Dawn of Man is a game deserving, in all honesty, of a video essay outlining all the good and bad about it, as there is plenty of both. However, nobody would watch that before buying, so I'll try to keep it quick instead.
The main thing I like about DoM is the AI; the way that the game gets stuff done without me having to directly tell it to. I just set out a few instructions and the rest is done for me - this makes managing a large population of individuals very easy.
The biggest issue though is the broken parts of priority, and the main flaw in the AI. One thing I always struggle with is maintaining a population in the copper age, without them all starving to death. No matter which route I take, from lots of farms set to high priority, to disabling repairs on as much stuff as possible, to enforcing tighter item limits than I had in the stone age, this is Always a problem.
The issue is that my farms are almost always left half-harvested, or less. Why? They're all set to high priority, and they were always done fully before, even when my population was smaller. So what's happening?
As far as I can see, the issue is that, when the game queues up tasks, it doesn't mark high priority tasks to be done first overall, only for them to be done first of the assigned tasks; of which, it only assigns a portion of them at a time. This means there is a long period between these tasks being done, where the "harvest" task just isn't queued up. At larger populations, this means that even more tasks are queued beforehand, and the problem snowballs. From there, people are needed to maintain a settlement designed for a larger population than is available, and you slowly decline into a famished, 200% workload mess.

When I mark things as top priority, I want them done before Anything else. Not just moved to the top of the queue, but queued up first too. Please.

Dawn of Man is a game deserving, in all honesty, of a video essay outlining all the good and bad about it, as there is plenty of both. However, nobody would watch that before buying, so I'll try to keep it quick instead. The main thing I like about DoM is the AI; the way that the game gets stuff done without me having to directly tell it to. I just set out a few instructions and the rest is done for me - this makes managing a large population of individuals very easy. The biggest issue though is the broken parts of priority, and the main flaw in the AI. One thing I always struggle with is maintaining a population in the copper age, without them all starving to death. No matter which route I take, from lots of farms set to high priority, to disabling repairs on as much stuff as possible, to enforcing tighter item limits than I had in the stone age, this is Always a problem. The issue is that my farms are almost always left half-harvested, or less. Why? They're all set to high priority, and they were always done fully before, even when my population was smaller. So what's happening? As far as I can see, the issue is that, when the game queues up tasks, it doesn't mark high priority tasks to be done first overall, only for them to be done first of the assigned tasks; of which, it only assigns a portion of them at a time. This means there is a long period between these tasks being done, where the "harvest" task just isn't queued up. At larger populations, this means that even more tasks are queued beforehand, and the problem snowballs. From there, people are needed to maintain a settlement designed for a larger population than is available, and you slowly decline into a famished, 200% workload mess. When I mark things as top priority, I want them done before Anything else. Not just moved to the top of the queue, but queued up first too. Please.