City Idle

ELECTRICITY IS LIVE!
This is a big update and it is highly likely additional updates will follow to modify balance of “things”. Electricity affects every production line there is, hence it is rather difficult to balance. Send me feedback 🙂
UPDATES
+ BREAKING CHANGE – Houses have new max capacity logic! Now goods are needed in houses to get higher capacity. For example berries give +1 max living space, bread +2 and so on. This can have huge change in some smaller islands if goods are not transported there.
In case this affects your city: add more cheap housing to keep population stable to areas where employment is high, but you don’t transport berries, fish, bread, meat, beds, dishes, etc… and/or don’t have tavern/cafe.
+ HUGE NEW FEATURE – Electricity: You can now build your own power plant to massively boost production by 2x for most buildings and increase houses max capacity by +4!
+ QUALITY OF LIFE: Holding down CTRL will set priority to all buildings of same type on the whole map.
+ Smaller adjustments to water flow. For most cases it will not cause any issues, but worth to double check that all pipes work as intended.
+ Great fire now has animation.

+ META CHANGE: horse wagons now have a special same size garage building. Old garage does not take in horse wagons anymore and existing horse wagons are automatically converted to wheelbarrows. Sorry!
Reasoning for this update is that it is now easier to plan which transport tool different locations should use. For some it does not make sense to use horse wagons, but garage would always try to still get them if accessible and it is impossible to control this.
One of the design principles for this game is to minimize amount of building specific settings, so “layout would be expressive”. Less micromanagement of buildings, more strategic placement planning.
Obviously this goal will fail and can’t be achieved 100%, but something to keep in mind as one of the goals. So every setting a building has goes through careful consideration.
+ NEW HEATMAP: storage heatmap – shows how full storages for a selected resource are.
+ NEW HEATMAP: People needs heatmap – shows how certain needs are satisfied in houses are.
+ BUGFIX: Homes and animal farms were slightly broken after last release. They really really tried to keep storages at 100% and that meant they became less efficient. This issue is now fixed and both should be back to normal.
+ BUGFIX: Brewery started producing only if storage was fully filled in case it was connected to beer pipe. Now it produces even if storage is not full.

• Huge buf: Cafe and pub now last for 25000 ticks instead of 10000 previously.
• Huge nerf Fishing harbours produce 50% less fish.
• library and construction now show correct animation when transporting with vehicle.
• people wearing clothes also have animation for work.

• WAREHOUSES / LIBRARIES / HARBOURS transport algorithm changes: (for harbours this applies to land transport, not ships!)
  – Warehouse only takes from other same type warehouse, if their storage is more than 50% full. From producers, if their storage is 25% full.
  – Harbour only takes from other sources via land, if their storage is 75% full. (so local island would not starve of resource it is exporting).
  – Library only takes from other library, if other library storage is 90% full.
  – Always prefer to bring resource they have least of in storage with small random of 0-5% of max storage.
  – Avoid deliveries if they can transport less than 50% of transport vehicle capacity (exceptions if source max storage is really small, then limit is 75% of max storage of source component. This only applies to bigger vehicles)
  – Avoid transporting from other same type if after trade they would have more resource in storage than source would have. This is to avoid ping-pong of same resource in case of high storage numbers.

• HARBOUR algorithm changes if using ships. (Not land based transport)
  – Harbours always choose resource to import they have least of in storage
  – Harbours always choose resource to export they have most of in storage (only if there is nothing to import!)
  – Harbours avoid deliveries that are less than 50% of ship capacity, if storage has at least 50 items. (Reduces usage of ships for small deliveries).

+ BREAKING CHANGE – Only homes take water from pipes going throuhg under it. Rest of the components need to be connected to the grid. (To fix existing building, select all tiles of that ONE building and move it, then move it back. It removes pipes under it. I left it so that pipe network would not break if you load the game.)
+ NEW VISUAL – Visualizing trade routes – click on any resource in component storage to view how it gets transported around the map. (needs to be researched first though!)
+ NEW TECH: Coffee!
+ NEW TECH: Horse wagons!
+ University does not take research papers anymore from thinking huts.
+ Bakery and clay based production does not use coal anymore. In addition to changes to ratio of coal vs wood usage in some buildings. General ratio is 3 wood or 1 coal for production.
+ area select does not move pipes anymore.
+ Component animals panel design is updated to support smaller screens. (Takes less space).