Few questions for experts/game dev

[AB Yukuai]

Hello everyone,

I'm doing my run in SoS but I think I need some help from you, veterans of the game.
My previous run (that was done around A58/59/60) went really smooth and peaked 1900 people in the city (not so much for you, but was a nice run for me :-D), it was really easy because the map was full of opiates and I sold them granting tons of gold to do anything I want. I interrupted that run to wait some features and here I'm, trying again SoS that in this current version seems to be totally a new game since my last run.

I'm currently around 600 settlers, 90% cretonians, 10% dondorians (I'll start gather Garths for my armies ASAP)

Here's my questions:
1- FOOD
I've got alot of food problems, can you confirm that is better to have orchards instead of fruit farm? Is there any tip to have a better production? I'm using canals around my farms/orchards but I didn't understand how canals help fertility, if someone can explain it to me I would be glad :-D

2- EXPAND MY REGION
How I can expand my region and get new city? I read through the forum that alot of players get "tons of items from my region", how this can be achieved?

3- SCIENCE
Maybe I'm doing something wrong but with a 600 pop I've got 224 scientist, in 7 building upgraded at level 1 and I keep having problem to mantain all the knowledge. I unlocked the library, does this will help? Am I doing something wrong having 37% of the my population occupied in knowledge?

I've got alot of other questions, but I don't want to spam too much :-D

Thanks in advance!

[bloodyesk]

2- EXPAND MY REGION
- first, have some "admin points" by Administration building.
- conquer nearby city with your army or mercenaries
- destroy(not mandatory) all existing buildings in new city
- build a "Builder" building in the new city with the help of your "Admin points"
- builder produces some "build points" in time, according to it's level.
- build other buildings with these "build points"

[an entire Roman legion]

Originally posted by bloodyesk:

- conquer nearby city with your army or mercenaries

or just buy it :P

[AB Yukuai]

So, to expand my reing I need administrative building, ok, I'll go for them as my next step :-D
I hope to conquer by money, not only with the crude brutaity of a fight :-P

[Ethonal]

1) Orchards are much better than fruit farms, but take years to grow as a trade off, there is also a event that can kill off a entire orchard.
Canals(water) boost fertility, if you right click any tile near water you will see 2 fertilitys, the original and what its being boosted too.

3)Knowledge goes down when no one is working at it, which makes this up and down normal, if its extreme they might be walking to far to often. Library just add a max % bonus at the cost of paper, but wont help with the yoyo effect

"I hope to conquer by money" Not sure if you noticed but you can infact buy regions, but you cant buy a factions capitol.

[PattyMcfly]

You can check fertility-base and fertility after water by clicking the eye under the minimap top right. Canals need to be at least 3-4 tiles thick to start giving off fertility I think.

I really feel like in this game you should only play to your local economic strengths, anything else is a waste of your most important resource, manpower.

IE: I start a map which has great fertility levels for grain, sweet water and a ton of wood. You create some grain farms, lots of fisheries, start making bread and harvest lots of wood through the job, or woodcutters.

From this you just start selling overstock and buying small bits of what you need. You don't want to overstretch what your guys are producing because if you try to spider web into every niche you will quickly not have enough people to do it. You need to use the manpower in a smart way to make DENARI which THEN will buy you the goods you need.

Your workers are way more productive harvesting 10k wood a day because you have a surplus of the material and selling that then they are spread out into 8 different types of food sources trying to piddle together a small amount of each.

I think this also goes for other goods industries. I try to make furniture and clothing later on in the game, but if you try to start producing every good they need you will find that other areas get left behind or fall off and suddenly everyone is starving.

[Mystomex]

Originally posted by AB Yukuai:

Hello everyone,

I'm doing my run in SoS but I think I need some help from you, veterans of the game.
My previous run (that was done around A58/59/60) went really smooth and peaked 1900 people in the city (not so much for you, but was a nice run for me :-D), it was really easy because the map was full of opiates and I sold them granting tons of gold to do anything I want. I interrupted that run to wait some features and here I'm, trying again SoS that in this current version seems to be totally a new game since my last run.

