Beginners Guide For 2022!

This is a newbie guide for 2022! The game version is v60.

Intro

This is a guide for 2022! The game version is v60.

I'm basing a lot of my thoughts on the "Beginner's Guide - a different take" by Community Cheeseburger. It's just that 50% of the guide was about exporting opiates, which aren't on every map.

Map Selection

Just pick a temperate area with lots of trees.

Having a lot of coal is nice since it saves you from importing later on

Placing your throne

Place it near some forests and near wild food. Although, you should be picking a map where that's pretty much everywhere.

If you have coal then being closer is good as long as you still have a lot of trees and food.

Building sizes and roads

I have two different building sizes. Small 8x8 and large 20x20. This size does not include the walls.

I start with small buildings and surround each building with 2 lane roads. Later on I switch to a 20x20 buildings. All you need to do is delete four 8x8 building and replace it with one 20x20 building.

Well, you can layout your city however you like. I just like grids and it makes upgrading to bigger buildings easy.

You want 2 tile roads at a minimum regardless of your layout preference, a single tile isn't enough.

Producing food

As Community Cheeseburger's guide mentioned, there is no need to build farms early on.

Go to the top left corner of the map, select harvest plants and just drag-select so it covers the entire map.

You'll have enough food for at least 200 people and you can make a lot of money exporting all your excess.

After that, build a small warehouse and a small hunter.

For the warehouse make sure you have storage for everything e.g. wood, stone, fruit, vegetable, grain, cotton, meat, leather, livestock.

Exporting everything

Ultimately you want to export all the excess from gathering and your hunters like this:

Fruit, vegetable, meat: 20% (meaning it keeps 80% in the warehouse)
Grain, cotton, leather, livestock: 100% (meaning it sells everything)

Each export depot requires a single employee so you won't have enough employees early on for all of them. You can start with just two. One for meat and the other you can switch between exporting grain, cotton, leather and livestock.

Check the costs of exports but generally, meat, leather and livestock are worth the most. Fruit and vegetables are worth the least.

Carpenters and libraries

Now build a small carpenter. Once you have enough furniture build a small library. You can first build a single research table and expand the library later. Don't bother with shelves, you should just add carpets later on.

Do not build a woodcutter. Just use the fell tree command whenever you run out of wood.

Expanding your population

To increase your population you want to keep your people fulfilled to encourage more people to come.

To start off with you want two hearths and two wells. Then you'll need to add dormitories, lavatories (requires research) and eateries (requires research).

You have essentially infinite amounts of food you should have time to figure out expanding the population with service buildings and managing employees.

Avoid anything that requires coal (canteen, bakery, bathhouse) since it's expensive, either in money or people.

Making money with furniture

Even though it's easy to make, furniture sells quite a lot. And you only need it for new buildings and for maintenance.

So you want to build another small carpenter and then an export depot for furniture at 20%.

Do not build a woodcutter. Just get all the wood you need with the fell tree command

Expanding your research

Now you want to increase your research. There are three ways and you should eventually do all three

(a) Import fabric so you can build carpets. You'll also need to keep some around for maintenance
(b) Import paper. You need to have enough money to support a constant supply of this, forever.
(c) Build another small library

You can spend the research on whatever buildings you need to expand your city but otherwise, you want to concentrate on getting Foreign Investment to #5. This will massively improve prices for imports and exports.

After that get Carpentry to #3, Knowledge to #5, max out Foreign Investment, max out Carpentry and then max out Knowledge.

To get all this you'll need at least one, maybe two large libraries.

Expanding your carpenters

While expanding your research you also want to expand your carpenters to earn more money.

Once you start building large carpenters, you will run out of trees.

At this point, you should be able to max out woodcutting research and build a woodcutter. Unlike before, the 5k research points required for maxing it out and the 25 people needed to man will feel very small.

If you don't have enough population to do this easily, just import the wood. Import depots don't require any population, just money.

Remember farms?

At this point, you should probably think about farming. Just check your food reserves in winter, if they are low build some farms until they stop being low. For farms, just create 10x25 farms with canals mentioned in "Warden1221's Guide to a good start" by Taxidermy Minotaur.

Also, you should have a lot of research available to spend on farms. Up to #5 is normally cheap.

Jewellery production is crazy money

I don't mean mining the jewels. Import the gems and export the jewellery. In my current game, I'm importing 90k gems, 20k coal and exporting 470k in jewellery. I've got 90 employees in my two large jewellers.

I'm just importing everything else I need. Drinks, clothes, tools, weapons and even bread.

What about other industries

So ignoring the jewellery, which honestly I think I'll do in the future, you can just keep expanding your carpenters and use the profits to buy everything you need.

Well, it becomes impractical once you have several hundred people. Plus, you'll have lots of unemployed people at that point.

