City Building
I thought it would be a good time to revisit the city building after talking about trains. Managing your villages, towns and cities will take a huge chunk of your playtime. For that reason, it is important to make it more challenging, interesting and less tedious.
People will want to travel with an expanding colony. Traveling will make a big chunk of your wealth. It is quite easy to manage with only a few villages. But with the ever-increasing colony it will become a harder and harder challenge to make sure that people can get to their destinations. It is a good thing that there is some control over it. You can influence destinations by making your cities more or less attractive.
Attractiveness is calculated by what is built. Some structures make your cities more attractive, while others less. At the moment positive attractiveness only influences traveling. Negative attractiveness makes inhabitants unhappy, which drives down your production and taxes.
Factories and farms are separate structures that can produce goods. There are also some production buildings that can only be placed in a city. I like to call these commercial buildings. This makes a variety of interesting production chains. One of the earliest will be producing cut stone for building. Miners in a quarry will mine some stone. Then that stone will need to go to a village that has stoneworks. Workers at stoneworks will cut that stone into stone bricks. And this cut stone then will need to be delivered to the warehouse for further use.
On top of that commercial buildings require a storage building to function. At the moment there can only be one storage in a city with a limited amount of slots. This means that a city that can produce everything will not exist. Villages, towns and cities will need to support one another.
Stations also add to the puzzle. You can load and unload goods in any station that is connected to the city. However to load people you need residences in range. Residences that have no station in range will not provide inhabitants with work. No work means no new inhabitants moving in the city. This is why stations need to be placed strategically to make sure that everyone gets to work.
At this moment I am working on the mid-game and enjoying the gameplay every step of the way. It seems that the expansion will be a constant struggle as intended. Eather traffic problems or production problems keep me wanting to fix one more thing to reach the balance. In the image above you can see 8k people, 75 trains with 2 villages and 2 towns all working in harmony (more or less).
I can not wait to see how people will enjoy these systems. Maybe more importantly what works and what still needs more work. Write a comment if you want to hear about something specific!