General Questions

[Olleus]

Been playing now and enjoying it greatly, but there are a few details here and there that I'm not sure about, and I couldn't find any information giving concrete answers to these. The wiki is vague, missing detail, or plain wrong in a lot of places. Any answers to these would be greatly appreciated and would help others in the future too I'm sure.


1) Is it only the blue outline of buildings that count for path finding? Am I correct in thinking that a villager will only go inside that blue outline via the green arrows, and only to enter/use that buildings? Otherwise, they have to go around the blue outline? Is there minimum gap width between buildings needed for people to walk through? Any advantage in having a larger gap?

2) What's the market price for different goods? Has someone written up a table somewhere? I've got that berries are 9, fish and clothes 10, bread 12, etc... but having a reference somewhere would be great. It should be in the resources tab of the book IMO.

3) How many of each buildings do I need in a supply chain? Ie, how many wheat farms per mill, how many mills pep bakery. Same thing for other resource chains like iron quarry -> smelter -> blacksmith -> Sword maker / Common wares workshop / etc... Things like charcoal and iron ore are particularly tricky to experiment with because the same resource is used at multiple steps of the same production chain. I know that this will depend on how close the workers live and how close the needed resources are, but I'm interested in the 100% optimal efficient case as a first ball park figure (most of my buildings will work at the similar rates of inefficiency anyway).

4) How does the Tavern room assignment work? Stall seems to sell beer (and can store 4 per room size), but what does the public lounge do? Where can I see how many meals I've sold?

5) How do Wood Keep rooms work? Some (like stone extension A) seem to work exactly like the Lord Manor Rooms and can be given the same functions (Great Hall, Bailiff's office, Treasury, Tax Office). But others (like extension B) can be only be assigned some of those (Great Hall, Treasury) BUT can also be dorms. How does that work? Which extensions are which? Do novice/soldiers/knights all use the same dorm? Do dorms have to be at the same keep as where troops are assigned?

6) Is there a limit as to how many soldiers I can assign to the same keep? Considering I can only build the magic healing garden once, is there any reason *NOT* to all my troops in the same one? Are training dummies only there to get recruits to "fully trained" and useless after that? Or do they need to keep training to heal or not get worse.

7) How is soldier strength calculated? It seems to be something like level + rank * training * weapon but I can't quite work it out.

[dperx]

Lots to unpack here:

1) Generally, yes. The blue outline exists so that when you're placing buildings you can see potential collisions and adjust your placement accordingly. If there is space between blue outlines, the villagers should be able to path between them, assuming they wish to use that path. Can't speak to a "minimum gap," but to be safe, I'd make sure there is obvious, visible space between the blue lines . . . that is, if you are worried about blocking an entrance or wanting to have villagers path between the buildings.

2) The market doesn't work the same way as many other games. There is no "market price," but rather, each town that will buy from you (or sell to you) as its own preset price for the goods it will buy or sell. The price they will buy for is right there in the trading screen. It's the number next to the coin (which is next to the item for sale).

3) There's no exact number of buildings you need for any particular supply chain. This is because the worker's productivity is somewhat dependent on how much time they spend filling needs vs. how much time they spend working. Generally, however, it's best to overproduce at the lower end of each supply chain. Build, say, 6 farms, 3 windmills, and 2 bread makers, and you're likely never to run out of wheat and flour while producing bread for your population to eat. You may eventually have to build more farms and windmills to accommodate additional bakeries as your population increases, but try to keep your basic ingredients more full to keep the end product flowing.

4) Not sure how to answer this. The service counters sell beer and wine. The public lounge holds people. You need both. If you have 10 citizens, you'll need at least 10 spaces in the public lounge so that your citizens (or soldiers or knights) can come to the tavern and buy their wine or beer to fulfill their luxury needs. You can see how many meals are sold in your economy overview. Meals are just an add on (for income) to the luxury need; they do not fulfill basic food needs.

5) Again, not sure what you mean by "how does that work." The dorms are for your soldiers to live in. When building your keep, decide which rooms you want to serve which function. Keep in mind, also, that you don't HAVE to assign a function if you don't want to. All level of military (novice, soldier, knight) use the same dorms. Soldiers work like other villagers. They can live anywhere within 150m of where they work. You don't have to have dorms at all, and can let your soldiers live in houses if you want, so no, soldiers don't have to live in the dorms in the keep where they "work," but they likely will just because its closer.

6) Don't think there's a limit on soldiers assigned to a keep; however, the officinal garden helps ALL your soldiers heal faster. It's not limited to one keep. The soldiers only have to have access to a training dummy. That's how they "heal" from wounded to untrained, and then up through the training process. Once they hit "fully trained," they don't need to train again unless/until they get wounded and need to heal. So dummies aren't useless after a while. You still need to keep them around. FWIW, I don't think soldiers from one keep will use the training dummies built as part of a different keep, so make sure that each keep you build has training dummies for the soldiers assigned to that keep to use.

