Distance penalty to higher priority activities?

[Dorkter]

One thing I've noticed that happens an awful lot is that townies will run half way across the map if a higher priority activity opens up, rather than just finishing up what they are doing.

Ideally, I think a good algorithm would be something like this:

1) Townie needs a new task, check to see what is the highest priority in the queue, and check to see which task is closest to his/her current location.
2) If the highest priority task is no more than x times the distance from the closest task, or the townie is the closest townie to the highest priority task, (s)he'll do the highest priority task.
3) Otherwise, just do whatever's nearest to the townie.

X could be a parameter that the user could adjust from 1 (always do the closest task unless townie is the closest townie to the high priority task) or some high number that effectively would have the game work how it does now (townie always does the highest priority task). This would be especially nice for those chopping/mining/killing trips far from your base, since your townies would never return empty handed just to have someone else walk the distance back out to collect stuff.

Later on, you could improve it to look at everything within a certain radius of the closest task and pick the highest priority task it finds there, but that seems like a considerably more difficult and involved change so it's something for the future.

[nathiral]

Priorities are just a bad implementation.

Dwarf Fortress has the right idea. Split actions into categories (much like the priorities did), and then allow individual civs to do some categories and not others.

I usually, in DF, end up with 7-14 dwarves who actually do stuff and 10-40 just hauling stuff around to smooth out the distances guys have to move.

Plus it means I can have someone dedicated to mining so he doesn't mine one tile, run 2000 tiles to grab a banana and cook it, then run 2000 tiles back to mine another tile.

[burningpet]

As we said countless times, a pseudo dedicated townies will be in.

[Euchale]

As we said countless times, a pseudo dedicated townies will be in.

I love you...

[bk3000]

As we said countless times, a pseudo dedicated townies will be in.

I love you...

Who knew it only took 1001 times.