low vessel
I considered making smaller, separate suggestions but it feels like it works better as one package.
With the introduction of factories and the railway system it's clear that the game is trying to complexify the economic buildup a bit and I'm all for it.
Currently every economic building seems very disjointed and this means that there will very quickly be a meta where only one type is really used, because they all require the same resource (gold) and all generate dividends in their own, independent ways (Except for the factory which is straight up only useful for generating a train network, with no real use to adding more factories or leveling them up).
Furthermore, which each new way of making money that relies only on buildings (which have fixed costs, and fixed construction times), workers become more and more obsolete. Even now they're not all that useful - even a large population of workers will make no money compared to a smaller population of only soldiers that happens to be in control of many ports, which doesn't make sense and is strategically less interesting.
These suggestion items have the aim of complexifying the economic buildup in the game so it becomes more strategic, more geographically relevant and more diversified in how you can approach it.
- Add a soft "employment cap" that increases with territory and factories, ports and cities (in reverse order).
- Make ports require something to send ships out (one train from a factory per ship for example).
- Make higher level factories more likely to send trains or send bigger trains to compensate.
- Trains only target ports and cities. When reaching a city it makes immediate money, when reaching a port it allows sending a trade ship out. You can control the proportion of trains going to cities vs ports.
- Ports send a train to a city on top of the immediate trade gold when a ship arrives.
- Make ports and factories work more efficiently depending on how many workers you have / your worker cap.
maiden fox