In-depth Settlement/Economy System (Patreon)

Greetings Conquerors!

I wanted to take the time to go more in detail about the settlement and economy system, which is just about done. This'll add on to the last post I made about it with some small changes to make the system a bit more intuitive.

Resource types

The economy for 0.4 will be revamped and will include 3 different resource types: Food, Materials, and Equipment.

Food is self-explanatory and is similar to how it was in the previous versions. The main difference is that instead of Food representing a simple numerical value, it now represents in-game items. For example, your Faction will have a Food storage, like before, but you can put food items in the storage that the citizens of your faction can take from to eat. This allows you to be more hands-on with your faction and be able to hunt/place Food for your citizens yourself.

Materials represent items that can be used for building/crafting. These include things like Leather, Hides, Ores, Ingots, Quarried Stone, and more. Your faction will have a Materials storage where again, you can place these items in and it will be drawn from when you build new things or your settlers craft new things.

Equipment represents the items that your blacksmith crafts. This comes in 3 types: Tools, Troop Equipment, and Jewelry. The Tools and Troop Equipment are crafted in “crates”, to which you can assign one of them for each settlement or troop regiment that you have in your faction. There are 8 tiers to these crates with tier 1 crates being crafted from iron ingots to tier 8 being crafted from dragon bones. Each tier allows your workers to produce more resources, or your troops/guards to have better equipment/better stats. Jewelry is self explanatory and corresponds to silver/gold rings/necklaces.

Buildings

Now that you understand the resource types, I’ll go more in detail about each type of building you can create in your settlements. There are 4 types of buildings: Residential, Base Production, Refining, and Crafting.

Residential buildings include those that will increase the max population of your settlement. These include bed rolls and tents (meshes provided by Simdrew) with bed rolls adding 1 to the max population, small tents adding 2, and large tents adding 4. The absolute max population per settlement will be 10 settlers.

(ignore the [...])

Base Production buildings are the bottom level of your supply chain. These are buildings that do not require anything other than workers to produce resources. These include Farms, Hunting Camps, Fisheries, Logging Camps, and Mines. Each settlement can build only one of each of these buildings (i.e., you can only have one farm per settlement, but you can have one farm and one hunting camp). Resources that your settlers produce will be placed in your faction’s Food or Materials Storage. Upgrades to these types of buildings increase their resource production.

Refining Buildings are the middle level of the supply chain. These are buildings that take some of the resources that were gathered from base production buildings and refines them into different objects that can be used for different things. These include Cookhouses, Lumber Mills, Tanneries, and Smelters. Upgrades to these types of buildings increase the amount of Base materials each worker can refine per hour.

Crafting Buildings are the top level of the supply chain and convert refined materials into usable items. For this update I only have the Blacksmith but I have more ideas for the future like Alchemists (I’ll defer this for future updates as it’ll require me to come up with new systems like how potions will work with troops). With these buildings you can set what they can craft so blacksmiths can craft iron materials, equipment, and/or jewelry.

(You can choose what your blacksmith produces each day using this menu)

When constructing a building, a ledger will be placed for that building where you can manage its workers/crafting. Upgrading buildings require resources that become more complex as it gets higher in level. Additionally, some buildings require more “stations” to be built before more workers can be hired to that building. For example, a tannery will require you to build a tanning rack in your settlement in order to increase the number of workers it can hire.

Workers

With every settler that joins your settlement, they can be hired as a worker to any of your buildings. Workers are not free labor however and have their own needs.

Each worker will want a wage that will be deducted from you faction treasury each day. The wage can be set at each building and can range from 0 gold – 200 gold per day. The higher the wage the happier they will be (assuming you have enough in your treasury).

Additionally, you will also need to ensure that there is enough food in your faction’s Food Storage for the workers in your faction.

Finally, you will want to make sure the workers and settlers are happy. This is shown by the “Happiness” score of your settlement, which is a value determined by a variety of factors such as food, defensiveness, economy,  and unemployment. If your settlers are unhappy, they will leave your settlement, setting back your resource production/recruitment numbers.

There’s still more I want to talk about settlements but I’ll save it for next week, in which we will discuss settlement guards, troop recruitment, and more. Thank you all for your continued support of the mod!