In Civ 3/4/5, which I play a lot, buildings are built in a queue. Finish one, start the next. Here, it seems the only way to do that is specify buildings where you want them and then “stop work”.
I get that we have enough workers to do parallel projects, but they are continuously taking resources needed by the priority build, and to make matters worse, I have builders wandering idle.
I think what would fix this is to have a priority queue for materials and workers.
For buildings, as long as the highest priority build gets what it needs, the next in queue can have the surplus, and so on.
For workers, if they’re idle waiting for wood planks, they should be chopping down trees and hauling logs to the saw pit. Likewise, if they’re waiting for anything, they should be looking at what needs to be done and doing that.
I ran the game through 9 years, and some trees I had set to be cut down were never cut, even though they were “prioritized”. I was NEVER able to build up a storage of logs, which everything needs. In the latest year, I saw a builder IDLE “unable to work”, with a dozen prioritized trees to be cut, and a palisade wall and gates to be built, etc.
EDIT: I found a trick to force some resource harvesting to the top of the queue: BUILD A ROAD THROUGH the resource. For whatever reason, looks like villagers prioritize building roads as #1 behind putting out fires. When the resource is gone, delete the road if necessary.
You almost need to be able to include in that queue those professions that use resources too. I’v been currently trying to upgrade multiple guard towers for two and half years. They all have everything they need, except for the iron. My iron bars keep getting sucked up for building tools, weapons, armor… I finally stopped all production of any items that required iron. Of course, it’s too late. Just as I stopped playing last night I had 60+ raiders sighted. ah well…
It could have been worse, I had 67 raiders this morning and they all went for the one section of the wall where an iron pit is and they almost all died. Still do not have the iron to upgrade the towers.
Yeah, if that happens to me, I’ll let 'er rip to see what the game does, but then load the autosave from 2 years back to see if I can avoid that somehow…
Yeah, it would be perfect if every citizen had a primary role and a secondary role, and their secondary role could trigger automatically if they are idle or in case of extreme need (e.g. town needs 50+ logs or 50+ stone, etc.), and why are weapons stored in town, rather than automatically distributed? I had raiders run straight to my storehouse and steal all my stored arrows and weapons. Meanwhile, everyone was unarmed… So I went back to a prior year and assigned 2 people to the tower that I’d left idle because I needed logs…
Still do not have the iron to upgrade the towers. 