More algorithm optimization needed to workforce/citizens in bigger settlements

[DozerKitty]

When it comes to bigger settlements (my biggest so far has just surpassed 5000 inhabitants), the algorithm seems to break down and no longer work as intended.

Current statistics of my population and labour pool:

Layout of my current city:

Boiled down, the biggest issues I’m encountering are as follows:

• Upkeep is an issue. Buildings keep getting condemned, however, this is mostly affecting production buildings, but some housing can be affected as well. The further out the building is, the bigger the problem gets. To mitigate this, I’ve tried to place stockyards and storehouses strategically requesting the needed building materials the nearby buildings will need for upkeep. This has helped quite a bit, but hasn’t solved the issue. Clicking the “Mark for immediate repairs” doesn’t seem to change things much, if at all.

• Travel time. SIngle-worker buildings are hit hard here. Ratcatchers, nightsoilmen, smokehouse etc will spend most of their time on anything but working as intended. The algorithm doesn’t seem to take into account where the workers live compared to the placement of their workplace. I’ve seen nightsoilmen that are placed in the north settlements go down to the south, and vice versa.

• Production numbers: As the city grows, the actual production numbers plummet. In early game I’ve seen smokehouse produce 1200-1300 pieces of smoked meat, but will usually never surpass 300 in bigger settlements. Firewood splitters and bakeries are also affected in the same manner.

There are many more smaller examples, but these are the main issues as I see them. Even though I have 800-1000 free labourers, they are not being utilized at all. I’m not sure how or why the algorithm seems to break like this, but it virtually makes it very difficult to have larger settlements. I do know that I’m an edge-case user, as very few people probably build as big as I do.

[Ro84]

Yeah this actually becomes an issue even with a single large town. The algorithm keeps insisting to assign jobs to people regardless of their home location; it seems just randomic: a library can have a worker living in the closest house and another worker living at the opposite side of the town, while the nearby houses have plenty of unemployed laborers; same for any other production building, including mines.

The algorithm simply does not care about living locations; this is a very old issue that needs to really be fixed.

[Daniel_Soul]

5k population is astonishing! My biggest city so far was 1300 people but I’ve noticed the same problems even if to a smaller degree. Another big issue is that building new structures becomes very slow because of the worker selection policy of the algorithm. Many times it happens that a builder bring the last resource to a construction site and then goes idle there as another worker on the opposite side of the town is assigned to complete the building. This makes no sense…

[Ranamar]

I do wish I could reliably know what my laborers were supposed to be doing. I know it mostly involves carrying stuff around and somewhat involves cutting trees or breaking rocks, but that doesn’t tell me why they aren’t doing some thing or another that needs to happen. (which I suspect is almost always “because all the laborers are currently occupied and we can’t tell that”)

[FrankvanDorp]

The late game still needs a LOT of improvement imho. In a game that is largely about resource management and transport, you really need a late game mechanic that allows the player to efficiently transport large numbers of goods. Currently, such a mechanic is lacking. This is a problem because this is a citybuilder, and people who play citybuilders often like to build huge cities, that’s where a lot of the fun lies.

Having individual laborers carry stuff around makes no sense in a game that already allows you to build wagons, and the problem there is that the only people allowed to use wagons are wainwrights, and they only transport a small selection of possible resources between a small selection of possible buildings.

It would make much more sense to give wagons to all villagers that can use them to transport whatever they need to. Builders are a major example, why not load all materials for a stretch of wall in a wagon and only have to drive there once, instead of having several villagers walk several times for each individual section?
In addition, the player needs more manual control, like the ability to design transport routes for wagons to follow, and maybe even to link certain buildings together, like linking a bakery to a specific granary that is close by, so only flour from that granary is used for stocking, not from granaries on the other end of town. By linking factories to the correct storages and other production buildings, the player could then eliminate long walking times for villagers.

I made a post about overhauling how wagons work here, and I feel like I’m referencing this post a lot here the past few weeks, but a lot of people seem to run into the issue of late game resource transport getting really inefficient. Idea: overhaul wainwrights and wagons to create vast, efficient transport networks in the late game

Right now, the most efficient way to reduce walking times and keep buildings productive that I have figured out, is to just build specially designated storage buildings for each area. So if you have a smokehouse, build a root cellar next to it, deselect everything inside except for fish, meat and their smoked counterparts, and then set a minimum quotum for fish and meat of something like 100 for both fish and meat, so the smoker can use this root cellar both to pick up raw meat and store smoked meat.

However, laborers are supposed to make sure quota in storage buildings are met but this doesn’t always seem to work very well, quite often it takes a long time for someone to deliver the goods. Laborers also seem to pick up goods only from other storage areas to fulfill these quota, never from production buildings, which sometimes causes them to remain empty for a long time.
For example, when I have designated granaries to provide flour to bakeries in town, they will only get flour once my mills have full storage and start moving flour to granaries. Until that moment, the bakers will just have to walk to the mills that are miles away (for some reason, bakers ARE allowed to pick up flour from mills, but laborers seeking to meet quota for storage buildings are not, no idea why).

[Darrke]

This issue has been brought up several times in the past as well. I posted back in March Better control of logistics management with some suggestions similar to what you’ve mentioned. I’m not sure if this is something the Devs are looking into, or if there is even a way for them to add it to the game at this stage without some major overhauls. But it’s been a topic of conversation for some time, with little to no movement on it. Hopefully, it’s something we’ll see some changes and improvements on.

Cheers

[FrankvanDorp]

You make very good points in that post. I think this is a big issue, in a citybuilder game you need to be able to go absolutely huge, that’s part of what makes the genre fun, and in a resource management game, you need to have mechanics to transport huge amounts in the late game.

Currently, because of the lack of manual controls or any transport route mechanisms, this game lacks both.
I would like it if devs communicated a bit more about what they are planning to do about this, or whether they’re planning anything at all. It sometimes feels like we’re shouting in the void here, and I don’t know if this is because they ignore this forum or because they disagree that this needs to be fixed, but if it’s the latter, I’d really love to know it, and know why they’re not fixing it. At the very least I would know I could stop bothering to keep posting about it.
There are several problems with this game that people have been pointing out for years at this point, that I haven’t seen anyone from Crate even address during that period (admittedly, I was gone for long periods at time so I could have missed it).