My first try at blogging a town, and I'm really not sure I'll keep up with it well. But, looking for something new, so here goes.
Year 1 -- The start position was a ways from either the river (to the west) or a lake (to the southeast). I don't want to get too far from the cart so I'll start building here and try to move toward the river as I expand. There's a decent amount of stone and iron in the area, but not a huge amount. Laborers are set to collect stone and clear trees for wood and the first boarding house was laid down. Also started building a gatherer's hut nearby -- the cart's food won't last too long.
Year 2 -- Built a woodcutter since firewood was starting to get low.
Year 3 -- Health was starting to drop, probably because of all the gatherer's veggies and nothing else. There's a pretty nice deer track nearby, so built a hunting cabin with one hunter (all I could afford this early). Also took a chance and built a fishing dock on the river even though it was a fair walk for the fishermen. Started on building the second boarding house in the early spring, but it's likely to take a while since I don't have the stone and logs I need and only a small number of laborers to harvest more. Ended up being able to complete the house by the end of the year.
Year 4 -- Starting to get some babies born, so started on and completed a school for them and the younger children still around. Managed to get 4 students in school by the end of the year.
Year 5 -- This was a bad year. The second boarding house cleaned out food reserves when it was completed, and the gatherers were not able to get the reserve growing again. The townies were pretty much living hand to mouth, taking food from the barns as fast as it could be delivered. By the autumn, I was starting to see hungry citizens. I used the tip A Nonny Moose posted a few days ago and shut down the school to get some more labor. I hated to see that crop of students leave school, but those 5 extra pairs of hands made the difference by assigning them as gatherers and fishermen. In the end, I only lost one person to starvation.
Year 6 -- Oops ... lost track of the tool supply, which is getting way too low. Built a blacksmith and managed to get the supply back up to ~10 before anyone needed one. Also started building a market over near the river as I started to plan for expanding in that direction.
Year 7 -- Built another boarding house (#3) near the new market, and a second gatherer's hut nearby. Would really like to avoid the Year 5 situation happening again.
Year 8 -- Finally, enough resources stored up to start thinking about 'non-essential' things like a tailor ... the townies' clothes were starting to get pretty ragged. Also managed to build another market at the original town site (had been a footprint for years, but had to wait), and a second hunting cabin, more for the tailor's leather than for the meat at this point.
Year 9 -- Just trying to sort of stabilize resources a little, so built a second fishing dock and forester. Logs have been a problem since the start, so maybe this will help some. Also got an herbalist built and staffed so hopefully the health will start to increase.
Year 10 -- The populations starting get pretty old and I don't want the happiness to drop too much, so it's time for a cemetery. Built one roughly in the middle between the old and new parts of the settlement, and placed the footprint for a church. That's going to have to wait a while, though.
Year 11 -- Started planning for a fourth boarding house across the river.
Year 12 -- Finally, finally ... got the town hall built. Will be a lot easier to keep track of what's happening from here on.
Nice start.
Would be nice to see some "windows" the next time.
@Nilla -- Thanks. Here are the windows from the same year the screenshot above was made (I still had the saved file). Please let me know if you want any of the Town Hall tabs other than the Overview.
For me, at least, this is turning into a more challenging game than I thought it would. Mostly, I think, because I'm still trying to play the way I would using normal housing.
Usually, I try to place housing near the workplace. That means 1 or 2 houses near the forest node circle edges to support the foresters/gatherers/hunters... and any woodcutters that I usually also put at the circle edges. With the boarding houses, you can have a max of 5 families, which is overkill for this type of outlying housing around a forest node. It really makes you have to think about the best place for a boarding house to best serve several work sites.
Maybe I'm not doing the destroy/reclaim thing right on the boarding houses to keep making couples, but another thing I've noticed with the boarding houses is that when you reclaim one, it will fill to capacity before another reclaimed house starts to fill up. This means if you have, say, 4 boarding houses, mark all for destruction, and then reclaim them, unless you have enough families to require all 4 boarding houses, only 3 will be used. Put another way, I haven't figured out how to have more than one boarding house only partially filled. If birth rates in boarding houses works like normal housing, where the rate goes down with crowding, this really limits how fast you can increase the population. Has anyone else seen something similar, and am I missing something obvious in how the destroy/reclaim technique works?
