Balance feels way too tight

[Sililos]

Need food?
Your going to run out of workers.
Need workers?
Nope your going to run out of food.
Fix your worker problem?
Your out of food again.
Fix that problem?
Once more your are out of food.
Place a park?
Don't even think about it! you will NEVER have the population room to support parks lol.

Everything's a bit too razors edge for me to enjoy and im playing on the easiest non sandbox setting, id expect to be able to build, with a small chance of failure, but also be able to spread out and design without too much of a headache.
But right now under the easiest difficulty, even the smallest tweak feels like juggling flaming knives on top of a pole over a pit of petrol and razor blades.
You cant put one thing wrong in even the smallest way without upsetting the entire balance, with zero room to play and experiment or have fun, and im STILL on the temperate map doing the tutorial which is total chaos and isn't teaching me anything about how to play its so all over the place, it feels more like a feature showcase.

If i was playing the hardest setting, yeah id expect this kind of play, but please, for the easiest non sandbox setting, give us some breathing room devs.
And please tidy up the tutorial to be a tutorial on how to play rather than a feature showcase, I think it rushes people a bit much trying to keep up with its demands to try develop every building type one after the other rather than teach us how to succeed.

[jwinter]

It is a puzzle. You need to minimize basic farming tiles that have poor workers to food ration and try to squeez as many as more efficient food generating buildings that need fields nearby ideally overlapping as many fields as possible.
I was succesful with farm buildings arranged in a pattern of 4 farm houses build in minimal distance from one another and with shared field in the middle. Then row of silos (later mixed with food processor) and another 4 farm houses. 2 Tractor sheds can later be added to each field.

[Jimmy James]

Play on smaller maps to get a better idea of how the game is meant to be played. It's about constantly replanning your space to maximize resources.

[Sililos]

You guys are not getting it at all.
Yeah its a a puzzle.

Im playing on 'easy'.
Id expect say, a 100 piece puzzle.
Instead Easy starts at 10000 with most the pieces 'blue' and no edge bits.

I don't care if the challenge is in spamming as many tenant (Aka slaves btw, I feel gross even being forced to use them to progress the tutorial.) farmers as possible or maximising every square inch of space from the first moment you put down those first 6 road tiles.

If there's an easy option, it SHOULD be Easy!
As i said, razor fine tuning on balance at lower difficulty's should not happen, they need to allow for more wiggle room UNLESS you choose the harder challenge settings.
The 'difficulty' means literally nothing except in the case of desert and snow where you lose a lot of farm land, and the map types that dont have flowing water for energy.

They have sandbox, It takes all fun away from the game unless simply building pretty city's is your thing.
And then they have 'hardcore' posing as Easy, medium and hard all at the same time for everyone else.

Some of us want resource management but not to have to juggle placing farms every time we place down a single house, or an entire block of houses for a single park etc.

[VascularPlant]

It's a great game. Stands out from other city builders, big time.

If you don't want to place tenant farmers, then optimize the farm houses and get fishing going. Fishing is much more productive on a per-tile basis than tenant farmers.

In very early game, you're right, being inbalanced will slow you down a lot. If you get the hang of early game, though, the growth is explosive. I don't allow the timer to run until I've exercised all of my options for that month.

It's worth "wasting" labor that you know won't be used on farms that you know will get demoed for housing next year.

[VascularPlant]

Just ran an experiment.

Loaded a medium temperate map with default river. I rushed building fishing on all the river and coastlines.

By July of Year 6, I had all docks and housing placed. Built 15 lumbercamps to support the build.

I let the simulation run and added lumberjack huts as required for power generation. Added regular housing to supply work to the lumber industry.

By April Year 7 it's clocking 12k in food from the fishers.

So, that's pretty fantastic. Could be done faster, too. I think that gets you to 10k pop? Add more lumbercamps to build out the neighborhoods. You could start teching up before major farms are built.

[Volodus]

That balancing is basically whole point of the game. Explore your options, read what each building does and improve, adapt, overcome.
Don't be afraid to demolish and rebuild whole sections.

[W]

Different people want different things out of games, a lot of us enjoy the challenge. I can agree this is not a casual game, there's some difficult curve to it. It might be it's not for you. It might also be if you watch someone else play it some on e.g. youtube, you'll learn enough to enjoy it a lot more.

