The big two-oh is on the way! This update is going to mainly focus on the new worker system and the AI associated with it. The plan is to clean up some of the forced micromanaging of work/job assigning and pass off some more control to the villagers, making a more streamlined system that you still have a good amount of control over if you still want to micromanage it.
This update is also going to focus on optimizing the game's CPU, GPU and memory usage as well as run through a lot of code cleanup. Thus why the road map is shorter than usual, but as always you will still be seeing other smaller content additions in this patch as well.
If you have any requests, be sure to post them in the comments. Let me know what you want, and how you want it to work! You might just find it sneak into the next patch. :)
InDev 20 Road Map
Worker Assignment System
The new worker assignment system will remove the per-building worker assignment system entirely, replacing it with a new global drop down panel. The new panel will allow you to set the desired amount of villagers you want, up to the maximum provided by the buildings. You'll be able to set the desired villager count higher than your actual population, and as villagers grow into adults or a worker dies they'll automatically fill the available slots doing their best to manage/balance the job assignments.
- The entire per-building worker assignment system will be removed, replaced with a single global panel to interact with all the job controls in the entire village at once.
- Work buildings will no longer "house" workers, instead they will provide extra slots to your global maximum workers (Example: 2 Lumber Shacks will no longer house 12 workers each, they will provide 12 worker slots to the maximum pool for a total of 24 workers that can be assigned)
- Rather than assigning villagers directly to jobs, you will set a maximum desired workers. This number can exceed the maximum population, but not the maximum worker slots provided by the buildings.
- Workers will be able to freely quit/change jobs as they like, based on the workers desired for each job. Meaning if a job type is extremely low on current workers, and another isn't, they may quit their current job and pickup a new one. (Example: you have 32 villagers and you've set the desired builders to 32 so they all decide to become builders. Later you build a farm and set the desired workers to 8, some of the builders will quit their job and they'll become farmers even though it would take the current builders count below the desired builders count, because they will do their best to maintain the same percentage of assigned workers to desired workers across the board.)
- Buildings that provide worker slots will automatically set the desired worker count up by the amount they provide when they are built. This way, you will never have to increase the desired worker count unless you've previously lowered it to force workers into other jobs. (Example: You build a Lumber Shack, the game will automatically increase the desired Lumberjacks by 12, and if possible, workers will start becoming lumberjacks unless you explicitly go into the worker panel and lower the desired amount.)
- When a worker changes or quits a job, he will first visit a work building associated with that job rather than the job being assigned instantly.