Index of Tips and Tricks

[Silent Ember]

Hi, all. After toiling with the game for about 14 hours and recording two playthroughs on a spreadsheet (spanning 20 in-game years), I feel like I have discovered some information that wasn't clear to me in the beginning. I'd like to help other players by sharing what I found, and also invite everyone to contribute to this thread. Once we gather enough input, we can turn this into a guide.

Please note that 95% of this info is based on the starter Bricco plot, with the starter Barbera vines. Specific values might differ for different grapes/plots.

- You have to pay upkeep for everything except land. Buildings and rooms inside them have a per-turn cost. Equipment, machines, and vehicles have a per-year cost. You can check how much rooms and machinery cost on the info tab of their cards, and the overall upkeep on a tool tip when you mouse-over your financial indicator on the top of the UI.

- The per-turn upkeep cost can be quite prohibitive. I went bankrupt several times because I wasn't watching it closely. You start at €150 per turn (€50 from each of your main buildings). Upgrading your Winery to level 2 raises its cost to €250. A Cleaning Room in the Tool Shed costs €300 per turn. The level 2 Tool Shed costs €500. All of those add up quickly, so make sure you're producing enough wine before you expand.

- Grapes/wine have an additional stat that isn't mentioned in the tutorial as far as I'm aware: polyphenols. You seem to get 3.0g/L from crushing, and then an extra amount during pressing, depending how much you press. On Barbera grapes, I got another 3.0/gL when pressing at 50%, and 6.0g/L when pressing at 100%. I'm unclear how/if polyphenols affect the wine.

- At least for Barbera wine, Body seems to matter more when determining the score than Tannin. This means that if you can get an additional Body point when pressing at the cost of one extra Tannin point (away from the optimum of 2), the trade pays off as long as you don't reduce the quality of the wine from overpressing.

- Pressing can reduce the quality of the wine. Always check the Wine Data when adjusting the slider.

- You can increase Body from pressing and aging wine in a casket. The devs mentioned that older vines also produce grapes with a higher body score, but I haven't observed this behavior in vines that were up to 14 years old. For aging, you must unlock the relevant tech (€10k) and then buy a Small Cask (€15k) under the Barrels pane in the Winery. The Small Cask will give you up to 4 Body points, and the Traditional Cask (€10k for level 2 Winery + €20k for tech + €15k for barrel = €45k), up to 5.

- In case you haven't noticed, for all equipment, vehicles, and rooms, buying the tech doesn't mean you get the item—you need to buy it separately. To prevent going bankrupt, you can always check the price to buy an item or a room on the shop tabs. Yes, things are super expensive and I think prices should undergo some balancing.

- On a couple of years, finishing the harvest in the winter pretty much decimated my grapes (even though there was no hailstorm, heatwave, or mildew). On other years, finishing the harvest in the winter had no effect. I don't know if it's just RNG, a bug, or even if it's working as intended. It would be great to get some input from the devs and my fellow players.

- The Principe plot is €10k cheaper in Story mode.

- At least Fermentation and Aging can add flavors to wine, both good and bad. The chance for getting a flavor seems to be random so far. I was able to get the following good flavors: leather, vanilla, dried herbs, and black pepper. The bad flavors seem to be: mercaptan, oxydation, and reduction. Mercaptan is the one that seems to reduce the score and the price of the wine by the largest amount.

- Spraying the vineyards once per year against Downy and Powdery Mildew seems to be very effective in keeping these diseases at bay. Of the 20 in-game years I have data for, I only got a vineyard infested once after I sprayed it. Mildew is quite harmful and can't be treated after it starts, though it will end naturally after Harvest (or if you uproot the vineyard). It will lower the health of the vines down to about 60–70% and cut your production in half, with the possibility of yielding lower quality grapes. The cost to spray the vines twice a year (one for each type of mildew) is worth it. It doesn't seem that the season you spray in affects the outcome.

