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The Foodgathering professions gain the following on average (Summer/Winter combined):
Hunters 4.375
Fisherman 4.35
Farmers 4.45
in an Upgraded bulding they gain 20% more.
A Tile with an upgraded Farm and 3 Farmers for instance generates ~16 Food
With an unupgraded Silo this would be 17.6
With an upgraded Silo this would be 20.8
So you see the gains are not that big on its own. You should try to combine them with clan specific bonuses and only upgrade silos in the lategame. Only exception to this is Goat who can have a sheepfold & a farm in the same tile.
Thanks for a detailed answer!
Specifically the pages Food ( https://northgard.gamepedia.com/Food )
and Silo ( https://northgard.gamepedia.com/Food_Silo )
+10 Farming
+8 Foraging
+2 Silo
This is one silo against 1 farm. However, the (regular) silo in this scenario is on an upgraded farm elseware. A Silo on a single unupgraded farm is ~+1, at +1, it struggles to pay off its maintenance cost. The reason, as you may note, isn't that the silo is good, but rather, "farms and other resource generation isn't that good to begin with."
PRE-ERUDITION
The payoff time for a farm (when it makes back its initial investment) is about 1.25 years, a regular silo (on an upgraded farm) is about 1.33 years.
Now an upgraded silo is about 4x the initial investment, and has double the maintenance rate. so an upgraded silo on an upgraded farm payoff... is in the 5 year territory. It's bad, even on an upgraded farm.
If you're working a double food tile, the regular silo pays itself off rapidly, and the upgraded silo is reduced to a more normal 1.8 years (when both farms are upgraded), it's still worse than building a farm on unused fertilised land, but its possible to make a profit on it.
POST-ERUDITION
If you have both erudition and the -20% cost policy, the efficiency of an upgraded silo is about as good as a regular silo, so about as good as a farm. Even without the -20%, you can expect a pretty good payoff on a single upgraded farm
Regular silos are pretty OP with erudition, making it good even on unupgraded farms, but you know, the lore has to have a benefit, just "enabling a structure that's as efficient as other buildings" would be pretty trash. The upgrade is mathematically unaffected by the +10%. (still trash to upgrade the silo on an unupgraded farm)
Of course all of this ignores the silo's ability to raise your food cap.
Some numbers may be a bit off now. I'm aware it's a tad sloppy as I'm working off memory. I'm also pretty sure they lowered the maintenance cost of silos from 30->22 in the latest update. It's still really bad to use silos for unupgraded farms. But a boar player might consider it.
Here are some good rules of thumb
- Don't Build Silos on unupgraded farms unless you have eruditon or it's a double food tile.
- After upgrading your regular farm (any type of food), it's good to build a silo
- Don't Upgrade Silos unless you have Erudition, or if you have a double food tile, which is fully upgraded.
- It's less efficient to build silos compared to getting a third food source (common timing), but it's only marginal, and may be preferred due to increased safety. (2 silos is stronger than 1 more farm, but it costs more)
Verry helpful post overall, would you mind elaborating how you get a return of investment time?
Firstly, the base measurement of the economy is the forager, "why build a farm, when you could do nothing and make more profit". Farms take resources to make, cost resources to maintain, and at the end of the day, a farmer only makes +1 food compared to a forager, and only in summer. Everything needs to be compared to not doing anything, because doing nothing in Northgard is surprisingly powerful.
Secondly, we need to know how much a building costs, after all, buildings aren't made out of food, we cant just straight up turn 80 food into a farm.... Or can we?
Wood is valued as 1:1 with food, and gold is valued as 2:1, (2 food or wood = 1 gold). At first, this seems objectionable, it takes a woodcutter to cut wood, and when gold is generated (by shipyards for example), biproducts are made. So I have to justify this first.
Woodcutters Make wood at the same rate a forager makes food, but it costs 50 wood to make, and costs ~22 gold to maintain (im going to get maintenance costs wrong throughout, I'm not going to keep northgard open and constantly alt tab to get my numbers correct, if you want that, pay me). However, they make wood at full speed in both winter and summer, an advantage over foragers, in each winter a woodcutter will make 27 more wood than a forager makes food, approximately, which doesn't quite make up the difference, however, In lores, it's far easier to gain a strong benefit to wood, when compared to food, a whole 20%, right at the start of the game, which you may or may not get. With it, wood is way easier to get than food, without it, it's slightly below. You also have forests, which can be measured against intrinsic value (see below) Reguardless, its worth is close enough, if someone calculated everything it's value may be something like 1:0.97, and i don't know which way, so it's close enough
Gold is made by docks/trade posts and markets, and make a bunch of additional resources, however, no matter how is made, it has a maintenance cost, and it costs as much as a farm to build so converting Food->Gold must have an intrinsic value, i.e. a processing cost. Just for the sake of comparison, think why steel is worth more than iron in many games. It's because you generally put effort into converting it from one to the other. Add this to the maintenance cost of the building, and once again, you are really close to a 2:1, foraging to merchanting.
