Stress/Chaos thought with overloaded AI

Suggestions
1

When your town gets really big, you need to employ tactics to make sure your hearthlings are overburdened. Regardless of whether these tactics should be necessary, I think the current game needs a gameplay way to tell/nudge the player to employ those tactics.

That’s why I’d suggest a chaos or stress thought: “I need a break after simply of thinking about all the stuff to be done.” (This is an actual state of mind people can have, btw.)

Also, put a little reference to what hearthlings do when they can’t handle the stress: leisure.

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2

Maybe add this option to Normal + Hard difficulty?

3

Not following why this wouldn’t be useful in peaceful mode?

4

Would be a great addition. Considering the number of problems arising from having too many hearthlings doing too many jobs and overwhelming the CPU, some form of notification would be great (other than the bar on the bottom of the screen).

Having farmers run around in circles with question marks above their head (or something a bit more subtle) would be a great way to indicate that you are reaching the limits of what is possible. Add something like a notification when multiple hearthlings have the same problem (with the suggestion to pause the game for a second or not use the experimental 3x game speed), and this would provide a great amount of clarity in why hearthlings are behaving like idiots and just standing around and talking.

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5

Ah right, I initially thought this was a difficulty feature for when towns got too big, but then I realised that this is meant to be an in-game way of telling you that the AI is getting literally overburdened.

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6

As it currently stands, the game just bottlenecks itself down to allow the AI to process things. And even at that point, the AI still can barely do anything to fix itself.

With this suggestion, it’d actually add more to the workload, as the AI would have to realize it’s overloaded (which it already does), but instead of slowing itself down, it’d have to run an animation loop (which seems heavier to me).

Also, what about instances where the AI just needs to complete a task to free itself? I have a Ryzen 1800x that can run 20 'lings and Eve Online at the same time. But as soon as I start mining near or in water in Stonehearth, even with 8 'lings it will begin to lock up. Once they clear that mining zone, it’s fine. With this “confused” solution, they’d just keep chasing their tail and never get the task causing the problem done.

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