- Pruning affects quality, quantity, and ripeness. With respect to quality and quantity, I have calculated averages from my data for the levels of pruning I experimented with:
Buds | Grape (kg) | Qual. | Revenue
High | 3692.1 | Good | €33,215
Medium | 3578.5 | Good | €33,714
Low | 3340.5 | Good | €32,485
V. Low | 3164,6 | Good | €32,117
Unfortunately, I don't have enough data to draw strong conclusions, but I believe having more bottles is better than having better wine, at least in the beginning. I was never able to get quality higher than Good on the starter Bricco plot.

- Ripeness is how quick the grapes will mature and the harvest card will come. Pruning on very low (ripeness +4), I got the harvest card on Summer 4. Pruning on high (ripeness +1), I got the harvest card on Autumn 3. The devs mentioned that slower ripening might yield higher sugar, but in my experience sugar development adjusts to ripening speed. On all my playthroughs, after the first two years, the harvest card for Barbera grapes always appeared when Sugar was at 5. I could choose to delay the harvest and increase sugar at the cost of lower acidity, but quicker ripening never left me with less sugar.

- When starting out a second plot with another grape variety, adjusting ripeness when pruning might let you reuse some of the processing machinery (i.e. one variety ripens early, one variety ripens late) and make it easier to fit the cards on the board.

- Tanks can't realistically be reused in the same year, because you fill them on the exact moment you click on the flashing ! symbol at the end of a harvest, and they stay in use until the end of bottling. If you click the flashing ! symbol (finishing the harvest), there is no going back. If you don't have a tank available, you will be forced to batch sell your grapes.

- If you don't have enough money to bottle all the wine you produced, your tank will remain in use after the initial bottling stage and you will get another bottling card immediately after you finish the first bottling. This will effectively create multiple copies of the same wine in your wine log, because a new copy gets created whenever you finish a bottling step.

- Special orders are usually the best sales deals you can get. They have a lower discount than the average for normal orders and you can sell a lot of wine at once. You can only get XP points from special orders as well, which is necessary to upgrade your buildings and unlock the tech tree.

- On most of my playthroughs, special orders seem to cap at 2. If you don't fulfill or dismiss them, they'll stay there forever. On a single playthrough, I had special orders disappear by themselves after left alone for a time, and I was able to stack as much as 5 orders at once. I believe that was a bug as I was never able to reproduce it. This means that you'll eventually have to take the XP hit to dismiss orders you can't fulfill (specially since we get so many orders for wines we don't actually produce) and pray to RNGezus that the next one will be good.

- Fermenting for one turn will always remove exactly 14g/L of sugar. Depending on how much you had to start with, that might equal to 3 or 4 points in the sugar scale. Fermenting for two turns seems to remove 16.9g/L (confirmation required).

- There is currently no way to get rid of wine bottles in the warehouse. You can't trash them, and you can't sell them for a low price of your choosing. In all my playthroughs, whenever I had exactly 1 bottle of a particular batch at the start of a turn (before fulfilling orders), I didn't get any more sell orders for that batch and that 1 bottle remained stuck in the warehouse for the remainder of the game. That's why I always micromanage sales when there are few bottles left, to make sure that the last order I fill will never leave out exactly 1 bottle.

[ゲ-で]

Too long to read without a bottle, how do I get that?

[Oddible]

Awesome info! Thanks! Needs to be dropped into the Guides section!

[ulzgoroth]

I've gotten the impression that aging may have a chance to destroy flavors from fermentation. Not sure about this, but aged wines seem less likely to have flavors like that signature Brecco native yeast dried herbs flavor. (Though aging can add beneficial flavors too.)

I'm not sure whether bottling choices make any practical difference, with one exception: you can get a flaw 'cork taint' if you use natural cork.

You should discover this in the campaign, but Chardonnay grapes can be extremely productive compared to your starter field of Barbera grapes. If you don't develop your selling capacity this can be a problem because they overflow your warehouse. If you do, it can be a huge source of income even if the bottles do sell a bit cheaper.