Generally speaking, you should avoid getting into an industry unless you want to spend a lot of research on it. Max carpenter research increases the production from 1 per worker per day to 3.5 per worker per day. That's massive!

So if you want to make clothes, first build enough libraries to max out tailoring. Or if you found a nice coal mine, max out mining first.

Ah, you still should never build a papermaker. There's no research to improve the output and paper is cheap.

Screenshots

Here is a set of screenshots of my v60 city.

A city full of identical 20x20 buildings will probably horrify some people. For me, the lack of symmetry, not having enough 20x20 buildings, in various parts bothers me now that I look at it.

I'm rather proud of my temple in the second image. It's hard to get a max-size temple looking nice because you need to add in so many supporting walls.

https://imgur.com/a/QRWDxjA

TLDR;

Avoid farms and harvest wild food at the start.

Concentrate research to improve the bartering prices.

Export furniture to make lots of money.

FAQ

1) Not every map has lots of wild food!
Yeah, in that case, you'll need farms from the beginning.

If you aren't a newbie, I'm sure you know how to do food.

2) A city of 8x8 and 20x20 buildings is very boring

Yeah, that's just my personal preference. As long as you spread out your service buildings in the right places and set up warehouses properly, the layout doesn't matter that much.

3) You're wrong about XYZ

Feel free to let me know in the comment. I'm sure there are people who've played since the beginning and have put hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into the game. So I'm happy to listen.

[Vitz]

Jewellery production has probably been heavily nerfed because the only way I can see it being profitable in v63 is by investing heavily in the Trade Negotiations perk. Even with a 50% bartering boost, the cost of importing gems and coal exceed the income made from exporting jewellery. You can probably get there eventually, but it's not the silver bullet this guide makes it out to be.

[A boy named Sue]

Guide was very useful and I finally broke the 900-1000 population milestone - thanks for writing it!

In case you are updating this, one thing I just realized today that I wish I had known early on is the efficiency improvement granted by increasing the size of a building's "work table/shelf/crate...".

When building, for example, a warehouse you can increase the size of crates from a 1x2 size (total 2 tiles), which gives you 250 storage (125 storage per tile) to a 7x1 (total 7 tiles) which gives you 1500 storage (214 storage per tile). This is a massive increase is space efficiency that's important even at very early stages.

This is not specific to warehouses. Every building's space efficiency (in number of workers per tile for industry buildings) can also be hugely improved this way.

Seems auxiliaries can also be affected by this but i haven't tested that much.

[caschque]

@John Moridin
Well, there is a difference between going with a generalisation and focused strategy. Either you try to be "ok" in most of the areas (skills/research) so you can be self-sustainable, or you can specialise in one or few directions to maximise the profit.

But in order to specialise you have to think beforehand which direction you want to go. In your guide you mention that later. For me it became obvious in the Carpenters and libraries section with Making money with furniture solidifying my understanding.

If you now explain at the beginning, that specialising is a viable strategy but planning ahead would be necessary, then this is what I meant.

And if you mean that you are too focused because you go into a bit detail about how to Produce food etc. I think that is totally fine, because often in order to understand a concept - in this case a strategy - examples really help grasping the concept. That is why I like your guide.

[Reemaswolf]

this was great thank you. i had a nightmare city of alittle over 1k and now i know why it felt so frustrating as i was trying to provide as many resources and industries as i could. luckily around 400 raiders took it off my hands.

[John Moridin]

@Florp Incarnate First build all outside walls. Find the place with the most yellow and put a wall there, then keep adding walls until there is no yellow. After that, you want to fit in the maximum amount of equipment/furniture you can while taking into account pathing.

I've added a section to the guide with screenshots of my v60 city. Despite being all the same size, the wall placement can be pretty different per build type in an attempt to cramp in as much stuff as possible.

@cashque I'm not sure what mean by focusing more.

In fact, when you describe my guide like that, I wonder if I'm too focused on that strategy.

Still, I think that having a clear strategy to follow is easier for newbies. And since it's a newbie guide, I think it is important to clearly explain the reasoning behind each step so they can make their own judgement about how to play.

[caschque]

Your guide is well written. I honestly mean that.

Though I think you should focus on the core aspect of your strategy which is to plan ahead. Producing to export. And then researching only necessary technologies for the strategy.

When I started my first game I did not realise this was a good alternative.

I also like your mentioning of others guides.

[Florp Incarnate]

20x20 buildings require supports. How are you placing those?

[Mikebrowski]

I feel you should do the oppsite. Focus on hunters leather, then plot a ton of farms near a coal and ore mine onces you get A TON OF IRON you can move on into wood

[Aikendar]

This is, on one hand, is a good guide, till furniture will be at it's current prices, which is nerfable, if dev will want to.
On the other hand - this game is about managing your own village to town to city with industry and such things, not about avoidiong in through economy flaws that are in game for now.
anyway, thank you for well done guide!