Food tips for those having issues

[Phebus]

A couple of tips ive learned for people having issues with starvation.

1) When you start a game, find your forest and build a hunter and a gather. Thats all you need for a population at the start. Add in a fishing dock and that can support you for a long time.

2) Gathers are far more efficient than farms. The only downside is that your gathers might be further away than your farms (depending on how you lay your towns out) and you need to factor in the time it takes to deliver food.

3) Dont build too many houses too quick. This is something that is very important to learn. I build on average a house every other year. This means the food consumption never out paces my food collection.

4) Increase your food supply! Normally, your food workers will stop making food once they hit their default limit of 5k. Click on any food producing building and increase your max food supply beyond 5k. I set mine to 50k+ as my population rises . This means if i have issues later on, i have a massive supply.

5) Build a town hall!!!!! This is probably the biggest thing that will help you. Once built, you can click on it and cycle through several stat menus. The most important is the production menu. This will show you your current food production/usage and what you produced/used for last year.

6)Build markets near your houses, build barns out near your farms/gathers/fish docks. This will increase the speed that your food gets to your people.

Tips 1-3 are great for getting started and getting your population into the 80-100 population range. Thats when tip 3-5 come into play and allow you to incrementally increase your population.

Using the town hall to spot that my people are eating more food than i can produce, along with increasing my max food storage, allows me to react to future problems now.

Hope this will help people get past 50 population issues i see most people having in terms of food.

[Howie Dewitt]

Good stuff, thanks.

[Den]

Good advice, I can only concur to everything you said.

Also, new players have to take in account the fact that agriculture produces a massive quantity of food only once a year, while every other type of food production bring a steady income of food all year long (more or less).
Anticipating the needs of your citizens is a lot more easier when you have a steady production.

[Phebus]

Yup, thats why i advocate trying to fulfill food needs via gathering, fishing and hunting as much as you can. Relying on a farm based system means you not only have to be supplied for the winter, but into late spring, which is where i think the biggest risk of starvation is.

I should also mention that if you can get a hold of chickens, DO SO! Those little things provide eggs AND chicken meat.

[City Builder]

I'd rather have two gatherers and a hunter or two hunters and a gatherer than having a fishing dock in the mix.

In the games that I've played so far my fishing docks take 4 people and produce relatively tiny amounts of fish per yer. So far I get double that just out of 4 farmers working a cabbage farm which IMO would be better than a fishing dock.

The most important thing I can say is "location location location" (as realtors like to say) as it's really important where you place those hunters and gatherers.

I have one game where my placement of the hunter and gatherer were apparently not placed well, and my people suffered through low food their entire lives until finally starving around year 12. In my new game I'm overwhelmed with food for my 20+ population with just one hunter, one gatherer and one cabbage 15x15 farm. So it seems to me that location is really "everything" in this game.

[Phebus]

One of the advantages ive noticed to having one fish docks early is that it is steady food with little to no travel time. Watching the time it takes to get food from a source to the homes of people has been very fun to watch and ive started to shift my food strategies based on that.

I do agree though that location can make or break a town after you have that initial surge of your original population dying.

[City Builder]

How many fish is one of your fishing docks getting per season, what did it get last season and this season?

I'm only wondering if perhaps location of the dock plays a bigger role in fishing than I had initially thought.

But I've got one fishing dock with 4 workers on a river that is wide enough to see movement in the river and it only produces about 560 fish a season.

I then put another fishing dock on a lake that is fed by a small river and it too only seems to produce 500+/- per season which seems terribly low to me for 4 workers, so maybe there are "prime" fishing locations on the map and others just barely supply fish?

[Phebus]

Yeah its only about 500 per year regardless of where placed, which is why i like it early game. I dont have to worry if i got my gather in the perfect spot and its a slow and steady supply of food, which is something i can plan around since its the same number year after year.

However, you are correct that once one dock is built its not worth building a second.

I should also mention im OCD and i dont like to place farms until i know how my city is going to be built so i hold off on a farm til year 5-8

[Ultima546]

Originally posted by Phebus:

Yeah its only about 500 per year regardless of where placed, which is why i like it early game. I dont have to worry if i got my gather in the perfect spot and its a slow and steady supply of food, which is something i can plan around since its the same number year after year.

However, you are correct that once one dock is built its not worth building a second.

I should also mention im OCD and i dont like to place farms until i know how my city is going to be built so i hold off on a farm til year 5-8

Not true at all about the fish farms, unless difficulty plays into account. If you place your Dock on a lake or a small river then you will get less fish than if you place it along the large river running through your map. Above half as much, to be semi-precise.

[Den]

Originally posted by City Builder:

But I've got one fishing dock with 4 workers on a river that is wide enough to see movement in the river and it only produces about 560 fish a season.

I then put another fishing dock on a lake that is fed by a small river and it too only seems to produce 500+/- per season which seems terribly low to me for 4 workers, so maybe there are "prime" fishing locations on the map and others just barely supply fish?

If you're talking about the big type of rivers, that's kind of strange. I have fishing docks on a large river, with a lake nearby. I tried to place them so they have as much water as possible within range.
With 4 (educated) workers, I get more than 1000 fish every season. So I guess there's a paramater that eludes us right now...

Will do a screenshot and post it.

[Phebus]

Oh thats interesting. I'll have to look into that more then, i have 3 cities im bouncing between and they all show 500.

On a side note (since ive seen city builder tossing some good ideas here and on the shining rock forums)

What do you guys think is the best thing to trade with? Ive been using iron tools since they seem a good value providing i get a mine up and iron on the ground is generous. But few traders will accept food which i find odd since one would think its the most common yet always needed resource.

[Phebus]

Wow 1k. Now i really want to explore fishing more. It still wont equal what a gather can bring in, but i like the stability fishing brings in terms of yearly food contributions.

[Den]

I tried to take screenshots of different docks so you can get a good idea of their cover. Don't take in account the number of workers (3 of 4), I reduced it after a tornado hit my town ^^

edit : You have the minimap so you can also check how the map looks. Maybe the fact that the river is connected to a lake makes it more fishy ?

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=230339348
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=230339373
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=230339393

[Phebus]

Thanks Den. It must be from the bend in the river, something my towns dont have close by. I'll have to keep an eye on that now.

I wonder if you put it north of that school house you are building, right on the tip there, if it would generate even more since there is more water to fish from.

[Den]

School ? Oh, no, I'm building the school(s) somewhere else. This is a cemetary. Maybe that's why there's so many fish :D
But as you said, the bend of the river must help too, that's why I put them there after all ^^

[Phebus]

I have a question for you since your city is bigger than mine. How is your food levels with that many new babies being born all the time? Do you have wild swings in population or always keep a large percentage reproducing? Ive been keep about 20:20 students and babies and slowly building my population since a disaster can ruin things quite easily. Maybe i'm just scared and going slow and steady

I've been playing 3 cities 3 different ways to try to learn all of the little tricks but i should pick one and see how high i can get it. Each is about 150-200 pop now, i might try upping my rate of births and see how that changes things.