Pangaea - Langtvekkistan

[Pangaea]

Thank you, that is nice to hear

I only have three trading ports, well, until very recently that is. Put up a fourth along the narrow stream, hoping no trader would come there so I could use it solely as storage, but as can be seen in a picture in the last update, the bugger rowed up the river. Haven't traded much there as I don't have much to trade with. Use 20 vendors in each TP, for example to try to move coal closer to the main area, where I have steel tools producing blacksmiths. Unfortunately that doesn't always work, and earlier I noticed the bannies had hauled in over 600 coal.

I'm mostly trading for iron, stone and fruits for ale-making. What I use is venison, mutton, tiny amounts of beef for food; and ale, firewood and the odd 100-batch of wool coats for raw material. Combined we're still importing a fair bit, but probably mighty well short of whatever people are using 20-30-above trading posts for.

Don't think much has changed in the last 10 years in terms of trading, but since the early parts of this town, what has come in and out has changed a bit. Now I'm relying mostly on ale out, and have 1000 ale in all three TPs, plus 1500-2000 of mutton and venison. I also have 2000 firewood in each TP, in case a large shipment of raw material arrives. In the early period, I relied a lot more on firewood, as we didn't have the production capacity for anything else, at least in large enough quantities to make much of a difference. Throughout I've traded a lot of venison, and when we got many pastures, I also added mutton. Both is valued at 3, which is great for buying fruit.

I've ordered apple, peach, plum (make ale with all three), iron, stone and sometimes coal from most merchants, but a few times I've also picked up logs, warm coats and steel tools, when they bring it. Stone, iron and coal aside, I think we are fairly self-reliant. Lots of fruit also come in, but we actually produce a great deal ourselves too, from countless orchards.

Right now we are actually completely out of stone (19 left, from thousands upon thousands a few years ago), I guess paving ALL roads with stone finally caught up with us 

The below picture shows that we'd be fairly boned without importing stone and iron, but other than that it's not too bad. Much food will have been imported too (often with the 3:1 venison/mutton ratio), but the numbers lie a little, as we're pumping out tons of ale, which means food gets "lost". Currently we have 16 brewers.

[Pangaea]

I feel like ranting a little bit, perhaps due to having so few trading OPs. Feels like every God damn time they drop by, the chance of it being a livestock or seed merchant is about 80%. This year, 3/4, last year 4/4, year before, 2/4, before that 3/4. Shortly before I built the fourth TP, which wasn't intended be a TP at all (storage), 3/3 came by with nothing but animals and seeds. I can't recall it being this bad earlier in the game, so have I just been unlucky or does the chance for these useless (now) muppets to drop by increase as time wears on?

The bannies have now picked up every last pebble of stone, so I need it rather desperately. Thankfully the one other merchant that came this year did bring 1000 stone, which brings the haul the last 3-ish years to... 1000.

Did anybody read the above post btw, and is how I deal with trading much different from others? I wouldn't think so, but the rant in this post aside, I don't really get why people "need" such an overflow of trading posts 

Sure, I see the need to import food, logs, tools and coats when you have 3-4000 citizens in massive towns where perhaps all forests have been chopped down, but before that?


Edit: Below is the sight that met me when firing up the game earlier. Apparently I had ordered the last pockets of surface stone to be collected before saving, and a stream of labourers did as asked.

[irrelevant]

I lol'd at the march of the laborers.

Your trading seems very similar to what I'd been doing; ale, venison/mutton, firewood. I also was trading lots of wool coats for wool and warm coats, and iron tools for iron and steel tools.

The only thing I would do differently, and feel strongly about, would be import a single type of fruit, and use only that fruit to make ale. Two towns ago I was importing just two types, and that was causing me all sorts of shortages and stoppages, this tavern is using cherries but there is only plum in the market, that sort of thing. Sure you can change the tavern, but it can take some time to notice, and when the low resource symbol is up, that means the brewer is out looking for fruit. So you may change from cherry to plum just at the time he is arriving back with an armload of cherries.

