Ease-of-use proposal for early-game vehicles...

[neroden]

So we have a dozen different types of pack horses.  Of course, in reality, these were all the *same* type of horse.  Likewise, we have a dozen variants of the Humber Keel, a dozen of the skiff, and a dozen of the Norfolk Wherry.

I would like to be able to take a Humber Keel or Pack Horse that I purchased for moving piece goods and convert it to moving bulk goods.  I can think of a couple of ways to do this:
(1) Shift these to using the "hold" system like the East Indiaman and the Brig
(2) Use the "upgrade" system to allow a Pack Horse (piece goods) to be "upgraded" to a Pack Horse (bulk goods) or vice versa.  I rather like this, and I think it has applications to railways, where carriages were converted in various ways through modifications.

What do you think?

[jamespetts]

So we have a dozen different types of pack horses.  Of course, in reality, these were all the *same* type of horse.  Likewise, we have a dozen variants of the Humber Keel, a dozen of the skiff, and a dozen of the Norfolk Wherry.

I would like to be able to take a Humber Keel or Pack Horse that I purchased for moving piece goods and convert it to moving bulk goods.  I can think of a couple of ways to do this:
(1) Shift these to using the "hold" system like the East Indiaman and the Brig
(2) Use the "upgrade" system to allow a Pack Horse (piece goods) to be "upgraded" to a Pack Horse (bulk goods) or vice versa.  I rather like this, and I think it has applications to railways, where carriages were converted in various ways through modifications.

What do you think?

If we want to be forward looking, although harder to implement, the hull/hold system may well be more future-proof: the consist re-combination feature would then allow the horses same horses to be used for complex transport patterns involving switching out their packs (the pack-horse equivalent of a hold) depending on what goods that they are transporting. This may be quite hard to implement, and even harder to make backwards compatible, however, so an upgrade system might also be workable. The upgrades should have a very low cost to simulate the cost of switching out the types of packs to accommodate different types of goods.

[neroden]

If we want to be forward looking, although harder to implement, the hull/hold system may well be more future-proof: the consist re-combination feature would then allow the horses same horses to be used for complex transport patterns involving switching out their packs (the pack-horse equivalent of a hold) depending on what goods that they are transporting. This may be quite hard to implement, and even harder to make backwards compatible, however, so an upgrade system might also be workable. The upgrades should have a very low cost to simulate the cost of switching out the types of packs to accommodate different types of goods.

Oooooh, that's a really cool idea, I knew you were thinking about having trains change their consists en route but I hadn't thought about how that feature could automatically apply to the horses the same way.

[neroden]

So the hold/hull system is easy enough to implement going forwards, but I am not sure how we'd do the backward compatibility either.  The problem is that on loading, a vehicle which was in the old pak and is missing from the current pak can be replaced by a *single* vehicle in the new pak automatically, but not by a *consist* of vehicles, right?

My current, slightly goofy, idea is to keep the old "one type" horses (etc) around as vehicles which become obsolete in 1750 but can be upgraded to the new hold/hull-based vehicles!  They wouldn't appear to players except those loading old save files.