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Yesterday was a lot of sport on TV. It´s a nice combination; winter sport and Banished.
Not much to tell; it´s a big difference between this normal woods and Iceland birches; no lack of logs or fuels. My ambition here on this harsh map is not to farm and no need to send everyone to pick berries but I´m far from there yet. 1 port isn´t enough to support even this small settlement with food. I tried to close the turnip field but that was no good idea; last year we were almost out of food so it was opened again and I will now move it because I want that spot for a second port.
I have started to invest in better houses even if will take a long time to have them “paid off”. It´s a big difference in cost between turf and log or frame houses. What about increasing the amount of stone needed for the turf houses? On seafarer, where you really need them, there are a lot of stones on the ground, so that wouldn´t hurt much and on other maps, it would motivate to build the more advanced houses.
I got some bricks and roof tiles and yes; I can say that it was bad luck on the other maps with only a few roof tiles; this time, both had about the same amount. But a bit more totally would be good.
The picture shows the content in the house stores. Last year I bought about 1000 of each bread and beans. Most of the beans are gone into the houses but there´s still bread left in the stores.
This time I´ll only show a couple of pictures.
First picture
This lady was stuck idling on the trading jetty. I could save her by building these small boardwalk pieces. I don´t know how this could happen. It wasn´t directly after it was built. Are there any “rules” how you can build this port? I´ve made it directly at the small port. Maybe there should be one tile in between. Or can you make something at the model that prevents this from happening?
Second picture
The village develops. It´s my usual dense village building style. I try not to set everything in perfect rows. But it still looks a bit too neat. Maybe that could be a possible future development; houses that are not in perfect angles. DS has some you can turn just a little “out of the row”. Such houses would make fun to use here.
You can see the food graph. This ups and downs are typical when you need to rely a lot on trade.
Basically we have export goods enough to buy the food that´s missing. I still have that one field, more of nostalgic reasons, we could do without it but I still need to send a lot of people out in the woods to pick berries in the autumn. The merchants simply bring too little fruit. I think fruit too is heavier, weight 2, so the merchants only bring half of what they did before. I order beans and bread from some merchants but I´m too stingy to pay the ordering fee on fruit so I only buy from those, I don´t order anything from. That strategy used to work in earlier Nordic games but it doesn´t here, at least not yet. I´m about to build a third small port to increase the chances to get some. We will see how it goes on.
Yes, the boardwalk left did save the stucked girl. But it would be nice if she could have been saved without it. It might be a good thing to open a path out, I have seen more people out there, even if they shouldn´t be there; not stuck, the boardwalk is still there. Maybe they also used it to get there.
Question: I can´t find a way to make steel. Did I miss something? Did you miss something? Or is it meant to be “import only”?
Yesterday was no sport, so I had more focus on testing and looking at different things in the game.
I might have a clue about the not good working market. It doesn’t work much better in this game, even when I have a larger surplus of food. I have looked more closely what the vendors are doing. These still sometimes make labourer´s work, even when the market holds too little food for my liking. And when they work, they often get something like 2 pottery, 3 leather or 4 wadmals in a far away barn; too busy with other things than gathering food together. It looks like very much space in the market is reserved for this “not foodstuff” and since the vendors find that a lot more of these things are missing than the food, they prefer these materials.
I find, there´s no reason to fill the market with things like pottery, tallow and barrows, it´s better to take it away. You don´t need 200-300 clothing at the market (the same with tools, even if I have never had such a large surplus of tools); I would reduce the available space to maximum about 50 of each tools and clothing. I´m not so sure about textiles, salt and sugar; it´s nice to follow the “vanilla rules” and locate tailors and salt/sugar demanding sites at the market, always provided with enough materials but we also have the Industrial Market that does the same. So either reduce the amount of textiles and salt/sugar or take it away. This would leave more possible space for food. This would probably not totally solve the issue with vendors doing labourer´s work but I guess it will improve the function of the market a lot.
I also made a “herbalist test”. I made notes of the total production for 2 years, divided in food and not food. Then I assigned 3 herbalists; 2 normal who also picked herbs in areas where people were really unhealthy and one healer in the middle of the village; as strategically located as I could. I also had picked a lot of herbs in the years before, so there was a good surplus. Health did improve very well. Now I noted the production another 2 years. Guess the result?
