Blacksmith overhaul
The blacksmith presented some major flaws, especially at the lower levels.
First, the player had to think much in advance about what weapon setup was needed and build weapons accordingly. This added a frustrating delay to the gameplay, both at the lower levels of the building, sometimes forcing the player to be locked in a single type of unit for combat and at the upper levels where things get harder to change suddenly (for example to move from shield/sword/leather armor to spear/chain mail).
Secondly, right at the beginning, the player had to switch frequently between weapon and shield when building because there were not enough slots to build weapon, armor and shield at the same time.
For this purpose, the blacksmith was changed in the following way.
The new blacksmith management window
On the left side, the slider to assign workers to the blacksmith was added. The blacksmith does not have slots anymore. Each of these workers produce 3 units of goods that are stored in the blacksmith (and cannot be removed). The pool is shared with the goods delivered from city hall (obtained from plunder), so having the blacksmith working and not producing weapons will allow the player to upgrade (eventually…) even without getting any plunder.
Next to the worker slider, the stored goods progress bar was added. This shows the current amount of goods stored as well as how many are produced in the next turn with the current worker assignment level. To more visual, suggestive, information about the goods production value, the pool is automatically scaled if only a small fraction is actually full/being affected by the workers (example: pool of 9000 at blacksmith level 3, but only 500 goods are stored and with full worker assignment 400 more will be produced. In this case, the “pool” will show up as having maximum 500+400*2 = 1300 units. The maximum will still be 9000). The cost of assigned workers is shown in the lower part of the screen, if no weapon is selected. After altering the number of assigned workers, the save button must be pressed to confirm. This button can be seen on the lower left side of the window.
The weapons that ca be build are still visible in the upper part of the window. Clicking on one will however open the “buy” option below.
Blacksmith management window with a weapon selected
The player can see an image of the item and right below the number of stored items and the number of items to be bought. In this case, 74 were already stored in the city, 132 are selected to be bought for a total of 206 after the trade. To select the number of units, the player can use the slider, the buttons – and + to remove or add a unit or “Max” to select as many as possible. The cost of a single unit of the weapon is displayed below the icon, the effects of the weapon are listed on the right side, and the total cost of the whole batch is listed on the lower part of the screen, replacing the worker cost per turn. Please note that the weapons will cost “goods” and that cost will be removed from the pool.
To confirm the purchase, the player has to press the check-mark button. After a purchase is complete, the weapons are immediately available.
This change opens the way of a different approach to building weapons, as the player can completely eliminate the use of workers in the blacksmith if sufficient plunder is brought home.