I'm currently around 600 settlers, 90% cretonians, 10% dondorians (I'll start gather Garths for my armies ASAP)

Here's my questions:
1- FOOD
I've got alot of food problems, can you confirm that is better to have orchards instead of fruit farm? Is there any tip to have a better production? I'm using canals around my farms/orchards but I didn't understand how canals help fertility, if someone can explain it to me I would be glad :-D

2- EXPAND MY REGION
How I can expand my region and get new city? I read through the forum that alot of players get "tons of items from my region", how this can be achieved?

3- SCIENCE
Maybe I'm doing something wrong but with a 600 pop I've got 224 scientist, in 7 building upgraded at level 1 and I keep having problem to mantain all the knowledge. I unlocked the library, does this will help? Am I doing something wrong having 37% of the my population occupied in knowledge?

I've got alot of other questions, but I don't want to spam too much :-D

Thanks in advance!

1) Food - Canals work by increasing the fertility of the squares next to it, more water increases the range that it can increase fertility. The amount of fertility increased and the range of the effect is based on the amount of water connected together. When the water is pooled it gives an AoE effect where the tiles right beside the water get a boost that drops off by 3% every tiles it moves out.
IE:
Boost is the immediate increase 1 tile away the AoE decreases the boost amount by 3% for every tile you move away from the water. So if the boost is 20% aoe of 6 then 6 tiles away the boost will be 3%, 3 tiles away the boost is 14% etc.

2x1 canal gives 3% boost 1 tile away with an AoE of 1 tile
2x2 gives 6% boost 1 tile away with AoE of 2 tiles
3x3 gives 20% boost 1 tile away with AoE of 6 tiles
4x4 gives 33% boost 1 tile away with AoE of 10 tiles.
5x5 gives 52% boost 1 tile away with AoE of 14 tiles
There are diminishing returns after a 5x5 square of water such that a 6x6 only increases the range to 15 tiles and I believe has the same boost 1 tile away as a 5x5.

So when making a farm placing the majority of the farm on the higher fertility portion then creating a moat of water around the entire farm will boost the fertility drastically. How thick you make that moat determines how far into the farm the water benefits.

2. Region expansion can be done through purchasing a city or conquering a city. If you want to actually do anything with these regions you must use administration points through the admin builiding.

3. You dont need to research everything on the tech page in fact about 90% of the tech tree is never needed in any given game. Focus on a few industries and the amenities and buy everything else. A few things will affect your research levels distance of homes, bathroom, food, heat from the labs and libraries as well as military training, and janitor distance.
If people are spending too much time going from home to food to bathroom to work it will drop production
If the race doing the research is also getting military training then your researchers will regularly become recruits which will drop your research.
If the janitors are overloaded or there just isnt one around the labs then they will degrade and reduce the overall research cap.
As for the library it increases the amount of research you have currently gained by a % based on the library and number of people working in it at the cost of paper.

[AB Yukuai]

Thanks alot for all the useful information, the one that I never tought enough is to not produce everything but sell what I've got enough and buy back the rest.

Actually I'm at 820 citizen, I'm doing well everywhere but the Clothes: I'll try to buy them!

[Baijiu]

Just to give you some idea about the scale of the game, my city has about 5.5k (500 researchers 270k research points) and I still don't have enough people to make all the refined and crafted goods, right now it's just fabric and clothes but that means i have to import ALL the clothes, 1500 a month and it costs me about $90,000

[an entire Roman legion]

my personal rule of thumb: if my ressources are red (capacity full) I just export 10% of my capacity. I'm swimming in gold, and could eventually start importing gems to make even more expensive jewelry =D

[Sad Cat]

Food:
Try building some pig pastures (forget what they're called, but they have the pig icon). They give a very good amount of meat and can be built over lowish fertility spots without too much of a hit to productivity. Obviously higher fertility yields better results but its less impacted than say a farm plot in a low fertility area. The map I am doing my current play through on has fairly poor fertility (average 40%-50% every where), but about 6 45x45 size plot (max size) pig pastures, combined with fishing the single river on my map, is enough to keep my 2,200 people fed with more than enough to spare.

