World of Banished

Sightseeing => Village Blogs => Topic started by: Nilla on March 01, 2017, 05:47:26 AM

Title: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 01, 2017, 05:47:26 AM
I started my new game yesterday. To be honest, I started two games and I have decided to start a third today. Opposite to what happens, when I test @Tom Sawyer´s mods, I didn't kill my population. I made other mistakes. I'll come to that.

When I test mods new to me, I want to test them "pure", if possible without any other mods. I also try to avoid vanilla buildings. I find it a good way to get to know a new mod. In my first attempt, I only loaded the 5 mods, you have published here on WOB @Necora, no others. My first settlement's name is Mingsport. It wasn't hard to find a suitable map. I just wanted at least one lake, to be able to play with the jetty parts and some land not too far away, to test the different forests. I play medium size, valley, hard start (I don't want any vanilla barn).

When I test new mods, I hate to mess with the production numbers, because of uneducated workers. There are some elder children, so I start with a school. After that, we have to go for some food production; hard start (no seeds) means to me a gatherer and a fisher. A lot of logs are also needed at the beginning, so a forester must be built early and before we can build any houses for our citizens, we need a woodchopper.

First impressions:

Your school is small but very nice looking. It's perfectly right to me, that it can educate less children than a vanilla school.

In your pine forest mod, there are 3 different kind of forests; the vanilla, pine and maple; different set of trees, but also different resources, that could be "picked" by gatherers. That's a really good idea. Makes perfect sense. I guess, it's like hardwood in the CC mod; you have to get rid of the vanilla trees first, then you can start to use the alternative. So, first it has to be a vanilla gatherer and a vanilla forester. The buildings look nice; they are small. That's perfect. These buildings have no real function, they are just there, to mark the active area. I find the vanilla versions too big. A small tent for the gatherer; couldn't be better. I don't know, if a forester would need a tower; maybe to watch out for forest fires. But to make it this way, has one big advantage in Banished; it's easy to find in a dense forest.

The output for one worker looks similar to the vanilla version. I only have one criticism: You can use 2 workers in each site. The radius is too big for that. I'll explain what I mean : A vanilla forester has a working area with a diameter of about 60 tiles. It looks like yours is 6 tiles smaller. 60 tiles gives an area of 2826 or 706 for each worker, 54 tiles gives an area of 2289 or 1145 each. With the same output for each forester, it means, that the area will be much less efficient used with your forester, than a vanilla. The way I play Banished, logs are always rare. Usually I have to buy some, to be able to build all I want. With your foresters, it will be worse.

Maybe this is intentional; that your foresters in the pine/maple forests use the area more efficient and you want to "promote" them. If it is that way, it's fine with me. If not; I would concider to make some changes. There are a few possibilities; to increase the number of workers, reduce the area; (2 foresters working the same area as his vanilla college, would mean a diameter of about 42 tiles) or increase the productivity of each forester.

I have one question to your small, very sweet looking shore fisher: When you build it, no active area is shown. Does this mean, that there is none; that you can build them close to eachother without losing any productivity? It's hard to say this early in the game, but it looks like a shore fisher is a bit less productive, than a vanilla fisher. If there's no active area, it's good that way.

I love this storage on the shore, where the bags hang in the water. Is it a historical way to store food in your neighborhood? I have never seen something similar. Can you tell more about it? What material are the bags? How did they prevent animals like beavers and otters from stealing any of it? To my knowledge, they are quite resourceful. I find such things very interesting. I built it in the wrong direction, so people behave a bit weird as they place things there, but now I know, how to put it and I hope, I will only make this mistake once.

This will be a long thread!  :-\ I read somewhere, that @Abandoned said, that if she would have to write in a foreign language, her stories would be short. I mean it's the opposite! In Swedish, I could say the same things much shorter. It's easier to use more words, when you don't find the perfect expression.

Now to my reasons to abandon this village so early:

First, I made a mistake; I didn't see, that the Pine Lumber Cutter also makes firewood, so I thought, I had to use the vanilla woodchopper. This is one of my least favourite vanilla buildings. When it's located beside your small lovely houses, it doesn't fit at all; too big, too rough. What about your buildings? They are small, but are they too small? I'm not sure. If we look at a picture with some people, they look small, but on the other hand, not so small, that they look like miniature buildings. And there are other houses from @kid1293 and @Discrepancy of the same size or even smaller, so why not. It only has room for a small family and can be upgraded. I will say more, what I think about this, when I've played a little more.

The ugly woodchopper, together with the fact, that I didn't find any market place in your mod, made that I decided to add @kid1293´s tiny mod to my game. (I think a vanilla market place, would fit as bad as the chopper to the neat buildings.)

I will tell about this second attempt later.

First picture

School, gatherer, forester are built. I put the footprint of the vanilla forester beside your. The difference isn't big.

Second picture

The sweet looking shore fisher and the interesting (but unfortunately wrong built) store. I like the grayish old version best.

Third picture

To compare the size; the small school, together with the vanilla chopper and a footprint of the vanilla school. There are also some people shown.

Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Abandoned on March 01, 2017, 06:46:02 AM
@Nilla  :) this will be interesting and I am sure a big help to Necora
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 01, 2017, 10:20:40 AM
Now to my second attempt. This settlement got the random name Ludowickliff. I did no changes of the settings, except loading the mod "Tiny" from @kid1293.

In this game too, there were a few older children, so again I started with the school, then gatherer, forester, a fisher and woodchopper from "tiny"(I didn't find your chopper @Necora, until I looked for, how to produce lumber a bit later in this game). I think, a normal fisherman produces a bit more food, than the shore fisher and you can put a second fisherman in it, so it's convenient at the beginning, not having to think so much about building additional food producers, when there's so many other things you want to do. That's the reason I choose it here, but I planned to build some shore fisher later.

