OK. Said I would come back when not on vacation. I haven’t been on vacation for a while, but real life got in the way and I forgot to respond. Here we go!
So this topic was made pre-A14 dev builds, so a lot has changed since your wrote this originally. I think A14 is starting to show where TR is heading with the game combat wise, and I personally like the small bit we have been shown.
This has come up in other threads, and while it is an interesting idea, there hasn’t been a lot of consensus on how to do it. Where would the caravan come from? What happens if you have walls, or are on a plateau? I think it would be neat, but how to do it…I don’t know.
So if I am understanding what you are looking for correctly, this already exists. The Goblin Campaign - with the demands from the chief - is a NPC is different results depending on how you respond. Frostfeast - only compatible with A13 - also had some NPC-type interactions with the church of plenty. Help them and get gifts.
Well, with traders and caravans being random, I am not sure how one could improve them! Being random means that sometimes the trades are garbage and utterly useless, other times you get the best deal in the world. Unfortunately, that is what happens when things are random.
As you mentioned there will certainly be more classes introduced. I am personally in favor of more specialized workers, like miners and builders, but I am not sure that TR wants to move in that direction. One of their big goals has been to keep the game macro, and not require the player to deal with too many little things. If you suddenly have to worry about which workers are miners and which are builders, it could be a bit too much. Then again, if all workers can mine, but miners get some type of advantage, I would be in complete favor of the idea.
Check out @Drotten’s mod Hearthlings of Many Faces for some neat customization options!
You are absolutely correct that this is a bug. @Ponder (and others) have been doing a ton of work in A14 on improving performance. The main issue that is encountered is that the Hearthling AI is overwhelmed when it has too many choices, causing everyone to idle. When this happens depends heavily on system specs, but at some point it will happen to everyone. If you have any save games (A14 only) where you are having this issue, please post them in the topic below:
I am pretty sure that is already the plan. Not sure what would be the “key differentiator” for the Northern Alliance, but it is the intention to have the kingdoms be different from each other, and not just a re-skin of the UI.