How Do You Keep Track Of Your People?

Ok so I was thinking how do we keep track of our settlers when our city has a massive number population? I mean after you give a command to just cut down a tree for wood, will a massive amount of workers come all at once? If so, there would be allot of Chaos and you wouldn’t be able to multitask. If you had an enormous city how would you find your workers to cut down a simple tree?(Now I know what you’re thinking, “They can do it automatically” well if you want ALL of your workers doing one simple thing at a time, like I said before, you can’t multitask)
I have a working in progress solution, you can make a tavern where all your workers can go spend their time when they have nothing to do then you can go to that one place and you have your workers ready to work. If this is the case then who will be walking in your town? Women and children? No, that would look too unrealistic so I came up with an idea (which I just thought up while writing this SUPER long paragraph), have a “citizen” or “worker” button so that if they are citizen they give you gold and they can play around and do whatever. So, when you need them to work click “worker” and they will stop giving money and go to the tavern ready for whatever you desire. This way, the player can still interact with his/her town or city instead of just click once and watch your people remove a tree because that isn’t fun at all. Thank You for reading and please leave a comment so I can see what you think of the idea.

Not quite sure I understand this part of your idea. I think you can simplify it further by just eliminating the citizen/worker designation and just have an idle bar. The idle bar would show the profession and how many of the are idle (e.g. Blacksmith 1 idle, Worker 3 Idle, Farmer 0 Idle) this way you know if they’re working or not. When they gain idle status they should be allowed to continue on with their lives and once you assign work the lose idle status and continue with your command. I hope this seems like it improves your tracking idea a bit or at least gets you brainstorming a bit more. I agree a system should be in place.

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Well, firstly you’re probably not going to have masses of workers which should help to negate any chaos. As your settlement progresses and your population grows you’re gonna specialise units accordingly. As for how the workers know which action to do, I’m not too sure, it might be a case of waiting and seeing what system they have in place.

We already know there is this hierarchy system of actions in place for each settler, so the units know what to do, perhaps this then translates that, any free worker will be assigned to cut down a tree. If all workers are busy, then it could simply be the next available worker, or perhaps workers who are building focus more on building, whereas ones who are hauling items could stop hauling to chop wood.

Rest assured this is something that they can’t ignore and there will be a system in place to handle what you’re talking about, it might just be a case of waiting to see how it is handled!

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The current system seen the gameplay footage shows that you need to select units to assign the task to that unit. It seems that could be a bit burdensome in a large settlement.

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And are you sure about that? I was under the impression at the moment it’s just nearby/ all workers that focus on the task … you could perhaps single a unit out and direct them to a specific task but there is this hierarchical system that governs your settlers actions?

So all you’d have to do is say ‘cut this tree’ ‘cut this tree’ ‘stockpile here’ ‘build here’, and your workers do it accordingly without you specifically directing them.

Sure anything that can indicate whether or not your workers are working or not. (That was my main point)

Sure i agree, but everyone knows that there probably will be no end just like any other tycoon or town building game out there. So they will run into this problem sometime later along the road because people will want to be “the one with the most population”

It’s very much looking like there will be some sort of soft population cap.

Sure you’ll run into problems if you start having large populations or if you mod in the ability to have a huge city. But the team have communicated how they want us as the player to be aware of the people we have milling about. There is a number of 150 floating around the forums as a potential upper limit to a population, and I would personally have to agree with that figure.

For me it feels that once you get to a certain point, a large population becomes more of a hinderance than a help, and anything 150+ will become difficult to keep track of, not just in terms of giving orders, but in terms of managing the settlement. My thoughts on it anyway!

I think I heard in the Livestream that 50 is the maximum number of characters that a normal human can comfortably remember in game. And Tom? added that it probably would have a population cap of 100 but nothing is set in stone at the moment.

For the gameplay question, I think the player will select a task (cut tree) and any idle worker will then move towards it to do it. Not having a direct control over the worker.
Will Wright while describing the Sims AI once said that they used “attractors” to control the actors. It means that unlike humans, it is the object in the environment that attracts a worker to interact with it and not the actor having the will to do it.

@sdee was discussing this notion of the [urlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar’s_number] ‘Monkey Sphere’ [/url], to protect her dignity we’ll pretend she said 150, and not 50 … but the number was very much up in the air, and they ultimately said that whatever it is, it has to make sense, like everything else really. So yer, it would seem that somthing in the region of 100 - 200, is currently what we should expect, but who knows!

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mm i think it has an easy solution: The player, as an Overlord/God/Omniscient character, has a Tab in-game that allows him to see what it’s doing every little worker in the game, and when you click on their names the camera moves to their position.

Another option, it’s to have a button for iddle workers.

Aaaand if you want a less invasive solution (the tab maybe it’s not a very creative solution) then a simple animation with the worker sit outside his workshop i think that would be enough to let the player know that there’s an iddle worker there.

But i’m sure that there are more and better solutions that this ones i’ve pointed; Anyway, i think that the tab should be included for people who likes to have everything controlled.

Yes, then later they said something like you could have between 100-75 people, because the workers won’t count as important people; you can remember who’s your blacksmith, but the normal worker that chops trees and mines is not so important for you to remember his/her name. Anyway if you think about guilds or partys that you can make in videogames (like FFTA) the maximun size it’s around 50-75, with that you can have almost every class that they woild include, at least that’s my opinion (and all the classes without any mods installed, probably the mods will add some extra classes)

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Yer good point! I had fogotten about that, and then if you factor in the golems that the geomancer could make, then I suppose the number could then be pushing 200 - 250 or something?

OMG 50-75 golems!!?!?!? hahaha i think that that’s too much automation in the city!! you can make an army of golems!!! that would be so OP, i don’t think we would be able to handle more than 5-10 golems, and they will be pretty expensive to make. At least i’d do that :stuck_out_tongue:

well, that all depends on the abilities of the golems i suppose… :wink:

they could very well serve as mindless drones that only perform simple tasks, and are ineffective at combat, etc.

But Tom has said that using a lot of magic could result in bad things. And if I remember correctly, the Geomancer uses magic to animate the lifeless golems. Maybe the golems could turn on your settlement?

I imaging you’re hitting some sort of nail on the head there.

As for the abilities of the golems, we’ve only really been made aware of them as mindless worker drones that supplement your normal workers, so I doubt they’re gonna function as some automaton army!

Yeah… I’ll just remind you what happens when magic combines with apparently inocent workers

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