What’s the “intended”/“expected” number of hearthlings, particularly with respect to A16’s combat? The cap defaults to 20, with the ingame option to set it from 10 to 50. Is 20 the ‘expected’ number, with the ease of upping the cap in response to player desires? Is 50 the ‘expected’ cap, with 20 as the default to keep the minimum specs lower and ensure a better performing initial experience?
The main impetus for this question comes from my first settlement. I went through the goblin campaign and then all four gongs relatively quickly and with little trouble, though I’d generally temporarily beef up my military before assaulting each camp (ie draft a few craftspeople into the military, then send them back to crafting after the camp was cleared). A while after I’d finished the purple gong, though, I kinda wanted to focus more on harvesting, crafting, building, etc, but I couldn’t afford to, as I was getting bombarded by two substantial attacks nearly every night (one multi-ogre/orc/kobold combo squad, and then the other varied, from a second ogre/orc/kobold mixed squad all the way down to goblin thieves). I’ve had to keep 10-12 hearthlings in my military to deal with it, which stifles everything else, since 8 hearthlings to cover food, mining, crafting, looting, and building stretches them pretty thin, and requires class swapping.
I’ve stayed at 20 hearthlings since it’s the ‘default’, and I presumed that was what the game was being developed around as a presumption. But looking at the Dev Blogs regarding A16, they almost always talk about the 50-hearthling cap rather than the 20-cap. If I was ‘expected’ to have up to 50 hearthlings by this point, that’d make my 10-12 person military much more reasonable.
I’ve started new settlements since then, but kept away from progressing through the gongs at all, not wanting to repeat the problem. But it still leaves me wondering - was my problem my cap (20) vs the expected cap (50), or is the combat supposed to scale with (actual, not projected) hearthling count/cap? Is the double-raids intended, or did the save get bugged at some point? Was intensive combat supposed to be the ‘last’ phase, rather than something you can opt into and out of (I tried taking down all the gongs and trophies, but at best, that seemed to make the 2nd raid less likely to be ogre combo, but that could’ve been pure chance; also tried disbanding most of my military, but the raids didn’t seem to shrink any in response)?
Am a newcomer to Stonehearth - been eying it for ages, but only actually bought it with the recent steam ‘birthday’ sale - and have certainly been enjoying it. But I haven’t been able to figure out this one question - designed/intended pop cap - and it’d be nice to know, since 2.5x as many hearthlings would rather change things .