I’ve been playing for some time and the one thing I’ve only begun to notice since the introduction of a hard difficulty is that any combat based Hearthlings will storm into battle against numerous enemies regardless of their role (I’m glaring at you Cleric) instead of staying safe behind walls until given the order to attack.
I’m doing pretty badly on my current save due to this, as the only way I can stop it is to get them to defend a location far within the walls and of course that stops them from feeding themselves. Even with only a Cleric left, he still charged out with his book to try and read a story to the 3 Goblin camps outside my town.
Put simply, my suggestion is to make combat based Hearthlings act like the others, staying in safety unless they have reason to do otherwise. Or at the very least have the option to make them act like that, like in literally every RTS I can think of, having a toggle to switch between standing their ground, being defensive only or being aggressive and attacking anything that gets close enough.
Sorry if this has been brought up but I did search and nothing seemed relevant to this.