At the time of the first picture, I've built 3 small houses. The last family will get one, too as soon as the blacksmith is built. Of cause, I like the red house very much. ;) But the green fit the forest and the "natural" in the front of the picture has a very nice "tarred" patina, that appeals to me a lot. I like the storage cellars, that could be added to the houses. There is one on the back side of the red house. Unfortunately I put it on the wrong side. It blocks the window a bit. I looked more for function than for aesthetics; it's closer to put food from the wood in it, on that side of the house. To look perfect; it should better be put on the side without windows. Again, I built this interesting shore storage. This time in the right direction, but it's not perfect here either: The entrance is a bit low , looks dug into the shore. I think it ought to be put further out in the water. (You can see it better on my second picture). One question to this. Does this storage "steal" area from the fisher, like a trading port would, in that position, or is the part over the lake rather "ghosted"?

The storage cellars could hold a lot of food for it's size. But it's not unrealistic; there is a lot of space available in the ground, that we don't see and the building costs are not so low (20 logs, 20 stones) but maybe I would have increased the work, that's needed to build it. It's a lot of effort to dig in the ground with handtools only and it would balance the high storage capacity better. One question to the storage: Do the other two larger shore storage, also store food or are they like the Pine Storage Barn?

Now I will tell you why I gave this settlemet up after only a few years. Some buildings need lumber. I started to look into how to make this and found two possibilities; the Pine Lumber Cutter and the Dock Lumber Cutter. If you look at the Dock Lumber Cutter, the menu says, there are 3 F-key variations. I can find only1; the footprint on the second picture. Because the menu says, that the Pine Lumber Cutter cuts lumber slow, I chose the dock version. I built it and as I opened the menu I saw two things:

First; this is a production building, that uses one raw material (logs) to produce another (lumber). The vanilla game and as far as I can remember, all other mods of that kind use another menu, where you can see how much raw material is stored in the building. Your menu @Necora is used for fishers, hunters, foresters.....; sites that produce something without raw material input. Why does this matter? Normally not much. But sometimes, especially at the beginning of a game or if you are short of some material, it's important to know. Example: In the beginning of a game, you need tools, but you don't have much iron on your stockpiles and need to know, if the blacksmith just fetched enough for the tools you desperately need or if there's none and you have to send some workers out to "pick" some at once. And to me, when I test new mods, I want to examine the balancing; productivity and profit. I look, how much raw material there is in the building. When some of it is gone, I look how much more of the product is made. This way, I get some numbers; for example 1 log gives 4 firewood. There is no way I can do this for lumber. Now I don't know, if you use this menu only here or for every production building. Your nice little blacksmith and green tailor have the other. If you use it on more sites, I would very much want to have a list of these numbers.( like 1 log -> 4 firewood.) Educated is enough. I can ask you for each site I build, but a list of all of your buildings would be fine (maybe also added to the description of the mod on the download headline).

But this was not the reason, that I abandoned  Ludowickliff. There was another strange thing on that menu: the limit showed 999999. As I wanted to change this, the game crashed. I think I know why. I hadn't upgraded the game to 1.7.0. I´m a bit lazy and it's still a beta version, so I wanted to wait until it's "official". This way I hoped to get away with upgrading just once. And it looks like it works in the latest part of @Abandoned´s Smallville story. But I don't think it does, if you want to use materials sorted into the new categories. Now I have upgraded and will make a third attempt to start a game with these mods tonight.


Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 01, 2017, 10:32:32 AM
Hi @Nilla I wrote a long reply to your first post but my internet decided to it didn't want to share the post and I lost the whole darn thing. I'll reply to these this afternoon once I finish work!
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 01, 2017, 10:42:21 AM
Bad luck! I live "in the middle of nowhere" so losing long texts because of bad internet connection is not unfamiliar to me. After it happened a few times, I use the "Save as Draft" function from time to time, if I write longer pieces. At least not everything is lost that way.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 01, 2017, 12:01:14 PM
NILLA,did you check the number of people per house? originally some of the houses were set to only 3 banis.how is the scale of the woodland buildings between the houses,school,etc?? my computer is picky about where it will download from lately so i have not ran checks on these sets since the community icon came about.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 01, 2017, 02:17:06 PM
@Nilla the internet here is terrible. OK let's try this again. I'll reply to the first post first.

QuoteWhen I test mods new to me, I want to test them "pure", if possible without any other mods. I also try to avoid vanilla buildings. I find it a good way to get to know a new mod. In my first attempt, I only loaded the 5 mods, you have published here on WOB @Necora, no others. My first settlement's name is Mingsport. It wasn't hard to find a suitable map. I just wanted at least one lake, to be able to play with the jetty parts and some land not too far away, to test the different forests. I play medium size, valley, hard start (I don't want any vanilla barn).

Mingsport? Did you come up with that or was it randomly generated? Ming in British English is a slang word for something disgusting... so it is hilarious if the game came up with it an funny of you did, if you meant to or not! There is a RL town down the road from me here in NS called 'Malignant Cove' also not an appealing sounding name for a fishing port! Although, it is just down the road from 'Doctors Brook'. Some name combination are so funny.

Quote
Your school is small but very nice looking. It's perfectly right to me, that it can educate less children than a vanilla school.

This set was aimed at smaller towns and start ups, so I wanted to keep the buildings small and capacity/production low, but also build costs low. Always open to suggestions on how any of these can be improved.

Quote
In your pine forest mod, there are 3 different kind of forests; the vanilla, pine and maple; different set of trees, but also different resources, that could be "picked" by gatherers. That's a really good idea. Makes perfect sense. I guess, it's like hardwood in the CC mod; you have to get rid of the vanilla trees first, then you can start to use the alternative.

I'm glad you like this idea. I originally did this set to introduce some forestry items I will need for future chains. I don't like the 'something from nothing' type of buildings (even though that is what the fisheries are) do thought a forester/gatherer combination would do well here. Once I made the pine versions, I decided to add some Canadian food options like the maple, apple, blueberry, and cranberry... stuff that is wild around here. Then decided to do a vanilla version to keep in with the theme, plus I hate the Vanilla buildings for the reasons you also mention, too big and useless.

