Banished - town building colonization survival game

The thing with wooden houses is that they use twice as much firewood as stone ones, so I prefer to build stone houses as soon as I can.

Maybe I'm building my quarries in bad spots? I try to put them where I know a lot of stone used to be.. but nope, I might have 10-15 guys working in the quarry and I barely get any.

Then increase your wood production substantially. I've had a ridiculous amount of wood my entire game, and I only wound up with 4 Foresters. Place them right, and firewood won't really be much of an issue. The spot doesn't matter for quarries, but regardless, the amount will always be a trickle, you just have to be patient for it to accumulate.
 
I'm curious, how do you guys deal with stone? All the other resources can be seemingly farmed, and stone can too, but it's just toooo slow. I usually end up building a quarry, but even if I have 10 guys assigned to it, the stone just slowly trickles in.. I never get enough and have to send out teams to far away places to stripmine a new part of the map of all stone... So that's not that bad, but eventually all that stone will be gone.. and what then?

I'm moving towards using the trading post and importing loads of stone, with a little of coal and iron as well. The labor required to manage quarries and mines is incredible, and right now my efficiency is royally shafted because when those mines and quarries ran out the homes are still nearby. I have masses of workers who now live far away from where they are working.

The thing with wooden houses is that they use twice as much firewood as stone ones, so I prefer to build stone houses as soon as I can.

Maybe I'm building my quarries in bad spots? I try to put them where I know a lot of stone used to be.. but nope, I might have 10-15 guys working in the quarry and I barely get any.

I don't think the location of the quarry matters, although having a nearby stockpile to collect the stone can help improve efficiency by a small margin.

Now, apparently a "good orchard" is virtually alround superior to farms. The orchard requires less labor per year and produces roughly 9.5 food per tile per year compared to the roughly 7.5 a farm produces.
Of course the farm has the upside that it is less prone to having the yield ruined by early snowfall.

I was reading that 56 tiles is the maximum field that could be worked by one worker, and 112 for two. Although I'm concerned the yields would be low (i.e. one worker could not complete the harvest before winter). I think your strategy increase the yield per farm/orchard.

I want that island.
So pretty. :)

My map seed is 329435652, if you want to give the map a try. It's great for fishing. There's some nice land near the start, but unfortunately there is a shallow hill that interrupts the large field just south of the starting location.

Re: Trading ale. I always wanted to do that. But i always ran out of cherries and pears in a few month. Apparently my people don't like to eat potatoes...
I always had like 200 at each trading port to help whenever a trader would take the stuff (most didn't want to hear anything about it), but it never came close to paying for a shipment of 2000 stones at "order price".

I even tried to store my fruits in the trading ports and realease them gradually so my people wouldn't eat them all before the Taverns could use them.
But that didn't really work all that well either.
I suppose my food surplus was just lackluster in general. :blush:

Yeah, my taverns go through idle periods when the citizens jack all the fruit and wheat before it gets brewed. I think I get away with volume and making sure that I have taverns processing a bunch of different ales (so at least one or two of them are always running).
 
Personally I've found a great way to make sure you have all the stone you need is to wait a good long time to make stone houses. Once you have a full 15 guys working a quarry, and can support yourself otherwise, then you can begin the slow building up of the town. I haven't had any problems if I just avoid building stone houses.
I'd agree with this: Delay stone houses. They are a luxury during the early game, not a necessity. Later on they are useful to reduce firewood consuption somewhat, so they are worth the investment *if* you have the stone.

...and I'd say it is actually easier to just buy huge amounts via the trader than producing it yourself. Quarries take lots of workers, lots of space and the return when fully worked is 100-150 stones per season. I think it is more effective to employ these people somewhere else to get a few more breweries, coat makers and the like and only use the quarry in times of need (e.g. after a disaster).

