Holdings, production and stacks

A quickie update because I’m a bit short on time at the minute.

The last two weeks have been spent trying to further build up the sparse systems of the strategic layer, so the buildings from last time around are being given a new feature; item production and I’ve added another new system and screen to support that. The idea is that once you’ve built your blacksmiths workshop at your mercenary camp you can hire a blacksmith to go in it and set him to work turning raw materials into usable weapons and armour for your mercenaries to use in upcoming missions. At first it’ll just be a cheaper way to equip mercenaries over what you can buy from local traders but as your blacksmith gets better, your tech level increase, your workshop gets upgraded you’ll be able to craft better gear than you can buy.

To support this I also needed to add raw materials into the game so your blacksmith (and other craftsmen) would have something to work with. So there are now a range of raw material resource items that you’ll be able to find and trade like the normal items but the main way of obtaining them will be through the new ‘holdings’ system. Holdings represent the lands and properties your mercenary company has bought, seized or been granted through their activities, they come in different types from empty lands to gold mines and you can exert some control over what exactly they do but, what they do in the main, is pump out resources and ship them to your mercenary camp.

Getting this working required some adjustments to the item and inventory system as previously the grid was strictly a one item per square deal which works fine when you are dealing with small numbers of finished mercenary gear but becomes a little unwieldy when you are getting shipments of thirty charcoal every turn into your company stores. So I spent a bunch of time adding support for items stacks, splitting stacks and merging stacks. Only some items can be stacked at the minute I’ll just limit it to whatever makes most sense I think.

And that’s about it. I’m currently still working through the actual production of the items at the blacksmith as that’s all very bare-bones and I want a proper build queue so that you can queue up a whole set of gear if you have the materials.