Quote from: salamander on March 11, 2015, 06:17:01 AM
For me, at least, this is turning into a more challenging game than I thought it would. Mostly, I think, because I'm still trying to play the way I would using normal housing.
Usually, I try to place housing near the workplace. That means 1 or 2 houses near the forest node circle edges to support the foresters/gatherers/hunters... and any woodcutters that I usually also put at the circle edges. With the boarding houses, you can have a max of 5 families, which is overkill for this type of outlying housing around a forest node. It really makes you have to think about the best place for a boarding house to best serve several work sites.
Maybe I'm not doing the destroy/reclaim thing right on the boarding houses to keep making couples, but another thing I've noticed with the boarding houses is that when you reclaim one, it will fill to capacity before another reclaimed house starts to fill up. This means if you have, say, 4 boarding houses, mark all for destruction, and then reclaim them, unless you have enough families to require all 4 boarding houses, only 3 will be used. Put another way, I haven't figured out how to have more than one boarding house only partially filled. If birth rates in boarding houses works like normal housing, where the rate goes down with crowding, this really limits how fast you can increase the population. Has anyone else seen something similar, and am I missing something obvious in how the destroy/reclaim technique works?
You don't really need to be able to fill all 4 BHs, you only need to have more than just enough to fill 3. It can take some finagling to get them organized the way you would like them to be. I find I need to dump everyone out 2, 3, or even 4 times.
I don't know if you've looked at my Bugtussle blog, but I'm not much worried about getting workers housed close to the forest nodes, I'm just concentrating them at the markets. Since the forest nodes are not far away, and since the buildings in the forest nodes aren't really workplaces in the same way that a tailor or a smith is, I don't think this is an issue. I certainly don't have any lack of logs or of food (so far, anyway).
I haven't noticed any difference in birth rates or family size between BHs and houses, regardless of occupancy. The most families a BH can have is 5, and there are 25 slots in the BH, so it is essentially the equivalent of 5 houses.
Quote from: irrelevant on March 11, 2015, 07:10:41 AM
You don't really need to be able to fill all 4 BHs, you only need to have more than just enough to fill 3.
I agree, but with normal houses, you can put folks pretty much where you want them. With the BH's, it seems like all except maybe the last will be fully filled, and any beyond the that will stay empty until the pop grows to occupy them. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it's definitely making me re-think the way I've been expanding towns since I started playing the game.
Quote from: irrelevant on March 11, 2015, 07:10:41 AM
I don't know if you've looked at my Bugtussle blog, but I'm not much worried about getting workers housed close to the forest nodes, I'm just concentrating them at the markets. Since the forest nodes are not far away, and since the buildings in the forest nodes aren't really workplaces in the same way that a tailor or a smith is, I don't think this is an issue. I certainly don't have any lack of logs or of food (so far, anyway).
I have looked at your blog, and I really like the way your settlement is going. But ... I'm trying not to look too closely at the details since this is a challenge, and it wouldn't be fair for me to 'borrow' (ie, steal) too many of your ideas. ;)
Quote from: irrelevant on March 11, 2015, 07:10:41 AM
I haven't noticed any difference in birth rates or family size between BHs and houses, regardless of occupancy.
I could've sworn that many months ago, now, I saw something that made me think birth rates dropped in a normal house as the occupancy went up. My general impressions (but with no actual data) over several games where I was trying to concentrate on population growth seemed to support this. I'll be the first to admit that I could very well be wrong. But, if this the case, it would really affect the rate at which you could grow a population when using only BH's.
Despite what I said before, I'm going to head over to your Bugtussle blog and really look at what's been going on over the years. I think of everyone here, you've probably got the best handle on population control. And, if I want to meet the 400 pop limit for the hard-core part of the challenge, something's got to change in the way I'm doing things.