7) No idea on this one. I'm pretty sure that part of it has to do with what weapon they are using. Spears are better than swords and thus provide more strength. Unarmed soldiers are pretty weak, even when fully trained.

[Olleus]

Thanks for taking the time to answer that.

2) By market I meant the literal market building in the game. Where my villagers buy things from me.

3) Sure, no exact numbers, but a ball park. That's why i asked "at peak efficiency" If I'm starting to brew beer, it would be good to know if I need 1 wheat farm and 1 hop farm to keep the brewer busy, or 17 of one and 4 of the others (I know it's not that extreme, but I also know I need way more than 1 wheat farm per mill).

4) Ah right. So I'm good with having a small room to stock drinks, and lots of big rooms for customers. As long as my granary keeping beer/wine isn't too far away, multiple barmaids seems redundant. Do beer / wine provide any villager needs?

5) I mean that some Wooden Keep rooms can be used as Dorms, and some can't. How do I find out which do which? It doesn't say in their descriptions or the wiki.

6) Ah, so dummies heal as well. By the way, what you wrote makes it sound like they go from wounded to untrained, but in my game they're going from wounded straight back to their previous level of training.

[dperx]

2) Ah yes, of course. I misread that. You could go to your economy page in the journal and see how many of each item you sold to your villagers and how much money you made from those sales and then divide the money amount by the number of sales to come up with the price per sale. I don't think it ever changes.

3) I would think that if you had 2 wheat fields and 2 hops fields, you could easily keep at least one and probably 2 breweries going quite well. There are no combinations that would require lopsided contributions like that. It's generally pretty even.

4) Yes, I always do small rooms as service counters. You definitely want at least one of each (beer and wine) if you're manufacturing both. Wine sells for more, but beer is a little easier to produce. Beer and wine fill the luxury needs for citizens, soldiers, and knights. No one else needs them.

5) Pretty much trial and error. I don't think there's a list.

6) They might go straight there. I don't know. I usually don't pay attention to them until they're completely healed.

[Olleus]

Once again, thanks for the answers.

But it's kind of frustrating and rather sloppy that the game (and even the Wiki!) don't provide answers to basic questions like this. Yes, I could go to every market, see how much I've made from every resource / number sold, and keep those in a spreadsheet for future reference. But the game should just tell me that up front, like so many of these questions.

That's even more true for the supply chains. I know it's never super lopsided, but even your best guess has a factor of x2 error! And this isn't something that can be quickly tested. I still have no idea what the ratio of wheat farm : windmill : bakery is. I think its about 3:1:2, but that seems to be a little short, but it's hard to tell because it's coupled to the wheat farm : hops farm : brewery chain. And every time I have an experiment set up, the wet weather even comes and ruins it.


There's absolutely no reason for the game to not just provide this information up front, even if it's just the ideal case scenario and leaves the player to work out how to make it work in practice.

[dperx]

Originally posted by Olleus:

Once again, thanks for the answers.

But it's kind of frustrating and rather sloppy that the game (and even the Wiki!) don't provide answers to basic questions like this. Yes, I could go to every market, see how much I've made from every resource / number sold, and keep those in a spreadsheet for future reference. But the game should just tell me that up front, like so many of these questions.

That's even more true for the supply chains. I know it's never super lopsided, but even your best guess has a factor of x2 error! And this isn't something that can be quickly tested. I still have no idea what the ratio of wheat farm : windmill : bakery is. I think its about 3:1:2, but that seems to be a little short, but it's hard to tell because it's coupled to the wheat farm : hops farm : brewery chain. And every time I have an experiment set up, the wet weather even comes and ruins it.


There's absolutely no reason for the game to not just provide this information up front, even if it's just the ideal case scenario and leaves the player to work out how to make it work in practice.

You don't need to go to each market. There's a page in the journal that tells you what you've sold, how much of it, and how much you've made. You then need to just do simple math to figure out how much each sells for.

In my experience, figuring out the ratios has been a lot of the fun. It's not always the same because of the variability caused by factors like the rank of villagers assigned to a task. For instance, 3 serfs working a farm field will generally produce more wheat than 3 commoners or 3 citizens because they spend more time working and less time filling needs. It doesn't make sense for the game to give you a hard ratio when no hard ratio actually exists.

Tip re: the wet weather . . . it is triggered by building a bakery. If you want to do some testing, don't build the bakery . . . or use the Stone Gate v8 mod to assign a bakery function to one of the buildings in that mod -- it own't trigger the bad weather event.

[Olleus]

Nope, the budget tab in the journal only tells me the total money made from each good, not how many was sold. And buildings could say how many seconds it takes of work to turn the inputs into the outputs. That leaves it up to the player to work out how much of a workers total time is spent working (rather than as free time or commuting) to get the real average output of a building. Same thing for my other remaining questions

This a good game and I'm enjoying it lots. But that's no reason to invent excuses for why the UI/UX hides some information for the player. A good learning curve is about learning how to use the game mechanics to your advantage, not deducing some hidden variable in the game code. But it's only an alpha so I still have hope this gets sorted out. Or, at least, that once there's a fixed release these details will get included in the wiki.