So Despite complex arguments you STILL end up with really nice conversion numbers. ^^
Stone/Iron is a headache. I would have to write double the words for it compared to wood/gold. I may make another post later if you're curious, but for now, you'll just have to take my word that its value is somewhere around ~8gold each (16 food)
Now, let's look at a farm, how much does it earn in a year... Ok i cheated for this one and manually measured it in game by waiting for a year and compared it to foragers, i even built a fake building for foragers so the gathering time was equal.
Farms earn around ~100 per year (this is both farmers combined, and subtracting the amount they WOULD gain as foragers), Hunters AND fishers are around ~90, which is more than the wiki states, i know, but next time you want to compare to the wiki, work 2 fishers in summer, you earn more than +8, which makes the wiki already incorrect : ), i think it was updated ages ago and the wiki never updated.
But after subtracting their gold cost per year (~20), you only end up with +60 food per year. The farm costs 80 wood, so you haven't earned back their value, now you have to increase the time AND maintenance until the earnings match the cost, which is somewhere around 1.25 years. i probably measured this assuming you weren't an Idiot and did NOT build your farm just before winter started, which is why it's not 1.33 years
Silos make a profit in winter, albeit less than summer, regular farms don't. Keep that in mind when measuring efficiency.
anyway, that should give you an idea of how I got these numbers. I expect some inaccuracies as maintenance costs seem to have changed from last time I checked. And i haven't really put too much thought into build time admittably.
Revise NOTE: When i originally did these calculations, I had valued stone/iron at around ~6, rather than 8, I'm sure that the 6 is wrong now, I realised that the cost of an upgraded silo with a 20% discount doesn't even look close to the original silo cost (which I mentioned in the original post) when evaluated as 8, thought I'd need to place a reason why. It's going to be like ~1.5-1.6 years with the higher stone cost, rather than the 1.33x put forth
I ran it trough the calculator quickly because i got confused by the 100 food farmers make over villagers.
If i go with the gamepedia wiki numbers, which seemed accurate in a quick test. The Fandom Wiki however is almost 2 years old and not a trustworthy source^^.
(+5 Food in Summer and + 2.8 in Winter for Farmers)
(And 2 Fishermen showing +9 (4.35x2 gets rounded up in the display))
i get 60 Food each Farmer gets over a Villager per year.
This would leave me with 120 for 2 Farmers, 110 for 2 Hunters and 113 for 2 Fishermen in theory. With give or take 20 Gold upkeep and a Food : Gold ratio of 1 : 2 i get a production of ~80 a year. So with a slightly shorter time to pay back the investment.
Now i do not know if i made a mistake or the wiki is in fact still wrong, or if you counted the initial buildtime towards the yeald of the farm in the one year period. But if this holds true in reality, this would make silos even slightly better, when compared to scavengeing villagers.
To also add something useful to this post, Improved tools for farmers also has a compunding effect when considering silos since it can make silos more desireable than for instance building a hunters lodge and having to upgrade hunters. After all, With an upgraded Farm with upgraded tools, the base Silo with Erudition gets you another 0.5 food.
With this taken into account, an unupgraded Silo on a full upgraded farm nets you 4.14 Food post erudition. Considering its upkeep cost, i would rate it marginally better than a free villager (this verdict also changes with difficaulty since a villager on hard will eat a good chunk of the food he produces straight away).
Fun Odditiy i realized about Stag while calculating: A Stag Silo in a Fully upgraded double Foodtile with Erudition and advanced Silos nets you almost +23 Food not considering Fame!
Yeah, i know about the tools, but tools also make the farms themselves more efficient, so the usefulness of that knowledge is debatable (as getting it means getting another farm is just as appealing).
Whilst I notice you added the tag "Free" villager, but I thought I needed to elaborate on that a bit. free villagers are worth an insane amount in Northgard. that is, a villager whose food consumption, wood consumption, house's gold consumption, happiness consumption is taken care of by other sources. Using poor quality sources (market, forager, woodcutter, brewer, unupgraded), a villager consumes exactly what he produces. So if your silo is doing that much, it's doing a hell of a good job.
elaborating on what I said above, a lot of the early game of northgard is about converting the town hall's rather large and scattered income into more useful sources. If you want to stagnate your income, try building a brewer, a market and a woodcutter early game and watch as your economy completely dies off (you'll make something, at first, because each villager has a higher upkeep than the last, but it wont be much at all, and winter will kill off most of what you did)
To be clear, for the test I found a good map where wolves wouldn't invade me, saved the game, built a farm, manned the farm, ensured i had enough other income to make it through a year, and waited. Then i loaded the game, build the farm, deleted the farm, and once again, sat there for a year. Same stuff with hunters and fishers. Fishers I needed a new map, but same concept.
After a year, i ended up with +100 more food when I farmed, and +90 on both hunters and fishers, hunters could be 95, but I only tested for a year, as when I started out, I did not expect the results to be so close, I expected more along the lines of the 80/60 on the wiki for hunters and farmers. A year gives me only a few seconds/milliseconds to figure out the diffences.