Speaking of developing selling capacity: for each level of your warehouse you are able to fill 5 more orders per turn, and may also be able to receive more orders. (I've never had fewer orders than I could fill, in my game, unless I had no wine to sell.) Once you've made some upgrades you may really want the automation provided by the Shop room.

[Corrine]

A couple of things I would add to this: I have had special orders up to 6 before and I never had to delete any. You can but you don't have to.

Also your observations about upgrading buildings and rooms when you are only farming the initial grape type is good advice because of your money. But you can slowly start to expand once you have been farming two types at once for a several years. Doing 2 grape types each year gives you a bit more income.

Also I would recommend the 3 board upgrades early on because they give you the ability to do the number of actions required to maintain growing and processing two vineyards worth of grapes. These are pricey but vital. I can't overstate how much difference getting these upgrades made for me. Also there is no constant upkeep fees for the boatd upgrades.

As another side note, with the board upgrades i was able to process everything for the two vineyards with only 1 extra tank to go in my winery as the only equipment i needed. I did add an aging tank while doing this also though in order to fill special orders that required aged wine.

I made the best amounts of money when I moved to growing the highest quality of grapes by pruning to maximum amounts. But i recommend you start at a medium amount of pruning and slowly incrrease the amount (move the slider to the left) until you reach the maximum after a couple years.

One thing that affects your sell price that I have heard no one mention is your fame rating. When you start out your fame rating is low. As you sell special orders your fame rating goes up. As it rises the prices you get paid for any wine you currently have will go up per bottle. This is one very good reason why I did not want to cancel special orders. You will get more special orders over time even if you don't cancel. You may decide to cancel a few orders to keep the count lower but each one will lower your fame which means you make less money per bottle. Special orders for chardonnay come up pretty quickly but hang on to them. As soon as you are able to get your 2nd plot of grapes growing (in the Principe plot) your chardonnay wine can be used to fill those special orders.

The original poster seemed to be spot on with his findings though I think he waited far to long to get more money producing plots in action. Then again his data would not have been as clear.

[Silent Ember]

Originally posted by Corrine:

The original poster seemed to be spot on with his findings though I think he waited far to long to get more money producing plots in action. Then again his data would not have been as clear.

You are absolutely right. I am a veteran of many a strategy game, and the approach that always paid off in every other game was "master the basics before you expand." I initially identified buying another plot and producing two types of wine as "expansion," so I spent 10+ hours trying to find a profitable path to get there. I erroneously believed that I'd first need to get really good at making Barbera wines, improve their score, and make money from that.

So my path involved getting the Winery to level 2, buying traditional caskets for improved Body scores, then getting the Tool Shed to level 2 and buying a harvesting tractor, a trimming tractor, and a cleaning room... In the end I was having a per-turn upkeep upwards of €1000, and I had sunk more than €80,000 in capital investments. But my production didn't improve noticeably, and I was still selling less than 3000 bottles of wine per year, barely scraping by and going bankrupt more often than not.

Now I realize that unless you get extremely lucky with RNG, there doesn't seem to be a way to get a 90+ score on the initial Bricco plot out of the bat. Even if you manage to improve the score, your income won't improve tremendously, and you're incurring ever higher upkeep and maintenance costs.

So I agree with you. The appropriate strategy for this game is to forego early improvement and go straight into expansion. The first two board upgrades (€20.5k) are quite feasible early on, and you only need to buy the Principe plot for €25k in Endless or €15k in Story Mode, plus the tech for Chardonnay grapes (€5k) to start producing crazy amounts of wine (compared to the starter Bricco plot).

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Speaking of developing selling capacity: for each level of your warehouse you are able to fill 5 more orders per turn, and may also be able to receive more orders. (I've never had fewer orders than I could fill, in my game, unless I had no wine to sell.) Once you've made some upgrades you may really want the automation provided by the Shop room.

After that, following ulzgoroth's tip, I determined that upgrading the Warehouse for 5 extra orders per turn + high Chardonnay production (even though the score was pretty lame) made heaps of money and then I had enough to upgrade everything else and start worrying about quality.