Research:
I've found it better to make fewer, but larger buildings for laboratories than having a bunch of smaller ones. In my current game I have 2 22x22 (usable area is 20x20) buildings that have 102 researchers each. Both fully upgraded are putting out some where between 40k to 50k of research. I haven't built any libraries yet. I've been considering combining the two buildings together and then doubling the size, but I think that might be too big for a single building.

[AB Yukuai]

Thanks again for the answers, I hope to receive even more in future!

FOOD
I think there is something not correct in what I'm doing because I've permanently got problem with the food. I'm at 850 pop and I just reviewed all my orchards fields adding water so that now every field has at least 90% fertility. The total production is 7.5K, and the city consume 7.4K. If I allow some immigrant to come, I need to add another orchard field to supply the demand.
Question: does the canteen reduce food consume or it only grant more happines/satisfaction?
Question2: is there a way to speed up fields production? (I've got 90% Cretonians so I prefer fruit over meat)

Research: maybe I need to full upgrade the laboratory, atm I'm really far away the numbers I see in this post (500 researcher for 270k kp, 200 researcher for 100k kp).
With my 224 researcher I've got only 31.5K kp ...

[espritcrafter]

Originally posted by AB Yukuai:

Thanks again for the answers, I hope to receive even more in future!

FOOD
I think there is something not correct in what I'm doing because I've permanently got problem with the food. I'm at 850 pop and I just reviewed all my orchards fields adding water so that now every field has at least 90% fertility. The total production is 7.5K, and the city consume 7.4K. If I allow some immigrant to come, I need to add another orchard field to supply the demand.
Question: does the canteen reduce food consume or it only grant more happines/satisfaction?
Question2: is there a way to speed up fields production? (I've got 90% Cretonians so I prefer fruit over meat)

Research: maybe I need to full upgrade the laboratory, atm I'm really far away the numbers I see in this post (500 researcher for 270k kp, 200 researcher for 100k kp).
With my 224 researcher I've got only 31.5K kp ...

What are you spending all of your research points on? I typically have luck pumping points early on into bartering to increase the value of my exports, which I can then turn around and buy other goods I need. This is much more efficient than producing your own goods, once you look at how much you can sell raw resources for and how inefficient production conversion rates are for goods.

It's extremely inefficient to try and produce your own goods until you have invested considerable research into the specific goods production that you want. For example, do not start smelting ores into metal bars, just sell the ores and then buy what bars you need. I think the early conversion rate is something like 3 ores for 1 bar. Prices vary per run, but in my world's early economy, I can sell 2 ores and have enough currency to buy 1 bar.

After I decided to get into the metal smelting business, I invested a bunch of resources into the metal smelting branch. After all of the research points being dumped into it and upgrading my smelters, I was getting a conversion rate closer to 1 bar for 1 ore, versus the original 1 bar for 3 ores.

I did the same invest research points before starting production method for tools. After adding tools into the picture, I'm getting a conversion rate of about 3 bars for 2 ores, and i'm producing 2 tools for 1 metal bar. Before I started dumping research into these production chains, it was simply more efficient to buy what I need.

For my food problems, I have turned to lots of fishing and wheat. Fishing is actually what saved me from most of my food issues early on, since it gives extremely reliable food throughout the year and not just in one big burst.

You have to process wheat into bread, but this extra step is also what makes wheat good for feeding masses; You can upgrade wheat production and then upgrade bread production as well for a double hit on a single food source.

For water canals, I've read that it's best to have them at least 4 tiles wide. If you get creative with your layout, you can maximize land usage by farming around the canals and also using the canals as a source of fish. I ended up cannibalizing almost all of the original water tiles and using them to build canals in more favorable patterns for farming and fishing.

*Edit: Also, Orchards seems like a trap. They produce more food than fields, which leads people to invested heavily in them. This makes your food source less diverse, so a single bad event is traumatic. I've read of people losing their games when they have 2 or more bad orchard events RNG their city into the ground. I have a couple of orchards as a good supplemental source of food. If you spread your food sources between multiple farm produce, ranching at least 2 types, and fishing, bad rng events will barely affect you.

