Last week, we've shared the results of our survey in regards to implementing realistic logistics. The response was overwhelmingly positive! We’ve also read all the comments on the blogs, and the discussions on our Discord server. There are some opponents, there is some hesitation, but the general mood seems to be one of excitement! We’re very seriously considering implementing realistic logistics.
While the concept allows for a lot of extra features, it’s not without its issues. Making the system completely automatic means you’ve got little control over where items go. Making the system completely manual will be very tedious, and difficult for newcomers. It’ll have to be a mix of automation and manual input, but making this system fun and intuitive to use is quite the challenge.
There are many different kinds of logistics the system has to facilitate. The easy cases to solve are small colonies with clear ‘directions’. Miners produce ores which have to go towards the smelters. Farmers produce crops which have to go towards bakers and cooks.
But this quickly becomes more complicated. Smelters, bakers and cooks all need firewood. What if they’re not all in the same location? What if one group consumes much more firewood than the others?
How about jobs, like the workbench, that create a lot of items with loads of different ingredients? And how do we handle long distance trade? Is there one system for item transport, or are there different systems for logistics within a colony versus logistics between colonies?
Some things we’re strongly considering to combine with realistic logistics are:
1.) A Reworked World
Our current (0.8.1, before realistic logistics) design idea is different useful areas, separated by “useless” terrain.
New World --- Ocean --- “Default Terrain / Spawn” --- Steppe --- Far East
The idea is to start a relatively self-sufficient colony in each unique area, and use it to get all the crops, jobs and ores that are unique to that area.
With the realistic logistics, we’re thinking of a wholly different system. Ores, and other useful things like fertile land (with hopefully a sensible system that makes different pieces of land optimal for different crops), should be spread throughout the world - but not all in the same location. Perhaps your main colony is near a source of fertile land and iron. You’ve got a fishing outpost on the shore, and a mining outpost in the mountains to gather gold and coal. Deep in the woods, you’ve got a small colony that gathers wood and saltpeter.
Instead of the current “magic”, completely UI-based trading, trade should involve physical connections between the colonies. It would be good if you could build actual roads that speed up the colonist walking speed. To indicate trade routes, you could need to build milestones next to the road. For shipping routes, there would be buoys. There would be a primitive map that indicates the location of colonies, major stockpiles and the trade routes between them.
2.) Streamlined Crafting
Currently, lots of items require specific and detailed ingredients. Bows need bow strings, there aren’t merely iron ingots but also wrought iron and iron rivets, lots of things require not merely copper but also copper nails and/or copper tools, etcetera, etcetera. Because of current technical limitations, we can’t let item crafting take more than 15 seconds, so we used these ingredients to allow us to let certain items take a more sensible amount of crafting time.
We intend to remove these technical limitations, and that could also allow us to remove these “cluttering” ingredients. Things would “merely” require ingredients like wood/copper/iron, not specific processed versions of it. That would make implementing a realistic stockpile with logistics easier as well.
This would temporarily reduce item variety, but this would rise again with later updates that add for example industrial content. But these items would work in a similar fashion, with "rubber" being "rubber" and not "rubber piece", "rubber ring", etcetera.
To work out these ideas, we’ve been doing a lot of research and discussion. Zun has been working on a simple 2D simulation that allows us to test some of our ideas. We can include some moving footage in the next blog if there’s interest! I’ve been testing Kingdoms and Castles on the recommendation of Vobbert and multiple players. That game already includes realistic logistics. It’s a lovely game that works brilliantly, and their system works mostly automatically. I did notice that logistics became a bit unwieldy at high colonist numbers, and when I started building more distant outposts. Job prioritization became a lot harder as well. It’s still properly manageable in Kingdoms and Castles, but their maps are a bit smaller, and it’s a lot easier to keep a proper overview with their top-down perspective. We think Kingdoms-and-Castles-style-logistics will be pretty confusing in Colony Survival, especially when you’re dealing with a larger variety of items over a longer distance.
We're still discussing and testing different ideas, and if anybody can recommend specific systems, we'd love to hear it!
Bedankt voor het lezen :D