Villagers are an absolute nightmare during raids. They will run right into the advancing hordes like complete idiots, won’t retreat until the raiders are within kissing distance, and I have to manually keep removing them and sending them to random spots inside the walls (and if a raid takes too long, they will just come back again like a bunch of morons)
This is VERY tedious, and it honestly ruins all the fun raids are supposed to be. When I am attacked, I want to be coordinating and commanding soldiers, not constantly having to pause to weed out all the idiot villagers who blundered onto the battlefield one by one.
That is something the AI guiding villager behavior is supposed to to for me, but any halfway decent self-preservation instinct in my villagers is simply non-existent. They will not change any behavior until the point they are already under attack, when it’s much too late.
What they SHOULD do, is simply not do any task that requires them to take any route that takes them near raiders, and if they are already doing a task, it should periodically check if a safe route exists and if not, switch to another task. If no task is found, simply go idle.
Alternatively, allow the player to select red zones during a raid, and any task a villager would do that leads him through a red zone would be skipped.
Also, the distance between raider and villager that will cause a villager to flee should be tripled at least.
And because raids only happen at specific times, you wouldn’t even have to have this self-preservation AI turned on at all times, you only need to switch it on during raids.
There are many ways to solve this. I want raids to be fun and challenging, not needlessly frustrating. The challenge should be to devise strategies to effectively repel the raiders, not to navigate a very poorly programmed villager AI.
Also, I always activate the bell of the Town Center, but does that even do anything?
Why are they running around when they should be cowering in their homes? Yes, the Town Centre bell causes some to run in and defend but once rung everyone should run into the nearest building, or hide in the mines and camps and stay there until the all clear is given. That should clear the screen of unneeded characters and improve gameplay.
I think an easy solution is once the town hall bell is rung all citizens retreat even if the town hall is full. It’s one things for citizens out in remote work camps and mines to get caught up it’s another things for farmers to not retreat until your own towers are firing on the raiders.
The last time I played, the town hall bell had a very short range and there were only a few villager slots in the hall itself. The button’s functions and range should upgrade with the town hall, so that later on it gets villagers behind walls.
Villagers out of range who encounter raiders/predators should run for the nearest secure area and stay there until they get the all clear. If there is no safe path or secure area, they should just go into the nearest building until there are no raiders/predators around. This has long been a sore point for me.
Just continued this savegame and I can’t get over how absolutely abysmally unfun this is.
Militarily, I had no problems repelling this raid. I have easily enough soldiers and towers to put the raiders to flight.
But I had to pause every few seconds to redirect swarms of stupid villagers who all tried to get back to their farms, building sites and mines that were swarming with raiders. That’s why I lost only 2 non-soldier villagers. Had I not done this, I probably would have lost 40 or 50.
This is not fun, this is an awfully boring and frustrating thing to have to do in the middle of combat. I genuinely think a lot of fun could be had directing soldiers to flank archers, defend gates and use feints to draw raiders to a desired location, but the entire combat feature of this game is ruined by this complete lack of a functional villager AI.
And it gets worse as combat progresses, because as soon as villagers and soldiers mingle you simply can’t control them anymore, as dragging and selecting will select only the soldiers. You have to take special care to select AROUND the soldiers so you only select villagers, to then send to the other side of town.
But for some reason guards are ALSO selected as villagers, not as soldiers, so I accidentally emptied my guard towers several times because the idiot guards went along with the idiot villagers, and I had to manually select them one by one and send them back to their towers again.
Did I mention how unfun all of this is?
I mean, just look at this. Look how close this villager is to the uncoming swarm of raiders, without retreating. This should be an embarrassing sight for whoever designed the AI for villager behavior:
That does look frustrating. On top of improved villager AI (why can’t they just be like deer fleeing when anyone gets too close?) it would be great if - like the Town Center - guard towers had warning bells we could ring that would prompt all villagers in its radius to seek shelter. We could then strategically place towers in our towns to make sure all villager hotspots are ‘saved by the bell’.
Having special bell towers to warn villagers in an area would be fine to me too, there just needs to be A mechanic to keep villagers away from raiders and allow me to concentrate on combat, while currently there is none.
I think having something as simple as locking the gates for villagers when the bell is rung would be a simple and effective method.
When the town gets raided, ensure all villagers you want inside the town’s walls are there, then ring the bell which locks the gates. Villagers can’t pass through gates.
Or allow each gate to be locked and unlocked manually.
But I suppose there is also issues where even if you have a wall all the way up to a steep mountainside on the edge of a map, villagers can run around the wall somehow anyway.
Or even easier, have the gates only lock for outgoing villagers but not ingoing ones.
And of course, if a route for a villager would go through a locked gate, the villager should drop the task immediately and find something else to do, so they don’t go looking for extreme detours to get there anyway.
There are a lot of ways this could be fixed, and I would be fine with any of them. As long as there is SOME way to keep villagers out of combat.
I can’t upvote this thread enough! This needs to be adopted into the game. The pop management, colony sim angle is a good one for this game. I like following my people around and to see what they are doing.
We need better controls for villagers, period. I should be able to select all of one type, for example, if I want to use hunters as defensive guard.
Why aren’t there ctrl groups? I should be able to select a group and assign them to a hotkey, RTS style.
The villager AI is annoying, giving them better behavior is crucial. Pseudo-Rimworld meets Banished.
Actually, this problem is very easy to solve. Just upgrade the game a little bit.
The current rule is that when the villagers reach a certain range, they will automatically run away.
So increase this range by 1.5 - 2 times. Or some number as long as it is out of the range of the archer.
Speaking of the intelligence of the villagers. In recent versions, I encountered a situation where the bandits/invaders, instead of stealing resources, would rush to destroy the house where the villagers were hiding and easily kill the villagers while my nearby fortresses and watchtowers were almost intact. This forced me to move all the villagers hiding in the houses in the opposite direction of the enemy attack. If there was a button that would select all non-soldier villagers it would be easier because at 1700 population and under attack from 500 enemies my poor computer drops to 5 FPS
The problem with this is, they don’t always obey this rule, esp wagon drivers, maybe at the last minute they flee, but that’s when they are in combat range then get killed by raider archers
and villagers going to pick up 1 ore from a mine, thats more important than fleeing from raiders
This really annoys the hell out of me too. I think a good fix would be for all villagers to either seek home or come to/around the town hall, when the bell rings. That would solve 90% of this issue.
I agree 100% … A very good game ruined by Villager AI. I am sure the devs will fix/enhance this BUG as it is a fun destroyer and makes the game a pain to play.
100% agree, I’ve complained about this for over a year.
During a raid, I typically spend 2-3x more time dealing with suicidal villagers than I do on combat. It really shouldn’t be called “combat,” it should be call “suicide prevention.”
Absolutely, without a doubt, the #1 fun-killer in this game, based on my 1500 hours of play.
