Overall most useful race (Discussion)

[Talon Rose]

HOY.

Basically, what do you think is a cornerstone species, and why?
We all know Harpies are great in hearths and we know why, or that having humans in farms is neat for that potential double yield, but I think the real MVP class in this game is the Beaver clan.

Wood is your basic starting block. It builds the basic stuff you need, refines into moderate stuff you *must* use, it is used in trade for slight padding, for fuel, for bonus fuel.
Beavers being able to some times get double wood is pretty good in my eyes. While they're arguably not too useful for much else, them being really helpful with such a core thing is what makes them the most useful race in my eyes.

Optional bonus discussion : "Worst" race and why?

[arjensmit79]

My ratings:

#1: Harpie. Indeed, hearth, and also lots of reputation gain.

#2: Closely followed by the Fox. Some good early reputation completely for free as they ignore hostility. Get your standard year 1 encampment, favor the foxes and they're in the blue already. Also glade events is very nice. Im starting to appreciate their firekeeper skills more and more as i find myself into situations where opening a lot of small glades is part of the game plan some times lately. A game plan that would be much less feasible with the foxies.

#3: At a distance follow the Lizards. The 10 tools they bring can be turned into 30 early gold with some luck in the trade routes. Their fire keeper is just that 1 extra point you want to get the harpies and themselves trough early storms at hostility level 1 with 5 base + 3 housing +2 Encampment needing nothing else.

#4: Humans: They don't have much going for them. Finding the soil is helpful, but i usually find it even without them just fine. The fact that their firekeeper is on rare occasions a real life saver keeps them from #5.

#5: And that leaves the last spot for the Beavers. They have their perks, but they simply are the least significant ones.


Each race has yield bonus. Enhancing the end of a production chain is better than the start of it. (no explaination needed right?) So food processing is the most important. I think foxes are most often used in there. Production of tools, build mats, coats and packs follow. Thats mostly beavers. Farming and woodcutting are the start of the chain and thus least important. All together, i think the yield bonusses are not what makes the biggest difference between the races though.

And yes, that makes my favorite starting team: Harpies + Fox + Lizard.

[Samseng Yik]

My vote go to fox. Few reason.
They have 2 mechanics that deal with high difficulty very well
a) immune to the hostility level penalty to resolve
b) work fast on events

A) Higher prestige level need more years to win. This usually means more hostile level. Fox at least easier to reach the reputation generation at that moment
B) Higher prestige also make events take more time to complete. This usually will make the negative events trigger effect for a while. You want this happen as little as possible. Also, blood flower.

Because your topic is about "most". This means I can only choose 1.
I cannot say the other

[Talon Rose]

Originally posted by Samseng Yik:

My vote go to fox. Few reason.
They have 2 mechanics that deal with high difficulty very well
a) immune to the hostility level penalty to resolve
b) work fast on events

A) Higher prestige level need more years to win. This usually means more hostile level. Fox at least easier to reach the reputation generation at that moment
B) Higher prestige also make events take more time to complete. This usually will make the negative events trigger effect for a while. You want this happen as little as possible. Also, blood flower.

Because your topic is about "most". This means I can only choose 1.
I cannot say the other :berserk:

You & the previous commenter are making me reconsider the foxes. I mean I'm obviously a furry but that's not even a factor. Although ...:->.
I might have to start playing more aggressively rather than more passively cuz yeah wow .

[马小褂]

I just want to remind you guys beavers are certainly not only for wood/plank production, they're also great when playing a trading-focus style. For me its fox > harpy > human=beaver > lizard.

My reasoning for foxes being on top:

1) easy to satisfy and good for early reputation gain. and imo they're the best for early reputation even than harpies/lizards, since they dont really need anything other than a rain collector (and you always at least build one in the first year). With harpies you will need to unlock their specie ability (40 coats) and the harpy houses to get early reputation, so for new players they're actually quite a pain to satisfy esp during the storm (assuming op is new to the game).

2) great firekeeper ability for the late game. the hostility reduce doesnt matter at the start of the run but overtime it becomes a significant amount after opening 2-3 dangerous glades.

3) faster event handling. actually imo it's not their best ability since for the most events, ~1 minute reduce doesnt mean too much if you know when to open a dangerous glade (and especially when you're not playing on high prestige), but it can be run-saving when you get some really bad events in a row. so for me this is like a “low roll” insurance.

4) they have longer break intervels than lizards/harpies, which means they rest less and consume less like humans/beavers. this means they can handle pretty much all the jobs (same with humans), you're losing some yield bonus but the overall production speed is the same. eg, they're better woodcutters than lizards/harpies when you don't have beavers in your clan. sure you dont get the wood bonus, but you would still cut down the same amount of trees with foxes.