Quote
So, first it has to be a vanilla gatherer and a vanilla forester. The buildings look nice; they are small. That's perfect. These buildings have no real function, they are just there, to mark the active area. I find the vanilla versions too big. A small tent for the gatherer; couldn't be better. I don't know, if a forester would need a tower; maybe to watch out for forest fires. But to make it this way, has one big advantage in Banished; it's easy to find in a dense forest.

Towers are cool ;) I have no other reason!

Quote
The output for one worker looks similar to the vanilla version. I only have one criticism: You can use 2 workers in each site. The radius is too big for that. I'll explain what I mean : A vanilla forester has a working area with a diameter of about 60 tiles. It looks like yours is 6 tiles smaller. 60 tiles gives an area of 2826 or 706 for each worker, 54 tiles gives an area of 2289 or 1145 each. With the same output for each forester, it means, that the area will be much less efficient used with your forester, than a vanilla. The way I play Banished, logs are always rare. Usually I have to buy some, to be able to build all I want. With your foresters, it will be worse.

Maybe this is intentional; that your foresters in the pine/maple forests use the area more efficient and you want to "promote" them. If it is that way, it's fine with me. If not; I would concider to make some changes. There are a few possibilities; to increase the number of workers, reduce the area; (2 foresters working the same area as his vanilla college, would mean a diameter of about 42 tiles) or increase the productivity of each forester.

I always use the 'more wood per tree' mod. So when I tested these I also realised output of the foresters are low, infact that is one area I don't like in vanilla especially as more buildings are added. I get it is hard, but sometimes too much when you have to clear vast areas to supplement slow foresters. There is no way to increase this, apart from changing the wood production value in the wood template file. There is no work time or work required in the foresters. Even in early game, when you need the wood the most, an extra forester isn't the best answer. Perhaps I will increase the wood per tree in the mod, as well as adding the option of another forester.

Quote
I have one question to your small, very sweet looking shore fisher: When you build it, no active area is shown. Does this mean, that there is none; that you can build them close to eachother without losing any productivity? It's hard to say this early in the game, but it looks like a shore fisher is a bit less productive, than a vanilla fisher. If there's no active area, it's good that way.

Yup, this is based on the apiary example so produces food from 'nothing' only work time and work required. There is no radius, so you can build as many as you want as close as you want.

Quote
I love this storage on the shore, where the bags hang in the water. Is it a historical way to store food in your neighborhood? I have never seen something similar. Can you tell more about it? What material are the bags? How did they prevent animals like beavers and otters from stealing any of it? To my knowledge, they are quite resourceful. I find such things very interesting. I built it in the wrong direction, so people behave a bit weird as they place things there, but now I know, how to put it and I hope, I will only make this mistake once.

I'm not sure about historical, but convenient. Keeps the shellfish alive and fresh. The idea actually came from the method of farming scallops which is basically the same.

Quote
First, I made a mistake; I didn't see, that the Pine Lumber Cutter also makes firewood, so I thought, I had to use the vanilla woodchopper. This is one of my least favourite vanilla buildings. When it's located beside your small lovely houses, it doesn't fit at all; too big, too rough.

I hate the vanilla chopper too! I was not going to have firewood with the lumber cutter at first, production is too slow to make it worth while. But when testing this mod I got annoyed having to build the vanilla chopper each time so reduced the production time of the lumber cutter and added the firewood to it. I didn't want to make a small chopper because there are already plenty available.

Quote
What about your buildings? They are small, but are they too small? I'm not sure. If we look at a picture with some people, they look small, but on the other hand, not so small, that they look like miniature buildings. And there are other houses from @kid1293 and @Discrepancy of the same size or even smaller, so why not. It only has room for a small family and can be upgraded. I will say more, what I think about this, when I've played a little more.

This is hard about making RL buildings in game, we are very restricted by the size of the tiles. It really doesn't help that the bannies are an exact tile tall. I make the doors about as high or slightly higher than a bannie, then build the rest from there trying to keep RL proportions as much as possible. The problem is, as the bannies are an exact square, this often means that buildings come out very squat. I also find vanilla and also some CC buildings are far too large an imposing.

Quote
The ugly woodchopper, together with the fact, that I didn't find any market place in your mod, made that I decided to add @kid1293´s tiny mod to my game. (I think a vanilla market place, would fit as bad as the chopper to the neat buildings.)

Yeah I'll admit there are a few things that can be added. I didn't want to add the market for the same reason as the chopper, Kid did a great job with the small one as did a few others I didn't want to just re make those. But then again, it could do with one in this texture theme, that wouldn't be bad.

Cheers! Next post coming shortly...
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 01, 2017, 02:35:49 PM
@Nilla Now to my second attempt!

Quote
I think, a normal fisherman produces a bit more food, than the shore fisher and you can put a second fisherman in it, so it's convenient at the beginning, not having to think so much about building additional food producers, when there's so many other things you want to do. That's the reason I choose it here, but I planned to build some shore fisher later.

As the shore fishers produce something from nothing, I was worried about over powering them especially as they are so cheep to build. So that is why production is quite low. If it is crazy low I will increase it.

Quote
One question to this. Does this storage "steal" area from the fisher, like a trading port would, in that position, or is the part over the lake rather "ghosted"?

In the case of a vanilla fisher, yes, it will reduce available fishing tiles just like other docks. But not the shore fishers, they have no radius.

Quote
The storage cellars could hold a lot of food for it's size. But it's not unrealistic; there is a lot of space available in the ground, that we don't see and the building costs are not so low (20 logs, 20 stones) but maybe I would have increased the work, that's needed to build it. It's a lot of effort to dig in the ground with handtools only and it would balance the high storage capacity better. One question to the storage: Do the other two larger shore storage, also store food or are they like the Pine Storage Barn?

I like 'hidden' storage like this but yes I can increase the build time. As for the larger dock storages they do both store all food types.

