From lurking in this thread:
http://forum.c-rpg.net/index.php/topic,18256.0.htmlthe problem with resource gathering is it already takes hours to go anywhere or do anything. if i can buy an item for gold, or spend 4 hours going to a tree on the map then 5 hours to get lumber, then 3 hours to go to a mountain, then 2 hours to gather iron, then 4 hours to go a river, then 6 hours to get fish guts, then 3 hours to get back to a village, then 1 hour to craft 1 item using all the resources i gathered... ill pay the gold.
Valid point. As the other guy said, you are not supposed to do it yourself, although I say you SHOULD be able to do a lot yourself! This is why I mentioned the different tiers. You do all yourself and get low equipment, or you can get lots of people all getting resources, get them to a town where they hand it over to designated refiners who, when finished, gives it to designated craftmen.
One thing that would be pretty necessary for this would be for factions to have "guilds" or "headquarters" in fiefs. They pay X ammount of money and they have a small base there where everyone can store items/equipment/money (NOT troops) and where rank over X (or title Y like smith) can take resources and rank Z and above can take resources/refined stuff and rank Æ and above can take everything (including gold).
Otherwise this would be a COMPLETE nightmare to micromanage.
I would also like a way to "auto pickup" for other players. This is more for Caravans than crafting. Basically you can let another player get all your TRADE Goods without having to manually login. So a faction can set up a caravan, he goes from fief to fief and pickup while the different members make Trade Goods. Might be a bit OP and minimize what the different members has to do, but currently it's still very little for them to do. Having those "Headquarters", though, could make this not needed AND make the individual member actually have to do something (dump his stuff or travel and dump).
What do you guys think? Should these headquarters and autotrade/pickup be added?