How to get better? (In general)

[Senva]

Something I struggle a lot with is late game, but in particular throughout the whole thing is planning and layout. I struggle to be efficient, to make things in a good way that everything is protected and taken care of

That I get lots of gold without my happiness dropping too bad, or my food suffering, and I have no clue how to get better. I'm awful at city builders, but I love em a ton, so any useful advice anyone can give me?

[Agmar]

Have you looked in the "Guides" section????

[Senva]

Originally posted by Agmar:

Have you looked in the "Guides" section????

In my defense, I did but I was hoping for general tips rather than full on guides. I've looked through some of the guides but they go into way more detail than I can make sense of currently.

I don't need the most optimal expansion method or anything, I just want to better defend my stuff and figure out how to pace things

[YetiChow]

Originally posted by Arimphae:

Originally posted by Agmar:

Have you looked in the "Guides" section????

In my defense, I did but I was hoping for general tips rather than full on guides. I've looked through some of the guides but they go into way more detail than I can make sense of currently.

I don't need the most optimal expansion method or anything, I just want to better defend my stuff and figure out how to pace things

Yeah, copy/pasting "hub" layouts from a guide kinda kills the fun of a city planning game doesn't it?

So, here's a few general tips/rules of efficient city planning instead:

1) you want to keep your resources near where they're needed. When that's not physically possible, distribution buildings can help. But the aim of distribution buildings is to move resources where they're needed -- there's no point putting your granary and bakery right next to the farm unless the houses are already right next to the farm. Sure, you can't have the granary too far away from the farm or else you'll lose some of the wheat harvest when it takes too long to bring in... so you want the granary between the farms and the houses they're feeding; then you want the bakery between the granary and the houses, then you might want a market in the middle of the houses so that food is always shuffling along from the farms to the granary to the bakery to the market (freeing up space in the granary so that, come harvest time, it can accept the newly harvested wheat immediately.) And in the spaces between the granary and the bakery you might want to put some charcoal burners -- that way they're far enough away from the town to not cause unhappiness, and the bakery gets charcoal first (with excess going to the market for houses to use!) so that you're never missing out on bread production because of charcoal shortages.

2) building on point 1: centralised storage is inefficient unless you specifically have a reason to funnel large quantities of something into a particular place (e.g. if you have a very dense "city" section and you want to funnel any surplus food from outlying farming villages towards the city for winter stockpiling.)

3) The best defence is neither a good offence nor a good defence, but time. The longer it takes for enemies to reach your peasants or treasuries, the more time you have to damage them or pick off key targets. Of course, dragons don't care about your plans... but still, you don't want to just have your ballistae and archers grouped around your keep in a "last stand" formation. You can spread them along the walls, or even build "watchtowers" throughout the kingdom, so that no matter where dragons come from they're always being attacked. You can use city walls as "highways" to move squads of archers around (which doubles as a way to slow down vikings if you can't afford to fully encircle your kingdom.)

4) unlike most city-building games with "classes" of houses, there's no real reason to keep using hovels when you can support manors. All the peasants in K+C are the same regardless of where they live; and while the actual numerical population density of a manor compared to 4 hovels is the same (i.e. 2x2 square of hovels holds the same number of peasants as 1 manor does), you can achieve a higher density with manors because you only need a service building to reach one tile of a house for it to count. This can mean it is, unintuitively, better to have the bigger houses on the outskirts of a residential district and use smaller houses to fill in any gaps as you approach the centre -- as long as the manors at the edge of town have one toe within the radius of all the services they need, they'll be happy; but for hovels they are only on one tile so you need everything to overlap that tile. And yes, hovels do benefit from having more than the "minimum required" services for happiness -- the extra boosts can counteract any penalties; so if you have the world's most luxurious hovels you might be able to weather the penalties of some minor misfortune without actually taking a hit to happiness. Or you can just bump the taxes higher before penalties kick in!

5) there's no real penalty for building something temporary with a plan to replace/upgrade it later. This is especially true when it comes to housing. If you come up with a layout for 2x2 blocks of hovels, well, later on that could be a manor instead (just make sure you have houses empty for the displaced residents to move into.) But if you're going to do this, remember the old "one toe" rule -- you don't need to have every manor surrounded by roads, you only need 1 tile to be adjacent to a road; so you can build a "patchwork" of manors with things like taverns or fountains in-between as long as every manor is connected to the "ring road" that connects back to your Keep. Once you come up with an efficient "block" format you like, then you can figure out its dimensions and just fill that area with hovels as a temporary housing project. Remember that you can use a "two to one" system -- 1 line of road, 2 lines of hovels, a line of road, 2 more lines of hovels, etc. to fill whatever space you need to (and if you end up with an odd fit, use the mid-tier houses or even manors if you can instead of hovels since they'll be touching the ring road on the other side.) As your kingdom advances, you can take out 2 hovels to add in a tavern; but you can also take out 1 hovel and 1 road in the centre of the "block" as long as you keep the connections to the ring road intact. Eventually you'll end up with a whole "town square" of service buildings in the middle of each block; at which point you'll be able to support the density of full blocks of manors.

