Update 2023-01-20 - Camp Production

I’ve moved the production from the cities to the camps. Earlier, most of the production was through the cities. Camps generated most of the production currencies used by the cities and would occasionally complete their own quests and so produce something, but all of the actual production flowed through the city. With this sprint, I changed it so that it is the camps that manage the production instead.

The player can choose the production of camps they control that are connected to a city they control and each camp has a separate construction queue. I felt that the earlier paradigm was too centralized and I didn’t like how colonial it felt. Empowering the camps felt more in line with the rest of the game.

This resulted in a dynamic that I’m really excited about. Camps start as preserves, which use all of the production of the tile, and then industrialize into more specialized camps, which produce more of a pair of currencies, but nothing of the rest. With this new system, that means that they start out having the ability to produce using any of the three production currencies, but once specialized, can only use the production currency of that specialization. This increase in production but loss of flexibility is a dynamic that I’ve been trying to get into the game from the start and this feature does so in a way that I really like.

A lot of the flow has been broken by this change. I need to tweak a lot of the parameters and figure out some minor code changes to smoothen the whole thing, but I’m really happy with how this rough update works and I’m looking forward to getting it fully in shape.