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Infinite: Designing a Town for no human interaction.

Started by smurphys7, December 23, 2017, 11:28:02 AM

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Nilla

I think you"cracked" it. But I'm not sure that I like the result. Starvation as a mean of success. I don't know.  :-\ Mean!

But somehow, I understand why it works. When Thar's not enough food, often whole families die; old and young, not random. It's those who aren't fast enough, to grab the little food there is who dies. This means houses are free for more adult children from other houses but the "age distribution" is still quite similar each time.

Do you have any intentions to go on with this experiment; see if it's possible to make this without starvation. I wonder how it would work with smaller houses, for 4 person families. if the "peaks" aren't that high, maybe the "flukes" are less likely.

smurphys7

I, too, don't like the starvation method.  I will be trying other tweaks as well.  I was only 1 person off succeeding on the previous attempt.  I haven't opened up trading yet.

I strongly want to avoid mods.  How would I decide which mods to use?  Some are like cheating.

smurphys7

I have not given up.  I simply hadn't had much to update for a while.  The tl;dr is I am using trading and have done 500+  years successfully.  Outlook optimistic

I tried a bazillion more slight tweaks to the original Gathering Hut, no tool, no trading method.  None were successful.  They were all very very close.  I may go back to the idea of traderless infinity, but for now I am working on being successful wtih trading.  I did learn many important things from all my attempts. 

The average population per home is 2.5 over the super-long-term.  That may have been roughly expected but it is good to see empirical results.  I can calculate my needed food production.  If I have 25 Homes I will have an average population of 62.5 and need to produce 6250 per year.  If I have 65 homes, my average population is 162.5 and I need to produce 16250 food per year.

The minimum adult count seems to be around 35%-40% of the total house count.  If I have 25 houses the lowest number of adults seems to be ~8 or 9.  If I have 65 houses the lowest number of adults seems to be about 22 or 23.  This number is critical.  This number is my assignable jobs.  If I assign more jobs than this then in a "fluke year" one person may die without a replacement.  Once that happens once my town's downfall is inevitable.  Eventually more and more problems will occur.

Using these numbers I looked into trading options.  I want to maximize Trade Value produced per worker.  I'm assuming Educated for now.  The classic "almost optimal calculator" farm-size is 11x11.  That's 847 Food per worker.  All of that food has a Trade Value of 1.  One Trader and one farmer mean I am getting about 425 TV (Trade Value) per worker.  I can use several farms and put all their goods through one trading post.  If I have 6 Farmers on 11x11 fields and one Trader I am producing 6x847 = 5,082 food/TV per year.  Adding in the Trader, I have 5,082 / 7 = 726 TV per worker.

If a Woodcutter produces 800 Firewood per year that means they turn 400 TV (200 logs) into 3200 TV.  That's one worker producing 2800 TV.  Four woodcutters and one trader mean 2,240 TV per worker, or 1,600 TV per year if spent on Food Merchants.  The "Firewood economy" is something I'd like to avoid.

I decided to go with 3 Herdsman, 3 Tailors and 3 Traders.  Sheep Pastures make about 1200 Mutton and 90 Wool per year.  The tailors turn 2 Wool into 2 Wool Coats.  If I assumed all of the goods produced got to the Trader that means I would produce a total of (3600 Mutton and 270 Wool Coats) = 14,850 TV  / 9 Workers = 1,650 TV per worker.  Some will be eaten.  Some will be worn.   Even accounting for those losses I still produce significant TV. 

My total work force = 21 Adults. 
3 Herdsman
3 Tailors
3 Trader
6 Gatherers
2 Foresters
2 Woodcutters
1 Physician
1 Teacher

I have 65 Homes.  Assuming a minimum adult count that is Total Homes x .35 then my minimum adult count is 22-23.  That leaves me a teeny bit of wiggle room.  Food required is 16,250 per year.  My Gatherers produce over 5400 Food per year.  That means over 10,000 of the ~15,000 TV of Mutton/Wool must be converted into food.  In practice, this is successful.

My population is not always entirely educated.  At times I run out of Tools.  At times not all homes have Firewood.  However, over the long term and with high reserves I have so far survived these lean times.  I tweaked the auto-purchasing numbers many many times.  If I purchase too many tools they fill up all my barns and there is no room for food.  If I purchase too few tools I don't produce enough goods.  I don't produce enough logs for my 2 Woodcutters.  I need to purchase some at the Trading Post.  Purchase too many and won't have enough food.  Purchase too few and not enough Firewood.

