Suggestion: Improve the hauling rules

[Aphid]

I've managed to lose a game to this, and find it annoying to manage, and it honestly doesn't make any sense how this is done.

Currently, for most resource gathering (woodcutting, stone/clay gathering, food gathering, etc), most of your civilian time is not spent gathering the resource, but moving it to the warehouse. Movement speed, roads, etc. are all critical, much more than production speed for these tasks. But it's made up to three times worse by the hauling criteria.

Currently, it works like this:
1. Gather until the builiding is full.
2. Empty out the full building.
3. Repeat.

Now imagine a forest with a 10% chance of getting an egg, a root, or a plant fiber as ' bonus'. These bonus resources drastically lower the speed at which you can gather stuff, open glades or cut trees (as in the basis of your entire economy). Why? Imagine a wood camp that gathers 11 wood, 1 insect, 1 egg, 1 root, 1 plant fiber after chopping 8 trees down.. The workers will make a total of 8 (!) trips to empty this out instead of 3, most of those trips carrying only one single resource. It makes the queen's glade, which is ostensibly the easiest environment, actually the hardest one due to it having the most types of different resources in its trees.

In addition, if you are producing things such as planks in the early game, you will want to use them as soon as you make them. You want those houses and production buildings up fast. In order to do this, it's optimal to constantly click the 'send back now' button. It also applies to making complex food, etc. The first few outputs should always be rushed to warehouse manually to get the resolve faster. It's tedious.

I'd like this to be a modicum more intelligent. Here's a much better way. that also makes increased building capacity worth something (instead of harming you for production buildings and being marginally useful for things like woodcutters):

1. If there is at least N of any resource in a building, there N is how much a civilian can carry (typically: 5), then one of the workers goes and delivers that to the warehouse. This is checked after each worker completes each task. The building does not need to be full for this to happen.
2. If a building is completely full, but (1) is false, go deliver the biggest stack to the warehouse.
3. If the user clicks the 'deliver now' button, empty out a building. But only then.

In other words, in the first situation above (11 wood, 1 bug, 1 egg, 1 root, 1 fiber), the lumberjacks should make 2 trips of 5 wood each and leave the scraps of other stuff. Once any of them builds up to 5 (or the camp gets full before them) deliver it.

This would make much more sense, and would make bonus resources not actually detrimental. Which honestly makes little sense.

[Carambar]

Hélo.

I found your 1, 2, 3 approach quite interesting; no idea how hard it would be to code, taking into account that both villager carry capacity and storage capacity can be increased independantly. How well would that mechanic scale with a great imbalance between the two is something I'm worried about.

There could also be added an essential building (that would be unlocked rather early similarly to food consumption, maybe one or two levels later) that could employ up to 2-3 workers that will have for sole duty to haul stuff around; BUT every worker in the settlement would still haul by themselves if they deem it necessary. (obviously early game, this building wont be a priority)

It would be an extra addition during transition to mid-late game.

[DG]

The 'carry a full load' method is more efficient but I think it needs some extra logic. One problem is that you can have a building creating provisions and flour, say, and there are four provisions in the building that are never carried out while the workers continually make flour and deliver flour. An order that needs precisely those four provisions never gets satisfied.

[OverThere]

Finished goods should be shown in the same way as input resources. Each type of good as its own little square with a close-window-X in the top right corner. Clicking the close window X on any item causes an immediate force delivery command - not for everything in storage, but for just the particular item.

This would allow players to target the specific item of critical need, in the same way items are managed for the input side of the same facility. It also allows micro-managing building storage to reduce some of the more dumb worker behaviour when emptying building storage (ie, if you deliver your 14 logs now you avoid a bunch of useless trips with workers delivering one leather, one plant fiber etc.)

For what it's worth, I have input this as a suggestion via the in-game F11 command.

[dragonboy212]

So I've thought about this a bit and I've thought that market should only have a +5 bonus to carry capacity but allow carrying of different types of goods like (7 wood,2 fiber and 1 resin) as it would make me use it even with harpies. Another way could be a logistics building that transports resources from storage to the warehouse when staffed so your gatherers spend the whole time between breaks gathering.

[Narandia]

I'd say just having some special rule for the woodcutters specifically would do wonders on this issue. On some biomes you frequently run into situations where all 3 workers have to make extra delivery runs for just 1-2 of each bonus resource, when they already tend to have some of the longest distances to any warehouse.

Nevermind how, once the delivery is triggered, workers returning from woodcutting can end up dropping their yield and then immediately take that one wood to deliver it by its own.

That one can happen with other buildings too of course, but its usually not too bad elsewhere. With camps, you can at least also cancel the delivery period early by moving them around, though a setting or general mechanic change where the delivery "mode" turns off when there isn't much left in the storage anyway would definitely be nice. Even clicking the button again to deactivate it would help (either option should still allow workers to finish their current delivery run, unlike current workarounds where the carried goods just get teleported back to the building).

[Ozmungus]

Why not just change it so that a delivery guy can carry 5 of any mixed materials? eg. 1 wood, 1 bug, 1 egg, 1 root, 1 fibre

[Narandia]

I think some kind of system where they can carry at least 2 different materials (maybe with only 1 or 2 capacity for the second one) would go a long way to solve the problem, yeah. Again, mainly a problem for the woodcutters in my experience.

[tomoscar]

I would like to see the worker delivering the gathered items directly to a warehouse if the warehouse is closer than the camp. This is often the case for woodcutters clearing out the area around a newly built warehouse.

[vindicar]

An insteresting idea. Albeit I think a perk that lets haulers pick up multiple item types up to a total carrying capacity would be a good idea. It'd likely be more interesting than the existing +5 perk.
Hell, maybe replace Harpy Firekeeper's +5 capacity bonus with that. At least in that case Harpy wouldn't be a middling pick in most situations...