And speakinf of disasters:
Stone houses are a lot more costly to replace, so the potential damage from fire and tornadoes is a lot higher - one of the main reasons why I don't build stone houses to early on. I once had an unlucky fire that destroyed a dozen stone houses, leaving me with a huuuuuuuge lack of stones that more or less stopped my construction projects for half a decade.
 
I attempted a small mountains map, harsh climate and hard difficulty, with a goal "no deaths due to cold and hunger". Managed for 22 years and until a pop of 30/10/10 or so, then all went south... :mad:
 
Purchased through Steam, but I have yet to partition my iMac HDD and install windows :-/

Maybe in a few days. Until then, I'll be holding weekly contests for settlements named in my honor.

1st challenge: the largest stock of (firewood? Logs? Timber?) I Don't know the resources here.

EDIT: no restrictions on difficulty level. We are all virgins here.

But whoever screenshots the largest stock of that woody necessity in Spring 5 will get a custom little cutting board made by me. Nothing fancy, so don't kill yourselves ;)

Deadline to post screenshots in this thread is 7 * 24 hours from this post. You can submit multiple screenshots, I'll mail off a cutting board to the poster with the highest reserves.

If this challenge is set up stupidly, I'll adjust it based on feedback from people who actually have played the game. But someone is getting a little cutting board no matter what :trophy:

Oh dear oh my, how meatspace has commandeered my online time :( I'm over a week late on my only PBEM, and I apparently missed this by a few days. But going through the screenshots it appears that there's only 1 contender who met the posting requirements: Year 4, within 7 days of my boast challenge.

Oakstead! :hammer:

This town had more verified stocks of logs than any other town as far as I can tell. So grandad1982, if you PM me (or email me, or semaphore me, or whatever me) a shipping address I'll send off a custom bit of polished log for you. And you can use it to increase your home happiness, food production, maybe both? :trophy:


Spoiler Winning Post :
Heres my first town rather optimistically called Grandadopia. It started a new one after this screen was taken.
Spoiler :




As you can see I had my first forest RGO (liking the vicky term) set up and was starting on a second. If only that gap for the market had been bigger...


My second town of Oakstead (lots of screens).

Spoiler :


Settings and initial start location.
Spoiler :




My starting layout takes shape. The houses are slightly offset from the market and I'll correct that later. Also later I'll move the wood cutter and stockpile. Note that I lost 5 people to starvation this winter.
Spoiler :


Not much has changed in a year except the situation has stabilized and I've built a barn nearer to the gatherers hut
Spoiler :


In the harsh winter of 3 a fire breaks out in the foresters lodge. I fear for my gatherers hut and the majority of my homes. I have no wells! Luckily it only wipes out the foresters, hunters and a single home leaving my main food producer unharmed.
Spoiler :




I rush a well to help in future fires.
Spoiler :


I build a school to get more efficient workers
Spoiler :


Things are shaping up ok. I've tidied the southern part of town up and placed a traders post in the SW. Had a couple of deaths from starvation in year 8 which was annoying as there was food in storage but they just wouldn't go get it for some reason. Maybe I need more market workers. Plans are to get some farms going in a few years and stone quarry in the NE (above my forest RGO). I'll extend my forest RGO are to the S and SE of the current zone.
Spoiler :



Loving this game so far. Like EQandcivfanatic says it would make a good SG game as long as some rules and plans were thrashed out before anyone played. The main thing that would need addressing in an SG would be the overwhelming importance of the first 2/3 years and how this stage would be handled. Maybe some thing like for the first 5 years people can only play 1 year per set?
 
I was reading that 56 tiles is the maximum field that could be worked by one worker, and 112 for two. Although I'm concerned the yields would be low (i.e. one worker could not complete the harvest before winter). I think your strategy increase the yield per farm/orchard.
In my Tington game my 5x4 tile orchards hit 195 pretty reliably. Extremely reliably actually. Like 90% of them have two 195s to their name if i check.
But my fields (most of them 8x8 tiles) where all over the map. There seemed to be an approximation to some value in the low 400s (with numbers above that value probably being accounting errors), but that's about it. Very messy data.

