Development Points Tier List

[Agony_Aunt]

Posted this to reddit yesterday, thought i'd share it here as well. Main arguments I had were Orchardry and Charcoal Burning should be higher. Will i get the same opinions here?

Anyway, usual disclaimer, personal opinion, yadda yadda, YMMV, yadda yadda. Feel free to disagree.

I'll also add there are no "Must have" perks to take. You can "win" the game without spending any development points if you know what you are doing, although I wouldn't recommend trying on Challenging unless you *really* like a challenge.

Also, the real value of some depends on your starting resources. No point taking deep mine if you don't have any rich mining resources, obviously. For cases like this, i'll be judging them based on their usefulness in situations when they can be used.

I'll also be judging them based on how they are meant to work and not counting any bugs that might be problematic or cause it to not work in some way. I will make a note if i'm aware of any bugs with the perk though.

My tiers go from A to E, none of this S and F horse manure.

A - Excellent choice. Worth taking in most regions.
B - Solid choice. Worth considering in most regions, depending on strategy.
C - Borderline. Can be situationally useful, perhaps filling in a needed gap.
D - Not worth it unless you're aiming for something in particular with your strategy.
E - Don't, just don't, unless you really really want to and know why you want to.

A

**Bakeries** - the ability to double bread production should never be overlooked. Not only can you get plenty of food with it, you can end up with so much you can export it for regional wealth. And don’t think its only worth going for in fertile regions. Bread can be a good source of food even in infertile regions, as there’s usually enough 1+ land to farm a decent amount. In fact, bakeries make even more sense in infertile regions than fertile.

**Deep mining** - this is a no-brainer for regions where you can take advantage of it. Even when the resource runs out, this will keep the mined materials going, and that means an infinite source of stuff to export. However, keep in mind, wood is effectively an infinite resource and cogcoins (sorry, wooden parts) seem to be stuck at trading for 5, never going down (at least, I’ve never caused their value to drop, despite years of intensively exporting), but it never hurts to have more wealth!

B

**Advanced Skinning** - double meat from deer is a great bonus. Without it, you’re contributing to food variety, but unlikely to be building up a decent supply for all your plots, especially mid-late game. With this perk you can be getting a surplus of meat even with large towns, especially with rich hunting grounds. Be aware of the current bug where deer will wander if you set the game to speed up while zoomed out. Keep in mind, until you start farming you can double the deer reproduction rate on rich hunting grounds with the hunting grounds policy, so these work well together. Just remember to disable that policy before you start farming!

**Orchardry** - more food variety is always good. They are expensive as far as backyard extensions go and take 5 years to reach full production, but when happiness is important, then these can provide a good mid-late game supply of food that requires no attention from your part. Best to make the plots large, 3 corpse pits/0.75 morgen in size is good and the burgage plots at least tier 2, better 3, to provide storage space during harvest, otherwise you might find the plot’s storage filling to capacity until your granary workers can take it away.

**Heavy Plow** - if you’re going for bakeries then you’re taking this anyway. How useful it is depends on what size fields you are going for and whether you are making your fields square/rectangular (you should if you’re using this). Smaller fields benefit less from this than large ones. Since you’re probably going for bakeries if taking this, then its best to make at least 0.75 morgen fields to take full advantage of this. By having 2 oxen plough two fields while the rest of your 8 farm workers hand plough another one, it means one farm can efficiently plough 3 large fields in a season and still leave plenty of time for sowing. There is an additional reason to take this as well that almost pushes it into the A category, and that is without it you can’t assign oxen to the farmhouse, and if assigned during September for gathering, they help with it, carrying more gathered goods than workers.

**Charcoal Burning** - wood is plentiful and really, unless you’re doing something wrong you should never have an issue with having enough firewood. However, due to how the markets work, having a second source of fuel can really help with happiness and distribution. I’d say this is borderline C, since personally I don’t take it that often, but it can make your life a bit easier and require less woodcutting camps and just more workers to process the wood, so it’s a bit of a trade off. You can’t really go wrong taking it though.

C

**Irrigation** - very situational as it depends on difficulty, whether you’re playing with weather effects on, and whether you are relying on farming. A drought if you’re only farming flax isn’t the end of the world. A drought if bread is just one of many sources of food isn’t the end of the world. A drought when farming barley and you are maintaining high happiness and not on challenging isn’t the end of the world. But if any of those apply, then irrigation can really save your bacon… or bread.

**Beekeeping** - I really enjoy this perk, but it is very situationally useful. There are many source of food in the game so variety isn’t usually a big concern, but if you are wanting more, then it can be good. Note that the tooltip is wrong, you are not limited to 2 apiaries, you can have many. The main issue is it requires 1 family to work an apiary (don’t bother putting in more, it doesn’t really help) and they only produce 1 honey per month. Like eggs, this is good for diversity, but only if you really need that diversity, and unlike eggs, it ties up people as workers. If you’re taking advanced beekeeping them it makes this a bit more worth it.

