I have seen villager " transferring produced goods" when carrying two pairs of shoes. And I have seen the employees at the preservist transfer 5 jars of preserves because they reached their maximum of 300, then restock to make 5 more jars and keep repeating that loop. I know the laborers are primarily supposed to transport things to storage. But, sometimes you are just low on laborers. ( a bunch of homes are upgrading all at once and the laborers are all chopping wood right now, or laborers got assigned to jobs because you just unlocked mining and immigration has not replaced them yet ).
Could production buildings have a trigger threshold ( other than their max storage ) where employees would do transfer instead of production? Or, a way to adjust a building’s max storage lower so that items get transferred ? Conversely, another threshold that says " laborers don’t walk all the way across town to move 2 pairs of shoes, wait until there are at least 6".
Personally, I would love to see some of the ideas from the Manifest Delivery Mod currently under discussion to find a home in the official game. A long time ago I played a game that had " teamsters". It worked similar to the Wagon Shop, but the moved everything everywhere, not just wood, rock and ore. The only drawback is that they were the ONLY ones who put things INTO storage. In that case, production employees could not move their own goods. But, if multiple teamsters were managed efficiently, it would be a moot point anyway.
Just literally had a thought, mark everything to go to the Trading Post, let those lazy buggers collect everything then after “midday” mark them to go back into storage. (I’m going to try that later, I haven’t had breakfast yet.)
If all goods flow through the trading post, then only the 4 traders would be picking up everything, which is worse. Plus, the problem was having needed items sitting in the production facility, and not where they can be used by the villagers. Putting them in the trading post still keeps them out of circulation.
Clearing the production buildings comes down to the number of feet and hands available, and how they prioritize what to move first - as far as laborers are concerned. If we could designate a group of laborers who only did transport, and set building priority and quantity levels to trigger pick up … then buildings farther from the center of town would not build up high quantities while the laborers are moving low quantities of less important items.
It still leaves the problem of where they decide to take it, but that is step 2 of the equation.
It didn’t work.
There is another logistics issue that I’ve posted about. When you reach the maximum production of a resource, it stops producing as it should and releases the workers to the labor pool. Problem is since the building has no workers, any remaining product left in the building never gets moved to storage. Before they go to the labor pool, workers should empty the building storage of anything produced there. Buildings where the product is moved by wagon seem to be okay.
Yep. as long as you have enough wagon shops spread about, all the construction and mining stuff get to where they need to be. Why couldn’t we have smaller wagons in town with a different “branch” of the wagon shop running them ? IRL they would have been called ’ Teamsters" ( at least in the US), which I have mentioned in a couple other posts.
I have read that the Devs based the game on early Europe, but I do not know what time period the game starts in and what century they estimate for each of the TC upgrades that unlock the next level of the tech tree and production buildings. Research says that people who owned wagons for hire to move goods (sometimes also transporting people) started forming local semi-organized groups in the mid1800’s and were Unionizing by late 1800’s / very early 1900’s … in America.
But that would be in the era of mass-produced glassware and foods being sealed instead of dried / salted. One source I found (glad to share the link) goes VERY DEEP into everything transit / transport related in Europe 1700 to 1800 - including on the state of roads, local municipal responsibilities and the prices of freight. Personally, I want to say " Teamsters" pretty much fits the timeline and fixes most of the logistics issues everyone complains about" and go with it. Make them available along-side their larger counterparts. But my husband would be appalled that I could even suggest such a thing without confirming that the dates are 100% accurate. I will leave that up to the Devs.
Here is the link. Forewarned : it is a 30 page summary of a BOOK written about the nature and evolution of transportation in pre 1900’s Europe.
https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~dbogart/transport_revolution_cehmbjuly92013_forweb.pdf
New tactic for storage, when I need to upgrade the Town Centre or build a major structure I can set the Trading Post/Centre to store the materiel required as if for sale, except for the gold ingots, and when I have them all send them back to gen-pop, start construction and then prioritise that construction so it gets done first.
I also use the trading post as a place to reserve goods that I need for upgrading, and that includes gold ingots. When you return them to town storage it doesn’t guarantee someone else will grab it before it’s used for the upgrade, but it does activate the UPDATE button to get started.