First picture
The alehouse can´t produce mead. It´s not necessary; it´s actually called “Ale House” but since the mead hall can produce ale, I guess it would be nice if the skill of making mead isn´t forgotten. I can also report that most of the ale I produce stays in the alehouse opposite to what it did at the mead hall.
I might be wrong but didn´t the roasted meat work as alcohol when consumed at the alehouse? Here my citizens had eaten all the barley I bought, so as the alehouse was finished, I had nothing to produce alcohol from but enough meat and fuel to roast beef. But I didn´t see any effect on happiness until I could produce alcohol.
So far, my strategy was to grow as fast as possible by taking every nomad until the population reach 100. (Here, July 36 we have 103.) From now on, I will not take any/only a few new nomads and rely on my educated youngsters for further growth.
Second picture
The “MortalSmurph” method of hunting does work well. Not this much every year but one small hunter at the edge of the map hunt a lot.
Third picture
My latest developments. You can see my herbalist experiment at the graph and also that I haven´t taken many new nomads for the last 10 years.
“Secluded Settlement” “Viking Village”, I don´t follow.
Again I have some notes that are hard to decipher but I will try; it´s a combination of small questions, suggestions and things I´ve just noticed. Nothing important.
It looks like the production of some iron products has no uneducation penalty. How where your thoughts by the different products?
I always find it more relaxed when all buildings, also those where you can employ many workers, like mines have the number of workers from the start set default to 1. Like here; I built an iron mine but didn´t want to start the production at once. But, of course, it started, since I had some miners in clay/sand pits. I also think that the sandpit has the number of miners set to 2 from the beginning.
I miss the brown variation of the smaller red barn? Why did you take it away? I find it fits very well in areas with log houses and izbas. Of course, you can always build this new larger storehouse, if you don´t want a red building but I don´t mind variation.
What is the durability of steel tools compared to iron tools?
If I read my notes right and there´s no mixing up with educated/uneducated workers, but I think both are uneducated: It looks like you need 4 salt to make 28 salted meat from 16 meat but only 2 salt to make cheese. I don´t think these numbers are weird if you think of real production but since the raw material increases its value from 2 to 3 by both products, it´s more profitable to make cheese than salt some meat. Now I don´t know if this is compensated by a higher speed by meat. That could make sense.
I also have noticed that we now also have oak trees. They weren´t there in the earlier versions. I may be wrong but they seem to spread very slowly. I built my Thingstead in a group of oaks, cut all other trees and hoped that the oaks would have spread. But unfortunately, now after 50 years, they start to die without any small oaks. Maybe the free space now is too small but it would have been nice to have oak trees there “forever”. After all, oaks may be very old.
First picture
I was too impatient when I thought that roasted meat doesn´t make anyone happy. I took the ale away, happiness down and started to roast meat and it took a little while but now they are all happy again.
Second picture
This is important, however! To all players that play disasters on: If you build a brickyard, make sure that you always have 80 bricks in your stores so that you can rebuild it if it catches fire! I had 76. Now I must wait for the Hanseatic merchant. No one has shown up, so far.
It looks like the fire started at the red cottage. Didn´t you write somewhere that they didn´t catch fire?
Third picture
My “cult area”. I also show the content in my stores. The wagon vendors in the “outback” work a bit better than the large market. But health isn´t very good.
Fourth picture
All in all, we are doing fine. I have even started to order some fruit. I think we can afford that. But I don´t think we will be able to hoard a lot of daler (as we have done in some earlier games). One export port, two small ports for orders with daler as payment (mostly) and one big port for barter trade of “not ordered” goods work well for a population of this size (170). Since I don´t need to buy all they bring, it will work for some time.
So far the merchants at the export port have brought enough daler. And since I sell many different goods, I can make business with everyone.
The merchant that´s least useful at the moment is the sami trader to the small ports. I sometimes buy some blueberries (but don´t want to order any because of the grain flag). I also used to buy gold but since I don´t barter any goods he wants anymore, I have no payment for his gold and gold for daler makes no sense. But, there´s no need for any changes, I used to trade with him and on another map, where we have sheep and no cows, we could buy hides or if we mine a lot and don´t have enough animal fat, we could buy it to make tallow and so on; so generally, all merchants are useful.
