistics system to only allow warehouse workers to transfer goods between villages for now, which should allow for players to keep their idle workers for intra-village tasks.
As usual, I will keep you updated on the progress!
Until next week!