So, I had a thriving little village doing just fine for about six years...

I had 1500 surplus food sitting in storage so I figured I'd expand a little to grow the population. Up to this point I'd only needed four wood houses. So I built two new stone houses.

All of a sudden, my food is down to 200 in about a year and everyone's starving and dying out the following year. Nothing else in the status quo had changed besides the two extra houses being built. So, the only logical explanation I can arrive at is that 6 people living in the same house consume much, much less food than two houses of 3 people each? Is this a bug or just some ridiculous balancing decision? My population still seemed pretty small to me, maybe 20 people at the most. I had tools 4 gatherers, 1 fisher and 1 hunter. Which had provided more than enough food for the past 6 years.

Do kids consume less food than adults? I would assume so. I definitely had less than 20 adults.


Second Bug Related Question:

I've noticed people labeled for "building" seem to be incredibly inefficient... or have terrible AI. They will constantly idle around instead of building. Even when all the resources needed are in the stockpile or even already delivered to the building site and all that's left to do is "hammer" the building... the builders still keep idling way too much. I often have to toggle builders off and on just to get them to stop standing around. Other times they will just wander off to do random labor jobs in the middle of building. I was building a well once... 2 of 2 builders... one is hammering it, trying to finish it... and the other builder just wanders right by and goes off to collect wood or something. Has anyone else had these problems with builders?

Thanks for the help.

1st issue:

I have noticed that when I build new houses my food supply drops suddenly. That is mainly due to the fact that people will move food from the storage to the house. You can click the newly built hoouse and check its inventory to see how much food has been stored there.

My advice is to focus on food early on and stockpile it as much as you can (since food does not go bad). Usually my first building is a fishery with 4 people working there, then I build houses for my people, and after that a gatherer's hut and a hunter's cabin (with a minimum of 2 workers for each). If I have laborer's idling around I move them to fill the empty slots in the before mentioned buildings.

2nd issue:

Tbh I haven't noticed anything wrong with the AI of builders. Sometimes there is a delay between the time I place down a building and when the builder starts working on it. If you're playing at double speed you won't notice that delay. If you say that the building has all its resources and the builder refuses to start work I have no idea what is wrong. Here are a few possibilities:
- If the builder was involved in a different action (like gathering resorces and carrying them to the storage) then he will start building once he fnishes the task he is currently doing, he won't drop the resources on the ground and go to the construction site immediately.
- If there aren't enough labourers to help carry resources to the building site then the builder has to do that. I think he can only start building after all the resources are at the construction site.

Disclaimer: I'm still pretty new to the game but I have been doing ok so far, hopefully my input will help you at least a little.

Thanks for the answers.

Yeah this was my first playthrough so far and I think I've learned a lot from it. Like the importance of getting a huge food surplus early on, so you can expand and get kids to replace people when they die out. I decided to start on the hardest difficulty settings, probably wasn't the best idea... but I managed to avert the starvation disaster with a older save and keep my village going for over ten years now. Now I realize my population isn't having enough kids though and is probably going to die out.

I realize people take food to the houses... but in the above scenario I had described, I had only built two new houses and had 1550 food in storage, with most of my other houses already stocked up. In less than a year that food went down to 200 and then zero. It happened so fast I really didn't have time to figure out the cause at all. Thinking about it now, it was almost like I lost half or more of my food production out of no where. Maybe some people got sick and weren't working or something.

As for the builders... I play on 2x speed and my builders continue to be quite fickle about their jobs. In fact, I don't even switch anyone to builder anymore until a construction site is fully stocked with the necessary resources by laborers. My builders will just idle around and not help stock construction sites. Sometimes they help but more often than not I will find them idling. When a construction site has been fully stocked and it's time to build, my builders will still sometimes get stuck in an idle/eat/pick up resources loop until I switch their jobs around.

I do know about and use the increase priority command. Sometimes it helps.

I do have a long tunnel on my map. With most of the houses on one side and most of the building projects on the other side. So... I don't know if maybe the builder AI is getting confused by the tunnel or not.