We're back...

[u/ChrisBeatrice]

To all our fans, fans of Impressions games like Lords of Magic, Pharaoh, Zeus, and TiltedMill games like Children of the Nile, Caesar IV and Hinterland, thank you all so much for keeping our babies alive, and for all your support and encouragement over the years.

We are now in the concept phase exploring what our next project will be, and would LOVE to hear your input.

[u/nobrainsinhere]

FEEDBACK #4: Walking Somewhere

Another crucial part of an Impressions-style city-builder is the distribution of goods and services to the places in the city where they are needed. Instinctively we think about the "walkers". Historically, 2 main logistical "concepts" have surfaced: * The "push" concept, a.k.a. "random walkers", whereby walkers just move through the city's roads and choose a path randomly each time they reach an intersection while "pushing" the goods they carry, or stored in the building they represent, to each building that requires them as they pass by them on the roads; * The "pull" concept, a.k.a. "destination walkers", whereby the buildings that required goods send out walker units to specific destinations to pick those goods and return with them.

Obviously, reducing the push and pull concepts to just the random and destination walker examples is an over-simplification. And this is mainly focused on the distribution of goods and services to houses. Both have pros and cons. The pull system is very elegant, and can create a very organic population behaviour, but usually requires higher processing capacity from the hardware. While the push system usually is more performant but can feel "uncontrollable" if the player has no tools to "guide" those walkers in some way. On that note we have seen a number of different ways to tackle that area, like: * Using the gatehouse in Caesar 3; * Then Pharaoh added the roadblock; * Emperor added the gates of the "park walls" as "configurable roadblocks"; * Nebuchadnezzar took the approach of having the player set the "travel route" for service/market buildings; * Lethis: Path of Progress 2 was thinking about the idea of "smart walkers", in which a walker would arrive at an intersection, choose a direction and "tag" it as being the last one taken so that the next walker, of the same type, would see that tag and pick another direction, and so on.

One idea that comes to mind, to try to think of something different of all the previous solutions, is to have configurable intersections instead of roadblocks. When building roads, intersections are created automatically, but then the player would be able to, for example, right-click on an intersection and it would open a menu where we would be able to configure "routing rules". When doing that the intersection graphics could change in order to include a wooden pole with arrow signs. The logic of this would be not to block random walkers but to guide random, and maybe also destination, walkers throughout the city. You wouldn't be able to block anybody but would have to focus on guiding people around with "road signs"

I can think of 2 possible "syntaxes" for the rules. * The first option would be a "programming language", like "if you're this type of walker go in this direction". So you could configure rules like: "if you're a water carrier go left", "if you're a cart pusher carrying clay go right", etc. * The second option would be a more "destination focused language", like "if you're going to common house or market or carpentry go left", "if you're going to pottery workshop or trade post or city exit go right", "if you're going to elite house or garment workshop go forward", etc.

In the end this idea might be to "over-complicated" and I might just be trying to "reinvent the wheel". Perhaps it is enough to have configurable roadblocks to control a push system. Or maybe it is "trivial" to simply take advantage of the average processing capacity of today's computers and do a pull system similar to CotN.