Quote
If you look at the Dock Lumber Cutter, the menu says, there are 3 F-key variations. I can find only1; the footprint on the second picture. Because the menu says, that the Pine Lumber Cutter cuts lumber slow, I chose the dock version. I built it and as I opened the menu I saw two things:

Yeah, I was being presumptious with my menu descriptions! The plan was to add the other F-variants, but I didn't have the time to model them. They will come in the future, when I have time to add more content. I forgot to change the descriptions!

Quote
First; this is a production building, that uses one raw material (logs) to produce another (lumber). The vanilla game and as far as I can remember, all other mods of that kind use another menu, where you can see how much raw material is stored in the building. Your menu @Necora is used for fishers, hunters, foresters.....; sites that produce something without raw material input. Why does this matter? Normally not much. But sometimes, especially at the beginning of a game or if you are short of some material, it's important to know. Example: In the beginning of a game, you need tools, but you don't have much iron on your stockpiles and need to know, if the blacksmith just fetched enough for the tools you desperately need or if there's none and you have to send some workers out to "pick" some at once. And to me, when I test new mods, I want to examine the balancing; productivity and profit. I look, how much raw material there is in the building. When some of it is gone, I look how much more of the product is made. This way, I get some numbers; for example 1 log gives 4 firewood. There is no way I can do this for lumber. Now I don't know, if you use this menu only here or for every production building. Your nice little blacksmith and green tailor have the other. If you use it on more sites, I would very much want to have a list of these numbers.( like 1 log -> 4 firewood.) Educated is enough. I can ask you for each site I build, but a list of all of your buildings would be fine (maybe also added to the description of the mod on the download headline).

I've not tried playing around with the building UI too much, my first attempts ended in drastic failure. I will learn how to add the production inventory, it is a good idea for all production buildings.

I'm also working on a spread sheet for all resources etc., but it is taking time. I can tell you that 2 lumber per wood is produced from 1 educated worker. I think this should actually be a bit higher.

Quote
But this was not the reason, that I abandoned  Ludowickliff. There was another strange thing on that menu: the limit showed 999999. As I wanted to change this, the game crashed. I think I know why. I hadn't upgraded the game to 1.7.0. I´m a bit lazy and it's still a beta version, so I wanted to wait until it's "official". This way I hoped to get away with upgrading just once. And it looks like it works in the latest part of @Abandoned´s Smallville story. But I don't think it does, if you want to use materials sorted into the new categories. Now I have upgraded and will make a third attempt to start a game with these mods tonight.

Hopefully this was due to the game update, let me know if it still occurs! I've not been able to replicate any crashes myself.

Cheers and looking forward to the next installment!
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 01, 2017, 05:42:45 PM
playing with a medium climate setting,i usually try to figure about  500 food production per worker. this includes herdsmen,farming,hunters,gatherers,etc. crops i set at 10x10.  you will have good and bad years but that makes a nice round number for an average. of course harsher climates or hard starts will affect that. the mini gatherers also produce less due to the smaller radius. fish and gatheres ,especially the mini or forest outpost mods, are normally on the low end producing at an average of 300-500 per dock or hut.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Abandoned on March 02, 2017, 04:25:13 AM
Regarding poor internet and loss of typing: I have pretty good internet connection but early on I lost several long posts and had to redo.  I tried to save as draft, got message that page had expired or something like that, could not even return to page, lost everything.  To avoid that I have been using Windows Word Pad to type my story chapter off-line, save it, then copy to clipboard.  When I go on-line and can simply paste to post and do spell check.  It works very well that way and I always get a laugh at the suggestions spell check comes up with for the strange Bannie names.  I also then have my stories off-line to review fact and story connections when I do next chapter.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 02, 2017, 07:21:35 AM
I have a feeling this again will be long.  :-\

I thank you for your long comments @Necora. I think, that this could be a very interesting discussion. I also thank you @brads3 for joining in.

First some comments to your comments:

Quote from: brads3 on March 01, 2017, 12:01:14 PM
NILLA,did you check the number of people per house? originally some of the houses were set to only 3 banis.how is the scale of the woodland buildings between the houses,school,etc?? my computer is picky about where it will download from lately so i have not ran checks on these sets since the community icon came about.

Yes, the small houses are for families of 3, but it has many positions in the menu, so the game doesn't crash because a larger family moved into it from start.

Quote
Mingsport? Did you come up with that or was it randomly generated? Ming in British English is a slang word for something disgusting... so it is hilarious if the game came up with it an funny of you did, if you meant to or not!

Not mine! Disgusting? ???? :-[  :D Mingsport was a random name. The random generator sometimes finds funny names. I didn't realize the meaning of this at all.

Quote
I'm glad you like this idea. I originally did this set to introduce some forestry items I will need for future chains. I don't like the 'something from nothing' type of buildings (even though that is what the fisheries are) do thought a forester/gatherer combination would do well here. Once I made the pine versions, I decided to add some Canadian food options like the maple, apple, blueberry, and cranberry... stuff that is wild around here.

Yes! I do like this theme, the regional inspired buildings, the local productions. You might have noticed, that I'm a big fan of @Tom Sawyer´s the North. I have several reason for this, but one is the local inspired/models of existing buildings. I do welcome other regional themes. It makes the game more interesting and variate.

It's also wise to make a vanilla version. Without this possibility, I would more or less had been forced to build a vanilla forester/gatherer from the start.

QuoteI always use the 'more wood per tree' mod. So when I tested these I also realised output of the foresters are low, infact that is one area I don't like in vanilla especially as more buildings are added. I get it is hard, but sometimes too much when you have to clear vast areas to supplement slow foresters. There is no way to increase this, apart from changing the wood production value in the wood template file. There is no work time or work required in the foresters. Even in early game, when you need the wood the most, an extra forester isn't the best answer. Perhaps I will increase the wood per tree in the mod, as well as adding the option of another forester.