Quote from: irrelevant on March 11, 2015, 07:10:41 AM
. . . since the buildings in the forest nodes aren't really workplaces in the same way that a tailor or a smith is, I don't think this is an issue. . . .
In what ways? Don't need raw materials? The workers "create" products, though the "raw materials" are located inside their circles by definition and not brought from elsewhere. I'm sure you're right, but I'm not quite understanding how. ???
Quote from: rkelly17 on March 11, 2015, 08:37:18 AM
Quote from: irrelevant on March 11, 2015, 07:10:41 AM
. . . since the buildings in the forest nodes aren't really workplaces in the same way that a tailor or a smith is, I don't think this is an issue. . . .
In what ways? Don't need raw materials? The workers "create" products, though the "raw materials" are located inside their circles by definition and not brought from elsewhere. I'm sure you're right, but I'm not quite understanding how. ???
The workers don't work "at" the buildings, they work everywhere within its circle. When they are inside the circle, they are "at work."
I am quite sure
@salamander, that the birth rate is not dependent on how full the house is. The only limit is the space in the house (normal house 5 people,
@RedKetchup colourful houses 6 people some of the CC-houses 4 or 3). As far as I have seen in the boarding house, it's like a normal house, only for 5 families with up to 5 people. If you are persistant enough to force couples together, there will be as many babies in a full as in a half empty boarding house.
As I played this challenge, I stopped the game, deleted the BH, let the game run a couple of seconds, than stop again to undo the demolition and finally started the game to let the people move in. I often had empty boarding houses. It seems like the Bannies prefere to live with other people.
If you play the "one with nature", I think it's a good idea to have many markets, locate the BH around it and "forest nodes" and fishers outside. I think I made too few markets in my attempt. Like
@irrelevant, I don't think that it's a big disadvantage for gatherers, hunters and foresters to live a bit more remote. Fishers are really much more productive, if they live close. But in this game; live with it and make a couple of more fishing huts than in a "normal" game.
@Nilla and
@irrelevant -- I surrender ;). I've got two folks I trust to know more about this than I do telling me I'm wrong, and I'm good with that. Thanks for straightening me out and for the advice. Looking back, it may be that what I thought I was seeing in the past was not a birth rate reduction in a single house because of crowding, but an overall town rate decrease as more and more houses reached capacity.
I'm not trying to diss either the game or this challenge, but even being wrong about the crowding/birth rate thing, using nothing but BH's is really making me re-think things, especially expansion of the town into new areas before an additional BH is ready to be occupied. It makes expansion more of a long-distance affair instead of being able to have laborers living nearby to the new area under development.
Quote from: irrelevant on March 11, 2015, 09:13:01 AM
The workers don't work "at" the buildings, they work everywhere within its circle. When they are inside the circle, they are "at work."
OK, now I understand. Please excuse the thick-headedness. :(
I seem to have expanded myself westward into a corner of the map. So the next few years are to move into the south and then back east toward the lake to the south of the original settlement.
Year 13 -- Built boarding house #4 across the river (west side) and a woodcutter for the forester I'll eventually put over here, too. Still a little nervous about food reserves, so another fishing dock put on the river nearby.
Year 14 -- Started a new hunting cabin to take advantage of a pretty good stream of deer coming through the old part of town. Built the forester lodge near the boarding house from last year.
Year 15 -- Added a market to the boarding house #4 area. Remembered that disasters are on, so put in a well in the oldest part of town ... everything else so far is pretty close to the river.
Year 16 -- Got the first group of nomads coming through ... a total of 6. Being a softy, I took them in (4 adults + 2 kids) mostly for the labor boost. Immediately started on a hospital, though, just in case.
Year 17 -- Starting to turn the town back to the east, toward the lake ... built boarding house #5 on the river's east bank south of the older part of town.
