I have just loaded a series of changes to the towne material system, as well as a guard upkeep. In particular:

TOWNE MATERIAL CHANGES
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All townes can now produce all raw materials. Each towne has a certain amount of workers, and towne governors can assign these workers to produce the desired materials. The governors will need to coordinate their production settings with their city or council to ensure that all materials are being supplied properly.

The syntax for assigning workers is TOWNE ASSIGN WORKERS <amount> TO <material>. This specifies the amount of workers that will be producing the material - to remove workers from production, simply assign a lower number to the material. Assigning 0 workers to a material disables its production entirely. You can not assign more than 100 workers to a single material.

For each towne, the materials are divided into primary and non-primary ones. Primary materials are those that the towne was capable of producing until now (with some exceptions), and all others are non-primary. Production of non-primary materials is 50% slower.

The amount of workers that each towne has access to depends on how many primary materials the towne has - townes with one primary material get 100 workers, those with two get 200, and townes with three materials get 300 workers.

The output of the TOWNE MAT SUMMARY command has been significantly improved, it should now provide all the information needed to effectively manage your towne's production. It lists worker count assigned to each material, current desirability, estimated amount of raw material units produced by the towne during an in-game month, as well as various hints on how to improve your production speed.

Please note that changes to production desirability are not instant - changes to material prices will require some time before any noticeable effects on production speed can be observed.

Townes of Agirni, Annona, Blackthorne, El'jazira, Kaark'krazul, and Velin have a different set of primary materials than what they were producing previously. All the other townes' primary materials match their previous production. The changes ensure that all cities and councils have equivalent access to materials.

Additionally, food commodities should be produced faster now (refer to HELP MATERIALS for specific numbers).


GUARD UPKEEP
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The other change that I have added is the introduction of upkeep for city and towne guards. The upkeep is paid in food commodities (dairy, fruit, grain, meat, and vegetable). Regular guards require 1 food commodity every in-game month, while elite guards require 2.5 food commodities. This applies to both city and towne guards - the upkeep for towne guards is taken from the reserves of their controlling city or council.

The numbers have been chosen so that townes with the appropriate primary materials can produce just enough food to feed all of their guards, as long as they maintain a maximum desirability and no fear in their townes. Each city/council has enough food commodities stockpiled to be able to optimise their production to the desired level before their reserves run out, and having more townes produce food can cover if necessary, at the cost of the production of other materials.

Information about paid upkeep is added to the city/council revlog. If the city/council does not have enough food to feed their guards for two in-game months in a row, all the guards who haven't received food will quit service. The shortage will be logged in the main city log, so the organization will have time to resolve the situation.

While the system is new, the guards will not actually quit - I will only enable this part once I am satisfied that everything is running smoothly.

To prevent intentional sabotage of the system, the minimum stock of food commodities can no longer be set to less than 1,000.

If you want to dismiss a guard from service, you can now use CITY GUARD DISMISS <guard>. This requires the Security privilege, and can only be done in the council chambers of the city or council. This has a balance cost, the guard needs to be located there with you, and a message will be given over the city/council channel.


As always, if there are any problems with the additions, please report then in the usual way.


Garryn

Penned by my hand on the 22nd of Solis, in the year 636 AD.