Topic: carts for transport

When I mentioned 'collect goods' I meant collecting from each flag it passes up to a certain distance from its base warehouse. This also brings up a thought as well, instead of stationing carts at flags, maybe they can be stationed at warehouses and dispatched to collect goods when bulk goods are available.

The aussies are coming, ya ho! ya ho!

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Thanks, I'm not sure t the moment wether this should be an add-on or a permanent part of the code base. That's up to everybody to discuss, but an add-on would at least allow the idea to be tested.

The aussies are coming, ya ho! ya ho!

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I think that planning and managing an efficient road network is one of the core aspects of Widelands's gameplay, and this proposal would drastically change that and take away much of the skill and consideration involved. Therefore -1 from me.

This would require a larger code change and could probably not be done as an add-on, unless you want to use a lot of (probably very inefficient) Lua magic and discard wares intended destinations.

• as soon a ware get created, the ware get an address to where it should be delivered (another production site, a warehouse)
• now the complete route to the destination will be calculated and this route will be valid as long the complete route is valid. A (processor intensive) recalculation of the route is only done if the route get cut somewhere (a road is destroyed, a ship has sunk)
• if the ware has reached the initial destination, the ware is free for another transport

Correct except that the entire route is always recalculated at every step of the way, even if nothing changed. And request-supply matching is lazy so it is possible that a ware briefly has no destination.

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Since a change to the code many months ago, more than just two different carriers can now occupy a road. For example, my Europeans have the option of using up to 6 carriers per road. My proposed solution, which I already suggested back then: more road types.

In reality, there are also dirt roads, state roads, federal roads and motorways with different levels of throughput. Even in the Middle Ages, long before industrialization and therefore within the time frame of this game, there were roads of varying degrees of development.

I would therefore like to give Widelands a third road type. (I am aware that there is formally already a third type of route, the waterway. I mean a third type of land road.)

The "normal road" is declared to be a better dirt road, which can use a maximum of one carrier.

The "busy road" is then the normal road type, which can use a maximum of three carriers.

And in addition, there is an extended road, which is designed for a high throughput of goods and where a (theoretically) unlimited number of carriers can be assigned. This road should be coded so that it must be populated by at least 3 carriers.

I would even go so far as to say that this new type of road would cost resources to build and would not generated automatically but by request from the player. This could be solved via an upgrade routine in the game, like with building upgrades.

My widelands addons: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jopANlODo41T2reHJ0zaCOMYxq_rxXP-/view?usp=sharing

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MarkMcWire wrote:

I would therefore like to give Widelands a third road type. (I am aware that there is formally already a third type of route, the waterway. I mean a third type of land road.)

The "normal road" is declared to be a better dirt road, which can use a maximum of one carrier.

The "busy road" is then the normal road type, which can use a maximum of three carriers.

And in addition, there is an extended road, which is designed for a high throughput of goods and where a (theoretically) unlimited number of carriers can be assigned. This road should be coded so that it must be populated by at least 3 carriers.

I would even go so far as to say that this new type of road would cost resources to build and would not generated automatically but by request from the player. This could be solved via an upgrade routine in the game, like with building upgrades.

I must say I don't like this proposal much; such a highway would necessitate a lot of micromanagement from the player. And increasing the carrier density on busy roads would just feel too convenient: In the vast majority of cases, thinking about making the roads higher throughput is the wrong solution to your traffic problems; the right way is to build more roads (especially parallel roads) and/or to take a good hard view at the macroscopic layout of your economy and see whether you might not want to relocate a bunch of buildings to reduce traffic between different sectors of the economy. (The new districts feature can help with that.)
And if space is very constricted, then this just makes the map a harder puzzle, with managing an efficient layout for roads and buildings being part of its specific challenge. (See for instance fri05 and fri02 which both deliberately introduce economic choke-points for the player to work around.)

However this would also be very hard to implement from the code side of view, and risk introducing lots of regressions into a stable core game mechanic, which I am even less excited about.

tothxa wrote:

I was going to propose this for the new markets feature anyway, but it would kind of do what's proposed here too: Allow players to set up "trades" between their own markets. This would allow sending wares directly to far-away parts of their territory, and it wouldn't be affected by traffic jams either.

Obviously, in this case "trades" without return wares would be allowed too. (maybe that would make sense between different players too, to allow demanding tributes — we already have at least 3 campaign scenarios where tributes are involved at least optionally: atl02, fri02 and fri03)

+1 for same-player trades
+1 for one-sided trades

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