So, i wanted to test this farming nonsense and started an easy map to that end.
To my disappointment what i got was even more messy data. Like really messy.
There was a trend though, that smaller fields had greater variance. Bigger ones were more stable but their net yield (i only harvested at 100%) still fell short of the values seen in my Tington game. The obvious reason was that i had more workers on them and that worker education affected net yield at 100% nominal yield.

It is virtually impossible to build a school before the oldest kid in your banished party becomes an adult. So i had to either constantly monitor what that citizen is doing and keep him or her away from the fields or build an actual town with a population that is 100% not-educated or 100% educated.
I opted for the latter - the educated town (i'm assuming that is what we are most interested in).

Having done that and actually monitoring the farming process i discovered that max net yield for farms can be reproduced with extreme reliability once the farming and harvesting is executed correctly.

I tested with fields at 4x4, 8x8 and 12x12 fields as well as the following orchards:

Dimensions|# of tiles|# of resulting trees
5x4|20|6
4x6|24|4
11x7|77|15
6x12|72|12

Summary of the results of these experiments (done with iron tools and educated workers):

  • If left on the fields/orchards farmers will start to harvest fields or orchards in specific months - uncued and regardless of the yield percentage (iirc it's Late Summer for fields and Autumn for Orchards).
    I.e. they will mercilessly butcher a field at 60% yield even if that field would have risen to 100% if left alone for another month or two.
  • By the relevant months Orchards have typically reached 100% but fields typically have not (usually they around 80%).
  • If any decent effort at sowing in spring takes place virtually all fields reach 100% eventually.
  • The time by which a field reaches 100% is almost entirely determined by how quickly sowing is done. Additional farming in spring beyond some point (yet to be determines) seems to have little to no effect.
    Farm work being done in summer has likely no or next to no effect on the speed of the yield bar.
  • Fields can be overstaffed. Workers will work on them (not walk on and off them, but actually do their thing) beyond the default worker limits.
    Due to the above this is highly recommendable in my view.
  • Also for this reason big fields are not just bad. They are outragously terribad.
    I tried to include 15x15 fields in my tests but failed to reliably bring them to 100% in time simply because the sawing took too long.
    This is because the max worker number for any field is (nominal) or appears to be (effective) 6.
    I.e. big fields cannot be properly overstaffed.
    That's very, very, very, catastroclusterfracktastically bad.
  • Orchard yield is indeed determined by the number of trees. The tile size of the plot is completely irrelevant.
  • For this reason any orchard that has other dimensions than 5x4 for any reason other than terrain obstaces etc. is to be considered a "bad orchard".
  • If all of the above is done correctly (i.e. field harvesting is done manually) fields produce net yields as reliable as those of orchards.
    My 12x12 fields hit the expected 1008 net yield with remarkable accuracy, once the above was applied.
  • If all of the above is done correctly net yield per tile for fields is plain and simple 7
  • Net yield for orchards is 32.5 per tree, which translates to a net yield per tile for 5x4 sized orchards of 9.5 (compared to 5.42, 6.75 and 5.42 for the other mentioned orchards).

So there is a definate upside to orchards, particularly since (figuring in walking to and from other tasks) proper farming appears to consume more in-game labor as well as requiring considerably more micromanagement.
There are still the obvious upsides to fields: You don't have to wait several years, orchards are still more prone to damage from early snowfall than fields (even if one waits for the fields to reach max yield), orchards cause the stone road bug etc.

The are still open questions:
How big exactly is the loss from uneducated labor?
(My guestimate would be 30 to 50%.)
Do steel tools make a difference?
How big is the loss due to fallen trees in orchards statistically?

Has anybody looked into how exactly consumption works?


