It would be great if there was a way in the future to where you can set all citizens to only interact/work within a drawn radius, making it its own town, besides infantry that you can move anywhere as normal.
This could allow me to make a second town off in the distance and move 2-3 people there to start living there instead, so I can multi manage two towns, and maybe we can have interactions between the two like carts that can transport goods to the warehouse in that town, so one town could be designed just for mining ore, and another be just for farming, and I can have the one that makes food distribute food to the other towns, or towns can just be fully self efficient, but it gives the player those choices how they want to manage that.
This would be fun to expand further than being one big cramped city because efficiency of the distance all citizens have to travel. So a farmer isnt running across half of the map because one of the farms need harvesting when I can have a farmer in that designated area do it instead.
Hope this makes sense!
TL:DR: Possible to make multiple little towns across the world, draw radius of that town and citizens of that town work on the fields/tasks in that area and not in the radius of a different town, and can chose to move citizens to different towns.
With bed assignments and stockpiles set up the way they are you can technically assign a few hearthlings to beds in a house/settlement far away from the original one and make 1 a farmer so they can actually have food and they could be self sustaining. The only problem is there’s currently no way to limit where a hearthling will go, so if there’s a mining task back at the original city and there’s nothing for a worker to do at the second city they might possibly pick up the task.
Yeah this is what I’ve been trying myself, the idea was to maybe have a way to refine it a little more so those issues with them having no limits to what tasks are available to them, like if my original city needed an extra farmer, I could send one over from the other town to move back, instead of having it walk back n forth all the time out of my control.
Maybe assign workbench as you assign beds, so the assigned carpenter, farmer, or whatever, only work at that workbench.
While unassigned worker go to nearest one.
This would probably run against the “avoid micro-management” policy; however I think it’s a logical step from having assigned beds. In fact, I’d like to see an option to assign hearthlings to a particular building–so if they’re eating they’ll prefer to use a table + chair in that building, if they’re working then they’ll prefer to use the workstation in that building (and other hearthlings will avoid that workstation); if they’re have time at the end of the day to sit around the fire pit then they prefer to do it in that building if there’s a fire pit in there.
Basically, making the houses into homes where the individual hearthlings spend their time. In the early days of the settlement, communal buildings make sense; but in the later part of the game I’d love to have proper residences where families of hearthlings can put down roots.
The crafting problem goes deeper than that. Even if you assigned the carpenters to the correct workbenches, the game would still assign the task to one of them “randomly”. When I order a template to be build, and it auto-queue the items, how it would assign to the correct carpenter? That’s not an easy to solve problem I guess.
There are probably ways to “imitate” groups currently, as suggested by many posts above.
But for proper representation at root level, the “faction/ownership” will have to be separated.
I.e. all the items etc actually belong to different factions. (You will need some trade interface, or something similar to “loot” command to actually claim items from the other faction).
And from game-play perspective, the context will probably always have to be on one group at a time, though the UI could allow switching groups.
i.e. while “controlling” one group, you cannot do anything to the other group (though you can use “loot” command to claim items belonging to other group). You can then “switch group” where you start controlling the other group, and the previous group becomes “outsiders”.
EDIT: Regarding the “family within community”, I think that problem can be modeled perhaps as resource authorization. Just use the file system for example. There are resources (files/folders) which any authorized users to a system can access, but there are some which are only accessible by the individual users that owns them.