In the past week I've been able to significantly increase my time to work on Bronze Age. The feature set I've planned for the first beta is almost finished.

Logistic paths are being calculated and displayed, and the fundamental economic simulation is complete. All that remains on that front is fleshing out the structure list.

Population Support Revisited

Prompted by some discussions on the discord server, I've slightly changed plans for population support. One of the biggest changes is the concept of item groups. Populations won't require specific items, but groups of items. The more items in that group that's available to the pop, the happier they'll be.

As an example: a basic house may require one food item, which can be bread, meat or fish. If you provide the house with bread, they'll be content. If you provide them with both bread and meat, they'll be happier. A more advanced house could require two types of food. There will also be item groups for drinks and luxuries.

Castes

Another big change is castes. Each race's population will be split into castes. They will have different housing and support needs, and will operate different structures. The Humittes, for example, will have two castes: citizens and nobles. Most of the economy will be run by citizens, with nobles operating administrative and religious structures.

Higher castes will have higher support needs and lower castes can ascend to higher castes if there is support capacity. Castes will also "naturally" grow, with each caste producing new population of the same caste.

Caste and ascension are separate from house upgrading discussed previously. Houses will upgrade to more advanced houses that support the same caste. Just the citizen caste will be implemented for beta 1, with the following house levels and needs.