Is it planned to improve the way resources are delivered to build sites, or how goods are delivered to houses because I see so much time wasted by both builders and grocers.
Currently if I build a temple a builder will transport several hundred gold for the project. But if I build two gardens that require 30 each two builders have to deliver 30 gold to each. Would it not make more sense for a builder to carry a large sum of gold and just dump it at multiple build sites before starting to build?
Same goes for the grocer - I just followed one now and she picked up 20 firewood from a splitter and not the stockyard which is closer - then dumped all 20 at the market. She then took 4 water from the nearby well and delivered it to a house, went back to the market grabbed 6 firewood and delivered it to a house, then went back to the firewood splitter to grab another 20 firewood. Why wouldn’t they just keep hold of the 20 firewood and distribute it evenly among 4-5 houses before taking on a new delivery task.
Yeah this feels a much needed improvement. Something like the waste collector that now fetches waste from multiple locations until the wagon is full but some time ago he just made back and forth from every single house.
Also I think that workers should carry more than one type of resource at a time…it just doesn’t make much sense that one can carry 10 logs but not 1 log and 30 gold togheter.
Additionally AI should manage better the labourers. For example, while excavating ruins it often happens to send labourers far away from town. Just yesterday noticed that a labourer that was excavating the ruins stopped after a while between the ruins and went “nothing to do” sitting there. At the same time another labourer on the other side of the map was tasked to excavate the ruins…this doesn’t make much sense…
Not a dev… but this sounds like a Traveling salesman problem…. Aka route optimization…
Can be incredibly difficult to program given the large amount of variables in FF and also very processor intensive…
At the end of the day… villagers are still software and not actual human reason… so the way you route optimize is a giant matrix of all possible combinations of locations and goods and minimize or maximize some output— like minimize travel time, or maximize building throughput or income or units produced/ time.
In order to “create the logic” to source from a stockyard vs say the firewood splitter… you’d need to apply a penalty, say to travel time, that would, for lack of a better term, incentivize the computer to prioritize one vs the other. But only if it was in stock, so that has to be nested in some if, then conditional logic… and applied to every combination of labor, production, and construction in the game—
Point being is… it ain’t so simple. And potentially comes at making the game run slower, due to increased processing demand while the computer “figures it out….”
and I’m not a hardware guy… but most gaming computers aren’t real heavy in that kind of processing power…since it just raw number crunching and not a GPU thing
That said, another fun fact is there actually isn’t a solution to the traveling salesman problem… it’s like solving for pi— it’s infinite. You can get… a better solution… but never an absolute solution. So much so, one use case of the TSP is to test processing power …
We don’t need a chatgpt AI for every villager but just a better one, like that used for waste collector. Allow workers to carry more than one resource and choose the nearest available worker instead of a random one. Just with this we would see a really big improvement in city efficiency.