No way to assign specific people to specific jobs... People just change occupations?

[clark3783]

Unless I'm missing it, there is no way to assign specific people to a specific job. Example that just happened. For the longest time, I had a 25 year old educated person as my teacher. He had previously been a forester, a woodcutter, and an herbalist. I didn't pick him to do any of these things except for herbalist. So without me knowing it, a 77 year old lady started teaching. And then she died. And the two students there were put into the work force. Now they won't go back to school. So when I finally clicked around enough to get a 22 year old teaching school, they decided to change jobs and a 10 year old that was previously a student started teaching school.

Before you say it, yes, having more than one teacher is a solution. But my initial population is dying off and I don't have enough people for every job currently. I'm hoping these new kids can keep the town alive.

I just thought that would be a good option; being able to tell certain people to work somewhere or to go to school.

[Raygun Wren]

To be fair, I've never played a city building sim that allows you to do that (if there is, please let me know! :D). What you can do is always have at least 1 laborer handy to replace dead teacher. I find that having at least 2 laborers at all time works perfectly. I don't have to worry about replacements whenever someone dies. Or, if you have plenty resources, have a working second school as a buffer.

[Romeo Deluxe]

Always have at least a couple of Laborers in reserve. As your population grows so too should your minimum Laborers.

A free Laborer would have instantly taken that Teacher post and you would not have lost any students.

[clark3783]

Yeah. Most of my issues are coming from a lack of population.

[ComfyCorner]

I've been having a similar problem except pertaining to proximity to their home. If you turn on the path tool (F2 -> 7) and click either a house or a workplace it will show where they live. In my little town, I've got a ton of people commuting like crazy people.

If I notice anything weird like that because of death or whatever, I just pause the game, pull the jobs to 0 of the affected occupations and then increase them back up to their old value. It seems like the games path algorithm does add the closest living 'laboror' to the closest jobs. Resetting their paths to optimum. I had a foresting place, hunting and gatherer units out in the middle of a forest away from everyone but with a couple houses with them and the game didn't auto assign the occupents to the workplaces until I did this. Its possible it would from their children or something over time or through death but my method seems to do the best to instantly increase productivity.

I have not checked to see if the paths update at other times (say at the start of a shift or something) I wish the path tool linked in the people as well, so you can see where they are in proximity to where they are expected to be

I know this doesn't directly answer the question and I would bet the students would drop in this process but at least you won't have people wasting time running back and forth.

I'm going to just make a new thread for myself to dump in my play style tips and observations. Loving this game!

[uus sanct (Kreese)]

I'm with you tim, there is something to the house/workplace assignment that needs help - too often i have looked and found the worst possible combination

[uus sanct (Kreese)]

also it would be nice to have the ability to limit the amount of something a storage barn and stock pile can have making it more like the trading post - in fact it would be nice to for them to have workers you could assign to them like the trading post that would actually go get items because while labourers are suppose to do this you don't have control that way - i have often seen my items laying on the ground and my crafter in dire need of that item

[Sparzy]

Build a town hall and you get nomads, its saved my life a few times. The groups are random 2-70 at a time. Make sure you have a hospital though as they can bring diseases.

[yarnosh]

I've noticed that the AI does a much better job of distributing jobs than I could. It sounds like your problem comes down to lack of surplus labor, not any fault of the game. Maybe it would be niche to ensure that younger workers are in more critical jobs, but that seems like a very minor tweak.

More than anything else, I think you want people to live as close to their place of employment as possible. And that's what the AI does for you. I wouldn't mess with that even if I could.

[Tommy_Cooker]

If you had to assign everyone to work a specific job it would be micromangement hell to get everyone working efficiently.

Another thing you have to realise about this game is that you're not running the village, the villagers are. Getting everything to run smoothly while they do their own thing like getting married, taking jobs near where they live, helping themselves to food while their neighbours starve (which by the way is all entirely predictable, they're just following a few basic AI rules), is the challenge of this game.