I personally feel that Stonehearth’s main focus should be increasing the hearthling count and jobs so it feels like an actual big city. I normally can only get to 20 as well and I always feel that at that point a lot of my hearthlings are idle. If the game could handle 40 people all with jobs and all not constantly idle then i would feel like i am running an actual town and not a tiny settlement. I hope this feature will be added in the future.
I am posting this to see if the community agrees with my opinion. I would very much appreciate responses.
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im hoping for big cities with at least 100 or so hearthlings. With giant battles, meaning, more enemies, siege type equiptment, and building hit points. (so they can be damaged/destroyed)
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I await seeing how construction works in the later-game. It is very difficult to build more than one Tier 2 building at once, it takes a very long time.
I would love to see Tier 2 introduce a mechanic where the construction switches from “climb all over the building doing each chunk individually” to a more traditional “stand at the base and swing hammers to raise it” because the current system is just untenable once the player starts making impressive buildings. If we’re ever going to see lovely large advanced towns SOMETHING will have to change, construction is just too slow and unwieldy at the moment IMO. Though in my comments on the dev blog Steph indicated it’s not likely to change. Personally I’d be more than happy with the aesthetic shift of such a gameplay change given it’d be for good reason. Heck, even just changing the way scaffolding works at Tier 2 might help greatly increase construction times.
I’d also love to see a “rush construction” option where a player could pay a wizard or something gold/resources to quickly raise a building. I’d reward a different playstyle (focus on gold, trading) and more patient players could stick to the traditional method.
I’m not sure we’ll ever see the game become a “city” game with the current systems, even if the AI performance is optimised to allow 40 or 50 hearthlings the current level of micromanagement and very vague feedback the player has over resource needs/surpluses means it’d be difficult. That’s why I personally would like to see something like the Bookkeeper from Dwarf Fortress (perhaps a mayor?) become a mid-game role which would furnish the player with useful information for running a larger town.
Of course nothing might change, in which case we’re limited to always having a small town with only 20-30 hearthlings and maybe one or two dozen buildings… which would also be okay, making it feel like a typical large town in an RPG from the 1990s.
@wantadog after the performance pass at the end of development and a next gen PC I’d expect a player to be able to have 150 - 200 hearthlings, I can get 27 on my 4 year old quad core i7 and 8gb ram.
In 2-3 years time when the game is released, a 16 core i9 will actually be affordable for a lot of people.
And then 5 years after release I’d imagine people building massive cities with 250+ hearthlings 
@MajorFordson Good thing Chris has spent the entire last year reworking building then. It won’t be the hammer on the floor sort of thing but everything will be more efficient, if his word is to go by 
I honestly think that building doesn’t take long enough in game, each building should be an achievement.
There is like no micro in stonehearth atm, and as it is a simulation low feedback is fine, for most of the time you are just watching your minions do there jobs
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@Freedom As it sits right now, I believe the major issue with performance lies with the AI only using one core if I’m remembering correctly. Using multiple cores, as well as implementing multi threading, for the AI would be very beneficial, but from what the devs had said this is an extremely difficult task they they most likely will not try attempting. With other optimizations this might not be as huge of an issue as I don’t believe they really aren’t aiming for the game to handle more than 50ish hearthlings.
Am I remebering this correctly @max99x ?
Well the recent test showed they use like 50% less scaffolding 
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