Hi everyone,
Work on the pioneer wagon is going slowly but steadily, so I want to take today to discuss a topic that has repeatedly been on my mind as I am developing it and as I keep trying to set things up to be as reusable as possible: The transport wagons.
With the upcoming changes to logistics and village mechanics, it will be necessary to create an additional unit to handle inter-village logistics. So let me start of with explaining why a new unit is even necessary:
I think I have mentioned quite a few times now that having global logistics has been a sure way to slow down logistics in your main base to the point where your villagers are no longer getting enough food to sustain themselves, leading to a quick end to the game. Consequently, logistics being contained to individual villages is important to make expansions possible and (more importantly) actually a fun thing to do. However, that means that each village will have its own economy and logistics system, which defeats the purpose, if it cannot interact with other villages.
The “simple” way to handle this for version 0.8 will be to leave warehouse workers as global logistics workers, while idle workers will be contained to their immediate area. As a result, idle workers should keep up with logistics at home and in the expansion area, while warehouse workers will still move goods from, e.g. the farm in the original base to the market in the expansion village that is calling for more food. However, this seems like a suboptimal way of handling inter-village logistics. If individual processing buildings can still create a call for supply from individual supply buildings halfway across the map, warehouse workers will be constantly busy and the player will have little control over prioritising the transport of, e.g. gold, from the expansion base back to the main one.
This leaves warehouse to warehouse (or village to village) logistics. Rather than creating calls to the global pool of buildings, calls will be issued only within each village, and the player needs to make sure (as one option), that the required goods are actually in the village. This could mean creating additional food production buildings in the expansion village, or setting up a transport system between the warehouses, where excess food from the main base gets sent to the expansion base (as you can currently do between coop players, for example). Of course this comes with its own challenges: How do you handle having more than one expansion base, if you want some of the food to be sent to the smaller one, and lots of excess food to go to the larger one instead? How do you adjust to having cleared one route to the expansion village, but your logistics workers keep taking the route that is still full of pirates?
With all of this, I am hoping that the transport wagon will be able to help. The transport wagon will have lots of space for goods, so each time it goes back and forth will be a big help for the forward base (or bring back its products), while the player will be able to define its waypoints for the journey similar to what you can do with soldiers. Of course this does not yet solve the problems of how to distribute goods, but it means that there are potential solutions. Looking, for example, at the way that the Anno series of games handles transport with ships, a transport wagon A could be set up on a trade route between base X and Y, grabbing 50 food each time it reaches X and dropping it off every time it reaches Y. Meanwhile, a transport wagon B could have a trade route between X and Z, grabbing and dropping off 100 food for each path. This solution would not necessarily ensure that either base would have enough food, but would place the tools to ensure sufficient supply firmly in the hands and actions of the players, rather than leaving it to an automated system that can be easily overwhelmed.
Of course this comes with yet more questions: If the wagons are operating independently like that and move between different villages, do they have an accommodation building like the villagers and soldiers? Or are they “outside” of the scope of accommodations and food, like the pioneer wagons? Can they be escorted by soldiers for protection? Many of these questions will impact how the pioneer wagon best gets designed so I don’t have to redesign it again in 2 months. I have not yet made my mind up on all of them, and am also still considering a system where the transport wagons would not be manually set on trade routes but instead controlled by a “macro level” warehouse logistics system - but I will keep you updated on my thoughts.
Until next week!