Originally posted by Corrine:

A couple of things I would add to this: I have had special orders up to 6 before and I never had to delete any. You can but you don't have to.

I tried another run after the patch, and since the devs essentially broke Endless (by forcing the stats of the plots to be random, instead of offering a choice of randomization to the player; I started a new game 12 times and couldn't get decent parameters for growing Chardonnay on Principe) I went with Story mode. I noticed I got a buttload of special orders. So I believe the "bug" I reported on my initial post was my memory of the first (and only) Story run I had played. In Endless Mode, I was never able to get more than two special orders, and they never went away. Are you talking about your experience on Endless or Story Mode?

Originally posted by Corrine:

One thing that affects your sell price that I have heard no one mention is your fame rating. When you start out your fame rating is low. As you sell special orders your fame rating goes up. As it rises the prices you get paid for any wine you currently have will go up per bottle. This is one very good reason why I did not want to cancel special orders. You will get more special orders over time even if you don't cancel. You may decide to cancel a few orders to keep the count lower but each one will lower your fame which means you make less money per bottle. Special orders for chardonnay come up pretty quickly but hang on to them. As soon as you are able to get your 2nd plot of grapes growing (in the Principe plot) your chardonnay wine can be used to fill those special orders.

Wow, this is a genius realization. Looking at my data, I had a feeling prices were going up. I almost proposed this as a trend in my initial post, but I had so much variability from RNG flavors and weather effects that I couldn't be sure. This might explain why a 2022 77/100 bottle was priced at €16.09 and a 2024 69/100 bottle with the same stats plus Mercaptan was priced at €16.35. Props to you for figuring that out!

[ulzgoroth]

I don't know whether the price of older bottles goes up, but in my experience the price of the latest year seems to almost always be higher than the preceding year, even if the wine is a bit worse. (For context, my fame pretty much always goes up 4 points per year since I get recurring special orders for a decent chardonnay and any good white wine from two of the story characters and never spend fame on deleting the unfullfillable orders for wines I can't produce.)

[Corrine]

I only played story so that may be true

[OFFSR]

not playing story, but produced a chardonnay with 6 body, 3 sweetness, 2 tannins, 6 acidity. All show stars in those marks meaning that is the preferred level in those categories. In the description, where it usually tells you what's wrong with the wine, it says "this wine has good body". Rating = 69. Any advice for what characteristic could be affecting the wine, that is not listed in its characteristics?

[ゲ-で]

Originally posted by OFFSR:

not playing story, but produced a chardonnay with 6 body, 3 sweetness, 2 tannins, 6 acidity. All show stars in those marks meaning that is the preferred level in those categories. In the description, where it usually tells you what's wrong with the wine, it says "this wine has good body". Rating = 69. Any advice for what characteristic could be affecting the wine, that is not listed in its characteristics?

You need 1-2 good traits to reach 100 even with all stats matched

[OFFSR]

So what's the difference between stats match and a trait? What traits do I need to be looking for? Do you mean flavors? How do you avoid the bad ones?

The Chardonnay I described above had two good flavors and no bad ones. Vanilla and Perfect Terroir.

[ゲ-で]

Originally posted by OFFSR:

So what's the difference between stats match and a trait? What traits do I need to be looking for? Do you mean flavors? How do you avoid the bad ones?

The Chardonnay I described above had two good flavors and no bad ones. Vanilla and Perfect Terroir.

Weird, I just found a picture of Chardonnay I've made two weeks ago, different version of the game, something might be different now and it's 100\100 even without traits. Could you share a picture of yours?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2506546437

[OFFSR]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2506656017

[sem♘]

Originally posted by OFFSR:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2506656017

This could be a bug, a good terroir with perfect stats should definetly be higher score, we will look into it. Did you prune the vines? You can see this info in the vineyard section under the bottle.

[OFFSR]

I went back and looked and it says I have not pruned any of my vineyards ever. I have done this every year, but it says I have not. Under, weeding, thinning, and suckering, it says yes to all of those.