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Game-Mechanics: Supply Chains

While introducing new types of goods like paper & dye, tool & weapons and horses, we have yet avoided using complex supply-chains, for the sake of intuitive usability.

It’s about time for another posting about Coobico’s supply chains and how they affect the management of a settlement. Based on our general mantra of keeping Coobico’s gameplay as simple as possible, we started out with only a hand-full of resources and goods – while tweaking the game it felt necessary to introduce additional types of goods.

To be precise, “simple” settlers produce and need basic goods, while “advanced” settlers require and manufacture additional, different types of resources. This is a straightforward fundamental underlying principle of several city-building games we decided to implement too. For example, a farm and its upgrades can provide basic necessities like food-supplies and wood & crop, important for almost all settlers. But with an advanced upgrade like a papermill, you can also produce paper & dye, which is required to keep scholars and healers happy.

While introducing new types of goods like paper & dye, tool & weapons and horses, we have yet avoided using complex supply-chains, for the sake of intuitive usability. You will not need to build different types of buildings depending on each other as production chains (as in the Anno series, for example). Whenever a settlement requires a certain resource, you can either manually harvest it somewhere or uncover it in a dungeon; you can also trade it from another settlement or build an according production spot in your settlement (which might require certain tech achievements and will probably raise the settlement’s pollution level). This works consistently for each of the resources of the game.

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