Priority systems
Players set the relative importance of tasks rather than directly commanding units, and AI agents self-assign work based on those priorities. RimWorld's job-priority grid and Oxygen Not Included's task lists let the player govern a colony by policy: set hauling above cooking for this pawn, and the simulation sorts it out. Designers use priority systems to enable indirect management at scale — you can't micromanage fifty tasks, but you can set rules that produce sensible emergent behavior. Key decisions: granularity (binary on/off versus numbered priority tiers), per-agent versus global priorities, how ties and conflicts resolve, and — critically — legibility of why an agent chose (or ignored) a task. Pitfall: the core failure mode is opacity: when a pawn stands idle or does the wrong thing, the player must be able to diagnose why (skill gating, reachability, priority conflict), or the system feels like fighting an inscrutable AI. Good priority systems expose their decision logic so players can tune policy with confidence.
- Dev effort: Medium
- Timing: Real-time
- Common in: colony-sim