Hi
I have been playing alpha 17 and is loving it. Though i am a little concerned about the performance late game.
I have a powerful machine so I quickly changed the max number of Hearthlings from 20 to 40. Never got there though, when I hit around 25 Hearthlings the game became more or less unplayable. Everybody seemed to started idling from time to time. What really made me stop playing was when my soldiers started not being able to follow commands. Sending a group to meet the enemy only the cleric would go the rest would just stand there.
I don’t know the inner workings of the AI but a suggestion that might lighten the load, and actually make the Hearthlings seem more human, divide things into smaller tasks and only let one Hearthling work on it at any time. E.g.
- Mining out an area. divide the area into cubes of 4x4x4 and only let one Hearthling work on that block at any given time. Removes 4 Hearthlings standing on top of each other, and the the thing of the Hearthling would be minimum for a short while.
- Building a building, digging out the floor again split into reasonable chunks, and let one person work on one chunk. This will also remove the scenario where the floor is duck out except on voxel, which Lars standing in the other corner of the map have decided to do. Then let one wall with scaffolding, be a task. This may means fewer Hearthlings working on the building at any given time but in a normal world there should be plenty of other things to do there is just as impotent. Maybe when you start a building make an stockpile which requires the material for the build, an another task could be to fill it up.
Thanks Peter