I realize you are growing those three fruits, but what I would do in that case would be to leave two of those for my guys to eat (they do need fruit), set all the taverns to make ale from the third, and import just that one type. My big towns taught me that the simplest supply chains are the least susceptible to disruption.

[irrelevant]

Also, I made a deal with myself WRT merchants. The deal was, since I didn't need any more seeds or livestock, I considered it a fact that I had told those guys, stay out of my town, I'm never buying anything from you, ever again! Anytime one of them showed up, I was free to revert to an earlier save. Not that I did it all the time, or even most of the time. But if I needed to, or if the RNG God was screwing with me, I did not hesitate.

That's another advantage to herding the merchants into a pack, you can concentrate on trading while they are on the map, and thus you can make saves judiciously. Is it cheating, or is it a workaround? I consider it a workaround, since I was putting considerable effort into creating the opportunity for myself. It's no more cheating than playing with disasters off is cheating. It's another way to play.

Anyway, just a thought.

[Pangaea]

Thanks for the feedback and advice.

One reason I grow and produce ale from three different fruits, is also that I like to keep things a little realistic, so I can pretend this is a real town. I'm not sure it's such a drawback either, but you probably know better based on more experience. Did the numbers on the last harvest. They don't look so great compared to what I've seen before when checking it out, but even so, the average comes out at ~360. I've seen over 600 on individual taverns before, with most above 400. Two of these taverns are new, however, which may explain a couple of the low ~200-ish numbers. I suppose less would be grabbed by citizens if I only produced ale from one fruit, but I kinda like to do it with plums, apples and peach. I know it doesn't matter in game terms, but I like the idea of diversifying crops and orchards. Even now I'm putting down new cropfields of pumpkins and squash and whatnot, although from an efficiency point of view I should put down nothing but beans, wheat and corn.

Good tip about saving before the merchant boats arrived, and I've read that somewhere before. I have done it a couple of times when we were out of fruit, but when I still got lousy merchant types I just took what I got and moved on. I do wish it was possible to tell the game "No thanks, I'm not interested in seed or livestock any more, bring me goods I actually need", and this could be one way of doing that in a cumbersome way, but I tend to prefer to just go with whatever cards the game is handing me, whether it's this one or other games. Not always, but mostly.

We've fallen behind the house-curve more than I like now, and have about 480 houses for almost 700 families. The population is up to about 1600 now, but the amount of children and students have largely remained the same, with a boost to adults, so there is a risk we go into a death spiral soon. That is also why I was desperate for stone, to build more houses, so that shipment of 1000 that just dropped by was precious.

@irrelevant and others who have built big towns, when you get to the margins of the map, do you leave some forest nods at the edge to provide you with logs, herbs (and more leather), or do you chop down the lot and start importing logs instead? I kind of like to be reasonably self-reliant, but I'd like to push the population up to at least 2000 before calling it a day on this town, so if I need to rely on mainly importing logs, then so be it - albeit with a heavy heart.

[irrelevant]

@irrelevant and others who have built big towns, when you get to the margins of the map, do you leave some forest nods at the edge to provide you with logs, herbs (and more leather), or do you chop down the lot and start importing logs instead? I kind of like to be reasonably self-reliant, but I'd like to push the population up to at least 2000 before calling it a day on this town, so if I need to rely on mainly importing logs, then so be it - albeit with a heavy heart.

Depends on your map, but with pop 2000 you probably should be able to leave several forest nodes about the fringes. My farming challenge town (pop 2700?) had plenty of forest space left, but no nodes, just undeveloped space; I was trading for essentially all my logs.

Rickettsville had a number of forest nodes (6? 8? 10? but nowhere near log self-sufficiency, was importing manymany logs) up to someplace between pop 2500-3000, at which point I systematically turned them all into farms over the next 10 years or so. By that point I had tons of herbs, and was buying all my logs, wool, fruit, and iron. If I had cared to curtail trading, I'd say that pop 2000-2500 would have been just about the max. There is only so much space on the map, and log production in particular takes up lots of space.

