Mar 4
Sidegrades for vehicles
At the moment, for the most part a more advanced vehicle is strictly better in every way to the one that it replaces. I'd love some early-to-midgame options that are a sidegrade, for example maybe a two-person version of the large canoe that requires double the oars to make, and if paddled by one person is slower than a large canoe, but if paddled by two people is as fast as the paddleboat, but at the tradeoff of much smaller inventory capacity (maybe only 3 slots like the first canoe)
Likewise at the Large Canoe level of technology, maybe the double-keel style like a catamaran -- requires the hemp rope to build, and is slower than a Large Canoe, but with extra carrying capacity would be great!
And sometimes I just want to get to the next town over in the early game and don't need carry capacity, so maybe Basic Engineering or Mechanics can build a bicycle -- faster and more calorie efficient than sprinting, but only works on engineered surfaces (let's say, maybe does not work on surfaces with speed < 1.0) so I can quickly run errands to get a little more food from the next town over because I just got a craving and my local store is sold out
Or perhaps people want to set up something like public transport, where an alternative to the Powered Cart replaces the built-in storage capacity with two or three seats in the back, and the driver can charge a small ticket price to take some citizens down to the harbour town on the coast.
Having these sidegrades might also mean that for a given player, they might want several vehicles -- for example, I can definitely see myself buying a fast-but-limited-storage vehicle *and* the slow-but-extra-capacity *and* the no-storage-but-extra-passengers vehicles, so that I can switch between the vehicles for different situations -- to avoid the current situation on small-ish population servers, where vehicles are sold only once per player and therefore either have a huge markup or that player might struggle to keep liquidity throughout the game.
Pending
Repairable parts is being added to all vehicles across which should help with longterm income for machine part producers in all tiers. As for sidegrades overall is difficult because on the majority there isnt enough time spent in each era of the game progression wise currently to warrant the time to add a whole bunch of new vehicles (as they are complicated assets to make) but it is not a bad idea though it will likely be something that we will look into in the future in some capacity perhaps.