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.
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:
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:
[table="Orchards"]-|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[/table]
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.
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 