Yes, you are right, I find too, that the output of the vanilla foresters is low. I haven't tried the "more wood per tree". (I avoid every mod, that have the slightest sound of "cheat" )  ;). But honestly;  I find increasing the output of a forester, is rather better balancing than cheat, as long as you don't exaggerate it. The foresters in the North produce a bit more than the vanilla version, I don't know how Tom made this, maybe you can ask him.

But you could make one thing without asking anyone. Maybe you didn't understand what I meant, talking about the area. (Not always easy for me to explain my thoughts in a foreign language.) Say, you have a spot of land, that you want to use for forestry. It's big enough to build 3 vanilla huts, where 12 foresters can work. Your area is almost as big as the vanilla, so you can't probably build more than 3, or at the most 4 of yours here either. That's only 6 or 8 foresters. They even produce much less than the 12 vanilla foresters. If you would reduce this area; not too much, that would not work well, but to a size, that gives each forester the same area as the vanilla foresters to work in, you could build 6 of your towers in this area. This would be an improvement of the output of the used area.

QuoteYeah I'll admit there are a few things that can be added. I didn't want to add the market for the same reason as the chopper, Kid did a great job with the small one as did a few others

No please don't make a copy of some of the existing small markets/choppers......just to have them there. I find @Kids markets and small choppers very nice and useful, too. If I understood the things right in that other thread, you have made a model of a small store. That's good. I love the North "lanthandel" (country store). A small store adapted to your area would be perfect.

QuoteAs the shore fishers produce something from nothing, I was worried about over powering them especially as they are so cheep to build. So that is why production is quite low. If it is crazy low I will increase it.

For such a small, cheap building, it's rather too high, than too low. But all in all, I think it's quite reasonable the way it is. I will look a bit closer into food production numbers and compare them, as the game goes on.

Quote from: brads3 on March 01, 2017, 05:42:45 PM
playing with a medium climate setting,i usually try to figure about  500 food production per worker. this includes herdsmen,farming,hunters,gatherers,etc. crops i set at 10x10.  you will have good and bad years but that makes a nice round number for an average. of course harsher climates or hard starts will affect that. the mini gatherers also produce less due to the smaller radius. fish and gatherers ,especially the mini or forest outpost mods, are normally on the low end producing at an average of 300-500 per dock or hut.

I agree. Let's think about food only; a Banni needs 100 food each year. But not everyone produce food. There are children, students, laborers, builders, traders, vendors... who produce nothing and there are other craftsmen; woodchopper, tailors, blacksmiths.... producing other things. So 500 food average for a food producer in a normal game, is perfect balancing: 1 food producer provides for another 4. It's alright, if some make a bit more, some less. I think, producers that are limited in numbers; gatherers and hunters, that need a lot of space, could produce more, others that you could "spam" on your map, like the shore fisher, could produce a bit less.

QuoteI'm also working on a spread sheet for all resources etc., but it is taking time. I can tell you that 2 lumber per wood is produced from 1 educated worker. I think this should actually be a bit higher

OK, I will ask you about the production numbers, when I build some new production building. No problem.

2 lumber from 1 wood is OK. But increasing it to 3 or 4 would maybe be better. 

I have some thoughts about using lumber as a building material.  It makes sense. To me, logs is rarely a building material. I like to see it this way: At the beginning of a game, the builders use lumber, as well for the houses. They make it by hand with an ax, we just don't see the lumber as a product. That's the way people made it a long time ago. It's slow and inefficient. Later you can make them in a saw mill more efficient; more material from one log, easier and faster to build the house. It could be a mixture of  handcut (logs) and "preproduced" (lumber) wood, like in my house. I live in a house originally built before 1840 (no one knows how old it is, but all existing houses were registered to this time). We have renovated, it's interesting to look at the old material. The thick wood for the walls are handcrafted, you can see the marks from the ax. The joists and other thinner parts are made from sawed lumber. But I have lived in an old house, where these parts were made by hand as well. Very thick, very beautiful, so we had some them open as ceiling on the ground floor and flooring (a part of) upstairs. Later of cause, the buildings could use lumber only (in combination with other materials). But of cause, then we need efficient saw mills.

This is long enough! :-\ I will write about my new game later.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 02, 2017, 10:05:05 AM
Here we go again. I made a lot of screenshots from my new town Somersonto yesterday. Now on to the pictures:

First picture

I have decided to load a few more of the mods from Kid. I haven't really looked at, how this new Modular Mod Toolbar works before. With 5 mods from Necora and only one another from Kid, you don't get much of an impression, so I also loaded the Forest outpost and the Rawhouses. I don't know yet, if I'm going to use any of these building in this town.

What is this? Look at the red circle. Can anyone say, how did this land here? I don't want any cheat functions! ???

For us experienced players, who have followed the developments of the mods, I think the new Toolbar is an improvement. But I can understand, that new players may find it confusing, especially if they use a lot of mods from different modders. I have cut in the toolbars, it's a few mods from only 2 modders. You can see, that the "sub bars" look very different with a lot of different symbols. It would be a good idea, if you modders would agree on some kind of similar "standard". I would like, that themed mods had their own sub menu (easy to find buildings fitting good together) and that "odd" buildings/group of buildings are sorted into a menu, that looks as much as possible like the vanilla main bar. Your symbols, for houses, barns, production buildings.... do look nicer, than the vanilla @Necora, but I think, that a more standardized look; same function:same symbol would be better, especially for new players.

Second picture

Another use of Kid's mods; compare the size of the smaller buildings. Yours are not too small compared to this forest outpost house, Necora.

Third picture

Finally, I got the shore storage right! Needed 3 attempts!  :-\

The house also has a cellar. Here I've built it with the entrance a bit "round the corner" but I've also built some with the door directly beside the entrance door, even one with the entrance from the back side of the house. As long as you don't block the window, it all looks good to me. Did you have any thoughts of, how to place it, as you designed the cellar, Necora?

I have some more pictures. I will show them later, after I've prepared the dinner.

Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 02, 2017, 10:14:43 AM
don't be alarmed the debug is part of the beta test 1.07. you don't have to use it.
i agree with you about the icons. some are hard to read too. one thing i have found is now all the modders mods go to the community button. so houses or markets that did go to the proper icons before have been moved. there are times when the old icons did work. i wish   mods that just adds a house or market or storage and would go under that icon instead of the community. but sets like the colonial or the medevil should go to the community. i understand modders want the recognition of having all their mods under their particulaar icon. i do think new players or those who don't play often will be more confused.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: kid1293 on March 02, 2017, 10:41:49 AM
You're right @brads3 , there should be more 'fixed' buttons under community button.
Now all modders have their own houses/storage/production...

If you want a special house now you have to click more times than before.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 02, 2017, 11:30:11 AM
Dinner cooked and eaten.

I know, @brads3. It was a try to joke! I will not use the bug! I don't like bugs. (unless it's a vintage car and I think it's called Beetle not Bug in English)

First picture

A sweet looking view from the small settlement.

Second picture

I see you use the CC-tradesmen.  :(

Why don't I like the CC trade? There are too many merchants from whom, I never want to buy anything. Merchants who bring, to this town useless goods are only annoying; disturbing your game. In addition CC trade has so many different merchants, that the one you really need, arrive too seldom.

The house in the background is rather large and look a bit modern, maybe it's just to my European eye. Maybe houses like this are traditional in Canada. Anyway it looks nice. I will build some of the smaller buildings, too in this area. Then we will see how they look together.

Third picture

I've started to grow a pine forest. It's not fully grown, yet but it already looks very much different from a vanilla forest. That's good. Maybe these barrels, lying around in the woods, look a bit odd, but I can live with that. I'm glad, that my favourite mushroom can be found oversee as well. But what are the light brown, round things right in the picture? Can't figure that out.

As next I want to build the production buildings, that use these pine wood resources. It would be nice Necora, if you could give me the production number of these buildings.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: grammycat on March 02, 2017, 12:21:57 PM
They look like bird nests to me.  I love Necora's  foresters-they add much to the game.  Always enjoy your testing posts-they are very informative and explore the mod in depth so thank you Nilla.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 02, 2017, 12:29:30 PM
Mingsport, still making me laugh. Especially as it is a dock set!

Re. Forester. From what I can see, the only way to change the output is to increase the amount of logs that are produced from trees. You could reduce the radius, I guess it would take less time to fill, but if you have clear and plant ticked at the same time I'm not sure it would make much of a difference. Even a small radius is actually relatively large. The one good thing about reducing the radius is to be able to fit more foresters on your map... a 2 buildings with 1 worker is more efficient than 1 building with 2 workers, I think I read somewhere this is part of the game code. Some balancing between these two aspects should work out. I know the more woods mod does seem like a bit of a cheat, but it is one I think is actually necessary.

Re. Market. Well, I did have a nice idea for one the other day, a long, thin (maybe 3x4 or 2x5) building modelled in the same style as the turpentine still/pine storage/whiskey still.

Re. Fisher production. I was aiming at around 500 units each. I've altered the high/low create numbers on the resources, so each one is slightly different to give a bit of variation and ultimately make it worth while having one building for each shellfish/seaweed. I think 500 might be too high, so 400 would be better, unless I can find a way to make it cost something.

Re. Lumber. I really like it as a resource, and think it is one of the best things CC introduced. There will be more efficient saw mills coming (see attached screen shot of a work in progress).

Re. Debug, ha, I'm glad it is part of the 107 beta, I was worried I had somehow packaged it up in one of the mods!

Re. Cellar. There is no specific placement in mind, it was an after thought. Wherever looks good/is useful! I am planning more small storage for different things, tools, firewood, textiles and cloths etc. I like storage variation and hate the vanilla stock piles.

Re. Tradesman. Yes, I didn't mean to! I used a common shared code for the new limits/flags and I think it might have included CC traders, that is why they are there. I don't particularily mind them, if you have a trading post for specific things. I see how with the vanilla tradepost it must be a pain when only one comes and it happens to be something you have no use for. Trade post will be added to future dock releases.

Re. Pine Lodge. I had ideas for nice woodland lodges, large buildings, good heat etc. For some reason, this one did come out really modern looking. I don't know why, I can't place my finger on what it is in particular! I do want to change it, but can't think how. I think the other one is a bit better.

Re. Pine Forest Items. I don't like the barrels, but I have yet to think of a good way to represent things like maple sap, resin etc. I could have other things on the ground, just have to think of what. Unfortunately, you can't put a tap on a tree, well you can, but the whole tree will be 'harvested' to produce the resin rather than just the tap emptied. So not sure what the best thing to do is.

Re. Light brown round things... have you tried harvesting them? They are grouse nests. They will produce a 'wild animal' resource when picked up by a trapper. This will be skinned by the skinner to produce random fur/feather/egg/meat products. There should be others on the map too... I see one in that picture obscured by a tree in the upper middle. I'll let you guess what they are. I want to expand this, more variety of models, and I also want to try and control where they spawn. But for that, I think I need to change a start condition.

Re. Production. All numbers should be in the spread sheet here (https://www.dropbox.com/s/6qlbwy93r3fnowl/MaritimesSpreadsheet.xlsx?dl=0).

