Posted July 25, 2017 by Commodore Shawn
First, a few notes on 1.4: Work is almost completed. There are just a couple more bugs (which might get pushed to 1.5) and the standard release checklist to go through. I'm targeting release for friday.
My goal for the settlement influence radius was to keep settlements cohesive. Due to the need to move items around the settlement keeping them from being too spread out is a major concern. Sparse settlements will have problems with logistics, and will present more complicated pathing problems and threaten performance. The formula behind the radius has been changed a few times, to make sure settlements have enough room to grow, but keep it from getting unreasonably large.
A side benefit of the settlement influence radius is preventing accidents when ordering construction. A few times I've been looking at one settlement, while actually having a different settlement selected. The influence radius has prevented me from placing a structure from Settlement B inside Settlement A.
Right now I'm planning on moving the World Update up to 1.5 (pushing boats back, yet again), as part of that update the world will get a major overhaul. Part of that overhaul will be persistent regions. The new world generator in 1.3 generates regions, which you see as coherent biomes. Those regions are discarded once generation is finished, though. The new world generator will remember those regions, allowing them to be used for gameplay. I'm already planning on using them for Masklings. Instead of being psychopathic raiders, they would now have a set of regions that they consider their territory, and try and keep the player out of it.
Another use for regions I've been considering is to replace the Settlement Influence Radius. Instead of settlements being restricted to a circle that grows with population, the settlements would be restricted to a single region, or a region and all adjacent regions. On the one hand I think this would be a more natural restriction, as borders would tend to follow natural boundaries (rivers, forests, different biomes). On the other hand it would invalidate some currently useful tactics, like straddling a region border with a settlement to get access to multiple resource types.
What do you all think about regions and the settlement influence radius?