6) fertile farmland, resources like stone or iron, and shallow water are the 3 things you can't "work around"; so they will determine your layout and prosperity the most. You'll need very fertile farmland and irrigation to feed a really large population (although below 1k pop you probably don't even need either -- just basic fertile land for wheat + some pig farms with some orchards on any very fertile land will go farther than you expect!) You can only get 2 mining sites on each stone or iron deposit, so don't worry too much about having "perfect" mining setups early on -- just get some stone and then iron coming in as early as you reasonably can, and let it start stockpiling up. You'll need it for later because the "ramp up" between tiers is more like a ladder; and having a trickle is better than spending all your stone and iron on clearing away the blocking rocks. Shallow water allows you to build docks, which you should do as soon as you can -- you may not use them much yet (everything you want is expensive, and everything you sell... isn't), but you want to have them available in case you run into an emergency since a trader showing up at the right time can save you from a massive setback like a famine (or missing a Witch demand.) Once you have docks, you can start throwing down fishing huts around them (they're not actually a good source of food; but the point here is to be pre-planning your dockside/shore layout early; and you likely won't have pigs yet), then building watchtowers or even a sea-wall in the remaining shallows. I personally feel like shallows are more valuable real-estate than anything else, since they're so limited and yet they're on the border against the ocean so you want them for so many things.

[Senva]

Tons and tons of info to take in here, made my head spin a bit, but I didn't know point #1! I always thought that you used the granary and produce storage for...Well, storage. Then you used markets and stockpiles to move that stuff towards villagers. I'll try to see how much of this I can use next time I play, I appreciate all the detailed advice!

Originally posted by YetiChow:

Originally posted by Arimphae:

In my defense, I did but I was hoping for general tips rather than full on guides. I've looked through some of the guides but they go into way more detail than I can make sense of currently.

I don't need the most optimal expansion method or anything, I just want to better defend my stuff and figure out how to pace things

Yeah, copy/pasting "hub" layouts from a guide kinda kills the fun of a city planning game doesn't it?

So, here's a few general tips/rules of efficient city planning instead:

1) you want to keep your resources near where they're needed. When that's not physically possible, distribution buildings can help. But the aim of distribution buildings is to move resources where they're needed -- there's no point putting your granary and bakery right next to the farm unless the houses are already right next to the farm. Sure, you can't have the granary too far away from the farm or else you'll lose some of the wheat harvest when it takes too long to bring in... so you want the granary between the farms and the houses they're feeding; then you want the bakery between the granary and the houses, then you might want a market in the middle of the houses so that food is always shuffling along from the farms to the granary to the bakery to the market (freeing up space in the granary so that, come harvest time, it can accept the newly harvested wheat immediately.) And in the spaces between the granary and the bakery you might want to put some charcoal burners -- that way they're far enough away from the town to not cause unhappiness, and the bakery gets charcoal first (with excess going to the market for houses to use!) so that you're never missing out on bread production because of charcoal shortages.

2) building on point 1: centralised storage is inefficient unless you specifically have a reason to funnel large quantities of something into a particular place (e.g. if you have a very dense "city" section and you want to funnel any surplus food from outlying farming villages towards the city for winter stockpiling.)

3) The best defence is neither a good offence nor a good defence, but time. The longer it takes for enemies to reach your peasants or treasuries, the more time you have to damage them or pick off key targets. Of course, dragons don't care about your plans... but still, you don't want to just have your ballistae and archers grouped around your keep in a "last stand" formation. You can spread them along the walls, or even build "watchtowers" throughout the kingdom, so that no matter where dragons come from they're always being attacked. You can use city walls as "highways" to move squads of archers around (which doubles as a way to slow down vikings if you can't afford to fully encircle your kingdom.)