Year 18 -- Mostly just hung out letting folks collect more iron and stone now that I'm getting into areas that haven't been cleared yet. Did start a school near the last boarding house, though, just to be ready.
The next several years have been spent moving back to the east to reach the lake, and to beef up the these southern settlements. Food had started to drop, so additional gatherers were assigned as the labor became available, and fishing docks and a gatherer's hut were built.
Year 19 -- Mostly clearing iron and stone to keep the building to come going.
Year 20 -- Built some additional storage barns near markets, and built a new boarding house (#6) as part of the southern settlements.
Year 21 -- Coats and herbs were not reaching the southern settlements very well, so constructed a tailor and herbalist hut in the new area.
Year 22 -- Finally started the lake settlement with a fishing dock and market. Accepted the second group of nomads ... 17 this time, 10 adults and 7 children. Started construction on boarding house #7 to accommodate them, and increased the number of fishermen and gatherers in already constructed buildings.
Year 23 -- Built an additional gatherer's hut back up in the northwest corner where the settlement first crossed the river.
Year 24 -- Built an additional well near the southern gatherers and hunters buildings since they are kind of far from the river. So far, no fires, but it's inevitable, right? With the new nomad arrivals and expansion of the town, I thought it might be smart to have a hospital in the south, so construction started on that. Started building boarding house #8 at the lakeside settlement.
This several year period started off promising as far as population growth, but despite my best efforts to shuffle BH occupants around to get new mates pairing up, there's been a decrease in the number of children (population graph attached). It seemed to start with the acceptance of the last group of nomads in year 22. It may be that I'm reaching total capacity for some of the BH's, and until the population expands enough to start filling the next boarding house, the lower birth rate is just a fact of life. Please let me know if something I've overlooked occurs to you.
I have no idea why the number of children are getting down. How often do you "demolish" your boardinghouses? After I had 5 BH or something like that, I did it once a year and I had a slow but steady growth.
I didn't take any nomads, but as long as you had room enough it should not be the reason. Maybe you didn't had enough room for new couples after you took the nomads. In a normal game, you can often see, that the number of children reduce after you took some nomads, unless there are a lot of free homes, when you take them. Perhaps it was something like this here, too.
@Nilla -- So far, I've been "demolishing" at least once a year, and sometimes more than once. Taking your and
@irrelevant's advice, each "demolishing" may kick the folks out of the houses more than once until I get things the way (I think) I want them. One thing I did change in the last few years was the way I looked at the result of shuffling the housing. It was starting to get tedious to look at the occupants of every BH, so I started looking at the number of families reported in the Town Hall Overview screen. It seems there's a difference in the way a house counts the number of families inside and the way the town hall reports the number of families total. After the demolition shuffling, a lower number of families in the town hall screen I think would indicate that new matings had been formed, and I would continue demolishing until the number was as low as I thought I was going to be able to get it to go. If I'm wrong about using this approach, it could be that I'm actually doing more harm than good.
Here's how the BH's occupancies look in late spring 25 (only a little after the screenshot you saw above):
BH1 -- 17
BH2 -- 15
BH3 -- 0 (this is my 'overflow' house)
BH4 -- 15
BH5 -- 19
BH6 -- 16
BH7 -- 11
BH8 -- 17
When I took in the nomads, though, BH7/8 had not yet been built, so I'm thinking you might be right about the effect being because of a sudden increase in population from the nomads. If so, with the last two BH's now recently built, I would expect to see the birth rate come back up. I'll keep an eye on it for a while.
The next few years focused on continuing to develop the southern parts of the town ... the SW area across the river, the S area between the river and lake, and the SE area at the lake. The decrease in population growth I mentioned at the end of the previous several years seems to have reversed itself. I'm betting that I just overpopulated houses with the last group of nomads and get a brief dip in births for my trouble.
Year 25 -- Happiness was starting hang more around 4 1/2 stars instead of 5, so a chapel was built in the south. A market was built in the southwest area, and a new boarding house (#9) was started nearby.
