A significant update is in progress, which will have huge affects on gameplay, and will probably bring a lot of bugs along with it.
Units will be of broader types – for example, carpenters who will be able to build workshops, horse carts, or ships, depending on what they’re assigned to. When they gain experience, it increases their skills in all the above.
Workshops are persistent, destructible structures that occupy one land-grid cell. This is part of a move toward an infrastructure model, where there must be an investment in your land/city to achieve anything more than subsistence.
Most units without a Workshop will only work at 25% productivity.
One Workshop will house multiple units when they have the same owner and unit type. So if you have 2 woodcutter units, they will live in the same workshop no matter their population size (this design may change to population limited).
When another player wants their units to work productively in the same land, they will have to build their own workshops.
Military units can burn down workshops.
Other unit types will be:
- Engineer – build and destroy walls, roads.
- Smith – Tools (requiring wood + metal): Farming, woodcutting, mining/quarry, engineering, weapons
- Miner – Mine tin, copper, gold, stone.
- Farmer – Grain, cattle, horses
- Carpenter – Build workshop, carts, shipwright (available only on coastal land)
Boats are a new unit type, but must be crewed by either a navy or fishing unit to be used. They can also hold passengers. Passenger and cargo space is limited by the size of the ship, which is determined by the amount of wood used when building.
When a boat is left abandoned by a crew, another player can come along and take it.
Land grid – The general direction will be toward using the land grid toward displaying all elements of a land as a visual summary here. It’s a kind of physical representation to understand what is happening in the land at a glance.
Lots of other changes coming, and things will of course evolve as the design is fleshed out.