[Huntn]

My Question 1: How much does it cost to move a building? Do you recoup all of the building materials or how much of a penalty is there? I've got a saw mill, where a forest used to be and I'm temped to move it to where the forest still is. Is it worth it?
Thanks!

[dperx]

Originally posted by Olleus:

Nope, the budget tab in the journal only tells me the total money made from each good, not how many was sold. And buildings could say how many seconds it takes of work to turn the inputs into the outputs. That leaves it up to the player to work out how much of a workers total time is spent working (rather than as free time or commuting) to get the real average output of a building. Same thing for my other remaining questions

This a good game and I'm enjoying it lots. But that's no reason to invent excuses for why the UI/UX hides some information for the player. A good learning curve is about learning how to use the game mechanics to your advantage, not deducing some hidden variable in the game code. But it's only an alpha so I still have hope this gets sorted out. Or, at least, that once there's a fixed release these details will get included in the wiki.

Nobody is hiding anything. It's really not that difficult to do the math. You've got lots of information to work with and if you want something more, just go to the suggestions folder and make your suggestion. The developers may or may not incorporate it, but they do constantly listen to feedback.

[dperx]

Originally posted by Huntn:

My Question 1: How much does it cost to move a building? Do you recoup all of the building materials or how much of a penalty is there? I've got a saw mill, where a forest used to be and I'm temped to move it to where the forest still is. Is it worth it?
Thanks!

You cannot just move a building. You have to destroy what you built and then rebuild it. To my knowledge, you do not recoup any of the building materials, but then, I never really paid attention to that. It may have changed in one of the recent updates; I just don't know for sure.

As for the saw mil, I'd simply build a new one where you want it and then destroy the old one after reassigning the workers to the new saw mill. Much easier. And, yes . . . it's likely worth it in the long run.

[vjraymon]

I don't think hiding informations was intended by the DEVs.
Anyway, once the UI will be exposed to the modders, this can be fixed by mods, and I don't think the DEVs should focus on this point right now: there are other priorities, like adding more gameplay mechanisms (families, building deprecating, MODDINg! ;) ...)

[Olleus]

Oh sure, hiding information isn't intentional. Everything in a game is hidden until someone decides to make it public.

But I do think that saying on the resource page how much each resource gets sold to villagers for would be nice. Sure, I could build the whole supply line to make beer and wine to figure this out. But I want to know which one is more expensive specifically so that I *don't* have to build a supply chain I then destroy. As for production times, I'm not the only who's asked for that. All it would take is for a bit to be added to the end of every building description, after it lists the input and output resources, that says "(every X seconds when all workers present)". A tiny change that would make so much planning actually possible.

As @Huntn's question, I don't know know and have wondered this myself. I'm not sure why people insist on answering a very straight forward question with "it doesn't matter, don't worry about it".

[vjraymon]

Originally posted by Olleus:

I'm not sure why people insist on answering a very straight forward question with "it doesn't matter, don't worry about it".

Well, some people have invested massively in this early access game: playing, testing, finding workaround, promoting, and retesting on each upgrade for 3 years...
And suddently are coming new people, asking for the same questions, and demanding everything immediately, as nobody asked for that before. So I can understand the first volonteers feel a little bit tired.
New people have to understand that this game is not developped by a major, but a small team, with no crunch. You can think that this game was too ambitious at the origin (home made engine Hurricane) but that's a fact: 1) the developpment is slow 2) the main developpment is structural, and then not easily visible, 3) The DEVs are following priorities.
So, well, if you don't want to invest in this game, take it as it comes, and be patient.
Otherwise the best place to discuss about enhancement is the official discord server https://discord.gg/foundation

[Olleus]

Can you point me to where the price of various goods is tabulated then? Or to how much of construction cost is refunded when dismantling a building?

I'm not saying that the fact that this info is not available in game (beyond, try it yourself and record the results after the fact) is game breaking. But it is a, minor, annoyance. I'm not even saying that this should be top priority for the devs, and I'm certainly not attacking them for not addressing it ASAP. Just because you've invested lots of time in the game doesn't mean that you have to reject all criticisms, or dismiss those who ask questions. I must have missed the part of this forum where it said you needed to have played the game for 3 years before being allowed to voice an opinion. No need to be a toxic, gate-keeping fanboy.

[vjraymon]

I fully agree with you: no need to be toxic. I really think you will find more helpful people by asking on the official discord server. The ambiance is also more friendly than on steam thread.
About your question: this can change with the game version. Roughly berry is 8gp, bread cloths honey, herb 10gp, beer 25gp Wine and meat 100gp AFAIK (Jewelery I don't remember) ... The easier way is to compute it from the statistics displayed by the game.

[vjraymon]

And, my opinion about criticism:
You have your criticism, and I have also mine. But the DEVs have not enough time to answer all criticisms. So, somewhere, we are competitors.
So we give you the workarounds we found, hoping the DEVS will answer sooner to the requests about which we have no workaround for 3 years.