I’ve been doing a lot of preparation work for the production mechanics. While I expected it to be a massive amount of work, I keep underestimating it.



First of all, based on repeated feedback that the words county (a geographical subunit of province) and country (a nation) are very similar, I renamed county to shire. It means the same thing and has a fantasy vibe.



World builder



I realized an easy way to start implementing the world builder (aka level editor). While this is a distraction from working on the economic system, there’s two reasons I started on it anyway. First, it’s good to have a basic framework in place so that I keep taking it into account while making the rest of the game. Second, it’s fun and useful to be able to make detailed maps. Currently, it just supports changing the province orientation and assigning which provinces are land and water.







Clearance levels



I then continued with implementing ‘clearance levels´. This was important to control which faction can actually give orders to construct buildings.



Each menu has a clearance level assigned. Some are public, which means it can be viewed by any player. Others are ´detailed´, meaning it can be viewed by any faction of the country. Then you have 'classified’, which means it can only be viewed by the faction holding the related portfolio. So classified army information can be seen by the faction controlling the army portfolio. Finally, there’s 'orders’, which allows access to menus to give orders related to the portfolio.



When I start implementing espionage, attaining clearance levels will be one of the features. This would allow you to see detailed and classified information of other countries.



Buildings



I hoped to finish everything concerning buildings this week, but I severely underestimated the extend of the framework. So I managed to get just over half done.



You construct buildings in holdings. Buildings will serve as place for the population to produce (farms, mines, factories) or gain various game effects (town walls, city hall, moat). While I’m now implementing it because I need it for the production buildings, the framework already needs to support all other options as well.



Like many other game elements, buildings are defined in plain text files and thus fully moddable. However, there are a few major categories which are hardcoded. Such as production buildings and plain settlements buildings.



In the construction menu, you can select a building to construct in the holding (if you have the right clearance levels). I spent quite a bit of time on the related menu, which you can see below. The construction project of the building will be started during turn resolution.





That’s where I’m now. The next step is that the construction project, after a number of turns, gets turned into an actual building. After which the population should start to produce goods.