This is great!! Thank you.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 02, 2017, 01:34:29 PM
VW can be called by either name. thou punch bug is more common.
   i didn't find that house to be too large. that might be since i do use CC,though i have various mods with small and large houses. i am curious to hear your take on the building sizes in relation to other houses and schools or production buiildings.
  NECORA,those food numbers sound good. as to storage , i would like to see a set. i use slinks small markets mod ,http://worldofbanished.com/index.php?topic=542.45 about half way down the page is a good pic. mainly started to use it to store stone. i like how the set splits the resources with several storage buildings.  with the new tags, a storage mod set is needed.i do wish slink's had come with a "f"variant rather than just the 1 rexture. actually we need storage plus a vendor set.
  speaking of traders,could we get an indian trader that has better numbers or values than the CC frontier's?? i know NILLA will call it a cheat since we don't wait for the boats but it could be tweaked. make it so it only uses 1 worker to stock it and then play with the input and outputs so it works smoothly not as a hack.with the furs this could be an interesting addition.
    as to the wild game,furs,or nests,i could see them spawning all over the map at the start like the blueberries,herbs,etc. CC just added the domestic animals in the latest version, and i dislike it. it is overpowering. more like NILLAS cheats.lol.  in time,hopefully CC releases a modular set to their version. then we might be able to have more options to our start settings.so far i don't think we can change start conditions and use Cc .
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: grammycat on March 02, 2017, 06:38:55 PM
I guess I'm the oddball that likes the barrels, but you could use buckets as both sap and resin are collected that way.  My lumber cutter seems real slow at producing firewood-is this how it should work?
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 02, 2017, 07:32:31 PM
Quote from: grammycat on March 02, 2017, 06:38:55 PM
I guess I'm the oddball that likes the barrels, but you could use buckets as both sap and resin are collected that way.  My lumber cutter seems real slow at producing firewood-is this how it should work?

I did think about buckets, I might give them a go and see.

And with the cutter, unfortunately, yes. I didn't want firewood in there initially, for that reason. I wanted it to be a slow building for lumber, if you produce lumber at firewood rate you get so much of it, it takes away a lot of difficulty when building. There were so many requests for firewood too that I added it in. I did cut the work time a bit, but it is still slow. Unfortunately, there is no way to separate the two. You can only set the work time and effort of the whole building, not individual outputs.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: grammycat on March 03, 2017, 06:23:35 AM
That's fine-I just wanted to make sure it was intended.  I like slow lumbar production-I always forget to cut it off until all my wood has been eaten up.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 03, 2017, 06:53:21 AM
QuoteFisher production. I was aiming at around 500 units each. I've altered the high/low create numbers on the resources, so each one is slightly different to give a bit of variation and ultimately make it worth while having one building for each shellfish/seaweed. I think 500 might be too high, so 400 would be better, unless I can find a way to make it cost something.
Yes, I've noticed, that there's a difference in production between the various kind of food. I have seen an annual production between 350 (oyster) and 680 (seeweed). My 3 huts are good located; storage and homes all close, all workers are educated, so I guess, you can't get much more. I agree; the production is high, especially for seeweed. The tiny fisher from Kid produces more ~800, but it has quite a large active area, so you can't build many. I guess you could squeeze in 10 of yours in the same area.

One question to this: To what food category does seeweed belong?

There's one small thing about your shore fisher, I can criticize: As far as I know; oyster, scallops and clams are salt water animals, not to be found here on a river or a lake. OK, we can pretend that the ocean is behind the river creek, just outside our view, but we don't see any boats, that bring the fisher there. I can't say, that this really disturbs me. There are other unrealistic things in Banished (the vanilla ageing above all) that are worse.

QuoteI used a common shared code for the new limits/flags and I think it might have included CC traders, that is why they are there. I don't particularly mind them, if you have a trading post for specific things. I see how with the vanilla tradepost it must be a pain when only one comes and it happens to be something you have no use for. Trade post will be added to future dock releases.

The only specialized tradingports, I can build in this game are from Kid's Raw house mod. They are good at the beginning of a game, but small, you can't store much export goods in it. Since you say, that many of your special goods has no real use in Banished yet, there will be a lot of different export goods to store. That's the reason I choose the big port. I have also built two small ports now; one for building materials and one for seeds. I want to farm grain for domestic animals and the merchants seldom bring seed and don't bring enough grain.

One or several special trading ports in the dock mod is a very good idea. The look of the vanilla port doesn't fit to your buildings. The small from Kid look better, are good at the beginning but some larger ports would be needed, too.

I would also think about which merchants you want to use. As I said in that other thread, I guess that one/some of the CC merchants causes a crash, if you play without CC. Vanilla would be better or maybe you could make your own.

To the items in the forest: Now, when I have workers in the pine forest, the barrels in the forest are logical; the gatherer walks around, tap the trees in buckets (as so many other things, you don't see it) and empties them in the barrel. When the barrel is full, it's carried to the store. Nothing wrong with that.

These things I asked about, do look like birds nests, but since I hadn't any trapper and skinner to that time, I thought that it was something for the gatherer, but I saw no eggs in my store. I can also see something, that looks like silver fox furs, and a pile of spruce, that could be some kind of animal nest, but I'm not sure.

As I said; I've built a trapper and a skinner. So far, I think the output is very low; just a little above 100 wild animals each year. You have planned the skinner to be built together with the trapper in the forest. But I don't find, that it's a good location; he has to go out of the forest  to get his raw material and back in again to process it.  A sawmill cellar for textiles(?) that could be placed in the forest without taking away much space, could solve this. I have chosen to build the skinner's desk at the store instead. It looks like the production of the skinner is even lower than the trapper. Not even on this good location, he can process the few animals from the trapper.

To lumber/firewood. The productivity of the small lumber cutter is indeed low. For lumber at the beginning, it might be good that way, as you say @grammycat. And you will not need much early anyway. And as long as there are more efficient alternatives for later, like your new very nice model, it's fine. But for firewood, this building is quite useless. You need a lot of firewood. I can think of one thing, that you can do, to make this building useful, even to times when you don't need lumber: If you can't change the working speed, why not the number of firewood, that's produced from one log? It would increase the output and save important building material at the beginning of a game. Of cause, to keep some kind of balance, the productivity must still be much lower than a normal chopper.

Thank you for the spreadsheet. I saw it in that other thread but didn't notice that there were several pages.

Now some pictures

First picture

You can see the small spinner and the workplace of the skinner, as I said, not in the forest but at the barn. The spinner looks very sweet. But I feel a bit sorry for the worker; out in the snow. Here spinning was a winterwork for the women, but the work was made in the house; the spinning wheel close to the fireplace. No wonder, that yours is very inefficient. ;) And if I understand your numbers right Necora, making twine is a really bad business: You need 5 flax (worth 2) to make 2 twine (worth 4). If you sell the twine, each makes a loss of 1 trade unit, compared to if you sell the flax without processing.

