Entity Activation Range and Minecolonies

I have an issue. I edit global.conf and try to tweak the entity activation range so that my minecolonies citizens will continue to move when they’re further than a full chunk away from me. No matter what I change the variables to (currently 256) they continue to stop movement after roughly 32 blocks.

I turned entity activation ranges off and they move all herkey jerkey. So now I have to just follow the citizens around to get them to do anything which defeats the purpose.

Does anyone have any experience tweaking these variables? I could use some help.