Gathering post vs gatherers?

[Huggable Cube]

Hey guys and dolls, I was wondering if early in the game it's better to have gathering posts or to manually send people to resorce nodes?

[Phat Pidjin]

Before you've built up your Hunters Huts etc, just use gatherers. You'll get more resources faster, but once the first cold hits the gatherers will start losing fingers.

But the difference between 10 people servicing 3 piles and 45 people servicing those same piles prevents it from working for long.

[The_Dead_Artist]

Depends really. Gathering Posts can save on people so you can assign them to different jobs and spread your efforts more efficiently. Gathering Posts are also warmer once the frost hits, so people assigned to them are less likely to get sick than those collecting out in the cold.

[-=Sentor=-]

I play on Extreme, and at the very start of the game you send manuallay your people to gather stuff. You send them to the resources that are the farthest away from the core (they even collect while they walk).

You buld gathering posts to collect stuff that is close/medium away and if possible in the direction of frozen trees, so you can use the roads later for that.

If gathering posts are below chill, disable them until it is warmer.

[erneiz]

Direct gathering is only for the first day, completely clean up a cluster (a group of 2-3 piles) with Emergency Shift and build gathering posts in the rest of the clusters.

[Lцсᶖаᶇ º¹]

direct gathering is fine if the temps are high (20-30). once it gets low they'll get sick pretty fast.

[PhailRaptor]

I can't speak to the starting resource dumps. However, I did a lot of number analysis on Coal Thumpers vs Coal Mines. With respect to Coal Piles generated by Thumpers, the following is true:

-> A Gathering Post staffed by all 10 people will gather 27.5 per hour, per pile in range.

-> A resource pile being worked by 15 people will gather 20.9 per hour.

Both values are increased by both of the Gathering techs, 15% each for a possile maximum of +30%.

Gathering Posts are quite a bit more effective, as they gather more per hour with 5 less people. They also are not limited to a single Coal Pile, so having multiple Thumpers encircling a unit of Gathering Posts allows them to produce some staggering quantities of Coal. But you will pay the price in transitioning away from people to Automotons, as you are increasing the number of workplaces, which in turn will require more Automotons (and thus, Steam Cores).

[erneiz]

A full set of auto steam coal thumpers needs 5 automatons. You will only ever need 2 sets so a max of 10 automatons or 10 steam cores. OTOH, if you go for mines only you will build 3 advanced coal mines with 3 automatons which means 12 steam cores. However, the wood and steel cost for building 7 more automatons are far larger than the total building cost of the mines. But, Advanced coal mine is at the last tier of the tech tree so it takes a longer time and more resource to research there.