Last night I ran the simulation at x100 speed while I slept. Here's a screenshot of town.

Population Graph

The key is the Green Line can never reach the Blue Line.
I have 21 Assigned Jobs.  If I reach 20 Adults I lose one without a replacement.  I max at 20 Students.  As long as the lowest point of the Green Line never gets to the highest point of the Blue Line I'm good.

Here's the Overview at year 710.  I started the simulation at around year 175. 
Overview
Production Tab
Citizens Graph
Tool Graph
Firewood Graph
Food Graph

I don't know what happened in years 200-600.  At some point in the last 100 years I survived a tool shortage that caused a firewood shortage and significant reductions in my food stores.  I still had over 100,000 food and the Food reserves seem to have recovered.

Things look good.  Only 4500 more years to go!

EDIT I tried to attach the pics as well but it seemed to fail.  If you need me to attach the pics rather than have links let me know.

Nilla

I think the combination wool coats and mutton is the best export good in this case. Good choice. Ale would be a possible alternative but I don't believe firewood would work.

You have 3 traders. I guess you need 3 trading ports to get enough goods. The population is quite small, so the merchants wouldn't bring much. I also guess, that you've tried less. Would be interesting to hear your thoughts about this.

Anyhow, I wish that it will work the following 4500 years! :)


smurphys7

Balancing the number of traders was mostly dumb luck.  Another consideration is this strange disappearing goods bug.  I am not sure precisely how the bug works.  But, I know not mixing Food/Non-Food goods helps.  After hitting the bug once in testing for the Infinity town I decided that Mutton and Wool Coats shall be kept apart.  Then I learned one trader could not hold sufficient Mutton.  Sometimes there are quite a few years between getting a Food or General Goods Merchant.  I have 2 traders on Mutton and 1 on Wool Coats.  It seemed to work nigh perfectly.  Virtually all of the Mutton is traded at 1 Mutton for 3 other food.

I intended to include Ale production in this Town.  However, when I balanced the Herdsman, Traders and Tailors to be 3-3-3 and everything worked really well I figured that was a sign not to touch anything.

I'm mostly curious about how stable the population fluctuates.  Is this luck?  Is the bigger size more stable?  Is the lack of 100% education and longer education times causing this increased stability?  I haven't seen the population go near 40 adults.  If this population/education setup is more stable I may go back and do a no-trading one again. 

Tom Sawyer

@smurphys7 This disappearing trade goods bug is known. We figured it out in a test game by @Nilla some time ago. Maybe she remembers our funny talk about her remote village where strange things are going on.^^ She had this issue in the North mod when auto purchasing and lost stored items randomly when merchants made a trade. I solved it in the next version but the same cause is in vanilla trading port code. The vanilla resource merchant has no edible flag in "want" or "buy" section and if a food item is selected by the purchase function then it just takes it away for nothing. It removes every food item until the trading loop comes to an end. I can fix that for vanilla based games with a patch but then you don't have an unmodded game for achievements anymore.

smurphys7

Awesome!  I am very glad you have already solved the issue.  I e-mailed the Developer and he said he would "take a look at it".  Perhaps if you provided him with the solution he would make a small patch.  At least he would have the option of releasing a patch.

I would love a fix/patch.  I probably wouldn't use it for this town since I've played around it.  I would certainly love to use it in some other towns.

Tom Sawyer

PurchasePatch.pkm

It can be loaded to a running game to fix the disappearing items bug in existing trading posts. All resource merchants will except food as payment then. That's the way to fix it. It only affects vanilla ports and it should be green in your mod list. If red then it will not have any effect below the conflicting mod. So it's for vanilla based games.

While testing this patch right now I figured out that the bug doesn't occur with only food stored (the resource merchant will not make a trade) but if there is something else like firewood in your video together with food then the function deletes the food item without calculating it as payment. So it's tricky to reproduce this bug. Anyway, the patch solves it. :)

smurphys7

2500 Years successfully simulated.  Halfway there.

I believe I had some starvation.  Population GraphZoomed inFood Graph.  I believe I had some bad luck with boats that brought food, a tool crisis, the population hitting two back-to-back highs, and possibly education as well.  The population did NOT fall to a point where I lost any adult laborers. 