[Clawyer]

The bonus production with the swirly highlight are a good indicator that you are doing something productive but in some cases they might distract you from the optimal way to play.

This is for two reasons:

a) The further you go up the upgrade tree the more chance for double production will already be available. This already lessens the impact of choosing the "correct" species for a task as percentage based modifiers just add up. There are more percentage based modifiers out there, the worst one probably being the farmers that eat biscuits cornerstone with +75%. Others like rainpunk engines or hearth level 3 also come to mind. The higher your chance for double production is without that species' modificator the lower the impact of the modificator is.

b) There is a productivity breakpoint for recipes that take around 1:15 to 1:45 seconds to complete. As production speed can vary a lot in a settlement due to buffs it's hard to keep an overview but as long as you only care about production speed, not about the optimal output, you have two different cases where I assume that one villager is working alone in a building for simplicity's sake:

Lizards or Harpies go from the hearth to their workplace (I assume sub 5 seconds). There they start working on the recipe for 1:30, needing to immediately go on a break again. They come back from resting, which happens twice. On the third cycle they take the produced goods to the storage (~ 10 seconds) and go to work again. After working on the recipe, ~ 1:45 minutes since the last rest they go to rest again, producing once, resting, delivering, producing and resting and so on.

Any other species goes to their workplace, start working for 1:30, don't need a rest, start on the next goods for another 1:30, go to rest after 3 minutes, come back and move the goods to the storage (~ 15 seconds) and start working again. After 1:45 since the last rest has happened they start another production cycle, going to rest again after 3:15. The 3:15 cycle goes on after that.

If you compare those two the average time for one production cycle for harpies and lizards is one production and one break plus the way to and from the hearth.
For all others the average time is one production and half a break. You also save a lot of food as they now consume every 3 minutes.

That might not be worth 10% double production chance..

[KD.AltQQ]

FOX (lower glade work time is huge and gives more breathing space in the early years). They are the race I take almost automatically if it shows up in the caravan. The fact that it has the break times of human/beaver with the rep gain rate per villager of harpy/lizard (not decadence--their decadence is not that good) makes it the clear winner.

Then:
humans/harpies/beavers: all useful in their own ways. Humans and beavers are never bad in a caravan (hard workers and high base resolve). Harpies require a lot of maintenance but gives good rep gain, the firekeeper bonus is fantastic (also helps solve glades), and 50 starting coats means they can help fulfill certain glade events, or early timed orders involving resolve of themselves, humans, or beavers--you can immediately reach the threshold with an encampment, coats and favoring (these usually give a delivery line which ends up being amazing through the entire course of the game).

At way rock bottom:
The worst race to ever exist--which shall not be named. 10 tools doesn't solve any glade above a certain P level (if they had made it 12 instead of 10, they would be a lot better). Frequent breaks, high decadence, low base resolve--they are practically harpies with only maybe 10% of the upsides. I avoid taking them with harpies if possible because they both will start whining once the storm hits and I can only favor one, while both eat and use up stuff a lot but the only difference is that harpies are grateful while these cold-blooded creatures are not.

[arjensmit79]

" I avoid taking them with harpies"
But they are the perfect pair !
Base resolve = 5
Encampment = 7
Housing = 10

Level 1 hostility -10 = 0. Oh noos ! panic time !

Lizard in hearth = +1. everyone happy, no more panic.

And they can help a lot of glade events if you get to sell their tools during year 1 :D
Honestly though, glade events were an issue in some distant past when i played a year ago. I dont know what happened, i think the harder ones got nerfed or something, but these days, i have no fears opening 3 dangerous glades simultaneously after the first storm on p20.
My biggest concerns these days are making sure i can buy blueprints from the first trader while also paying my glade taxes so that i wont miss out on the chance to get the needed farms and or camps.

[Clawyer]

I would take lizards with harpies over lizards with foxes. They have way more synergy!
Harpies and foxes have only one shared need: Cosmetics. And that comes into play very late so you have to either get specific buildings that offer complex food for both (and I am not talking about the soup kitchen here, it's doable but sooo time and resource consuming >.<) or use a lot of global resolve.
Buildings that come to mind are the butcher (with both recipes fighting for resources), the cellar (1 star.. needs containers.. meh) or the cookhouse (which needs some way to get flour first).

I am not saying it's not doable, but lizards and harpies can both be buffed resolve-wise with a smaller amount of blueprints.

