The bigger my settlement gets, the more the inefficiency of my builders becomes the limiting factor.
I was raided 5 years ago, the first major raid of 60 raiders, so I decided to build city walls. However, even though I doubled the number of builders, it just isn’t working because the process is so terribly slow. I haven’t been able to build much else the past 5 years because I tried to focus on the walls, but nevertheless they weren’t finished and now I got the second raid, where a single raider managed to somehow destroy my theater and almost half my houses became uninhabitable, right before winter.
I was saved by rebuilding it just in time, but even that was slowed by builders being stupid and picking up stacks of 1 clay they found somewhere, instead of the 150 clay that was lying in a stockyard close by.
So effectively, the bigger your settlement gets, the more you obviously need to build and upgrade, but because your builders get more inefficient as your settlement grows (due to walking times) the further development of the town slows into a crawl.
First of all, they don’t seem to calculate well how to quickly finish their task. When a builder, or group of builders, is assigned to a project, it would make sense for them to quickly figure out where the available resources are, where the builders themselves are, and how the resources can be brought to the site in as little time as possible. So to figure out where to get building materials, the builder should take the distance into account as well as the size of the stockpile, as a small stockpile could necessitate additional supply runs.
Instead, what they now seem to do is prioritize stacks of materials that are lying outside of storage, regardless of how small they are or how far away, while completely ignoring whatever storage depots might be lying nearby. It’s common to see villagers doing multiple supply runs for a single piece of wall, just because small stacks of 1 or 2 stone happened to lie somewhere on the map.
Builders also seem incapable of planning ahead. This is especially obvious if you’re building walls, because the builders will just take 3 stones and go back and forth to build a single wall section, then go back and forth again for 3 more stones to build another section, and so on. It would obviously be much more efficient if builders were capable of planning ahead to build multiple sections at once, based on how much they can carry. So if they can carry 15 stone, just bring 15 stone and build 5 sections at once.
The same applies to buildings which require multiple materials. If some small garden requires 2 gold and 2 wood, why not bring both the wood and gold at the same time? Why do separate supply runs for both materials?
Then there’s the wagon shop. I don’t see why the only people who drive wagons are the ones who build the wagons, it would make more sense for villagers of all kinds of professions to drive wagons and for wainwrights to focus solely on building them and repairing them.
That way, builders could use wagons to transport raw materials needed for big projects. It would be very easy to build walls very quickly if you just have one builder loading 60 stone in his wagon, then going past the wall building site dropping off 3 for each segment, and have a few other builders follow him and build the wall. What you would need is the builders identifying a lot of wall sections that lie close together, then have the one driving the wagon plan a route alongside all the building sites for these sections.
There are other professions who would greatly benefit as well from having wagons of course, like traders, grocers and nightsoil collectors. Their job would be so much easier if they could simply transport larger quantities of materials.
And in addition, it would be great to have dedicated transport wagons as well and the ability for the player to design the transport routes himself. So for example, you could have one wagon dedicated to a specific mining area, constantly carrying food and supplies to the temporary shelters while carrying back all the ore and raw materials. Another wagon could be dedicated to keeping the markets stocked and reduce the time villagers need to spend on shelter stocking. And so on.
Right now the wagons just take up whatever job they feel like, and a large amount of the time they are carrying around small quantities of food or raw materials or even move around empty, which defeats their entire purpose. I just followed one that first carried something like 20 food to a distant logging camp, to then return carrying nothing at all until they passed a market and decided to carry 5 meat from a market to a shelter. Then it picked up another 12 food to transport to a mining camp at the other end of the map. It hurt to see how inefficiently it was being used.
So to finish, the further you get into the game, the more resources you need to move around, and the bigger your projects will be. So it’s crucial the player can easily transport large amounts of goods around the settlement, and does not have to rely on villagers running around the settlement chaotically and spending 95% of their time on needlessly long supply runs.