Food, and everything else, recovered just fine.  It seemed to be a fluke.  I likely could do some rebalancing to prevent this from happening in the future.  I could add more barns, raise the food limit, employ a few farmers, or buy 1 or 2 more tools per boat.  I know buying 3 more tools per boat is too many.

I didn't touch any buttons.  I think it was a fluke.  I'm ok with this minor fluke of starvation.  I don't consider this a failure.

I don't know if anything else interesting has happened.  I only check on the game once every 300-500 year.  I can only see the last 100 years in the graph.  I do know that once I hit 3,000 wool.  This was due to a tool shortage and education issues.  However, everything recovered just fine.  I got back to 0 stored textiles and I store 300 tools at times.

Looks very promising.  I am feeling confident.

Nilla

The population graph and the food graph; are they from the same time? In that case, that fast population drop couldn't be starvation. It's also hard to believe, that it's just a "natural" population drop. I would rather say one of the really bad diseases.

smurphys7

The food graph and the shorter timed population graph are both the same time and set for 50 years.  I assumed it was starvation because that's the first time my food graph ever hit 0.  It very well could have been something else.  I only produce about 1/3 of the food needed myself.  The other 2/3 comes from trading so I could see a precipitous drop like that being starvation but I am not 100% certain on that.

Whatever it was it seems like the town is robust enough to survive a significant problem like that with no interaction so that is a good sign.

Nilla

OK, now I see. I compared the 100 years population with the food graph. When I look at the both 50 years, I think, you´re right. It was probably starvation. But since the town recovered once I think it will do it again.

smurphys7

I am back to no trading, no starving with lots of Gathering Huts and no tools.  1000 Years successfully simulated.  I have stopped simulating my version with starvation and my version with trading.  Neither had any issues but I would prefer to work on a different version of town.

Some town facts: 70 Homes, 50 employed citizens, no tools, some clothes, mostly educated, and I even included some unnecessary perks.  The town has a Cleric, 2 Herbalists, and two Vendors.  I believe these are unnecessary but I wanted to take some risks.  There are 8 Gathering Hut stations with 3 Gatherers and 1 Forester each.

Pictures of Layout: OverviewDowntownNorthside GatheringSouthside Gathering.

Interestingly, I expected 2.5 citizens per home on average.  That number was based on all my saved games of smaller sized towns.  This town has about 2.9 citizens per home on average.  Whether that is due to the larger size or imperfect education system, or both, I don't know. 

These factors also cause much greater stability than my previous smaller towns.  Again, I am unsure if that is due to the increased size, imperfect education or both.  The education system is imperfect because the schools fill up at times and occasionally some citizens become adults at 10 years old.  Also, due to the size of town some citizens have long walks to school and become adults much later than other students.  Somehow, all of this works together to prevent the sharp, steep and large population drop offs. 

Statistics Panels: Overview.  ProductionPopulationCitizensFood

smurphys7

First greedy attempt failed.  Second more lean attempt underway.

At around year 1500 my town survived a big drop.  Shown Here.  A few hundred years later I had a larger drop off.  I didn't take a picture of the population graph.  At this point I thought "Hey this could be bad".  Then about 10 years later I eventually fell to 48 adults.  That's 2 below my employed 50 citizens.  Here's a pic at 50 Adults.

That town was 50 Jobs and 70 Homes.  That's a .71 ratio.  Smaller the ratio the more efficient.  Five of those jobs aren't really needed.  So I could have had 45 and 70 which means a ratio of .64.  I believe my town would have survived if I cut the unnecessary Vendors, Herbalists and Cleric.

Instead I have remade the town slightly larger AND more efficient.  I believe larger towns allow larger ratios.  I have cut the inefficiency and not strictly necessary out.  The new larger town has 54 jobs and 90 Homes.  That's a ratio of 0.6.

The new town is larger and more efficient than the slightly smaller town ever could be.  I have simulated 400 years and the lowest number of adults I have had is about 90.

smurphys7

"Outbreaks of Tuberculosis, Typhus and Influenza have occurred."



The joys of running at x100 speed with 1 Heart health.  Here's an edited picture with the disease names.

1500 Years simulated.  I know of one close call.  I survived.  I don't know how close it was.  The following picture is the only evidence I have.  Don't look at the dip in the middle.  That dip is nothing.  Look at the far left.



All I know is I had 54 employed citizens before that bump and I have 54 citizens now.  I'm 1/2 way to catching up to irrelevant and almost 1/3 of the way to my personal challenge of 5,000 years.  I get about 35 years per hour.