[马小褂]

I would also avoid taking lizards with harpies. its not about synergy but the resources/time loss due to their short break intervels. say, if you had both of as your main species while the third specie was the minority, then you had to assign them to do most of your woodcutting / materials producing jobs, and honestly they're kinda bad workers.

you can test it yourself in training expeditions: for jobs with a short production cycle like woodcutting, humans/foxes would produce roughly 10% more woods while cosume 20% less food/services than lizards/harpies in one year. and for long-term jobs the difference can be more significant for the reason KD.AltQQ had mentioned. this basically means for any jobs that they are not skilled in, humans/beavers/foxes are way better than lizards/harpies.

certainly minus 10% production speed and plus 20% food/services consumption doesnt matter too much for most of p20 runs without modifiers, since you can basically win with every comp anyway. but when it comes to some severe situations, the resources/time loss can be really tough. like some of the harder map modifiers, or some bad glade events (like if you get 2 living matters in a row), or even some nasty negative effects combo during the storm. and this comp is also bad for the new updated seal forest when fuels and foods are so scarce.

[Lil brekky]

1. Humans with maphack AND the ability to leverage their own maphack with farming production chance. And they very rarely quit. The first questions I ask on every embark are "what are the chances I have humans" and "how cheap are farm BPs"

2. Harpies and Foxes are easy to please and reduce wasted time, either through glade event speed or goods-transportation. Harpies get a heavy consideration from me just for crit chance in the blight post. Foxes can be a large, lategame, 1-click Hostility reduction. They also seem to get a mood buff from virtually all of my favourite buildings.

3. Beavers and Zards make more good stuff - fuel and foods. Beavers have this kind of counterintuitive problem where they actually work more slowly than any other woodcutter, because their extra production means they spend more time delivering - so the rapidly-spinning blade around their portrait always struck me as a little deceptive. I don't dislike them at all. I just like them "the least".

[Slatepaws]

I'd have to say foxes feel a little bit op with how easy it is to please them and their glade even bonuses

[Dunal]

If I'm looking at data from my own games (at P20) and see which species are more likely to result in faster completions (at higher populations), it seems that ordering of best to worst would be:

Beaver >= Lizard > Harpy > Fox > Human

Beaver/Lizard combo seem to be what results in Y5 wins most commonly. Interestingly, the data is skewed even further towards them since the recent housing update, which indicates they have the most powerful bonuses (makes sense since trading is incredibly strong and beavers boost that even further, while Lizard's gathering bonus can be pretty significant in marshlands when I prioritise on receiving it).

Otherwise, Beavers innate is much stronger that you'd think it is (one extra trade option per route) since it makes it a lot more likely to have efficient trade routes early on to snowball standing (without needing to pay up to 20 amber) and I suppose 10 tools are just useful to sell early. Effective trades in Y1 can do a lot to really setup the remainder of the run.

Humans might be the worst within this data since while farming is of course useful, they have less flexibility and micro compared to gathering/trading or other production buildings. You stick a warehouse close to them and they'll give decent food/resources over a whole year but there isn't much room to optimise outside of that (with humans not providing any significant boost). Might also be that they usually don't become active until mid-Y2 (their innate doesn't affect this if nearest soil is in a dangerous glade and/or further away). Humans best trait is probably that you can ignore them (disable consumption over other species) without much concern, but that may not be useful to clearing quickly. Slowing impatience as a hearth bonus is also the least relevant for faster clears (from my experience it's never used, so there's no added flexibility in switching to them which to some extent, is not the case for any other species).

I wouldn't say there are huge gaps between any species though. Biome, blueprints, map layout and playstyle are going to affect quite a lot. I'd argue they're pretty balanced all things considered, with things being a little skewed towards trading perks just due to how strong (probably too strong) it often is.

EDIT: Another factor is also that there just isn't a metric for win-rate % because well... unless you're stacking several negative modifiers on purpose, there isn't really gonna be games lost so there's no data for it. For all I know, humans might be more reliable for win-rate if the game was much more difficult (where losses are common). Reducing impatience or having a steady reliable food source (farming) could be more desired at that point. Win speed is just the only useful data to have currently.

[Spacesuit Spiff]

I will never take beavers in the embark, but I actually like seeing them show up as the third species in year 2 because their passive only procs when one arrives. So you can buy the first and maybe even second tier in the trade routes for 5 and 10 respectively, and then they'll autobuy the next tier for 40+ amber saved. This makes up for how bad they are outside of Coral. Worst species housing, 3 services because they're picky eaters, and the woodcutter bonus isn't as good as it looks because of how much woodcutter time is spent carrying stuff back, it even slows their ability to dig for glades. There are a lot of engineering jobs but beaver resolve doesn't matter to begin with, and very few jobs with the log icon.

That said, you always want one of Humans and Beavers in a run as a "safe" pick, and Humans aren't much better than Beavers if you don't end up farming (I often bring sword supply line and just stretch starting/cache food while rushing to a win, with some light gathering).

