Productivity

Buildings and Tools

As part of the game design process there's some decisions to be made about industrial structures and tools that help your people make more stuff so that they can consume more stuff in their evil capitalist materialist consumerist lifestyle of reckless abandon.

Tools

Tools cost a certain amount of resources to make, they last a certain amount of uses. This means it's more efficient to use them in conjunction with an industrial building. Then they break and must be replaced. This helps speed labour and of course the bonus must be balanced against the cost of the tool. By reducing labour time this frees up food (because labour time could be calculated in terms of the food that was eaten).

Their bonus is simple. Tool increases production speed and reduces labour time required.

Industrial Buildings

An industrial building takes up space and requires fuel. The kind of fuel changes with technology. This cost is balanced against the reduction in consumption of inputs and an increase in the amount of outputs. The building lasts forever but has high sunk costs.

First, it improves the ratio of input to output. Say you want to make pottery. If you have no building it costs 100 slip to make 1 pottery. If you have a firing pit it takes 180 slip and 10 lithic fuel to make 2 pottery. That's a better ratio. It takes the same amount of time but since you get twice the output, really your productivity has doubled.

Fuel

I've been wrestling with how to make fuel "simple". One issue is that you can effin burn anything. Let's power your evil firing pit with everything from orange peels to old people! Okay, maybe not orange peels. In any case, since so many things can be "fuel", how do I want to define it in game? My current design idea is something like this: there's a good you can make called "lithic fuel", this is the simplest fuel you can make. However, you can make the generic lithic fuel out of many different inputs. So you can select which items are allowed to be used in your lithic fuel industry and then your assigned workers automatically choose the "cheapest" (which would probably be interpreted as the "most abundant") input possible and then create lithic fuel from that. So lithic fuel could use "wood" or "filler" or "bones" or whatever.

However, perhaps the better industrial buildings then require something like "coal fuel". This has stricter input requirements. Now you can only use "wood" or "coal" (which sadly isn't in the game right now, but perhaps a future iteration!). As a side note, the early steampunk tech route is likely to just mirror China because their ancient technology is pretty much steampunk (they had blast furnaces for thousands of years before Europe). That or Greeks if they hadn't wasted all their technology as toys while using mass slave labour.

So the main issue here is that it makes the coding a bit tricky. While most of my goods have only one possible kind of input, fuel has several kinds of possible input. But, I've introduced a concept called "item super id", in addition to an "item id". So what I can do is have 3 or 4 different item ids that say "lithic fuel" and to the player they'll see they have several kinds of lithic fuel. They'll understand why they're in different bundles because it'll say something like Lithic Fuel (switchgrass) and another will say Lithic Fuel (oak). That's understandable. They can then have matching super ids, so that the "firing pit" will require the super id of "lithic fuel super category" which all of those different item ids fit in. Voila! Solved my code problem. With more ids.

Occupancy

Another aspect is how many people can live in the same structure? Originally I was going to do a flat "2 people per room". But then I thought "hmm maybe a bedroom can fit more than say a storage vault". So I'm introducing the concept of occupancy rate per room. It's pretty simple. Go beyond the rate then the family suffers some penalty.

One of the estates that a family owns is considered the primary residence. They get a base health/happiness bonus. If the family exceeds the occupancy rate of this estate then they suffer a penalty for every person beyond that to their health and happiness. Very simple.

Animal Growth

Trying to keep this one simple as well. Animals are born during their birthing season. The rate depends on the herd size. Outside of the birthing season, their numbers decrease to the maximum. The maximum herd size is determined by how many plants (if herbivores) there are in the land region or animals (if carnivores). Best to slaughter animals beyond the max herd size just as it leaves birthing season.