Production flow needs tweaks

[SkyNTP]

Hello,

I have recently tried this game (v0.45) and enjoyed myself enough to come here and provide some feedback/suggestions about the production economy. If it has already been mentioned, then consider this just another vote in favour and move on to the next topic. (v0.46 change list does not seem to address any of this)

I feel that the system needs a few tweaks. First of all, most importantly, this game needs a production queue for "buildings" such as mill and animal farms such that production at these locations can be balanced with parent and child production. As it stands, my villagers just pump out flower like it's nobody's business and forget to bake bread afterwards so I end up with flower all over the village and a lot of hungry mouths. The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that my villagers don't seem to bother to put the food products into containers, even if these are located a square away from the the production facility (apparently the 5 second rule is more of a 1 year rule). So someone near the dinning room will march all the way to the bakery floor and then back to the dining room to eat some bread.

Secondly, the current jack-of-all-trades system works fine for small tasks but as the village grows large we start running into some serious efficiency problems. Because jobs are always changing, a steady supply of food is never guaranteed, so I always end up with too much food (literally, no floor space left while containers get conveniently ignored so stockpiling is not an option) or not enough (especially when I queue up a large mining or armour producing order for example). If I could assign say 20% (manually or through a % slider) to be dedicated to food production and 20% to food transportation, I could control the production flow much more efficiently. Also, dedicated jobs means less running back and forth between work locations. I'd say 40% of the time workers are just walking back and forth between jobs. I'd rather have the option to have them just stay put, even if that means idling.

Lastly I'd like to designate dedicated warehouse space (zone) e.g. a collection of shared containers which are managed collectively and in such a way that I can order transfers between zones. This would be useful for example to order food into the lower floors, or order stone to be moved up. Transportation accounts for a huge proportion of the production time; given the fact that so little control regarding the movement of goods is given to the player, I really feel cramped when building my economy. It really irks me when villagers drop stuff liberally on the ground, especially when this gets in the way of construction (a real pet peeve I had with Cultures 2: The Gates of Asgard as well).

Oh, one more thing, a list of villagers would be handy (couldn't find one).

[Skip Sandwich]

I couldn't agree more, assigning work orders would work so much more smoothly if instead of "Do this, then this, then this, then that"

it went "I want 50% of you working on this, 20% on that, 15% on that, 10% on this, and 5% on that".

even a combination of both could work, i.e, perhaps by assigning a # of workers on the priority screen, so it works as follows;

"Okay, I want 3 of you working on this first, then 4 on that, and lastly 5 on this, if you finish completely, go help whoever's lower down the queue until more work comes in"

[cheeselover92]

Love what the person above me here has suggested and was thinking about that as I finished up my daily assessment of how we are doing over here in Smalltown U.S.A. Hope this makes it in! +1 for sure!