Logistics Changes - Did Anyone notice?

[Olleus]

So now workers in a production building will source their ingredients directly from neighbouring buildings if possible, rather than exclusively from the warehouse. Has anyone noticed a difference? I used to cluster my production around each other and the warehouse anyway, and used to group them roughly by production chain as well (just to find easier to remember where they were). I haven't noticed things being produced much faster, but I haven't zoomed in on a single villager for minutes at a time to see exactly what they were doing either. Has it been revolutionary for anyone? New strategies of placing mills right next to farms?

Impactful or not, I like the idea. I'm all up for rewarding the player a little for doing things that feel natural and immersive in the first place. The only un-intuitive thing about it is that it seems to be care about straight line distance between two buildings, not the front-door-to-front-door via unobstructed tiles. That's a bit of a shame, because it further encourages the very unnatural and un-obvious playstyle of mashing together all production buildings without paths (which is already slightly more efficient than the alternative).

I also think it would be cool if similar adjacency logic applied to housing: the closer to the hearth they are the more resolve they could give. Say +4 if right next to it, down to +1 if it's on the edge of the allowed zone (doubling it for race-specific housing). It wouldn't be a huge change, but I think it would be nice, lead to settlements looking a little more natural, and remove what is currently a noob trap.

[Bukkfrig]

I'm not sure what the point of the change was, maybe my brain doesn't work well in logistics chains. Was it:

(1) To move materials from the warehouse to certain buildings more efficiently (in less time), or
(2) To prevent one building from hoarding all of a particular type of material and preventing other production buildings accessing those resources.

If it's (1), then I just can't picture how it actually saves any time or how I'm supposed to build to take advantage of it. I still build the same way: production building entrances as close as possible to any warehouse.

If it's (2), then that's fine, perhaps I'm getting some small gain from it that I don't really notice. I don't usually have too many buildings competing for the same resource. And the times that I do, it's often more of an issue like I enabled Coal for a recipe and since it all got taken inside a building, my firekeeper can't use it and I can't sacrifice it. Or I enabled planks for a recipe, and now my builders can't access it. Those issues are still not addressed.

Edit: Oh, I guess it's about recently manufactured goods, for example copper bars could be manufactured in the Smelter and then taken directly from there to the Toolshop without going via the warehouse at all. Just trying to think about which other resources are similarly produced by a production building and then used in one... Flour. Pigments. Actually, any resource produced in gathering camps including woodcutters, mines... Maybe it's not as insignificant as I thought.

[Olleus]

Say you have a lumber mill turning wood -> plank and a smithy turning planks (+ other things) -> tools. Before you would have:

Lumber mill workers take wood from warehouse to lumber mill
Lumber mill workers make planks
Lumber mill workers take planks to warehouse
Smithy workers take planks from warehouse to smithy
etc...

Now, if the smithy and mill are close enough together it is

Lumber mill workers take wood from warehouse to lumber mill
Lumber mill workers make planks
Smithy workers take planks from *lumber mill* to smithy
etc...

One step has been removed, so the lumber mill workers go walkies slightly less often if someone takes their planks directly. But yeah, not a huge change in practical terms.

[SamuraiJones]

I haven't noticed much difference, but then i also clamber for parts so i no production building is ever more than a handful of squares from a warehouse. I have seen it happen, when i watch for it though.

Walking any distance is super expensive, so i feel like it's still the best move to build warehouses everywhere. But one trip next door vs 2 trips to the warehouse is an improvement... a small one admittedly, but the game is tight enough that i'm sure it's significant.

[Nazenn]

I hadn't noticed when I was still doing groups around the warehouse. However in one of my recent games I was in desperate need for planks and I set up a carpenter right next to two woodchopper huts and then I did notice. That choice saved that particular run, where as I had been frustrated waiting for the wood to get delivered to the warehouse first

Since then I've started grouping food processing places near farms or large meat sources and that does cut down the time it takes to start production quite a lot depending on the layout of your town, so then the only real wait is for the final delivery to the warehouse and nothing else

I do think that front door/path access should be part of it though.

[Crank Stanis]

I wrote about a problem a month ago, that the more cap of building's storage is giving a disadvantage, if you dont have cornerstone for increasing carry, no Harpy nore Marketplace and buffer time is getting longer unless you click manually every "bring to the storage now". Most of the times I was avoiding to have the cornerstone for store cap, if I dont have carry bonus.

Now, the manufacturers run smoother and less idle. I feel faster in early years.

I noticed one about the glade event where I have to bring tools, I was in hurry to produce a few tools from the workshop and was tried to click it to bring to the storage now, but the scouter just picked it up from the workshop directly and bring to the glade event. So much time saved. That's one impactful.

[Narandia]

one aspect I like to try to take advantage of is other workers taking stuff from farms so the farmers can harvest more. Kinda would love if builders could take building materials from building storage too, as well as scouts here and there. For most of my industry though it doesn't feel like it gets to shine much since blight management still favors the clustered approach anyway.

[LotusBlade]

If all buildings are near warehouse, it does not matters anyway and this is what i personally do every run. Maybe it was change for prestige-20 mostly. At p4 it feels irrelevant.

[Silberfuchs]

Many things are hard to notice but have very real impacts nonetheless.
"Nice, another +10% chance for 2x production" => yeah it's nice, but hard to actually see and feel.

The logistics update makes a difference, doesn't mean it's the kind of difference that's easy to see for all of us in action.

[Samseng Yik]

I think this is a make sense changes and correct direction.
Not always have big impact, but it add up

[Olleus]

Glad to see that general consensus is broadly the same as my impressions. I like the change more because I like feeling clever about my settlement layout, than any real gains to efficiency. Although, because of rain engines giving massive speed production boost, transport time becomes an ever-larger fraction of the total production chain and so is even more important than before.

This accumulation of lot of small variables (logistics time, speed multipliers, double production modifiers, etc...) gives a lot of depth to the game. But because they're so invisible to the player, there's a lack of feedback about when something the player is doing them well or badly. I wonder if misunderstanding (or not at all realising the existence of) these subtleties acts as a big barrier in people improving with the game? Of course, a forum were half the contributors play at P20 is probably not the best place to gauge this...

[Alexander]

I see two potential purposes for tuning logistics:
1) A quality of life feature that removes the need for annoying micromanagement.
2) A new mechanics that would be fun to use.

The first purpose does not really apply. Each building has 3 recipes, most of the recipes have multiple ingredients, building blueprints are acquired gradually and unpredictable, and as the result, there's no way to organize the buildings into production chains to solve the problem with accumulation of resources in the building output storage. I still cluster my production buildings around the warehouse to average the transportation time, because achieving optimal transportation time through delivery chains seems impossible.

The only usable mechanics added by the update is the "agriculture cluster" described in previous comments. Other production buildings still need to be organized into good old "industrial cluster" around a warehouse.

These logistics changes probably improve the overall production somewhat, but it could be as well achieved by boosting global production speed.

As much as the game needs some changes in logistics, this one looks really underwhelming. However, I hope that it will make sense after future improvements.

[Crank Stanis]

If the gears are getting expensive and scarcity, which can prevent building many storages. Or a small storage requires one worker.
Then the new logistics is really important.