Pico Islands/Blogs/2023/2023-05-09 - Country Roads

2023-05-09 - Country Roads

Version: 23-04-98

Posted by Andreas on 2023-05-09

Path construction by click

The fact that path building can only be done section by section was an intentional design decision to give maximum control and also to associate a certain amount of effort with path building. On large islands, however, this can quickly lead to excessive work if you have to click a path step by step over more than 20 fields.
Now you can have the path built up to a certain point with a single click. This way is certainly not always the ideal, but often enough. Of course, the existing functionality is still available as usual. We hope you welcome this new feature and keep us posted if you find any bugs or problems with it.

Livestock Balancing

So far, cattle, sheep and chickens have behaved relatively the same. They would be in the same number and also ate the same amount of plants. Here we have tried to bring in a little more variety.
The number of animals per farm now varies depending on the species. They also eat different amounts now. While a cow may eat all the grass in a field, chickens tend to eat smaller amounts. Nevertheless, due to their sheer mass, they can quickly "clear" an entire valley of grass.

In addition, we found a bug that meant that eaten wheat or hemp did not give a saturation bonus. We have fixed this now, since it should lead to the fact that one builds the Rancher rather far away from farms, but it should always be possible to increase the production of the rancher, if desired, by deliberately building it next to a farm.

Autopilot

In the past, we were always faced with the problem that the time it takes to play through an island is pretty long. If we wanted to test balancing adjustments or if we had to find a bug that only rarely occurs in special game situations, we had to invest a lot of time.
Because of these requirements, we implemented an "autopilot", which should cover enough game functions to play through an island completely on its own and also create some rather unusual game situations.
This is not available to players, but you will still benefit from it indirectly.

We hope this will save time in development in the future. Autopilot functions will also find their way back into the actual game in a direct way, as in the path construction by click.

In addition, we improved and fixed the following things:

added wiki pages for skills
mines harvest 3 instead of 2 coal items per resource
fixed possible crash in some special cases in wareOrders processing
fixed harbors so they start in valid sleep state

We wish you a lot of fun
Andreas and Steffen