Tips, Tricks, and Starting Guide(Hard).

[Mobscene]

Hey all. Figured I would post some of tips and tricks I've learned so far. Some may be repeats from other posts that I've just read.

1. UI - There's a few windows in the UI you should always have open. These are General Statistics, Event Log, and Job Assignments(Professions). These allow you to see needed information and change things you need to quickly.

2. Town Hall - Town Hall is a must have to see how much food you are producing and using, to gauge whether or not you can expand safely. It also allows Nomads to start showing up in your town. Nomads are great for increasing your population. But be careful. Taking in too many at the wrong time can trigger a starvation in your population. They will all take tools/clothes and require a lot of food. If you don't have a sufficient stock of these and food production jobs for them, you can quickly lose a large chunk of your population.

3.Resource Hub - I love to use these. I stagger them around the map between higher population hubs.
Build a Gatherer's Hut, Forester Lodge, small Stockpile, Storage Barn, and a couple Houses in a forested location. In the picture below you can see some extra buildings like a Hunting Cabin and Herbalist. The Herbalist doesn't get full potential from being near a Forester, but it will collect a decent amount of Herbs. Ideally you'll have your Hunting Cabin and Herbalist in a separate location.

Always try to have your Woodcutter next to a stockpile that is frequented by Log deposits. I prefer to have a Stockpile near my Forester Lodge, with a Wood Cutter nearby. The Wood Cutter is just south of the forest in this picture, with its own little stockpile.
https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1397x786q90/827/etmw.png


4. Fishing - Fishing is a good way to get food variety early. It's a poor way of gathering large amounts of food. The amount of Fish you catch seems to depend on how much water area you cover with your Fishing Dock. If you can get a very good location, try to put as many Fishermen you can in it. Sometimes it's hard to find good fishing locations early on.

You'll also get more fish if you have a Storage Barn nearby. Fishermen will partake in hauling fish to be stored. If they spend all their time running halfway across town, they won't spend that time fishing. Which leads me to tip #5.
Below is a good example of a good location. Try to find a spot that has as much water coverage possible.
https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1397x786q90/856/1cqa.png

5. Stockpiles and Storage - Try to have Stockpiles and Storage Locations relatively close to any resources that need them. Put a small Stockpile by Quarries, Mines, Forester Lodges, and Wood Cutters. Storage Barns are a bit more difficult, as they have a set size and that size isn't small. But try to have Storage Barns near any areas that produce large quantities of food. Near your Farmlands and Herds especially. The less distance a person has to run to deposit their goods, the more time they will spend doing their job. Farmers are especially bad for this. You may lose harvest if an acceptable food dump is too far from your farm.

6. Crop, Orchard, and Pastures - I've seen various differing tips on this. My advice is to go with what you prefer. There are a few things you should do though:

Make sure your Pastures all hold at least 10 of the animal inside. 10 seems to be the current minimum amount of animals needed to Split a Herd. I've seen it split with less, and heard of others doing it. But it seems to be buggy if it's meant to work with less. 10 always works. This isn't an issue for Chickens, as fairly small Pastures hold a lot. But for Cattle and Sheep, you'll need to go bigger.
Cattle - 12x18, 10x20, or any other variant that adds up to 30 squares seems to work.
Sheep - 14x12 or 26 squares.

As for Farm sizes, I prefer to go 9x9 with 1 Farmer. The one farmer seems to get the job done, even though the game will assign 2 farmers. 10x10 may work as well with a closer food dump.

Orchards are a bit more different. The amount of trees planted seems to differ on the seed type. Some will have 2 spaces between them, others only one. I'm not sure if the amount of trees affects the outcome or not, it's something someone else will have to work out :D I usually just go 9x9 Orchards with 1 Farmer, same as Farms. The 1 Farmer can harvest it by themselves.

