Topic: OIPUN's Tidy Warehouses - thoughts

OIPUN add-on Tidy Warehouses put some thoughts into my head for further game additions. This makes things more challenging by ensuring each warehouse does not go too far above a total of 500 items. Nasty, when you have a warehouse that is accumulating large numbers of logs, for example, as all the other wares will trickle away. This is OIPUN's Add-On:

Name: Tidy Warehouses
Description: Start with a basic Headquarter. From time to time your workers do inventories. If there is more than 500 items in any of your warehouses, workers throw away one quarter of stock stored in such a warehouse and let you know, that they have cleaned your warehouse.
Category: starting_condition

I thought "You could call that Heathrow Baggage Handlers Add-on" as putting your cases through Heathrow Airport has a similar effect. That made me think this add-on does bring an element of realism: no economy is as efficient as that in Widelands. And it also gives the potential for chance disasters.

The following immediately sprang to mind. I'm sure some imaginative people could take these thoughts and turn them into add-ons.

Theft by staff A feature of the retail, airport baggage handling and courier industries: petty thieving of stock or goods by staff. Commonly called 'shrinkage'.
Implemented as a steady trickle of valuable processed goods but not so precious as to be noticed like the gold items. Tools, for example, would go 'missing' quite a lot.

Theft by criminals Pirates, bandits, criminal gangs, cunning thieves - all these would target warehouses for their accumulated precious items.
Implemented as the occasional total removal of one of the most precious items from the warehouse that has the most of them. E.g. all the gold, or all the top-level weapons.

Spoilage You can't keep large quantities of grain or processed foodstuffs for a long time and not expect some to go off. It also attracts vermin which will spoil goods.
Implemented as a sudden massive drop in one, some or all of the foodstuffs in one warehouse, if that warehouse has had a steady large quantity for quite a long time. Or just randomly.

Plagues A 'Plagues of Egypt' add-on? Each 'year' the lands are visited by one of a number of possible plagues. Moths that wreck cloth or fur items. Mice that eat the grain. Termites that ruin the wood. Diseases that kill workers. Pestilence that kills livestock or courier animals. Weevils in all the processed food.
Implemented as an event that destroys one item or a group of related items in all warehouses. Might be for one player or all players?

Damp You can't keep metal near water without it corroding.
Implemented by metal items (tools and weapons and armour) in ports rusting and becoming lost or converted back to iron ore.

Flooding Would you put all your valuables in a wooden building on a coastline? With risk of flooding or spring tides? Then why use a port as a warehouse?
Implemented as occasionally losing all or most items - possibly including people and animals - from one port because of flooding.

Fire Historically, serious fires were quite common. And with wood as a building material, warehouses and their goods went up in smoke too.
Implemented as losing a warehouse exactly the same as when an enemy conquers it. Up in flames, all goods lost and animals and people running away.

Corruption The bigger your operation, the worse corruption gets. An extension of the petty theft by staff. The more warehouses you have, the harder it is to manage, and goods go missing more and more.
Implemented as the random loss of some goods that increases exponentially according to the number of warehouses.

Civil unrest Occasionally people kick off, even in well-managed societies. Riots happen, looting occurs and buildings get destroyed. It might be triggered by too large an empire, a shortage of food, losing a castle, or just a random event (such as the current leader dies).
Implemented as the occasional random loss of goods in a warehouse.

Wastage Stuff gets dropped, damaged, misdirected. Inefficiencies in supply chains, poor planning, poor raw materials mean what you thought would turn up, doesn't.
Implemented differently from others as rather than it being a reduction in existing stock, it is stock that gets delivered but the inventory does not increase.

Triggers
- Could just be time. Floods happen annually.
- Could be the size of the empire. Too high a population gets hard to manage.
- Too few military. Perhaps the soldiers also provide civil functions and keep people calm... or sufficiently oppressed! If the ratio of soldiers to workers is too low, maybe that encourages naughtiness.
- Too rich. Storing a lot of gold is going to attract attention.
- Too successful. Too much of one item across all the warehouses will attract vermin and spoilage.
- Maximum limit on warehouse size. Anything above that is being left outside and liable to loss. (Essentially, this is what Tidy Warehouses is doing.)
- Military events. Loss of an important building makes people angry.
- Hungry citizens. Running out of food has serious consequences for a society.

Scope and benefits
- Just the current player, to make it harder playing against the AI.
- All players in a multi-player game, to make it more interesting.
- To add variety and interest and develop different ways to play.
- To create or support new story lines and campaigns.

It says a lot about the potential for customisation in this game that almost all the above can be implemented by tweaking stock levels.

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