Cue:
Someone telling me that all this was already known and showing me where i could have looked it up (please do - would save work in the future). :)
 
Oh dear oh my, how meatspace has commandeered my online time :( I'm over a week late on my only PBEM, and I apparently missed this by a few days. But going through the screenshots it appears that there's only 1 contender who met the posting requirements: Year 4, within 7 days of my boast challenge.

Oakstead! :hammer:

This town had more verified stocks of logs than any other town as far as I can tell. So grandad1982, if you PM me (or email me, or semaphore me, or whatever me) a shipping address I'll send off a custom bit of polished log for you. And you can use it to increase your home happiness, food production, maybe both? :trophy:

Shoot! I forgot about this! :(

Next time, man, I'm going for it.

Spoiler :
In my Tington game my 5x4 tile orchards hit 195 pretty reliably. Extremely reliably actually. Like 90% of them have two 195s to their name if i check.
But my fields (most of them 8x8 tiles) where all over the map. There seemed to be an approximation to some value in the low 400s (with numbers above that value probably being accounting errors), but that's about it. Very messy data.

So, i wanted to test this farming nonsense and started an easy map to that end.
To my disappointment what i got was even more messy data. Like really messy.
There was a trend though, that smaller fields had greater variance. Bigger ones were more stable but their net yield (i only harvested at 100%) still fell short of the values seen in my Tington game. The obvious reason was that i had more workers on them and that worker education affected net yield at 100% nominal yield.

It is virtually impossible to build a school before the oldest kid in your banished party becomes an adult. So i had to either constantly monitor what that citizen is doing and keep him or her away from the fields or build an actual town with a population that is 100% not-educated or 100% educated.
I opted for the latter - the educated town (i'm assuming that is what we are most interested in).

Having done that and actually monitoring the farming process i discovered that max net yield for farms can be reproduced with extreme reliability once the farming and harvesting is executed correctly.

I tested with fields at 4x4, 8x8 and 12x12 fields as well as the following orchards:

Dimensions|# of tiles|# of resulting trees
5x4|20|6
4x6|24|4
11x7|77|15
6x12|72|12

Summary of the results of these experiments (done with iron tools and educated workers):

  • If left on the fields/orchards farmers will start to harvest fields or orchards in specific months - uncued and regardless of the yield percentage (iirc it's Late Summer for fields and Autumn for Orchards).
    I.e. they will mercilessly butcher a field at 60% yield even if that field would have risen to 100% if left alone for another month or two.
  • By the relevant months Orchards have typically reached 100% but fields typically have not (usually they around 80%).
  • If any decent effort at sowing in spring takes place virtually all fields reach 100% eventually.
  • The time by which a field reaches 100% is almost entirely determined by how quickly sowing is done. Additional farming in spring beyond some point (yet to be determines) seems to have little to no effect.
    Farm work being done in summer has likely no or next to no effect on the speed of the yield bar.
  • Fields can be overstaffed. Workers will work on them (not walk on and off them, but actually do their thing) beyond the default worker limits.
    Due to the above this is highly recommendable in my view.
  • Also for this reason big fields are not just bad. They are outragously terribad.
    I tried to include 15x15 fields in my tests but failed to reliably bring them to 100% in time simply because the sawing took too long.
    This is because the max worker number for any field is (nominal) or appears to be (effective) 6.
    I.e. big fields cannot be properly overstaffed.
    That's very, very, very, catastroclusterfracktastically bad.
  • Orchard yield is indeed determined by the number of trees. The tile size of the plot is completely irrelevant.
  • For this reason any orchard that has other dimensions than 5x4 for any reason other than terrain obstaces etc. is to be considered a "bad orchard".
  • If all of the above is done correctly (i.e. field harvesting is done manually) fields produce net yields as reliable as those of orchards.
    My 12x12 fields hit the expected 1008 net yield with remarkable accuracy, once the above was applied.
  • If all of the above is done correctly net yield per tile for fields is plain and simple 7
  • Net yield for orchards is 32.5 per tree, which translates to a net yield per tile for 5x4 sized orchards of 9.5 (compared to 5.42, 6.75 and 5.42 for the other mentioned orchards).