Infestation! - Try to have an extra/empty Pasture somewhere. If you need to, you can move the animals out quickly, rather than slaughter them for food or have them die. With Orchards/Crops, you'll want to Harvest right away, and cut down the trees if it's an Orchard. It will replant next season or right away if it's not winter.

7. Reproduction - If you want your population to grow, you need to build more houses. But don't just throw them out there at random times. Growing your population at the wrong time(as with Nomads) can lead to death. Make sure you are producing more food than you're using before building more homes. If you have too many children, they will consume all your food before you can get more food gathering coming in.

Early on, check your houses to see who's living inside. The top two occupants always seem to be the Mother and Father of that family. Anyone below is a child of them. If you want to start more families, you need to make sure there's a Male and Female of age that can move in together. Any person in a house with a title(Gatherer, Laborer, etc) other than Child/Student will be able to move out and start a new family. As long as they aren't the current Mother/Father of that home.

Population Stagnation can happen if you don't make houses early on. Once a Mother/Father of a home reaches a certain age, they will no longer have children. So if you let people get too old before building new homes, you may have a hard time increasing your population.

8. Trading - Build more than one Trading Post if/when you can afford it. I never make more than 2, but if you're relying heavily on trade for food, you may need more. One Trader will come for each Trading Post.

Venison, Venison, Venison. This stuff is awesome for trading. It's gathered by your hunters. 834 of it will buy you any new seed, as long as that merchant will take it in trade. I usually set my stock of it to 2500-5000 per Trading Post. If you're hard up for food, 2000 Venison will get you 6000 of other foods that trade for 1, as Venison trades for 3. 1-2 Hunting Cabins with 2-3 workers each will keep you stocked in Venison quite well.

Firewood and Logs are another good thing to stock your Trading Post with, as long as you have a decent income of it from Forester Lodges. Leather, Clothing, Tools, Stone, and Iron are also great if you have an abundance of any. Don't trade it all away rather than keep you people equipped and clothed though.

9. Education - Start educating your people as early as possible. Sometimes it's one of the first buildings I build if I'm going for a more productive population. Educating early can hurt you though, if you aren't prepared to shoulder an extra 6-10 seasons of non-productive members of your population.

I've looked for specifics on what exactly education does. As of this moment the only thing I am fairly sure about is that educated people do their jobs better. Jobs that create/gather mostly. Laborers likely don't benefit from education much as say, Blacksmith, except that they may get more wood, stone, iron, when gathering it.

10. Houses and the Boarding House - Some people say not to use the Boarding House at all. I don't agree with this. It's a great early way to house your initial population, and costs very little to heat compared to individual houses. Don't keep people living in it for too long if you want to increase your population though.

Do not destroy your Boarding House after you've started building homes. Unless you never plan to take in Nomads.
Nomads will use this as a temporary home until you can build homes for them. It will also prevent them from creating too many children of their own when they first arrive. You may actually want additional Boarding Houses later on when Nomads start coming in greater numbers. Nomads can kill your town if you can't handle all the new mouths to feed and equipment for them.

Try to have Houses near all your places of work that are far from central housing. If you have some Mines and Quarries off in the distance, put some Houses next to them. The people that work there will move in so they don't have to travel far to and from their job.
Use the Paths tool and click on workplaces or homes to see where people are traveling to and from. Try to minimize the amount of travel as much as possible. This will make your population more productive.

11. Auto Save Timer - You may want to increase the intervals of your Auto Saves, if you think you may want to go back and fix any devastating mistakes.

A lot can happen in 5 minutes that can destroy your town, then be Auto Saved forever :p

10-15 minutes is probably best. If you don't consider it "cheating".

Basic Starting Guide(Hard Difficulty) - The first thing you should do is pause the game and have a look at your map. You may want to restart for a new map if you get a terrible one. Or not if you like a challenge :)

Set 3-4 Laborers to Builders.