4) unlike most city-building games with "classes" of houses, there's no real reason to keep using hovels when you can support manors. All the peasants in K+C are the same regardless of where they live; and while the actual numerical population density of a manor compared to 4 hovels is the same (i.e. 2x2 square of hovels holds the same number of peasants as 1 manor does), you can achieve a higher density with manors because you only need a service building to reach one tile of a house for it to count. This can mean it is, unintuitively, better to have the bigger houses on the outskirts of a residential district and use smaller houses to fill in any gaps as you approach the centre -- as long as the manors at the edge of town have one toe within the radius of all the services they need, they'll be happy; but for hovels they are only on one tile so you need everything to overlap that tile. And yes, hovels do benefit from having more than the "minimum required" services for happiness -- the extra boosts can counteract any penalties; so if you have the world's most luxurious hovels you might be able to weather the penalties of some minor misfortune without actually taking a hit to happiness. Or you can just bump the taxes higher before penalties kick in!

5) there's no real penalty for building something temporary with a plan to replace/upgrade it later. This is especially true when it comes to housing. If you come up with a layout for 2x2 blocks of hovels, well, later on that could be a manor instead (just make sure you have houses empty for the displaced residents to move into.) But if you're going to do this, remember the old "one toe" rule -- you don't need to have every manor surrounded by roads, you only need 1 tile to be adjacent to a road; so you can build a "patchwork" of manors with things like taverns or fountains in-between as long as every manor is connected to the "ring road" that connects back to your Keep. Once you come up with an efficient "block" format you like, then you can figure out its dimensions and just fill that area with hovels as a temporary housing project. Remember that you can use a "two to one" system -- 1 line of road, 2 lines of hovels, a line of road, 2 more lines of hovels, etc. to fill whatever space you need to (and if you end up with an odd fit, use the mid-tier houses or even manors if you can instead of hovels since they'll be touching the ring road on the other side.) As your kingdom advances, you can take out 2 hovels to add in a tavern; but you can also take out 1 hovel and 1 road in the centre of the "block" as long as you keep the connections to the ring road intact. Eventually you'll end up with a whole "town square" of service buildings in the middle of each block; at which point you'll be able to support the density of full blocks of manors.

6) fertile farmland, resources like stone or iron, and shallow water are the 3 things you can't "work around"; so they will determine your layout and prosperity the most. You'll need very fertile farmland and irrigation to feed a really large population (although below 1k pop you probably don't even need either -- just basic fertile land for wheat + some pig farms with some orchards on any very fertile land will go farther than you expect!) You can only get 2 mining sites on each stone or iron deposit, so don't worry too much about having "perfect" mining setups early on -- just get some stone and then iron coming in as early as you reasonably can, and let it start stockpiling up. You'll need it for later because the "ramp up" between tiers is more like a ladder; and having a trickle is better than spending all your stone and iron on clearing away the blocking rocks. Shallow water allows you to build docks, which you should do as soon as you can -- you may not use them much yet (everything you want is expensive, and everything you sell... isn't), but you want to have them available in case you run into an emergency since a trader showing up at the right time can save you from a massive setback like a famine (or missing a Witch demand.) Once you have docks, you can start throwing down fishing huts around them (they're not actually a good source of food; but the point here is to be pre-planning your dockside/shore layout early; and you likely won't have pigs yet), then building watchtowers or even a sea-wall in the remaining shallows. I personally feel like shallows are more valuable real-estate than anything else, since they're so limited and yet they're on the border against the ocean so you want them for so many things.

[YetiChow]

Originally posted by Arimphae:

Tons and tons of info to take in here, made my head spin a bit, but I didn't know point #1! I always thought that you used the granary and produce storage for...Well, storage. Then you used markets and stockpiles to move that stuff towards villagers. I'll try to see how much of this I can use next time I play, I appreciate all the detailed advice!

I mean you're not wrong -- you do use the granary for storage. The question is, where do you want to store the grain? If you put the granary right next to the farms then it's suuuuuuper easy for the farmers to bring in the grain harvest... but the villagers have to walk all the way to the granaries to pick up food. It's a question of trade-offs to meet your needs, and a lesson that will serve you well in any city-building game that has resource "flows" -- if you can set things up so that resources naturally flow towards where they're needed, you cut down work for the in-game workers and the real-world computer (which can come into play if you're building a massive town, or in games that have a much higher processing load.)

I probably should have done a "main rule: explanation/example paragraph" here; but I've never been a fan of soundbites or rules presented as dogma hahah. I'd much rather explain "here's why I do it this way" than say "this is the way to do it."

I'll take the chance to clarify something I wasn't super clear about too: "shallow water" in point 6 should be "shoreline."

Good luck with your next kingdom!

[lordanthrax]

Some general tips.

1) You can build a Noria in moat squares (requires a Chamber of War to dig a moat), letting you build reservoirs and thus irrigate land anywhere you want.

