We’re still working on the details of implementing ‘realistic logistics’. As explained in last week’s blog, I’ve been testing Kingdoms and Castles. When bigger population sizes and larger distances came into play, it became harder to understand and steer the production process. A handful of precise questions regularly appeared in my mind:
- Do my workers waste a large part of their working time walking from their homes to their jobs and back?
- Do my workers waste a lot of time idling at their job, because the required resources aren’t available?
- Do my workers waste a lot of energy hauling low-value resources from one side of the map to the other, while these resources could have better been produced or processed locally?
In essence, these are all questions of efficiency. And that’s kind of the point. With the introduction of realistic logistics, building an efficient, sensible layout for your colony becomes a lot more important. This should become a fun and engaging challenge, without being frustrating and tedious.
While the automatic transport system in Kingdoms and Castles is very fun, it becomes more unwieldy in the later stages. It still works relatively well in that game, but the planned logistics in CS will involve larger distances and more complex production chains, without the benefits of a clear top-down view. I was deeply concerned that similar automatic systems would become irritating and opaque in CS.
So I was trying to think of a system that would work well in our game. A clear, consistent system that would work for small and large colonies, on both small and long distances. One that would properly handle low-value and high-value items. Suddenly, I had an answer. Value! Money? Worth. Currency. Prices. Something in that direction. All the questions above are questions of value: is crafting time and transport time well spent?
A “Philippus goudgulden” from Dordrecht, source
Let’s describe an example. Imagine we’ve got “Guilders”, coincidentally the pre-Euro Dutch currency with medieval origins. Let’s say the average colonist works 300 seconds in a day and earns 30 Guilders with that labor. In this hypothetical example, a baker only needs wheat to bake bread. This costs the baker 20 seconds, which would translate to 2 Guilders of labor costs.
The baker is situated next to stockpile Food Corner. Wheat is available from three stockpiles. Ten pieces of wheat are carried by one deliverer.
- Stockpile Next To The Walls: 30 seconds of delivery time, and the wheat itself costs 5 Guilder.
- Stockpile Seaside: 150 seconds of delivery time, wheat costs 3 Guilder.
- Stockpile Very Fertile: 1000 seconds of delivery time, wheat costs 1 Guilder.
I've just written this example and have no ideas which stockpile is most cost-efficient, but some simple math should help us solve this problem.
- Next To The Walls: 30 seconds of delivery time for 10 wheat = 3 seconds per wheat = 0.3 Guilders of delivery cost (10 seconds of labor for 1 Guilder) = 0.3 Guilder delivery cost + 5 Guilder wheat cost = 5.3 Guilder total cost
- Seaside: 1.5 Guilder delivery cost + 3 Guilder wheat cost = 4.5 Guilder total cost
- Very Fertile: 10 Guilder + 1 Guilder = 11 Guilder total cost.
It seems obvious that stockpile Seaside is the most optimal choice. But we’ve haven’t looked at the full picture yet. You, the player, could hand out “contracts”. Imagine you’d pay 7.5 Guilder for one bread. With Seaside wheat (4.5 Guilder) plus the costs of the time of the baker (2 Guilder), the colony would have 6.5 Guilder costs for 7.5 Guilder worth of bread. One Guilder of “profit” for every bread!
But with Next To The Walls wheat, the cost increases to 7.3 Guilder, removing nearly all profits. Last and least, with Very Fertile wheat, there isn’t even a profit: 13 Guilder of costs for every bread.
Next To The Walls wheat should only be used as a last resort, and it doesn’t make any sense to haul Very Fertile wheat across the map. Perhaps making bread at all doesn’t make a lot of sense: what if in a similar timespan, Luxury Meals can be made, worth 20 Guilder for only 5 Guilders of cost? 15 Guilders of profit makes 1 Guilder of profit look a lot less attractive.
On the other hand, the results could be easily changed by some actions from the player. The “contract” for bread could be upped to 15 Guilders per bread, suddenly making even the Very Fertile wheat profitable. Raising the price of a contract would simultaneously raise the price of that product when it's used as an ingredient by colonists. This explains the differences in the price for wheat between the stockpiles from the example.
The player could also improve the transport route from stockpile Very Fertile to stockpile Food Corner, with roads and bridges, a shipping route or rails. If this reduces the transport costs far enough, Very Fertile wheat would become the optimal choice.
The idea isn’t to force players to do all of these calculations. The costs should relate to sensible, in-game things. Everybody understands that placing smelters who need ores close to miners of these ores, reduces the delivery costs of these ores. It makes sense that delivering heavy items is more expensive than delivering small, light items.
The colonists themselves should take the value of the products they are crafting, and the costs of ingredients and delivery, into account when making their choices. This will automatically focus them on doing efficient things, and will stop them from dragging resources across the map without serious benefits. The “Guilder-value” of your actions should be clearly communicated to players, without making managing a spreadsheet the core of your activities.
We hope we can accomplish this, and love to have your opinion and input! To test our ideas, Zun has been building a simple 2D simulation. Last week, I asked whether you wanted to see some footage of the simulation, and there was definitely some interest. I made two short GIFs to showcase its features:
A steady network in action
Setting up a network
Bedankt voor het lezen :D