**Basic Armormaking** - helmets give more defense to your troops and can be worn by all troops. So if you have the iron, its worth considering. On the other hand, maybe you will want to just import if you have the wealth, saving the development point. Its not like you will want a never ending supply.

D

**Rye Cultivation** - in principle it sounds like a decent choice, especially if you’re already taking the Orchardry development. My issue with it is that unless you really want to go crazy on bread production, you can still produce a load of bread even in infertile regions, especially with the Bakeries development. If you don’t take bakeries, then you’ll need a load of communal ovens to handle the load from fertile fields. And its not like you need to worry about space in the game, there’s always plenty of land for your town and fields and whatever else you need. The main thing is to look at the start of the region where your best land for farming is and then place fields in advance so you don’t build on it. Doing this, even in infertile regions means you can ignore this development perk, unless you’re really going in the direction of massive bread production.

**Trapping** - extra meat is always nice, and if you’re taking Advanced Skinning then you’re taking this anyway. However, the placing traps can slow down your hunters doing their main task, killing deer and gathering hides and meat from them. Perhaps not an altogether bad thing though, as even a single family can halve the deer population in a few months if the deer don’t wander and you want to carefully manage their numbers.

**Advanced Beekeeping** - the only reason to take this is to export wax, since wax currently doesn’t have a use. Extra sources of things to export to rotate between can help keep export prices high, resulting in extra wealth. So, if you’d like to do that, go ahead, otherwise not worth it.

**Advanced Armormaking** - keep in mind only people from tier 3 houses can wear chainmail. If you’re playing efficiently you’re going to limit how many tier 3 houses you have, so the benefit of this is quite questionable. You might want to forget about chainmail altogether, or import the small amount you need. But if you want to lean into it, or are doing lots of tier 3 houses, maybe you will find this useful.

**Better Deals** - personally I avoid importing as much as possible and use it only to import limited numbers of stuff, for example, helmets if I don’t take the relevant perk, and once I have enough, I stop, so paying 10 less per unit isn’t really something worth spending a development point on. If you’re doing lots of importing, then this will make a huge difference, but I’d say if you are doing lots of importing, you might want to ask yourself what can you change so you don’t need to.

E

**Sheepbreeding** - it sounds nice, and back when it worked (too) well you could make good money selling sheep from it. But now the breeding is so slow and growth takes a couple of years, that by the time you get the perk and have some sheep to breed, you’ll probably have so much wealth that its just better to buy more sheep until you have enough to satisfy your cloth making needs.

**Fertilization** - as long as you’re rotating fields this isn’t needed at all. In a fertile region you can almost get away with rotating a crop every other year. If you rotate different crops or have 2 years fallow then its not needed at all. You also need to invest in sheep and have the sheep moving between fields, most likely meaning your sheep farm workers are having to follow the sheep around, making them less efficient. Even in infertile regions, its not like you really need to worry about space that much and can use what fertile land you have with fallow years to recover all lost fertility in 2 years, without spending a point on this.

**Master Armormaking** - the only people who can wear plate are retinue. The cost of adding plate to the limited number of retinue via the retinue customization screen isn’t that high, and if you really want to balk at that cost, you could import some, although the cost of the trade route could be very high, more than you’d pay for the armor you need… and then you’d need to do the same for each region… or use pack stations… and it all gets a bit messy, so just upgrade on the retinue screen and save yourself the hassle!

**Foreign Supplies** - No, just don’t do this, forget this even exists. It will chew through your regional wealth in return for extra firewood or food. It works really quickly and can bankrupt you before you know it. Its not like firewood or food is hard to come by either!

**Trade Logistics** - with increasing costs of opening trade routes the more you open, this can look tempting. Early game, when wealth is limited, it could be a bonus. But later game, when you’re perhaps wanting more and more trade routes, its not like one time payment of a few hundred wealth really matter that much. Yes, it could be nice, but wouldn’t you rather spend that development point on something else? The answer is probably yes.

**Pelt Extraction** - a few extra hides, when you’re already getting hides from hunting in a decent amount and you’ve probably got goats giving you even more. A lack of hides is rarely a concern, so this development point is not worth thinking about.

**Forest Management** - its been demonstrated that as long as you set up a few Forager huts and have a couple of families in each, you can gather the max possible number of berries per season, since this doesn’t increase the replenishment rate, just the cap. The only reason it might be worth getting is if you are late to start gathering, so the extra time to fill up is a benefit, or perhaps you just like seeing bigger numbers.

And there you go, that’s my list. Make of it what you will.

[goblin]

Nice list. Valid points!

[Didz]

As you correctly point out the DP's one chooses to take and their value are dependant upon the starting resources that are available in the Region being developed.

[Agony_Aunt]

Originally posted by goblin:

Nice list. Valid points!

Thanks. Not everyone will agree, but it should provide some food for thought, especially for new players who are wanting to know which DPs to take.