As I mentioned last time, my time to work on Bronze Age has been rather limited lately. I have managed, though, to make decent headway on world structure and generation. 

A settlement from the world map, and then zoomed into the settlement map.

The basics of structure placement is in place, as well. So now it's time to start talking about the economy.

The Economy

The economy in 3.0 will be largely similar to 2.x. Settlements will be focused around producing, transforming and consuming items. The core differences will be in population support and settlement design.

Population Support

I like the idea behind the population needs added in 2.6.1, but not the implementation. For 3.0 I'll be taking an approach more like the Caeser or Anno series.  Basic houses will require no support, but provide little housing. If you provide items to the residents, though,  the house will upgrade to a higher level. Higher level houses provide more housing and prosperity (more on that later), but have to be maintained with a steady supply of items or they will downgrade.

The basic progression is:

An

Note that house auto-upgrading will just be a feature of houses, other structures will be upgraded similarly to how they are in 2.x.

Prosperity

Bronze Age 3.0 will introduce money of a sort. Settlements will now have an amount of wealth, which can be accumulated and spent. It will be mostly used for high level cell developments, structures, and military units. Notably, it will be needed to expand your settlement to additional districts. Wealth is primarily produced through taxes and prosperity.

Wealth Per Season = (Prosperity / Population) * Tax Rate

Prosperity comes from advanced housing and other economic activity, such as trade routes.

Intra-Settlement Logistics

The largest difference when it comes to settlement management will be in moving items. Items aren't magically teleported to where they're needed (as they are in 2.x), nor are they hauled around by individuals (as in 1.x). Instead, a background process will calculate hauling paths, then simulate item movement along those paths.

Congestion

Congestion is the defining feature of this system. All tiles in a settlement will have a "throughput" level, improved through roads. When the amount of items moving across a tile exceeds its throughput, the item movement begins to be penalized. This will reward attention given to settlement layout and road design.

An example of congestion. Where the path is yellow the road is mildly congested. Where the path is red the path is heavily congested.

Each structure will have a "compression factor", essentially how many items a worker from that structure can carry in a single trip. This compression factor reduces congestion generation.

There will also be a concept of warehouses as intermediate structures. These wont actually produce or consume items, but they can be included as an intermediate step in path calculating. The benefit of this is that warehouses will provide a buffer of items, and have a higher compression factor.

With warehouses added to the example above, the higher compression factor reduces congestion through the center section of road.

What's Next

My plan is continue through getting the new economy logic in place, then but out a very basic beta for feedback.