So there is a definate upside to orchards, particularly since (figuring in walking to and from other tasks) proper farming appears to consume more in-game labor as well as requiring considerably more micromanagement.
There are still the obvious upsides to fields: You don't have to wait several years, orchards are still more prone to damage from early snowfall than fields (even if one waits for the fields to reach max yield), orchards cause the stone road bug etc.

The are still open questions:
How big exactly is the loss from uneducated labor?
(My guestimate would be 30 to 50%.)
Do steel tools make a difference?
How big is the loss due to fallen trees in orchards statistically?

Has anybody looked into how exactly consumption works?


Cue:
Someone telling me that all this was already known and showing me where i could have looked it up (please do - would save work in the future). :)

All of what I know comes from trading notes here, reading threads on reddit (/r/banished), watching LPs especially from quill18, and the developer's logs.

That was really insightful analysis. I suspected the number of plants (whether trees or crops) determined the yield but didn't have any evidence to prove it--and since trees appear to be something like 2.5x2 in size (to account for the footpaths between rows) and crops 1x1, there are optimal orchard sizes in ways there are not optimal farm sizes.

I haven't tried assigning additional farmers over the recommended amount, but I'm going to do that the moment I can play again because it looks like it does a lot of good during the Spring planting season.

I can't answer your first question on the effect of education but suspect something similar. I think the difference between iron and steel tools is how long they last before needing to be replaced, and given the rate that my citizens steal the coal for heating their houses I have switched back to all-iron tools (that is a bit aggravating, I was having big tool shortages because my blacksmiths couldn't get to the coal before everyone else could).
 
Started a new town since I didn't really like how my first town was developing. I call this new town Hackenbush. Internet high five for anyone who gets the reference.

Spoiler :
 
Blimey. I'd forgotten about that competition! My puny stack of logs doesn't seem worth a prize. If I hadn't just got carried away playing the game I would have tried harder :lol:

I live in the UK. I don't want you to go to the trouble and possibly expense of posting me a chopping board! I'll PM you and you can decide on the best course of action.
 
The Mountain Men achievement... must that be done on hard with disasters on?
It doesn't say so in the description, but i suppose it would make sense.

:confused:
 
Another town, another miserable death. I tried a different layout in Fair Valley, made it more decentralized, and it worked very well for quite a bit. Then I hit that bump again and every thing failed as everyone starved. It's beginning to annoy me how I just can't get over the mining bump, every time I try to do it my food dries up, even when I'm continuing to build food infrastructure and workers. I just don't understand it.

Enjoy some pictures:

Overview of most of Fair Valley.

Spoiler :


North River, the fourth town I built.

Spoiler :


West Town-on-the-Lake, second town I built. Smallest out of all.

Spoiler :


Newton, the fifth and final town I built. This was the first attempt to deal with depleting food supplies. It didn't help.

Spoiler :


Pastureworks, my second attempt to rectify the food scarcity situation. None of the animals bred (chickens and sheep both, which cost me a fortune to get).

Spoiler :


Ironton, the third town I built. It started out looking like the rest of the towns above, and was named for the large amount of iron on the site that was settled. Eventually this town bloated and became the largest out of the five, becoming known less as Ironton and more as "the Dirty Hovel." It's also where you can see my final attempt at fixing the food situation, which involved mass farming (once again, the seeds costing me just about everything I had). It failed. Right after the first harvest is when the starvation began.

Spoiler :


And finally, here's the initial settlement, the downtown of Fair Valley.

Spoiler :


I had hoped to eventually grow large enough to connect all the settlements to one another, becoming one giant city, but food prevented that from happening. I maxed at a population of around 200 or so, including kids (so 150 adults, and 50 kids). As you can see my numbers have dwindled since then, and I can safely say the town has failed. :undecide:
 
Things were going fairly well for Hackenbush, when suddenly a fire broke out. I will have to wait and see how this develops.

