Big Cup Small Cup

A lot of the joy from an economic game is watching your industries go ahead after you've set them up. One issue that usually stands out is storage of goods. A game like Cultura is really complex, it has fifteen types of raw items and perhaps upwards to thirty finished and intermediate goods (the exact number is still in flux). This gives us two immediate questions: How many types of storage buildings for the different goods? How many sizes of storage buildings of each type?

For Cultura, the question of types of storage buildings is going to be simplified to "food" and "not food". This is mostly because in the game, the idea of useful storage is more about accessibility, space and preventing spoilage. Only food spoils, so its storage is paramount. Everything else is not really much of a concern so they're mostly for space efficiency (piles of goods would generally be less efficient than a storage pit). Then perhaps there's just two sizes of each: big and small. That leaves us with just four types of storage buildings and then upgrades for them as you progress in technology.

Algorithmically interesting is how you decided which storage site to use to drop off your goods and how you coordinate the movement of goods between storage sites. This is where you get the "sit back and watch" comfortable feeling of an economic game. The current idea is to use a "big cup small cup". A worker chooses the closest drop off site to dump goods. Then when a storage location is full, if it has a larger storage location to transfer goods into then it'll queue up a goods transfer job. This means a small cup can be poured into a larger cup. Whether or not goods should transfer between same size cups is still questionable (right now the answer is no, that way any number of storage location sizes can be coded and people simply keep transferring only "upward").