A task that should be "high priority" for serfs

[The_King]

Hi everybody

So I've been through this situation several times in my games. It can happen that one of your allies (or yourself) gets beaten very hard in a team game and almost all of your serfs are killed but your team is able to rescue you and you are not totally beaten. Now in order to come back into the game, you need to make tons of serfs. It can happen that you have almost no gold in the storehouse because you pumped out tons of recruits recently.

Once the gold in your schoolhouse is finished, you can't produce more serfs because there's no gold in storehouse. The serfs seem to give higher priority to other tasks and do NOT bring the gold ore and coal into the metallurgist's to make gold... this really slows down the revival process and can lead to losing the game unnecessarily. The only way to work around this is to close supply to all of your buildings so that your serfs only take gold ore and coal tasks.

I think it would be better if bringing the gold ore and coal to the metallurgist is made a high priority task for the serfs. This can help lessen the trouble when a person loses most or all of his serfs during a team match. It saves him the trouble of clicking on every building and closing its supply.

What do you think?

[Lewin]

That's a good point, but the problem is that at other times it might be bad if serfs treated gold/coal as top priority. For example if you already have a lot of gold produced your serfs would still focus on the gold/coal mines. What do other people think?

[kocsis1david]

When I'm in a similar situation I change the distribution of wares and close the delivery for some buildings. But it would be nice if I could set that e.g. how many tree trunks to deliver at distribution of wares menu, or maybe just a checkbox would be nice to disable it. In this way I wouldn't forget to reset the delivery at some building. There could be also a switch off delivery button for construction sites.

[Ben]

No, I don't think that this is good because of Lewin's points. If your city was sacked, then you should close all buildings but your schools and gold production, and you shouldn't have issues with making gold (all things considered, of course).

[kocsis1david]

If your city was sacked, then you should close all buildings but your schools and gold production, and you shouldn't have issues with making gold (all things considered, of course).

I don't think it's necessary to have anything else, but only options to switch off delivery more effectively.

[Ben]

I agree. If we could set how many, as you said for an example, tree trunks to sawmill, that would be nice in my opinion (but maybe a little ugly/complicated).

[The_King]

Well, when I play I usually put the coal supply to the metallurgist's as "2" or sometimes "3" in the distribution of wares menu. Having done that I have a maximum of one serf committed to bringing the coal at any given time and I have a steady gold production running. Even if this becomes a high priority task I don't think one serf could actually make a big problem (unless if there are two different coal fields where the mines are placed as it happens in some maps, then it being a high priority the serf might pick up the coal from a farther away coal field where a mine will have a coal ready if the nearby coalfield doesn't have it ready .. this could happen at low priority as well but I guess it will happen more often at higher priority).

Anyway, I think the suggestion given above seems like the best and most neat solution to the problem but I don't know how much effort it will take for the developers . If it is made possible to somehow close supply or adjust distribution of wares for different types of buildings from one handy menu this will save a lot of hassle. Because to go on each building and close it's supply is a big hassle because remember that you have to enable the supply later as well.