The Progress of V0.4, 3 January 2024: The Return

Greetings Conquerors!

Happy New Years! It has been quite some time since the last progress update. You may be wondering what has been taking so long. 

Well, while I have been continuing to work on the mod every day, most of my time has been taken by my IRL job. In addition to this, the aforementioned issues with scripts from previous versions of the mod have forced me to backtrack and work on improving them. The issue is that a lot of these scripts were foundational to the mod which means a lot of other scripts require calling on them to work. So as I rewrite one script to work better in the engine, it effectively makes the scripts that utilized it obsolete. 

This indicated to me that I basically needed to redo the mod from scratch, using more efficient modding practices (this was my first real mod so a lot of the issues players experience were most likely due to inefficient scripting practices).

As I have been going back and rewriting the scripts, I have been learning what causes specific issues. For example, crashes during battles seem to have been caused by over-utilizing the "MoveTo" function and issues that involved having to re-load the game were caused by script functions that were written too long and storing too much data in memory.

It's been a long process and having less time to work on it has not helped. However, the work I've done so far has definitely made the mod perform A LOT smoother. For example, I'm just about finished reworking the scripting of the economy system. Remember in the older versions it took ages for the economy to update every day? Now with the scripting improvements, at 30 FPS the economy takes about 4-5 seconds to fully update, which means at 60 FPS it should take around 2 seconds. This is including the new features added to the economy system mentioned in previous posts. The difference is really night and day.

Now, I wanted to go over some changes you'll notice when you start a new game. Firstly, there is a new system for conquering bandit camps/territories!

Settlement Building

In previous versions when you conquered a territory and tried to place your banner, you may have gotten a notification that you could not claim the area while there were enemies. However it would not indicate where these enemies were. Well, now if enemies are detected, a misc quest will start indicating the locations of where the enemies are, so you aren't constantly having to look for the 1 enemy that's still alive.

Additionally, when you finally do place your banner, it will no longer immediately place it at the same spot in front of you. I have added a new placement system that allows you to choose where exactly you want to place objects.

Objects can also be moved later by crouching and activating them, starting the placement system again to move it somewhere else.

Once you have placed your banner, you can begin the process of building a settlement at your new territory. Just like in previous versions, the settlement will initially be listed as a "Hideout" unless it is a mine.

However, you can choose to change it to one of three types: Farms, Hunting Lodges, and Lumber Mills.

Farms will produce Crates of Food, Hunting Lodges produce Crates of Food and Leather, and Lumber Mills produce Wooden Planks. The new economy system utilizes a lot of different resources as opposed to the original "Food", "Wood", and "Metal" in recent versions. Each of these resources are divided into separate reserves in each "Holding" (Cities and Settlements) and Faction. 

The Building Material Reserves will be of great importance when initially building your settlement, as building materials are required for construction.

When you have set your settlement type, your settlement will now have the ability to produce resources. However, how will it produce resources if there is nobody to actually gather the resources? That is where settlers come in! But first we will need a place for the settlers to stay. We can do this by constructing tents! (Provided by the Great Simdrew!)

Tents increase the max population of the settlement by 2 and allows Settlers to flow into the settlement.

Settlers can be assigned to perform specific jobs including gathering the resources based on your settlement type, crafting at a blacksmith's forge, or being assigned to your army. The amount of settlers that flow into your settlement per day is dependent on the influence you have with the Commoners in nearby cities.

We can assign the new settler to our Lumber Mill by interacting with the faction banner. Once he is assigned, he will begin producing Wooden Planks for our settlement and faction.

You may notice that he is now damaging his hands by punching down trees for us in order to get our Wood. That's because we haven't given him any tools to perform his job. Settlers can still produce resources without tools but it will be at a highly reduced rate.

To craft tools we can construct a blacksmith's forge at our settlement.

Once our Forge is constructed, we will need to wait for another settler to join the settlement. Once that happens, we can assign him to the forge.

We can then choose what exactly we want him to craft.

He will then start crafting assuming the materials he needs is in the Reserves of the settlement.

Once the tools show up in the Reserves, our workers will immediately be able to use them and increase the resource production.

Another important resource in the settlement is food, as each settler requires 1 Crate of food per day. Since our settlement does not produce any food, we can either place food into their reserves that they can eat, or import it from other factions. To import it we need to start a trade agreement with another faction. We'll go to Jarl Balgruuf since he is nearby.

When you start a trade agreement, you will need to negotiate the terms of the agreement. The Jarl most likely want to profit from trading with you and want to pay a bit lower than the market price for your imports or want you to pay a bit higher for his exports.

You can negotiate with him using your speech skill or influence with him in order to get the best deal possible.

Once you have negotiated the agreement, you can begin importing and exporting resource to and from your faction.

The cost of each resource to import is determined by the base cost, the agreed upon cost during the negotiation, and the distance from the exporting faction to your faction's capital.

Once you have chosen what you want to import, your Faction's reserves will now show a revenue.

Your faction will then automatically send the needed resources to your settlement.

This whole system is just one of the things I've been working on the past few months and there is still a lot more to talk about. Thank you all very much for your continued support over the past few months and the interest you have for this mod continues to keep me going to work on it!