Harpies and Foxes are both great. I'm looking at the wiki (from here on let's assume the wiki numbers are accurate, I have no idea if that's the case) and Foxes surprisingly have the same break interval as Humans and Beavers, so I would want a majority Foxes to do the actual work and 1 Harpy on the hearth. The intel from Fox passive (seeing location, color, and sometimes absence of geysers in nearer clearings, is very useful in the year 1 draft, much better than seeing farmland). Fox firekeeper bonus is sometimes fantastic.

Lizards have fantastic synergies (food production chains hugely benefit from the bonus yield, and there are a million fire buildings) and starting with tools is extremely good (either crack open a cache and snowball, or sell them to trade routes at 4 or 5 a pop and snowball). Outside of that they don't have very much going for them other than very slow resolve decay (so they can play the role of a safe species in a pinch, though you'll want a lot of Foxes to do the actual work).

[arjensmit79]

Originally posted by Dunal:

If I'm looking at data from my own games (at P20)

LIttle side note: I dont need to know how much you play to think your sample size is going to be waaaaay to small to have any meaning at all in this way. Its been a long time since i was involved in statistics playing poker for a living, but let me give it a try. Someone correct me if i'm doing this wrong.

I think a reasonable distribution looks like this:
65% of games won in 6 years
95% of games won in 5-7 years.
99% of games won in 4-8 years.

That would make the standard deviation of game length 1.0 year.
Now if you average say 100 games, the standard deviation of such a sample should change with the square root of 100, so it becomes 0.1 year.

So to analyse your results per race, you would need to average all your games as a baseline and then average only the games with a certain race in it. If the smallest of these sample sizes is 100 games, there should be 2 to 3 standard deviations difference between them (so 0.2 to 0.3 years) to say that race is better or worse than average with 95 or 99% confidence.

Say you have 2 races where one averages to 6.15 and the other averages to 6.24
If you want to confidently conclude that 1 is better than the other, that 0.09 needs to be 3 st.dev. Stdev needs to be 0.03. For this you need samples of about 1000 games.

That is still not enough to say anything about how much better or worse than average. Just that its better or worse. If you want to say anything quantitative, (like you indicate with your >= and > signs) you would need a sample size big enough to get your standard deviation smaller than the significant digits your looking at in your comparison. I assume the difference between races is not that big that 1 digit after the separator is enough, so you would need samples in the order of 100.000s or millions of games to make the second digit behind the separator have any meaning.

Even for Eremite games that might be impossible with the regular updates and shifting meta. They simply wont have such sample sizes within 1 update/meta.

[马小褂]

Originally posted by Dunal:

If I'm looking at data from my own games (at P20) and see which species are more likely to result in faster completions (at higher populations), it seems that ordering of best to worst would be:

Beaver >= Lizard > Harpy > Fox > Human

Beaver/Lizard combo seem to be what results in Y5 wins most commonly. Interestingly, the data is skewed even further towards them since the recent housing update, which indicates they have the most powerful bonuses (makes sense since trading is incredibly strong and beavers boost that even further, while Lizard's gathering bonus can be pretty significant in marshlands when I prioritise on receiving it).

if we're talking about win speed, i think lizards/harpies/foxes are roughly the same at least for me. i also checked my run history, 5 out of 17 recent p20 runs were y5 win and they were:

lizard/fox/harpy on royal woodlands, with tightened belt/protected trade/prosperous settlement/trade negotiations (this run basically got all the good trading cornerstones lol)

lizard/fox/harpy on coral forest, with prosperous settlement

human/lizard/harpy on coral forest (no trading cornerstones, cant really remember what happens in this run)

beaver/fox/harpy on mashland, with trade hub/guild house

harpy/lizard/fox on marshland (one of the rare cases to win on y5 without any trading cornerstone. i think it was due to marrow grow which i think its one of the best positive forest mysteries, got kiln as the first blueprint so i just never worried about fuel or hostility)

and of course, all the y5 wins were done without any negative map modifiers.

for me, the key to get a y5 win on p20 seems to be having at least two species of the three (lizard/fox/harpy) and some good trading cornerstones. the ranking probably goes like lizard=fox=harpy>beaver>human then.

but i think this rushing style has been heavily unfavored since recent upgrades (both Seal Contracts and Sealed Forest). i've noticed that after Seal Contracts my average run length went above by ~1 year and i only managed to pull out one y5 win since then (but i only had done 5 runs on my main profile since then so it might be a lowroll idk).

the Prestige 15 modifier change (reputation threshold increases by 1 everytime after you get a reputation point) basically forces you to play a longer game for most of the time. and even the thing with villagers moving slower when going through building seems quite impactful to me since its roughly minus ~10% woodcutting/gathering speed, which is also dragging the game for a little bit.

Sealed Forest upgrade also heavily favors a slow and steady style which means humans are way better than lizards/harpies for the new biome.