Sink Mill, I was trading for logs from the start, nodes were never more than a supplement.

I have never built a town with any intention other than to trade for logs and fruit. Until Gnaw Bone

[Pangaea]

Thanks, I should be able to get up to perhaps 2500 population here without near-total deforestation then, as I see there is actually quite some bit of land up north yet, which can be farmed and populated.

Wanted to go back to the mono-fruit culture for a question. If you e.g. order plum from a merchant, how much will he typically bring?

I've ordered plum, apple and peach from a few merchants, and they must have some magic boats of holding They can bring for example 18000, 10000 and 10000. So if I ordered only one type, would they bring close to 40,000?

[irrelevant]

I don't remember ever seeing that much, but I was always ordering nuts as well. 15-20k of each was pretty common though. My guys ate lots of pecans and very little meat, which I traded away for the nuts. Ale for fruit, meat for nuts; I had like 250k each of apples and pecans stored much of the time.

That's from the food merchant only. I was also ordering fruit and nuts from the general goods merchant. He would bring more like 5-10k of one or the other, along with logs, wool, iron, tools, or coats.

[Pangaea]

Perhaps 40,000 is the max then, as I've seen that amount a few times now.





This is weird. All my pastures are up in the north/north-east. At the very south-west tip of the map is a loose cow.

But there is more. A few moments later she has a little friend with her

No idea how this can happen, but pretty cute.

[Pangaea]

90 years

Last ten years have seen some big developments, in several parts of the map. We have built ~130 new stone houses, so no wonder the stone was vanishing quickly.

Up by Animal Farm we've built a municipality, as a spot was nicely positioned between three markets. Farms have expanded further south-west, and another town centre has been erected around a market. Four taverns and two woodcutters is really pushing it, miles away from our core, but hopefully they won't just sit there and twin their fingers.

Still south, but on the other side of the river, more farms, and another market with a residential area on hold. Six more production buildings here, two blacksmiths, two tailors and a woodcutter and tavern, which is pushing it, but we needed some more output of clothes and tools, otherwise we need to start relying on imports as we can just about keep up with demand.

Quite liked the orchards around the mountains in that region, so am attaching a picture of them as well.

Food has increased a bit due to the expansion of the farms, which we'll need when all these new couples start wrestling in bed. Kids have already shot up, while adults are starting to decline a little, so I was a little slow on the house construction earlier. Baby boom coming up now, that's for sure.

This is rare, but if you look closely at these screenshots, you'll notice a mighty hot summer. So hot, in fact, that it'll probably be a lousy harvest as the crops simply don't grow in such blistering heat.


I'm surprised the game is as smooth as it is. Settings are pumped up to max, and there are quite a few people and constructions on this map now, but only once in a while is there a snag with lag. This new-ish computer must be pretty decent after all.

[assobanana76]

beautiful trees that try to climb the mountain !! 

[irrelevant]

90 years

This is rare, but if you look closely at these screenshots, you'll notice a mighty hot summer. So hot, in fact, that it'll probably be a lousy harvest as the crops simply don't grow in such blistering heat.

The irrelevant tweak crop mod makes some of the crops more heat-resistant 

[Pangaea]

90 years

This is rare, but if you look closely at these screenshots, you'll notice a mighty hot summer. So hot, in fact, that it'll probably be a lousy harvest as the crops simply don't grow in such blistering heat.

The irrelevant tweak crop mod makes some of the crops more heat-resistant 

Nice. And it doesn't overpower things?

On the one hand, it's annoying to get early frosts, or this Death Valley heated summer, but it's also nice with some variety. Turned out to be a terrible harvest btw. We lost about 60,000 food that year, out of a normal harvest of 190,000 - 200,000. It was actually worse than most early frosts, as they tend to mostly kill the late bloomers, not hamstring the whole lot, even orchards.

[Pangaea]

Yay

[irrelevant]

Congrats on 2000! 

No, ITC is not OP, it just makes some judicious temperature range changes to potatoes, pumpkins, cabbages, peppers, and squash. It gives them all a chance to be useful, without homogenizing them.