News & Announcements - Crafting/Harvesting/Trade v2 Dev Chat Video

Current caravan gathering will be the same, but if you send more than one caravan, they will now all gather at the same time instead of one after the other.

There will be 50 different new herbs and mineral types, and dozens of useable drops for animals in successful or unsuccessful battles. There will be generic gatherer units and 3 specialist gatherers (skinner, miner, and herbalist) to gather the rarer forms of these new resources.

Dwarves will be especially good at mining, elves at herbalist, orcs at skinning, and humans are a jack of all trades.

72 new weapons, 53 new armor types, and 9 new mounts.

7 new buildings will be needed to make these new items (horse trainer, tanner, etc.) that work in tandem with your basic productions buildings. You need the specialist buildings, but you still produce the items in the blacksmith, etc. You can build multiples of these buildings to increase the production rates.

Current trade will remain exactly as it is except the seller of goods will pay a sales tax.

Faction trade hub cities will become active, and they will be the only place to trade the new resources and craftable goods. You can also sell the curent items and basic resources. There will be a sales tax, but it will be lower than on our current global market, and it will change as your standing at the hub changes. Also, your caravans take the goods to the hub, the goods are listed for sell, and then your caravans return so they aren't "locked up" until the goods are sold.

Everyone will be able to see the nearest trade hub and use it. There will be a new trader unit that you can send out and station at any other trade hub you'd like to be able to see their market. You send caravans out to the trade hub to pick up the goods you buy. Caravans can now be sent to a hub, and from there to another hub or another town or wait there for orders.

New buildings for Trade V2 are Merchants Guild which determines the number of traders your town can support and Trade Offices which determines the number of buy and sell orders you can have listed from any one town.

Trade visibilty now effects all trades, and you can only see items for sell within a certain radius from your town. Increasing your marketplace level will increase that visibility radius. This will be up to about 100 squares radius. To see further, you need to position a trader in a trade hub. Any trade you can see, you can buy from or sell to. As long as you can see the goods for sell, you can buy--you don't need a trader there as long as you have caravans available to bring gold. But you need a trader there--to have an "office" there--to place buy or sell orders there.

Trade rankings will be reset to zero and your trade score will be determined by the number of times you pay sales tax (the "neutral standing with the faction" sales tax you would have paid).

You can now specialize your armies to specific biones and terrains. Each item has positives and negative trade offs. Something good at attack might be worse at defense. Mounts will increase speed or carry capacity. Some equipment will be better on certain terrains and others in certain biomes. Some are good during the day or the night, some are better against animals, or monsters, or will give a greater bonus if the user is a certain race.

Mineral resources are in fixed positions and can be depleted, but they will generate more resources. They have a limited number of resources to be harvested from them, but they will come back.

Herbs, once completely harvested, are gone but will respawn in another location. So you can guard and tend the herbs to maintain it over time, or just harvest everything and then it'll respawn potentially far away from you. The herbs do have regional or biome preferences, though.

Some hides, minerals, and herbs will be fairly common and they will be used for a lower level of crafted goods. Rare-to-find new resources will be for higher level uses.

Caravans will not cost gold upkeep and there will NOT be different caravan types (fast versus large capacity). Caravans are currently left the same (number of, how much carry, speed). No current plans to change this.

Harvesters pick up your new harvested items. Herbalists, miners, skinners require no upkeep. Trader units have upkeep costs (the cost of running an office at the trade hub).

Giving a mount to a unit does not make it a cavalry unit--they just ride (move more quickly) to the battle site, dismount, and battle as their unit type would.

The new armor and weapons will help defend against certain units or are better on certain terrain, but always choices to make based on trade offs. You can unequip and change your unit's equipage when they are at home.

No new user prestige options with this new release. The double-speed prestige units will also apply to your traders and new gathering units.

The new resources can be harvested by any race, but some of the new equipment is race specific. There will be a few new discoveries that are specific to race--only a specific race can discover them--relating to equipment manufacturing. All races can use that equipment, but there will be less of an advantage to them for doing so.

Dwarven faction areas will have more mines.

Herb patches generally appear in woodland and forests, and minerals on mountains and hills. You can't put a city on mines or specialist mineral mine veins. The general/common minerals and herbs are distributed throughout the land, and you could place a city on those and then that mineral or herb patch is gone and will respawn elsewhere on the map.

Faction standing will be reinstated. You can see them on that faction's page, and your standing will effect the tax rate you pay. If they are below -35, you will not be able to use that hub. In this release, there is no way to change your faction standing.

Players will continue to produce spears, horses, chainmail, etc., like in the past, and that is what you will continue to use to produce your troops. You don't have to use crafted equipment. Crafted equipment is a choice to boost your troops abilities in specific situations.

Peace of the camp will work exactly the same for the gathering of resources as it currently does with caravans.

You can not send harvesters with the armies, but you must send them afterwards to gather the drops for the battle. You can send the harvester following the army, before the attack has happened, just as long as it doesn't arrive before the battle happens.

Some of the herbs released on the map may not have uses immediately. Some herbs and hides will act as spell components in the future. It was important to get the herbs available before updating current spells or releasing new spells schools that use these components. In the future, currently available spells will need these new components to cast them. But not right now.

The gathering and crafting buildings will only require food hourly upkeep (no other basic resource hourly cost). The trade office building does require basic resource (beyond food) hourly upkeep.

You can claim sovereignty on resource patches, but it will perform the exact same way is sovereignty currently performs. There will be no additional benefits.

Yes, if a fixed position resource is in an area with no 5 or higher food, then a player might have incentive to place a city there to be close to it despite the lack of food.

Yes, there will be an inequality in distribution of some of these resources.

No new building plots in the cities.

Yes, you can have troops that are equiped differently all in the same division.

Different factions hubs will usually have the gathered items common to the area. (Items rare to the area might be priced higher than in an area they are common). Their visibility will differ based on if you have a trader there or not. Their tax rate on selling will differ based on how much they like you.

Factions will not gather or sell goods in their trade hub (it will be a player-driven market in terms of prices and availability), but factions might buy goods someday.

You produce military units exactly the same as now, but then you can unequip them (and their equipment returns to your town inventory) and change their equipment to specialized equipment while they are in the city.

[Already answered questions..sorry, too tired to type it again.]

No, you can't assassinate other player's traders (at trade hubs) at this time. You can buy goods at one trade hub and ship it directly to another trade hub to sell it.

Yes, some of the animal body parts from the body parts tournament will be making a reappearance in this release. These are the parts that will have uses (and the ones they didn't feel had uses won't reappear). New herbs and minerals and such may be added in the future as new uses for them are made.

This release will come out in the next few days (toward the end of this week).