Year 26 -- Started on a boarding house (#10) at the lake in the southeast. The southwest area got a forester lodge and a gatherer's hut. I seem to have plenty of logs and firewood at the moment, so the plan here is to set the foresters to only plant for a few years to get a good forest going for the gatherers, and then stop work at the forester lodge
Year 27 -- The lake boarding house is starting to populate, so a school was built nearby. More resource production building (for gatherers, hunters and foresters) started by the river. At the moment, if the population keeps growing, I'm going to need a lot more food coming in. I plan to treat the foresters here the same as at the forest cluster in Year 26. An additional boarding house (#11) started in the southwest area.
Year 28 -- Kind of a boring year, pretty much letting the laborers and builders catch up on all the buildings placed in the last couple of years.
For the next few years, I think I'm going to have to concentrate on getting the food reserves a lot higher than they are now. I also want to try moving the students around after the housing shuffles, so some additional schools are going to be needed.
Your population graph is very instructive; It shows very good the main problem to take nomads. I do not talk about deceases. I do not talk about uneducated people. I talk about the birth rate of your original people.
If you don't plan carefully and build a lot of new houses (in this case boarding houses), the nomads will take all the new houses and there is no room for your originally young couples to move out. That means; the birth rate goes down after you take the nomads. If you draw a line, estimating the normal natural population growth, you can see that you would have had about the same population now, even if you hadn't taken the nomads. Two differences; younger and better educated.
Year 29 -- Four schools were started (with two actually under construction and 2 paused) for the student shuffling. Boarding house (#12) started as well as another fishing dock on the river.
Year 30 -- A new cemetery was constructed in the south. The original was still only a little over half full, but I don't think that will last long. The next major move is going to be to start building around the lake -- a market and two boarding houses (#13 & #14) were placed to the south of the lake. I think
@Nilla's right about the nomads vs. housing, but against my better judgment I accepted another group of 18 of the wandering fiends (11 adults and 7 children). So far, I haven't had any disease outbreaks, but I may be playing with fire (which I also have not had yet ... knock on wood).
Year 31 -- Built another fishing dock on the river because I'm still a little nervous about the food reserves and how quickly the population is starting to climb. For the same reason, started on a gatherer hut/forester lodge pair near the new south lake settlement. Again, the foresters will be set to plant only for now.
Year 32 -- Built a boarding house (#15) at the original lake settlement, and started a market and a boarding house (#16) on the north side of the lake. Finished building another of the schools for shuffling students around as the number of students is growing.
Year 33 -- Boarding house (#17) built at the new north lake settlement, and fourth school for shuffling unpaused. Still being stupid ... maybe I'm getting overconfident ... a group of 36 nomads was accepted (19 adults and 17 children). This will probably lead to the birth rate decrease
@Nilla was talking about, so some more boarding houses are going to be needed very soon. This may be the last group of nomads I accept -- their numbers are starting to get too high to comfortably take them in.
Year 34 -- Built a third chapel at the south lake settlement ... try to keep these folks happy since they look like they're going to have to eat mostly fish for a while. Also put in a school at the north lake settlement and two more boarding houses (#18 & #19). Added another gatherer/forester pair to the south of the south lake settlement.
Managed to get the Isolationist Award, even though I didn't realize I was working toward it. Maybe I've been too diligent about growing the population, or maybe I just wasn't paying close enough attention, but the rate at which it's increasing is alarming. At this point, I'm afraid I may be headed for something like a Malthusian meltdown if I don't slow it down. I may try only doing the housing shuffle once per year instead of several times like I have been doing.
No panic! Don't be nervous about the food. You must concider one thing: It comes from, gatherers, fishers and hunters, That's very reliable. With farming (or trade even much more) you need a larger reserve for a bad harvest (or no food boats for a long time). Of cause, you have to increase the production, as the population grows but otherwise, it should be fine.
Actually, I've been surprised at how stable the food reserves have been over several years, even though the population has been growing. I wonder if it's the education level getting higher and bringing in more food over the same period?
