Knights and Merchants.net Forum

This labourer idea splits me in two parts :p
- KaM is a game based on indirect control over your economy, every change to make it more "controlled" needs to be done very carefully, for exemple the woodcutter's checkboxes are really useful and don't change the essence of the game. For labourers, it's quite a huge aprt of the game :p
- But .. I think it'd be great to have a way to control them, I always spend my time doing roads, and removing half of it some minutes later when I see all of my poor sad buildings waiting for someone to hammer them

As you can see, quite a difficult position in my mind :p

The problem isn't when all your labourers are digging roads, like you said it's easy to cancel that, very useful if you want to split up your labourers on 2 different places.
The problem is more that when you're 1 sec too late with your placing roads you can loose 2 min building time because all your labourers are moving to 1 building, on the other side of your town, to build it. With the checkboxes for labourers some minor errors in your timing would make you loose way less time.
This doesn't mean timing wouldn't be important anymore..
It's like you said with the woodcutter, very useful but it won't change the essence of the game. It's not that with checkboxes you will be able to build a city twice as big.
You will still have the same indirect way of controlling your economy.

How about being able to remove messages by right clicking them? It's very anyoing to have 20 of them pop up in the middle of a fight.
Also why not write in the message which type of house that needs a worker instead of having to use the goto only to have to search for the house which is not occupied?

Very good points, imo.

Can we have a tosell list in the market?
I mean , we can define several kinds of wares to exchange into one thing , like that sell 2 lances , 2 bows and 2 axe then buy 3 gold ore.
Then the serfs can delivers these thing from different block of the city to the market , i think it will make the exchange more convenient and efficient , with less markets required

@bbokay: This is an interesting idea, but it will be much more complicated to set up in a convenient way. I don't think any implementation can fit into 180x300 pixels of space we've got without being much too overcomplicated and disastrous to use.

Yes it's an interesting idea, but as Krom said it's not possible to make it work in the space available, and I quite like the simplicity of the current interface.

The fact that you can't easily trade two things at once in the market means there is an advantage to having multiple markets, in the same way that there is an advantage to having multiple schools, multiple bakeries, etc. which adds more variety of tactics available. It also limits the exploitablility of the market because you can't just feed all your excess resources into one market at once. For example in multiplayer games I can mine coal, iron, stone, gold and feed it all into the market to buy weapons, (instead of manufacturing them myself) but I have to have 4 markets to do that, (much bigger investment) or feed the resources separately into one market, (slow) so therefore tactics like that are less exploitable. If I could feed all of those different resources into one market at once, it might become more effective than manufacturing weapons which would mean we'd need to increase market prices since we want manufacturing to always be more effective than trading in the long term (but the market is quicker and cheaper to build than the full manufacturing process, so it can pay off for a short period or quickly help out in crises like food shortages)

This may seem pretty far fetched but what about some sort of in-game translation system? Players can look at the flag of each player and select a language to translate their text from. I've encountered plenty of games where I have trouble talking to other players because we don't all speak the same language. Both in the lobby and in-game.

@BarbariansRule: Thats an interesting idea, but that probably wont work. Stand-alone translation system is gonna be too big, besides I doubt there are any open-source / freeware ones we could use. Secondly there are quite many languages we need - not so many systems worked with more than a dozen in my experience. Thirdly, translated text will not look nice, especially with taking typos and acronyms in regard. All-in-all I think thats not gonna work.

And we wouldn't be able to talk about people behind their backs anymore. We don't want that, do we...

Yeah I figured it wasn't very plausible, but I thought why not throw it out there. That is a good point TDL... Forget about my suggestion completely!

Random Map Generator

A challenging suggestion I'd say

i think someone already said that...the problem with it is the difficulty of the maps. Everything needs to be close but also not too close.

Making KaM maps that look good is very difficult when humans do it, I doubt a computer could do a good job without a monumental amount of work.

Hehe, I never said it was easy

More constructive, what I had in mind was a pseudo random map generator:
The computer combines multiple human made map parts (map parts made specifically for this goal)

I wouldn't prioritize it very high though