Set an area for a Stockpile at the edge of a large forested area near your Cart. Also set a Storage Barn right next to that and Pause the construction(un-pause building after Gather, Forester, and Boarding House is done). Inside the forest you just built the Stockpile next to, start a Gatherer's with the edge of the circle at your Stockpile and Storage Barn, have the circle encompass as much forest as possible. Also build a Forester Lodge next to the Gatherer, leave both Cut and Plant on.

Designate a good amount of Trees, Stone, and Iron to be Gathered by your Laborers. Don't go overboard right away, you can send them to gather more as you need it. Don't designate the forest area your Gatherer and Forester is in for chopping. You can gather the Stone/Iron from there, but the Forester will do that over time himself.

Unpause the game and speed up game speed if you like. Once both the Forester Lodge and Gatherer are almost complete, find a good spot for your Boarding House. Try to have it close to your initial Stockpile, Cart, and Storage Barn. The less distance people have to run to resupply, the better.

Once you've got your initial food and firewood coming in and your stores are going up, not down, it's time to start building a few houses to expand your population, before people start getting too old.

Start thinking of what you need to build next. A Fishing Dock may be good, if you have good a good spot for it nearby, otherwise do a Hunting Cabin.
Make sure your food keeps going up. If it isn't, you'll need to sort that out with another Gatherer, Hunting Cabin, or Fishing.

Get a Blacksmith ASAP and start making Iron Tools. As well as a Tailor if you made a Hunting Cabin.

You'll want a Trading Post fairly soon, and stock it with Venison, Firewood, Logs, Stone and Iron. Maybe some clothing/tool/leather if you can spare it.
Once you've got it stocked, keep your population steadily growing for as long as your food gathering can support it. Then trade for Seeds or Animals as soon as you can, this will help you start pushing your population higher with more food gathering sources.

That's all for now.

Feel free to add your own in, or point out anything you don't agree with or think is wrong :D

[BoringProphet]

Wow, good work! :)

[dcbobo]

good work, i disagree with your start, but no idea it might be ok... but i doubt i ever go forester early, resources and time taken away from food and getting woodcutters, tool shop up and i tend to to say heavy on my laborers. also, I mow the area for resources cept where i put hunter or gatherer. And i mow resources in kinda small chunks.

[CobraA1]

I've personally been using 7x7 farms (which default to 1 farmer). But yeah: Full size farms are impractical IMO. I think the reason why a lot of people are saying "no farms" or "farms are inefficient" is because they tried full size farms, thinking they were best.

Turns out, that's really not true. Smaller farms with less farmers actually get planted and harvested faster, resulting in less crop loss when the season ends. Also, by replacing a 15x15 farm with four 7x7 farms, I get four farms, and if one farmer gets delayed (as happens often in this game, it seems), that's only one farm affected and the other three are still good.

It would actually be nice if a thread like this got pinned; threads are falling fast around here.

[Mobscene]

Yeah. Large farms seem to be very bad. I've seen a lot of people streaming and on youtube that are using massive farms and wondering why 75% of their harvest dies.

You can't harvest any large crops early on, unless you will have no one doing anything else :p

[CobraA1]

Haven't done a big test with it, but it does seem as if a market is a good thing to have in areas that are separated from your primary production areas. I've got essentially a mining base separated from my primary production center, and I have a market in it, which seems to keep various supplies stocked so nobody has to walk too far to get food.

[Mobscene]

Originally posted by CobraA1:

Haven't done a big test with it, but it does seem as if a market is a good thing to have in areas that are separated from your primary production areas. I've got essentially a mining base separated from my primary production center, and I have a market in it, which seems to keep various supplies stocked so nobody has to walk too far to get food.

Markets can be good, yes. I try to avoid them in my initial town. Save them for spreading into new areas.

They do hold a lot more than Storage Barns, but they also take up massive amounts of space. I've heard of them actually messing up the synergy of towns people built. Sometimes they don't play well with certain town setups. Like people will run across massive amounts of terrain to deposit something they could deposit in a barn way closer.