Spoiler :
 
I decided to do my Mountain Men with additional ovaries:

Spoiler :


Better view:

Spoiler :


  • Normal difficulty, disasters on
  • No buildings and no farming off that island. Exceptions: Bridges and stockpiles.
    (I didn't start on the island so my first building had to be in fact a bridge)
  • The initial barn has to be razed as soon as survival permits (summer 3 in my case)
  • No Gatherers, no Hunters, no Foresters.
  • (incidentally) no Quarry, no Mine (a Mine would have been nice but could have only been placed where the Market is - the other sides of the mountain didn't work - and i really wanted the Market)

90% of the difficulty came from the lack of a forester.

(Not pushing the natural forests past a point of no return was the concern. Derping all over the map (without cloths for a long time, too) wasn't. My people still got to idle a lot. Like, really.... a lot.)

PS: Micromanaging forest cutting sure qualifies as "fun".
 

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Took this shot to show a friend, figured I'd show you guys too. After failing at not starving to death with every village, I finally managed to survive past the first 5 years and have grown obsessed with maxing out my food supply each season with at least 30% of the harvest going to waste. :D

Spoiler :
 
All of what I know comes from trading notes here, reading threads on reddit (/r/banished), watching LPs especially from quill18, and the developer's logs.

Ok, i'm going to say it:

The people on reddit/banished are complete imbeciles, who at some point must have gotten wind of "scientific methods" and didn't get the memo that those are not very effective as a remedy for, you know, one being stupid.

Quill is ok. He's a completely different species than the reddit morons anyway.
 
@grandad - I should post your prize in the middle of the week.

I'm thinking of doing another prize challenge if there's interest?
 
I'd be interested in a prize, but I still think a succession game should be organized.
 
I asked JC for his save, thinking i could turn around things in a somewhat convicing fashion based on farming (and other) micro managament (i convincingly failed).
He asked me to show him his town if it still lives later, and i suppose i'm doing that now.
As i said: Things didn't turn out as well as i hoped.
Pastureworks, my second attempt to rectify the food scarcity situation. None of the animals bred (chickens and sheep both, which cost me a fortune to get).
Pastures need to be worked to have the animals breed.
To my surprise i found your pastures completely empty. I didn't know that could happen. My unworked animals did just stagnate (with their pop count). I didn't see them die from not being worked before.
And finally, here's the initial settlement, the downtown of Fair Valley.
I visciously scrapped much of your town for parts, but i kept with the vision of the original Fair Valley as the center.
There were other possible choices for a market based center, but this one was fine. Particularly since i wanted to keep the hospital and that wouldlimit alternatives to something east of the central town, saving some of the workshops but awkwardly placing the town between those hills.
So Fair Valley downtown it was.

Ok...
So i had a fairly reasonable plan:
1. Resize the farms and bring in a few good harvests, while having the population slowly dwindle, stabilising at something like 70.
2. Build a school and a market and rework the town for efficiency.
3. Oh, yeah, and stem the tide against that tool shortage.

I soon realised that #1 was highly problematic and #3 was next to impossible, both because toolless uneducated workers are really terribly useless.
Like any attempt to staff the mine and the smithies proved to be completely futile during the first summer. So i postponed that and focussed on 1. and 2.

That did go, well, not half bad the first year. People where constantly dying from starvation, but breeding too. The first harvest fell short of what was needed but was essentially as good as one could expect. Adult population was at, like, 80 during the winter and the decline seemed to slow down.
I managed to scrap buildings where the market was supposed to go and scrapped some workshops for the needed iron too.

The second harvest however went the way of Atlanta, which catastrophically improved the tools-to-people-ratio (along with the everything-to-people ratio).

