Efficiency of large populations

[Asidecay]

I've been playing a lot lately (v 0.11.0.12), and there has been one issue that has pretty much "broken" every settlement I've started: once the population reaches a certain threshold, the majority of pawns become useless at hauling.

It's hard to pinpoint what that threshold is, because my population usually goes from about 2 dozen to being maxed out at 99 within a few game days (human pawns pump out kids like nobody's business!).

Here are things that I have noticed:
- When I have two dozen or so pawns, hauling jobs are queued in large quantities in the jobs menu. When I have a population of 99, hauling jobs are queued one at a time.
- When I have a low amount of population, specialized workers (like farmers) will go and haul random stuff, so long as they are idle. When I have a high population count, most of my specialized workers will cease to haul items that don't pertain to their specialization. My farmers stand around all winter in the middle of their fields... doing nothing besides being idle.
- Besides directly after a bandit raid, when all my pawns bum rush the food and drink, I can never seem to have more than 50 pawns actively doing a job. Meaning, if I have 99 pawns in my population, 49 of them (or more) are ALWAYS guaranteed to be idle.

In each save, It always ends up that I have waaaay too many items to haul with way too many pawns standing around idle, while having more than ample storage space (and pathing to get to said spaces).

It becomes a snowballing effect; I have a top tier bandit raid, all pawns rush to eat and drink after. All of a sudden cooks are cooking, water's being hauled, farms are being tended, bodies are being butchered (parts are being hauled). The gear that the dead bandits dropped needs to be hauled. I have 99 pawns (most adult w/ specializations), but only 40 of them want to work. The hauling is done at such a snail's pace that by the time I have the next wave of top tier bandits, my pawns haven't finished moving all of the stuff from the last raid... and now there's more.

[Sleipnir]

Interesting. Hmmm, I'll need to look into this. Could be some of the things which try to optimize checks for hauling when populations get huge may be grinding to a standstill. Or it could be something totally unrelated. I'll take a look! Thanks for breaking down your experience to help me better understand the issue. :)

[davebojack]

I'm running into the same problem.

I'm loving this game, but as soon as the population starts approaching 100, everything falls apart - which is just when the game really starts getting fun for me.

It seems like the game can't keep up with figuring out which jobs people should be doing. The inefficiency of all of the idlers is bad enough - then I start getting so many notifications of hunger and thirst that I completely ignore the *bung* sound effect. Then when people start dying of hunger while idling next to a crate full of food, I have to call it quits.

I want to say that it's not only the population count, but the number of items on the map to haul (which, of course, snowballs). Some of this might be mitigated by allowing the designation of areas to ignore when hauling (or the opposite). I always get annoyed that I can't stop everyone from running off to the corners of the map to pick up every apple that falls off a tree when there's much more important jobs to do (like drinking water).

Fortunately, the reason this frustrates me so much is because I really enjoy the game. I'm sure everything will be ironed out in the end - I just felt like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ a bit after having to abandon a map I was having fun with.

[Sleipnir]

Thank you for the feedback. I totally understand that frustration. I'm going to do my best to track down the issue and fix it. Hope to improve this soon.

[Sleipnir]

Also, if either of you has a save with those issues you'd be able to send me, that would be super valuable.

If so, you can follow this:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/688060/discussions/0/1741106440033049878/

[Sleipnir]

Actually, I think I've got a fix. I'll try to throw in a patch today so you guys can test it out.

[Sleipnir]

I've uploaded 0.11.0.16 to the beta branch. It has some improvements for entities not being given jobs. I still need to improve idling settlers on the highest game speed, but that's not quite related to this issue you two found. So, check it out and let me know if things improve.

[Asidecay]

I started a fresh game for 0.11.0.16.

So far, I've hit 100 population and half of the villagers are now adults. I've left all of the job priorities to be automatic and everything seems to be running well.

Just had a pretty big raid and there were 2 very noticeable differences:

1. All of the raid loot got picked up rather quickly, even though i had lots of jobs queued up before the raid even started.

2. I had said before that only 50 pawns (max) would queue up a job, unless they were eating and/or drinking. After this raid, all pawns went to eat and drink (as expected) but after that was all done, 70 of them went to work doing something else. This was the first time I've seen them work this much.

I don't know what you did, but you seemed to have fixed it. Well done, Sleipnir!

I'm going to continue playing this save and see how it goes. If anything "breaks", I'll let you know.

[Sleipnir]

Thank you for testing that out and for the feedback. :)

I think there are still a couple smaller things making folks idle for longer than they should, but I'll continue to tune these. So, do let me know if you encounter anything else.

Cheers!

[padreco]

I have noticed the same problem, glad to see it's been potentially resolved. One thing though, the 0.11.0.16 version does not show for me, the beta is still on 0.11.0.15, am I missing something?

Edit: Nevermind, apparently Steam was just messing with me and now everything is up to date