*Edit 2: With my current upgrades, I produce a tad bit more than 1 bread per wheat used.

[AB Yukuai]

Originally posted by espritcrafter:

What are you spending all of your research points on? I typically have luck pumping points early on into bartering to increase the value of my exports, which I can then turn around and buy other goods I need. This is much more efficient than producing your own goods, once you look at how much you can sell raw resources for and how inefficient production conversion rates are for goods.

Nice, I added only 1 point in that perk, maybe I can focus on it...
I used knowledge point on farms (alot for fruit, something for opiates because I was hoping to have enough opium to sell, but I see that is not a good idea so I'll rollback these points), mines (I've got 2 silthon ore mines and 5 iron ore) and to unlock the basic building (sanitarium, medic, hospital, eatery etc.)

It's extremely inefficient to try and produce your own goods until you have invested considerable research into the specific goods production that you want. For example, do not start smelting ores into metal bars, just sell the ores and then buy what bars you need. I think the early conversion rate is something like 3 ores for 1 bar. Prices vary per run, but in my world's early economy, I can sell 2 ores and have enough currency to buy 1 bar.

Mmmm I need to take a look at this, I sold the ore early but now I've got a solid bars production and I'm selling them ... but I need to take a look to the prices

After I decided to get into the metal smelting business, I invested a bunch of resources into the metal smelting branch. After all of the research points being dumped into it and upgrading my smelters, I was getting a conversion rate closer to 1 bar for 1 ore, versus the original 1 bar for 3 ores.

Nice, I need to do this calc too

For my food problems, I have turned to lots of fishing and wheat. Fishing is actually what saved me from most of my food issues early on, since it gives extremely reliable food throughout the year and not just in one big burst.

You have to process wheat into bread, but this extra step is also what makes wheat good for feeding masses; You can upgrade wheat production and then upgrade bread production as well for a double hit on a single food source.

Even here, nice suggestions, thanks

*Edit: Also, Orchards seems like a trap. They produce more food than fields, which leads people to invested heavily in them. This makes your food source less diverse, so a single bad event is traumatic. I've read of people losing their games when they have 2 or more bad orchard events RNG their city into the ground. I have a couple of orchards as a good supplemental source of food. If you spread your food sources between multiple farm produce, ranching at least 2 types, and fishing, bad rng events will barely affect you.

*Edit 2: With my current upgrades, I produce a tad bit more than 1 bread per wheat used.

I can confirm this.
Yesterday I've got 2 drought that dropped my production (from 7.5 to 1K!).
I sold every other exceeding material to buy enough food to survive, I did it but I dropped from 100K money to 10K money)

I need to re-valuate fishing and wheat/bread...

[espritcrafter]

Originally posted by AB Yukuai:

Originally posted by espritcrafter:

What are you spending all of your research points on? I typically have luck pumping points early on into bartering to increase the value of my exports, which I can then turn around and buy other goods I need. This is much more efficient than producing your own goods, once you look at how much you can sell raw resources for and how inefficient production conversion rates are for goods.

Nice, I added only 1 point in that perk, maybe I can focus on it...
I used knowledge point on farms (alot for fruit, something for opiates because I was hoping to have enough opium to sell, but I see that is not a good idea so I'll rollback these points), mines (I've got 2 silthon ore mines and 5 iron ore) and to unlock the basic building (sanitarium, medic, hospital, eatery etc.)

Also, one effect of barter research is that it expands the reach of your trade network. So not only are you able to sell for better prices, but you're also accessing more of the world market for better prices as well. I followed a suggestion I read elsewhere and focused on solely upgrading bartering until I got it about 1/3 or halfway done. This allowed me to do stuff like selling vegetables and then using that currency to buy double the amount of fruits.

[AB Yukuai]

A question: I unlocked administration and now I've got 18 points ... where I can spend them?
In the administration tab of the world windows I only see how many point I've got, but I cannot spend them...