I would love to have an overhaul of how wainwrights and wagons work. Once your town becomes a city and vast numbers of resources need to be transported over increasing distances, you need to have the ability to build ambitious transport networks, with wagons transporting large numbers of goods along user-defined transport routes.
I always thought it was strange that wainwrights are the only wagon drivers in town. It would make much more sense to have the wainwrights just build and maintain the wagons, and have everyone else drive them.
Wagons could be a resource similar to baskets or tools: some professions could be outfitted with wagons for much easier transport of large numbers of resources, as well as the ability to transport many different types of resources at once.
An important one would probably be builders, who can just load a wagon full of materials and get everything a build site needs there at once. Instead of twenty builders each running back and forth several times to construct a few fences, have them load a wagon full of wood and then drop off 1 wood on each fence tile and build it all at once.
Laborers could use them for transporting goods between storages, and loading and unloading factories.
Grocers could stock their entire market in one haul, and Traders could do the same for their trading post.
Composters could go from house to house and clean entire neighbourhoods at once.
And in addition to all that, you could implement manually customizable trade routes, where you can assign villagers to the profession Wagon Driver, and have them move goods back and forth.
Those could take over the jobs that wainwrights currently do, supplying far outposts and returning with their products, but with much greater flexibility. If you have bakeries spread out through your town, it would be great to have a single wagon driver constantly go round providing them with flour. Or design routes from your wood, stone and bricks sites and have a wagon driver spread them out evenly over the stockyards in your town.
Especially my bakeries are currently hard to get to work efficiently. They are always in town for the desirability bonus, while the mills are always out of town due to the desirability penalty. I put granaries close to my bakeries with minimum quota for flour, but these get stocked very infrequently. In addition, because workers only carry something like 60 flour each haul, as soon as they arrive everyone bakes a single bread and then five of them go Idle again while waiting for the sixth baker to run back and forth again to the mill.
Just having a wagon drive around and drop 200 flour at every bakery each cycle would solve all of this.
This would vastly improve the late game, when you have large numbers of resources needing transport over larger distances. I can only imagine how satisfying it would feel to have a 2000 pop town run like a well oiled machine, with wagons everywhere making sure all work sites remain supplied and villagers don’t constantly have to wait for restocking.
With enough manual controls for the player, this could even allow you to create smaller satellite villages far outside of your main town, dedicated entirely to mining or gathering specific resources, and use transport wagons to supply them and return with the yields. I would love to be able to spread out more, instead of being forced to keep everything centered around the same area so villagers don’t have to spend the entire year walking everywhere.
As for the wainwrights, a fun mechanic could be to have wagons require maintenance at the wainwright’s workshop. Wagons can slowly wear down when they are active, and if you take too long without going for maintenance at the wainwright, a wagon runs an increased chance of breaking down, and if that happens a wainwright has to come running to fix the wagon on site.
The player can then be allowed to manually specify, for each wagon, after how many miles travel it should seek maintenance, and try to balance the risk of wagons breaking down against taking time out of the wagon’s transport schedule.
And if the risk of breakdowns is linked to the total distance traveled, this would also encourage the player to not just put anyone into a wagon to do his job, but instead save it for jobs that require large numbers of (different) resources to be transported.