Solutions for traffic jams

[TomBombardil]

Hi, As A KaM fan i like to make Huge cities this means a lot of planning and a lot of distribution.

Now i know that choke points as warehouses are always overly crouded so i make lots of road around them. But still te servants bump in to eachother and wait till the oter one moves. esspecialy the waiting annoys me as there is a empty tile next to them. this is not only with servants but also with farmers who want the same tile, ( I hear this is solved in KaM remake).

Problem: Working units wating for the other unit to get out of the way.

Now i have a copple ideas/solution's? but i dont know if they are possble:

1. Keep Right (or left for the english):
This is for the serfs on 2 tile roads, as they move the will keep right. This will make bumping in to eachother less more frequent

2. One way traffic:
Be able to set road direction, or rather stop road direction the other way. This will allow to set the general way of traffic, but serfs till can get on/off the way of traffic. This is esspecialy usefull in 2-tile roads (or bigger), big chokepoint as the wearhouse (prefent incoming and outgoing on tiles to make incoming and outgoing flow), Or set roundwas around buildings/tiles.

3.limited space:
Be able to set radius of work or better be able to set a preferd radius of work area for serfs/buildings (somewhat like rollecoaster tycoon dedocated workspace / setlers 3 wokr erea) This will enable serfs to prefer a ceartain area of work but still be able to leave if there is nothing to do or eat/feed troops. But is esspecaly handy to give farmers ther own space and wont interfere with thear neighbours (unless there is nothing to do in there own, if preferd is a option).

4.link buildings.
Only allow goods of that building 'source' be delivered to 'Set' building. esspecaly handy for coal miners close to a smith to only deliver to that smith unless there is no room in que of 'set building'

5. Goods prioraty order:
Be able to set withs goods are more inportand to be moved than others (like setlers 3). This way you are able to set that, for instance: corn sould always be move over leather. so if there is a serf looking for work in its preferd area and there is a option of those it will choose the 'corn'. This must only be inplemented if it doesnt interfere with close by choise AND the feeding goes first.

These are all my sugestions to make the world of KaM a better place.

Tell me what You think and If these options should/can be inplemented in KaM Remake.

Regards Tom Bombardil

PS. I'm verry dyslectic and not native english speaker. i hope your able to read it and that there are not to many mistakes.

[Da Revolution]

Traffic jams are really easy to solve. I never have them even though I don't build double roads. Its important to close your storehouse for certain wares and you'll need to build for example bakers/butchers near an inn.

Do you play singleplayer mainly?

[Encaitar]

Traffic jams are really easy to solve. I never have them even though I don't build double roads. Its important to close your storehouse for certain wares and you'll need to build for example bakers/butchers near an inn.

Do you play singleplayer mainly?

You do have a point that all buildings that are 'chained together' should be build together too, which leads to less crowded roads. But TomBombardil points are well thought and some are maybe worth implementing. So let's at least discuss them before burning them down without even given them a look! For instance, I do like idea #1 -Keep Right- as it seems rather logical to me that a 2-tile road does have two directions.

For the other ideas:
#2 -One way traffic- : Don't know about this, maybe it's worth discussing.
#3 -Limited space- : I would vote against it, imho it feels too much as detail-management what does not fit KaM.
#4 -Link buildings- : It don't think that's a improvement to the game. To keep the game straight and simple, I think every village should only do his own job (so a serve does carry stuff, and a miner mines stuff ). To me no mingling of jobs.
#5 -Goods prioraty order- : It could be an enhancement to the priority menu. But maybe again such a priority menu would give the player too much details to manage.

