Resourciv: Revamping Peeps, Part III

Guess it's. Never. Really. Over!

Although I thought it'd be neat, I didn't like the feel of rural hexes being both home- and work-places. Just felt difficult and nonintuitive more than anything. I've reverted to the previous (unreleased) system, where all peeps live in a habitat hex and work at a non-habitat hex, with the working-time system now in place (yay!).

But I'm not really happy with it. Right now, there's no way to reassign peeps between different hexes, and honestly that's not the problem. If I had to actively reassign peeps to work hexes I want, that would suck. If it were automatic, it would still suck because it means I need to make the AI smart enough to know where to assign them (and this is true regardless). What I liked the most is what I have going in the released version, where you don't assign labor until you build buildings, and otherwise you don't worry about it and are even incentivized to improve rural hexes.

So I had another thought: rather than assigning peeps to rural hexes, pool peeps leftover from buildings across all rural hexes, distributing their labor power. Imagine a settlement with 3 peeps and 11 hexes, each with 5/10 labor; if 1 peep were assigned to a building, that leaves 2 peeps and thus 5×2 labor power for the rural territory; thus the one building hex receives 5 labor power from its 1 peep, whereas each rural hex receives 5×2 divided by 10 = 1 labor power.

There's some drawbacks: first, it's perhaps less board gamey in that rural hexes are no longer worked by 1 peep each; second, you can no longer trace rural yields to individual hexes, which makes tooltips a little more boring; finally, less productive hexes may feel like deadweights (although unproductive hexes can be removed from consideration, and less productive hexes may just incentivize improvement).

However, this preserves the dynamic I already have going, which basically lets you specialize peeps at your own pace, and in fact works more-or-less the same except "fairer" since yields are impacted by labor. I'm still not sure if this is the route I want to go, but I'm really considering it. Speak now or hold your peace! Or whatever they say.