See all this wood lying down ?
The laborers needed to find a shelter for the blizzard…
Their shelters are in the bottom of the image ; there is only one road and it passes just in front of the stockyard where they could drop their wood …
So WHY do they get rid of their wood ?
they could drop it in the stockyard as it’s on their way home
It doesn’t slow them down, so they at least could keep it with them, and once the blizzard is finished they can resume their task and bring it to the stockyard
It’s part of my serie of posts about the frustrating AI.
I just learned yesterday that when you have labourers flattening the ground somewhere, they dont go straight till the end of the job. They switch labourers and simply abandon the position with a hand cart (carrying something, possibly? Sand or rocks from the ground?) and sometime later another person comes to take the work from where they left.
Its almost the same “logic” applied to this issue…
Any task given for laborers or builders aren’t completed straight away. I had shelters building on the countdown, where the builder just need to sit there, counting up to 2 and builder leave to pee. Even in prioritize projects this happens a lot.
I wholehearted agree about the AI - kind of ridiculous that the farmer dropped his food to go find some other food. But, it’s not just blizzards and hunger - raids, need to go drink at the pub, etc.
Eventually, if you have enough free laborers, they’ll retrieve the dropped items, but sometimes it can take several in-game years. Perhaps, the Devs could implement an option to be able to select a close-by villager and then be able to select the dropped item to ‘tag it’ for immediate pickup and delivery.
Another possible solution - instead of a villager dropping whatever they are carrying intermediately due to an event, they should drop it in front of whatever building that they are going to (shelter, pub, etc) and when the event is over (end of raid, storm,etc), the villager exits the building and automatically picks up the dropped item and proceeds to deliver it wherever.
Laborers can spend a lot of time just doing nothing–that’s a lot of drain on the resources, especially food at the moment. When I’m not building and have wagons in action, my laborers are doing very little.
The AI definitely needs improvement: it needs to be able to set priorities: with how much time is lost currently, I don’t mind say a villager working without tools for a season than what’s going on–they’d be far more productive holding off for a bit on lesser priority tasks than what they do now.
There’s too many checks that can cause them to overwrite current action: getting food, clothes, baskets, tools, restocking shelter that I’ve noticed so far. It’s painful watching some of those triggering in a chain: they stop what they’re doing, go do something else, walk back, drop it again and do anything thing–rinse and repeat. The restocking one affects everyone in that house as well from what I can tell, so instead of one village completing the restock, it takes several away from jobs.
The dropping food to get food is a tad annoying.
Food (and water I assume) should have a high priority, that makes sense: stop what you’re doing, get food and carry on. But when stopping to get tools or a basket or clothes, I’d rather they wait till their next food check, at least. So they can go do a resupply chain and head back to job in one round trip then the several it can take now.
If a laborer is in a house, they should be the one to restock, not an actual job role.
) and sometime later another person comes to take the work from where they left.