[Nii_P]

Yeah, it needs some brain cells to be activated. "How dare you!" ;)

Nah seriously, the key is to grow just bit by bit, no large squares of any infrastructure. It's like using the throttle at slow traffic: One wouldn't change it from full to 0, full, to 0, asf... but slowly accelerate or decelerate to get the best out of the engine.

[GlitterGloo]

Originally posted by Sililos:

You guys are not getting it at all.
Yeah its a a puzzle.

Im playing on 'easy'.
Id expect say, a 100 piece puzzle.
Instead Easy starts at 10000 with most the pieces 'blue' and no edge bits.

I don't care if the challenge is in spamming as many tenant (Aka slaves btw, I feel gross even being forced to use them to progress the tutorial.) farmers as possible or maximising every square inch of space from the first moment you put down those first 6 road tiles.

If there's an easy option, it SHOULD be Easy!
As i said, razor fine tuning on balance at lower difficulty's should not happen, they need to allow for more wiggle room UNLESS you choose the harder challenge settings.
The 'difficulty' means literally nothing except in the case of desert and snow where you lose a lot of farm land, and the map types that dont have flowing water for energy.

They have sandbox, It takes all fun away from the game unless simply building pretty city's is your thing.
And then they have 'hardcore' posing as Easy, medium and hard all at the same time for everyone else.

Some of us want resource management but not to have to juggle placing farms every time we place down a single house, or an entire block of houses for a single park etc.

Tenants are not slaves. At least in the US, people often rent farm land to work for a share of the profit. I have family who rent land for this purpose. It's extremely common.

Aside from that, I felt the same about the balance at first, but using the right combo of pieces does eventually alleviate that tightness you refer to. Farm houses, tenants, landlords, silos, docks... It all works out quite well if you figure out a good balance. :)

[Bluetooth the Pirate]

Originally posted by Smirkin' Merkin:

Tenants are not slaves. At least in the US, people often rent farm land to work for a share of the profit. I have family who rent land for this purpose. It's extremely common.

Aside from that, I felt the same about the balance at first, but using the right combo of pieces does eventually alleviate that tightness you refer to. Farm houses, tenants, landlords, silos, docks... It all works out quite well if you figure out a good balance. :)

This game is Chilean, and tenant farming has a history there, a lot of it bad. It compares to post-reconstruction sharecropping. That's one of the fascinating things bout Urbek is seeing the perspective on city-building that isn't either a US (SimCity) or US-filtered-through-Europe (Cities Skylines) framework.

There isn't really a hard fail condition for Urbek, you might need to bulldoze a lot of buildings but you have a minimum labor production that means you can always start over so long as you haven't bulldozed all the trees.

[BedBug]

Farming breaks when you learn you can build a 3 tile wide path of farms, remove the center and just plaster it with tenant farmers, as they produce much more food and cost nothing. rinse repeat.
Example
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I generally sit with 9-10k+ food production from 1000+ population and upwards.
But yeah half the game is normally balancing normal work and food production.
It's so easy to get skilled and higher labor and basically every other resource, you spend 90% of your time micromanaging food and normal labor.

I think the game could benefit strongly from showing the potential change when you mark a grid of farms/buildings.
Like, mark an area if 9x9 farms and it'll show, beside the food/labor numbers the + and - that will occur if you were to place the buildings

[DeWitt]

Yes the tenant farmer thing really baffles me - I do not use this method as I dont`t like to build so many of these poor creatures but I still wonder why this method even exists in the first place...

[Volodus]

Tenant farmer are unhappy people.
It probably exists for this reason - it gives you moral dilemma (and it affects over happiness).

[BEEN]

How are you having trouble with food and labor? I find it super easy to have plenty of both

[SilasOfBorg]

The game definitely has puzzle aspects, but I find it extremely forgiving. OP's description of "juggling flaming knives on top of a pole over a pit of petrol and razor blades" is a leeeetle over the top... :D

Later on in the game when your city is larger you CAN accidentally screw yourself over really badly if you delete the wrong thing (my favorite is accidentally deleting something that causes a bunch of houses to de-level and you lose all your skilled labor and the thing you need to rebuild takes skilled labor....) But this is why save/reload exists.