2) Because you can irrigate anywhere you want, you can maximize the use of Fountains and Gardens to help boost Happiness. Always endeavor to build Gardens in a + formation of 5 squares for maximum benefit.

3) Moat squares count for the 'by the water' Happiness boost for housing. Build one and cover with a Bridge to keep population moving smoothly by.

4) Fishing is not worth the population or resources expended in returns for meat. Wheat is VERY easy to grow when you build Farm blocks around Windmills on irrigated land and stretch with efficient use of Bakeries, so Pigs should be your sole source of meat (though the occasional Dragon won't go amiss if you're not playing in Peace Mode).

[Senva]

Originally posted by lordanthrax:

Some general tips.

1) You can build a Noria in moat squares (requires a Chamber of War to dig a moat), letting you build reservoirs and thus irrigate land anywhere you want.

2) Because you can irrigate anywhere you want, you can maximize the use of Fountains and Gardens to help boost Happiness. Always endeavor to build Gardens in a + formation of 5 squares for maximum benefit.

3) Moat squares count for the 'by the water' Happiness boost for housing. Build one and cover with a Bridge to keep population moving smoothly by.

4) Fishing is not worth the population or resources expended in returns for meat. Wheat is VERY easy to grow when you build Farm blocks around Windmills on irrigated land and stretch with efficient use of Bakeries, so Pigs should be your sole source of meat (though the occasional Dragon won't go amiss if you're not playing in Peace Mode).

Noted, thanks!

[Senva]

Originally posted by YetiChow:

Originally posted by Arimphae:

Tons and tons of info to take in here, made my head spin a bit, but I didn't know point #1! I always thought that you used the granary and produce storage for...Well, storage. Then you used markets and stockpiles to move that stuff towards villagers. I'll try to see how much of this I can use next time I play, I appreciate all the detailed advice!

I mean you're not wrong -- you do use the granary for storage. The question is, where do you want to store the grain? If you put the granary right next to the farms then it's suuuuuuper easy for the farmers to bring in the grain harvest... but the villagers have to walk all the way to the granaries to pick up food. It's a question of trade-offs to meet your needs, and a lesson that will serve you well in any city-building game that has resource "flows" -- if you can set things up so that resources naturally flow towards where they're needed, you cut down work for the in-game workers and the real-world computer (which can come into play if you're building a massive town, or in games that have a much higher processing load.)

I probably should have done a "main rule: explanation/example paragraph" here; but I've never been a fan of soundbites or rules presented as dogma hahah. I'd much rather explain "here's why I do it this way" than say "this is the way to do it."

I'll take the chance to clarify something I wasn't super clear about too: "shallow water" in point 6 should be "shoreline."

Good luck with your next kingdom!

My thanks! I'll take all the advice to heart and see if I can make use of it with my tiny peanut brain, haha

[xenxander]

I find fishing to be very useful.
Some very plentiful fishing patches are in isolated areas.
Solution? Build the fishing places, then build a dock nearby.
Build a transport and transport the fish to a dock nearby residential zones for your fishmongers and markets to distribute.

Bakeries and butcher shops can be placed really close to their sources of food. Butcher shops near pig farms and bakeries new granaries.
Docks do collect food from bakeries and butchers so the food they make can be put upon a dock and then transported to a dock near residential districts.
This has helped me make more meat and bread and distribute it more efficiently.

Build a Cathedral and a bathhouse next to each other and plan your residential blocks outward from those buildings as your 'hub'.
You maximize their effectiveness this way.
2xN blocks for your manors is rather ideal. Two manors across and as many in the row as your city services extend out for. I generally go for five to seven (max).
Any longer and they have trouble getting food as the markets and town squares may be closer to the bathhouses.

Residential districts do not like being near:
Pig farms, fishmongers, any quarry, charcoal maker, and blacksmiths.
They don't care about being next to foresters or storehouses.
Foresters can be used to move your forest to any location you want.
Plant near the trees you have and then play 'hopscotch' with placing new foresters outward.
Since foresters can plant trees on barren land, I sometimes have my trees grow more on barren soil so they aren't taking up valuable crop land (if the houses aren't already doing that).

Put your charcoal makers very close to your foresters (but use your foresters as sort of a buffer between charcoal and homes if you have to build homes near those industries.
Put fire brigades close to charcoal makers and deep inside farm districts.

Build fountains on your road network. Residents walk through them anyway and this helps you not waste build space with fountains and allows fountains to have maximum coverage. True you can't build them 'directly' on the road tile, so just demo the road tile and replace that tile with the fountain.