Whew! -- finally finished the challenge. Since I was holding up the whole challenge, I haven't been keeping up with the blog very well. Also, things started to happen more and more quickly in the last part of the 50 years, so here's just a summary of the last part of the game (years 35 through early spring 50):
The main goal was keeping the population growing, which required food (duh ...), so much of the next several years was spent building additional boarding houses (ended up being an additional 26 BH's). Along with the BH's, quite a few more food production buildings -- fishing docks, forester/gather pairs, and hunting cabins -- were constructed to take advantage of space and keep up with food demand. As resources were available, more markets were built to spread into new areas of the map. Additional production buildings (blacksmiths, tailors, woodcutters, etc... were built as needed). Also constructed more happiness and health buildings to keep the hearts and stars between 4 1/2 and 5.
Only one more group of nomads was accepted, in year 38, with 44 new bannies being added to the town. Over the following years, two more groups were denied citizenship, mostly because of food issues later on. That last nomad group pushed me over the edge into getting the One With Nature award.
I may have made the wrong choice in map size, which was left open for this challenge. I chose to use a medium map, and by the end, I had pretty much used up all the space, a lot of it being taken up for forest production buildings. By year 42, I had almost completely harvested all of the stone, and was running out of space for additional food production. I'd hoped to be able to complete the game without a trading post, but I didn't really see a choice other than to finally build the one I'd placed on pause way back in year 4. Food production was not keeping up with the population, and I was out of stone for more boarding houses and other buildings. Ironically, I spent a fair amount of stone and other resources on wells for fire fighting and on hospitals for epidemics, but I never had a single disaster happen in the 49 years of the game ... I'd say that's pretty lucky.
There are 9 screenshots of the town below -- 3 left-to-right across the top of the map, 3 left-to right across the middle, and 3 across the bottom of the map.
Congratulations! Nice job!
How often did you demolish the boarding houses? The growth is impressive at the end.
Thanks. Through the 30's and early 40's I was demolishing around twice per year, with school shuffling happening each time immediately after everyone was resettled in a house. For the last several years, I reduced the demolishing to only once per year to avoid the baby boom that usually happened right afterwards ... I just didn't have the food production to support big increases in population all at once.
All in all, I think
@kee might want to handicap the scoring for this town: after all, I had your and
@irrelevant's discussions about keeping the population growing with demolishing and
@rkelly17's ideas about rearranging the students in the schools to get them through more quickly.
@irrelevant replayed 10 years (I think) with the school rearrangements and saw an improvement, but because I was bringing up the rear as far as completing the challenge, I had 21 years to do the same. I think that made a big difference.
@salamander. nicely done!
Bah to a handicap. This is another challenge that should just stay open, for anyone to top if he/she can. You're on top for now, until I try again and get pop 1000 ;) ;D
@irrelevant -- Thanks. Keeping the challenge open sounds like a good plan to me. This has been one of the most enjoyable games I've played in a while. The rules of the challenge really changed the way I normally do things and kept it interesting.
Go for the 1000+ town. That would be cool to see. :)
Me too; bah for the handicap. I see these challenges as challenges, to try what's possible. Not competitions, to beat someone. And if I could help a little bit; I'm happy!
And yes
@irrelevant; go for the 1000! I would like to see that, too.
Although I had in mind to close the challenge soon and declare a winner, you make a convincing argument. This means no post
@solarscreen s champions list though, you cool with that @salamander since it seems you'd top it right at the moment?
No problem here, although I hope I'll still be to claim at least a part of the huge cash prize you were offering.
Something you might think about: with
@solarscreen's okay, what about including a section in the Champion's List for open-ended challenges, or a separate thread specifically for open challenges. In both cases, rather than listing a final "winner," something like a leader board (like in golf) that shows what the current standings/rankings are could be updated as new challenge games are completed. How's something like that sound to everyone?
I never offered cash, only capital. You'll find a stash of Unobtainium with your name on waiting for you at Sirius central.
I'll update the challenge text to make it reflect that it's open.i