Loving the game so far, can’t wait to see what’s coming next!
Like others, I’ve noticed that as my settlement grows, travel times become harder to manage, and trying to build houses near far-flung mines/work camps/farms doesn’t really work as you’d hope (folks don’t reshuffle to a home close to where they work automatically).
I think part of the problem is that this type of optimization can be really hard to do in an automatic and performant way (similar to the “traveling salesman” problem). I had a thought of way one that could help though.
What if you had the ability to create ‘hamlet’ town halls? This smaller version of the town hall would have a radius around it, and any building in that radius would first pull its workers from any workers living in the hamlet itself. Other details:
- On the professions screen, you could have separate tabs for each hamlet, plus your main town.
- Laborers and builders would remain in a global pool, and if a hamlet doesn’t have enough workers living in it, it could pull workers from anywhere.
- Wagons would likely have to be repurposed to carry all goods, and could be the primary way goods are delivered/sent from the hamlet to the town center.
Not sure if this would help or not, but if it did, it’d also be more realistic with how cities and towns grew. It also opens up interesting gameplay ideas:
- Maybe you could pick a ‘focus’ for each hamlet, that would boost one set of industry and the expense of others.
- The wagon-based transactions could be a tax source for your town (import/export sort of thing)
Anyways just an idea I had that I wanted to pass along!