[Krom]

That mostly sounds like too much micro-management really...
Keep-right rule is a good one, we already thought of that, but it is rather hard to implement programmatically with A*, thats why we have it on ice (

[Lewin]

I don't think traffic is a problem in the Remake now, as long as you plan your village well. Since deliveries are now very efficient to minimise walking for the serfs there's a lot less unnecessary traffic than in the original game. We also allow people to pass each other while going in/out of a house which didn't happen in the original game. If you block the right things in the storehouses and build multiple storehouses in large villages you can usually avoid traffic jams. Personally I think it's part of the challenge of KaM, keeping your road network running smoothly and efficiently Since I've been playing multiplayer I've changed the way I layout my villages and I'm a lot more efficient at it now.
Keeping right would make double lane roads more useful, but unfortunately as Krom said it's hard to implement into pathfinding. Maybe we can look at this eventually.

I agree with Krom that the other ideas are probably too much micromanagement. We're always happy to read new ideas though, please keep discussing it if you wish

[godest]

I like your ideas, but the most important one i think that should be implemented in the future is the option/feature to set the priority for wares to be delivered. For example, set food to have a higher priority so that villagers dont walk into an empty inn just cause they dont focus more effort on refilling it than getting leather or something else.

[Krom]

Inn is already at top priority, together with School and Barracks.

[godest]

Inn is already at top priority, together with School and Barracks.

cant say iv noticed that. I usaly see during endgame while im not even recruting any new villagers the inn/inns being out of food right next to a storehouse filled with bread and no one is refilling it and instead people go in and out and starve :/

[Krom]

That often happens if you have just one Inn and brought food gets eaten very quickly, there's just not enough serfs nearby to refill it quickly, as they are busy with already going deliveries someplace else. Solution - build more Inns and hire more serfs.

On a sidenote: One Inn can fit only 6 units at once, even if it is full of food and there are 6 units inside then 7th unit will go in and out hungry.

[Lewin]

Another interesting thing about inns is that if you only have 1 or 2 food types available (say bread and wine) then your inn will become empty much faster, so you need more inns in a large village in order to keep them stocked. I think this is a nice feature, it means there is a "reward" for producing many types of food (or at least a penalty for only producing 1-2 types).

[godest]

Hummm... in the original they all ate one of each food type right? one serf ate 1 bread, one wine and one sasuage? If you also have fish they dont eat all types do they or how does that work anyways? You dont need all food types to get 100% hunger regained or?

[tover]

i had it a few days ago,i didnt have enough serfs and had run out of goldchests,i had goldmines and smelters but my serfs seemed to busy to walk all the way to the goldmine(goldmine was full of goldore constantly but the serfs barely walked there)so i eneded up using the marketbuilding to trade goldchests to make more serfs even tho i had all the buildings and recources to just make some myself(for some reason they did go to the marketplace with some priority)the priorities in this game seem to be oke 90% of the time,but that other 10% when they just wont do what u need them to do most i have also wished i could force priorities

[Lewin]

i had it a few days ago,i didnt have enough serfs and had run out of goldchests,i had goldmines and smelters but my serfs seemed to busy to walk all the way to the goldmine(goldmine was full of goldore constantly but the serfs barely walked there)so i eneded up using the marketbuilding to trade goldchests to make more serfs even tho i had all the buildings and recources to just make some myself(for some reason they did go to the marketplace with some priority)the priorities in this game seem to be oke 90% of the time,but that other 10% when they just wont do what u need them to do most i have also wished i could force priorities

In emergencies like that you can force priorities by closing the doors of various houses/blocking deliveries in the storehouse by clicking the resource. Serfs will prefer shorter distance deliveries, and they also prefer to start a delivery that they are standing near to already. These things make the village far more efficient but they can occasionally mean that buildings like mines don't get the attention they deserve because they are further away.

[Bo_]

The problem in Kam is that you will always have traffic jams in big cities, unless you manage your storehouses, yes more than 1, well. Same for the roads.
So that's why people always close it, except for food and sometimes chests.

[tover]

wasnt sure where to post this,but the perfectionist in me got rly bothered when i noticed that serfs will use a road that isnt complete as long as the edges are touching each other(if u make a full square road u can leave the last corner off and they still seem to walk by it as if it was there)