This may be a bug but I’m terrible at doing that kind of reports so…
I had paused the game to deselect the construction of several refuges
When unpausing, almost all the villagers have the message about they doing nothing, and they were standing on work places or refuges
At fist thought the game was still paused because there wasn’t any movement
Even the fisher which have a message about delivering fish, was standing in place
I left the map and went to main menu, entered the saved game, and things seems fine now
It feels to me that the law of diminishing returns is at work in this game. The larger it gets, the less efficient it becomes. If I give the builders one task to build, even if I have 40 builders, it takes several years to complete the job.
It’s like that for a bit in early growth. I find once i pass 400-500 people, then i have a whack ton of builders and labourers and things build faster then in tier 2/1. I made a stone wall around the mountains in my current town, and it took a year (for a really extensive wall). However, that was with 35 builders and 30 labourers. This comes from the town that took 8 years to construct a granary with 200 people.
I expected it to get slower, but it speeds up when you reach a critical mass. THis also means you don’t need to mainly select prioritize (expect for some walls)
My 700 pops town has 50 builders, with a lot of materials and resources, but it takes years to build a bunch of towers, and it takes decades to build roads and walls. It seems the farther the building sites are from the town center, the longer it takes to finish the jobs.
I had that happen the other day, every single villager (I had about 15 because I just started) had the message “Doing Stuff” which I swear I saw and I have never seen anywhere before and stood stock still for about 3 months while I stared at them. I am kicking myself for not taking a screenshot. I found out that the issue was a laborer lock, when I opened the professions menu I found that my fields had taken all available laborers as farmers and I was left laborless. Deselecting some of the farmers and thus adding laborers fixed the issue.
I didn’t mean the work seems not being done, or doing something low priority instead of important stuff. they were literally standing in place
Those on work buildings have an “idle” animation, and they have a message of not doing anything
The fisher has a message of delivering fish but he wasn’t moving either, just standing in place
Nothing on the map moved like if it was paused but it wasn’t, it was weird