I really hate the multiple Districts Concept

[Four T 4]

I really dislike the way you have to have multiple districts to expand upon the map. I'm not sure what point of even adding extra districts does?

[tadeos_trollhammer]

I think it is a good way to prevent the beavers from having to run too far for their needs and wares etc.

[Atriador]

To be honest, I could deal better with this district thing if it would only do exactly that: prevent beavers from running terrible long ways. But the need to distribute your resources like a madman via two different buildings annoys the hell out of me. But besides that, i love the game till now.

[GMC]

Originally posted by Four T 4:

I'm not sure what point of even adding extra districts does?

It keeps journey times reasonable. If resources are produced too far from where they're consumed, the producer will fill up and stop producing while the consumer is empty and not consuming. If beavers live too far from work, they'll spend most of the day commuting and not get any work done.

On a practical note, it also stops the game from grinding to a halt while trying to do path-finding for hundreds of beavers travelling half-way across the map. Pathfinding cost tends to increase with the square of the distance, so many short journeys require less effort than fewer, longer journeys.

[jaquig]

You can also focus each district to produce part of the resources needed, then ship that resource around.
You only need to grow wheat, make flour in 1 district. Shipping the flour is least work max benefit if each district has a bakery.

This allows lower population in each district, which in turn makes it easier to feed and water the population.

[Tonisaka]

I like the district idea, I had 10 districts, 4 are just for travel, but having a districts dedicate itself to doing one job makes it manageable for my personal choice,

I had one main district that does all the production that takes in all resources to make another like, bread etc, then distribute those to other districts.
Another would be all the wood production,
Then the water distributor one would be the one with the lake (granted my lake was 1/4 of the map)

to make it efficent for travel all my district connected in strait lines, as traveling was rather far, especially the food production one had to travel across the map. Every district i had had 3-5 dropoff points , each of those would carry 300 max of a single product like water, food, wood, etc

[City Builder]

Originally posted by Tonisaka:

I like the district idea, I had 10 districts....

What was your beaver population in each district?

I find there not bad until you have large populations then the drop off and distribution centers can't keep up.

[Tazilon]

Seems fairly reasonable to me. If you get too far away from the base camp, you need to set up a new camp for support. The distribution system makes it pretty simple to do.

[Tazilon]

Originally posted by City Builder:

Originally posted by Tonisaka:

I like the district idea, I had 10 districts....

What was your beaver population in each district?

I find there not bad until you have large populations then the drop off and distribution centers can't keep up.

I have the opposite experience. When your districts get large populations, starting a new district barely impacts them at all.

[Alcator]

1. As far as I know, the District limitations (maximum range) are there to make pathfinding reasonable - the game suffered from terrible performance before districts were added. That's the technical reason for it.
   
2. Once you learn how the Distribution centers and their limits work, it's actually quite powerful and allows solving some problems that happen when everything is one big "heap" - things like "Survival Ark" for IronTooth are possible with Districts which wouldn't be possible without them.

[AOE2.GG | MattWithAHat]

As already pointed out, the districts are just necessary at the time, until there may be a better solution. However, what I hate about it, is that the distribution posts are so large and you can't even build on top of them. On large maps I get to the point where I easily need 15+ distribution posts in my main district, which takes up a huge amount of space.

Since these buildings are mostly for performance and eco efficiency reasons, there should be better ways to integrate them into your structures. Make them stackable, like warehouses and maybe a bit smaller. Same goes for drop off points.

Also some more convenience in setting up the routes would be nice.

[Alcator]

Originally posted by tactica.gg | MattWithAHat_AoE:

As already pointed out, the districts are just necessary at the time, until there may be a better solution. However, what I hate about it, is that the distribution posts are so large and you can't even build on top of them. On large maps I get to the point where I easily need 15+ distribution posts in my main district, which takes up a huge amount of space.

Since these buildings are mostly for performance and eco efficiency reasons, there should be better ways to integrate them into your structures. Make them stackable, like warehouses and maybe a bit smaller. Same goes for drop off points.

Also some more convenience in setting up the routes would be nice.

Why on earth would you need 15 Distrib Posts?? Each of them can have up to 10 paths, Water and 1 type of food is typically all you may need long-term.

Try a RELAY approach - you send stuff from central district only to two or three closest districts, and have them send surplus stuff further to distant districts. That way, you should comfortably do it with just 2 Distrib Posts in the central district (perhaps sending Planks, Gears, Metal Blocks).

Also, consider placing Distrib Posts on top of storage buildings to save space.

[AOE2.GG | MattWithAHat]

Well, if you have multiple districts that are not yet self sustaining and they each have 100+ beavers, 2 DPs is definately not enough. I have 1500 beaver colony and I couldn't possibly distribute everything I need in the outer regions from my main district with just 2 DPs. For instance, I have a very large wood production in the center and east of the map and need to transport all that wood to a large dam project on the west, that alone takes up at least 3 or 4 DPs (I'm talking tens of thousands of logs that need to be transported in a timely manner).

Also having the ability to set up 10 paths per DP doesn't increase the quantity of stuff you can transport. Usually I have 1 DP that transports food to one outer drop off point only, if that district still doesn't have a running food production (which can happen sometimes, if you want to build in an area that doesn't have water yet). If I would schedule that same DP to also transport everything else, like building material etc., they would be too busy doing that and would only transport food every 10th round.

One example: I have a "dam building district" with roughly 150 beavers all being busy with just contruction and moving stuff around. There is not much room for food production and water production is also difficult. So imagine how many DPs I need to get them all the food, water, wood etc. 2 DPs can't handle that at all.

I'm already doing relay approaches if it's far away. But for that you also need more DPs, they are just distributed. Also it's less efficient than transporting materials in one go. At a certain scale you just need so many of those DPs.

[Wolfman]

I think the district concept as it is needs most effort in terms of conceptionally and practically rework. However, I wouldn't say it's the first thing that has to be adressed immediatly. But it's quite improvable.

[graphitepaddle]

Districts: Specialization, instead of self-sufficiency: Good topic, got me thinking --> Instead of making districts self-sufficient, make specialists.

Late in my first game, and I was getting bored, and how does the real world work? Everyone does they are best at, and gets their required products from other specialists.

Started by creating a district that only creates Planks. Besides building needed infrastructure, they only run the Lumber Mills & Power Wheels that energize them. Food, water. & logs from other districts who have it in abundance.

Expanding this ideas, gives the current game meaning.

[Mr. Clutch]

Districts are just bad for the game because they need to be manually fine-tuned. I would love to have the game automatically sort that out and let me focus on the real game.