The late game still needs a LOT of improvement imho. In a game that is largely about resource management and transport, you really need a late game mechanic that allows the player to efficiently transport large numbers of goods. Currently, such a mechanic is lacking. This is a problem because this is a citybuilder, and people who play citybuilders often like to build huge cities, that’s where a lot of the fun lies.
Having individual laborers carry stuff around makes no sense in a game that already allows you to build wagons, and the problem there is that the only people allowed to use wagons are wainwrights, and they only transport a small selection of possible resources between a small selection of possible buildings.
It would make much more sense to give wagons to all villagers that can use them to transport whatever they need to. Builders are a major example, why not load all materials for a stretch of wall in a wagon and only have to drive there once, instead of having several villagers walk several times for each individual section?
In addition, the player needs more manual control, like the ability to design transport routes for wagons to follow, and maybe even to link certain buildings together, like linking a bakery to a specific granary that is close by, so only flour from that granary is used for stocking, not from granaries on the other end of town. By linking factories to the correct storages and other production buildings, the player could then eliminate long walking times for villagers.
I made a post about overhauling how wagons work here, and I feel like I’m referencing this post a lot here the past few weeks, but a lot of people seem to run into the issue of late game resource transport getting really inefficient. Idea: overhaul wainwrights and wagons to create vast, efficient transport networks in the late game
Right now, the most efficient way to reduce walking times and keep buildings productive that I have figured out, is to just build specially designated storage buildings for each area. So if you have a smokehouse, build a root cellar next to it, deselect everything inside except for fish, meat and their smoked counterparts, and then set a minimum quotum for fish and meat of something like 100 for both fish and meat, so the smoker can use this root cellar both to pick up raw meat and store smoked meat.
However, laborers are supposed to make sure quota in storage buildings are met but this doesn’t always seem to work very well, quite often it takes a long time for someone to deliver the goods. Laborers also seem to pick up goods only from other storage areas to fulfill these quota, never from production buildings, which sometimes causes them to remain empty for a long time.
For example, when I have designated granaries to provide flour to bakeries in town, they will only get flour once my mills have full storage and start moving flour to granaries. Until that moment, the bakers will just have to walk to the mills that are miles away (for some reason, bakers ARE allowed to pick up flour from mills, but laborers seeking to meet quota for storage buildings are not, no idea why).