Furniture and Research

[Destroi]

That's basically what the game is right now, have hundreds of people making furniture, and hundreds of people researching.

Kind of hard to immerse myself when I want to go from Thrope -> Village -> Town -> City -> Metropolis -> Duchy -> Kingdom -> Empire

But instead its more like:
Thorpe -> Ikea -> Scientific Society -> Duchy

See what I mean?

The flow seems off, its like I ALWAYS need more research and furniture. It kills the immersion of making a small town into an Empire.

Research is so unbalanced, 10% of anything means nothing but takes a HUGE amount of upkeep to maintain.

The game feels like you've taken Pharaoh, and tried to make a really hard to figure out Pharaoh. That's cool, but its making it unfun.

[JustinCase]

I'm not sure why you need so many people making furniture. I'm at around 3k pop and I've only got 110 people on furniture and its enough to sell off leftovers when my stockpile is full...

[Le'Stranger Wuv'Bottom]

Never found knowledge to be an issue or imbalanced, 12k pop with most of the tech done, maybe 400-500 in laboratories/libraries, less for furniture

[.anointed.]

how are you building your labs? I usually go with giant 20x20 labs, even in the early game, and eventually get it filled with 100 humans. I dont have exact numbers but that usually allows me to allocate 10k worth of tech, which is more than enough to get setup imo.

[Cacalio]

Agreed - I'm having issues with this update where my city eventually stagnates. For some reason trade prices seem way off - buying goods are really expensive, whereas selling them makes no money. So setting up an export economy doesn't work. End up with no money, no growth, everyone on research and furniture (as I cannot import furniture because its so expensive). Really weird. Wasn't like this in previous versions.

[afrodude11243]

You definitely need to get your research situation squared away as early as possible, so that you're only building more labs and whatnot when you notice knowledge increasing too slowly, rather than when it's already hit negative. What I do whenever I have a good chunk of oddjobbers I want to give a real job is check if I need more food, then check if I need more knowledge, and everything else is downhill from that, barring specific situations like needing to rebuild a battered army, etc.

The abstractions of tech development in these kinds of games is always weird. In reality, pre-industrial innovations were mostly made in very specific places, and knowledge of them slowly seeped out through trade of products made with that innovation, or theft of trade secrets, or somehow getting individuals schooled in the inner workings of a technology to work/teach/build in your area. The main means you became one of those centers of innovation was by having massive heaps of money so you can afford to pay a bunch of spergs to sit around all day musing on the nature of reality. You definitely didn't have frontier colonies with a dedicated cottage industry for researching the mysterious art of baking, they would either have a baker already, and he would train his kids/whoever was interested to pass it on to the next generation, or you would develop what economy you could doing what you knew (probably farming) until you could just trade for baked goods, pay for some kids to go to cities and learn from guilds, or attract a baker to move in.

As for furniture, there is definitely something off about it. A single tick of furniture allocated to household use is enough to keep my stores at zero with 10 carpenters in a pop of 100 (1/10th of my population!) and basically 100% of my wood going to the carpenters. They go through chairs faster than the meat my measly 2 hunters keep cramming into every warehouse. The projects/upgrades locked behind furniture and then metal are definitely an unusually serious early game hurdle, probably due to the fact that there is only one tier of product. You either have furniture or not, metal products or not, there's no crap chairs/ alright chairs/ artisian chairs, pig iron/ iron/ steel kind of progression, so the furniture resource has to be good enough for late game, meaning its pretty prohibitive to get early game.

[daggaz]

@pinker stinklage: 20x20 labs take an ungodly large amount of chairs (not to mention all the other materials).

8x8 rooms (not counting walls) are exactly big enough to fit workshop items allowing for exactly 6 workers (the first whole integer number you can hit) and 100% efficiency.

Labs dont have auxillary items for efficiency for whatever reason, but might as well keep the size to fit the other city blocks. Now you only need 40 chairs in order to get operational (compared for example to 120 chairs in an optimally filled 15x15 lab) which means you are gaining knowledge in a fraction of the time a 20x20 takes. Knowledge that can increase happiness and thus immigration. You will progress much faster this way, and eventually get the same number of scientists as starting big, just copy the building when its almost full.

Its the same issue when you need ingots to upgrade, again smaller labs are better.