So essentially i got to start over.
With buildings instead of natural stone and iron to mine.
Oh and that population was still rapidly loosing the tools it had left, was increasingly unclothed and of course completly uneducated.
But at least the school was up and running and the market was on its way.

Spoiler :

You can see here that i have already resized the farms again (and deleted like two thirds of them) on account of the much smaller population.

From there i spent 5 years essentially getting nowhere. The tool shortage got worse before it got better, even though i commited whatever labor could be spared on addressing it. I really only managed to break free once i had scrapped most of the remaining workshops for iron. The mine was still just ridiculous. By the look of it the untooled uneducated folks working there were playing canasta all day.

Once that was somewhat under control, i started to work on the settlements i was still using to keep myself afloat. West Town first, then North River. I deleted the housing in newtown, because people kept moving back there for no apparently reasons (all economic buildings there had been offline for ages) and Irontown became Ghosttown - completely abandoned, save for a few - still useless - miners and one of the first tooled and educated guys i could find operating the only surviving smithy.
Unfortunatly most of the people surviving Fair Valleys meltdown were - apparently - rather old and kept dying of old age even when provided for.
So even while there where plenty of children growing up, total population remained frustratingly stagnant.

At the end of the twenties all that had finally passed. A well educated population in West Town and North River finally a) grew and b) produced significant surplusses that could be traded and/or invested into revitalisation of the other settlements.

By 42 things look like this:
Spoiler :

River Town has moved its forestry to the other side of the river, the new South Town is operating the economic buildings left over from Newtown as well as two fully filled max sized chicken pastures and some orchards on the other side of the southern hills.
I recently got sheep and there are already multiple max size pastues off screen waiting for them.
River town has it's own port now, with a smithy right next to it. There space for more smithies as well as a mine there (the paused thing).
Popuation is soaring and the town generated huge surplussed in, well, everything. The ports are stuffed with 2000 firewood, 4000 venison and some other stuff.
Those farms haven't been used in years. Hunter's each have only one worker, Gatherer's only 2. In the light of that i was just to lazy to bother with the farms.

On the agenda:
- Expanding the town to the east, revitalising Irontown and finally making use of that quarry.
- Scrapping that pasture there and buiding 2 fishing huts and a third merchat there.
- Increasing the well count from 4 to 7 or 8.​
Stone is the sole limiting factor right now. Hence the third trading post.

But, yeah, as i said: I completely, miserably and unambiguously failed with the hoped for quick turnaround.
I'm thinking of doing another prize challenge if there's interest?
I don't care about any prize.
I just want someone to give me an objective. :)

I already contemplated doing the log-challenge even though it's already over.
So, you can take that as a "yes".
I'd be interested in a prize, but I still think a succession game should be organized.
Up for it.
Be warned: I will lobby whoever goes first hard on building a school asap.

The advise in post #128 regarding schools is in my view horribly misleading.
The only real question is how fast you can feasably build a school and if you want to bring up 4 or 6 kids uneducated or just one. Delaying the school past year three is plain and unambiguously horrible.
Uneducated workers do so much less work, and worse, they don't just do it slower, they actually waste ressources. They farm, mine (i suspect even craft) the same things, depleting sources at normal speed but producing less output. This leeds to an attrociously bad economy that fails at the slightest huff and puff.

Like, these are the main things that can be wrong with your town:
-|prevention constantly consumes considerable labor and/or ressources|prevention is (usually) absurdly easy and affordable
things that kill people in short order|starvation|exposure
things that cripple the entire economy|lack of tools|lack of education
things that rank between nuisance and irrelevance|lack of cloths|low health
The pernicious thing is that you notice lack of tools. Funny icons pop up, stuff gets "stuck" while slow toolless workers endlessly try to do it etc.
With uneducated people there are no warnings and everything gets done in a - seemingly - timely fashion. The output is just horrible.

JC here started in the middle field in the right hand column by design and then worked his way to the left and then up. :D
 

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