Finally think I’m getting the hang of how to balance the system requirements of running 30 Hearthlings yet still enjoy building, crafting, combat, and of course the insane amount of gathering required to fuel all of that. I’m surprised this saved game has only a few errors that don’t seem to effect me much and still runs well on x2
One of the biggest things I’ve found to help keep things running smoothly is to feed orders to the Hearthlings in small bursts. Let them finish that entire batch of tasks before sending them another burst. It’s very easy to run up the queue depth to the point where it seems like the Hearthlings are forgetting to do things. Feed them like a nest of baby birds… bite sized chunks of tasks.
So for example I need to mine and gather lumber. You can freely queue up a couple dozen tasks to do both. They will figure it out and do it. Oh while they are doing that you notice you’re low on something else… queue up a bunch of tasks there. Dang someone is attacking! More tasks! OK now that I beat them lets check in on the Hearthlings… ??? They’ve only done about 1/3 of the stuff you told them to do. So you wait a while… this is boring… Let’s play around in the building designer… Oh that’s cool BUILD! The Hearthlings drop everything and scurry over to the build site. Crafters start running around restocking and building all the tasks they were ordered. Laborers buzz around grabbing resources. Meanwhile ALLLL the stuff you told them to do 10 min ago is still waiting there to be dealt with. This snowballs out of control pretty quickly… I mean you can choke out 15 Hearthlings very easily, the game slows down because it has a thousand things to try and prioritize and grind through all the while the factors to calculate all of that changes as resources flow in and out.
Simply give them time to catch up. Often times I have to just let the game run without my interaction for a while just to let them get caught up. Then I’ll give them another batch of work.
Also after like 20sh Hearthlings x3 speed is pretty much off limits =) Sorry I get super impatient and love running turbo mode just to get shit done.
Between those things alone it’s pretty smooth sailing to 25+ Hearthlings
Roads help more than I thought… Someone showed me how to progress with minimal sized farm fields… Not mining out intricate, multilevel underground tunnel systems… Making sure you have
the minimal amount of crafters and max laborers you can with your current population… and other things like this help keep the overhead lower and performance up.
Anyway…attached is the save game files. Super impressed by this game every time I play it; which is often. Can’t wait to enjoy it’s progress! Thanks!