To my opinion: Every production building should increase the value of the product in a reasonable way; never decrease it. I know, that in CC quite a few production buildings are that way.  Because some other CC buildings give a to me too high profit, the game is still playable, but I dislike these overpowered buildings as much as the "lossmaker". That's the reason, I usually don't play CC, even if I like the design and many of their ideas.

Second picture

The same area as I stopped the game, 6 years later. I fully agree with you, Necora; stockpiles don't look nice. I have replaced some of them with your fantastic stores. I like the look of this area; a mixture of homes and workplaces, all well fit together, close the pine forest. It do look good in the snow. I like the contrast between dark green and the white snow. I guess, it would have looked even better, if I've left some more space between the buildings, but this is the way I build; efficiency first.  :-\

Third picture

I've also built a maple forest, not fully grown, yet.

Fourth picture

Another impression. Someone maybe want to see the production numbers.

I finally got some corn seeds, so I could start to build your farm. Well, the fence will not prevent any goat or chicken from pillaging the close corn field. But it's red! So I built it anyway. ;)

Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 03, 2017, 09:09:46 AM
NILLA "There's one small thing about your shore fisher, I can criticize: As far as I know; oyster, scallops and clams are salt water animals, not to be found here on a river or a lake. OK, we can pretend that the ocean is behind the river creek, just outside our view, but we don't see any boats, that bring the fisher there."
this is funny. haven't you learned by now that NECORA played on the beach too long when he was a kid. he has sand and salt water betwen his ears.lol jk
modders don't know what freshwater tastes like let along the type of  fish we really have. this is a quirk of the game.we never really have a coastline.hmm but it never gets dark either so you have to work all day every day with no sleep.hahaha

NILLA"that this really disturbs me." at least you admit it.you must be lost since all your water isn't frozen.would you like some decorative ghosted boats and maybe an iceberg and polar bear?
  i agree with the idea of a dock port. the CC 1 doesn't seem to bring seeds so it needs to work more like a vanilla or general trader.
   would the firewood-lumber problems be better solved by changing the output to both firewood and lumber each yr and take logs on input??then NECORA can adjust the output numbers himself so you get x amount of firewood plus a small amount of lumber.even if the lumber per year is less than if you set it to lumber all year now.might get a better balance.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 03, 2017, 12:14:46 PM
@Nilla I'm really enjoying this run through, it is bringing out some great ideas/improvements, so thank you.

Re. Trapper and Skinner - These are the first goes, so I expect production to be changed in the next update. In fact, I want to change the way things are spawned on the map which will allow me to add more diversity to what you see in the forests, and have specific graphics for different forest sets (pine, maple, vanilla). I also want to add a type that is spawned at the start of the game, and only spawns next to the river. I see what you mean by the skinner having to go get stuff from outside the radius, I didn't think of that, I was just thinking of keeping them as one building. I think I will add a) a small textiles store for the forest set and b) an F-variant of the skinner that is a stand alone so it can be placed anywhere else and still look good.

Re. Merchants. I'll go over the code and make sure what is in there is not CC. Then I will go back to just vanilla for the time being.

Re. Firewood/lumber... again, something I didn't consider. It is a good idea, at the moment it generates 1:2 lumber/firewood from 4 logs. I can change the amount of logs from 4 to 1 to quadruple firewood production, making the option worth while. Do you have an idea of how much firewood was produced in 1 year?

Re. Saltwater species, well, yeah I get that. 1 - I wanted to introduce them because the bounty of the ocean is such a large aspect of the reason many places were colonized in Atlantic Canada/NE USA. Lobster especially, shaped many coastal communities, and is still a major aspect of the culture/economy. 2 - Technically, all species in the shore gatherers are also inter-tidal/estuarine species, so it is possible to get them without a boat from mudbanks/sandbanks in river mouths and lagoons. All of the species in the shore fishers are harvested by hand or grown in estuaries etc. 3 - Around here, the coasts have a lot of salt water lagoons, tidal inlets, large estuarys etc., with narrow entrances to the ocean and salt water that can stretch a long way in land (not unlike the fjords in Norway/Sweden just less deep and without the mountains). There are plenty of fishing towns that you cannot see the ocean from, so from that point of view, I imagine that the lakes in banished are representative of that.

Plus, I'm a marine biologist who spent his whole life living by the ocean and think it is crazy that there is no ocean in banished, what @brads3 said totally true, I have the surfer's ear (like swimmers ear - too much salt water!) to prove it ;)

Oh and Seaweed is a vegetable.

Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 03, 2017, 02:10:51 PM
I realised I forgot a couple of bits...

Quote
You can see the small spinner and the workplace of the skinner, as I said, not in the forest but at the barn. The spinner looks very sweet. But I feel a bit sorry for the worker; out in the snow. Here spinning was a winterwork for the women, but the work was made in the house; the spinning wheel close to the fireplace. No wonder, that yours is very inefficient. ;) And if I understand your numbers right Necora, making twine is a really bad business: You need 5 flax (worth 2) to make 2 twine (worth 4). If you sell the twine, each makes a loss of 1 trade unit, compared to if you sell the flax without processing.

To my opinion: Every production building should increase the value of the product in a reasonable way; never decrease it. I know, that in CC quite a few production buildings are that way.  Because some other CC buildings give a to me too high profit, the game is still playable, but I dislike these overpowered buildings as much as the "lossmaker". That's the reason, I usually don't play CC, even if I like the design and many of their ideas.

Re. Spinner... well here is a conundrum. I agree that spinning is an inside job, but there is an issue with visual representation in game, especially with small production buildings. Originally, it was going to be in a shed that can be placed next to or a joining a house, like the loom. However, you then get a bunch of nondescript shed buildings than unless you are very familiar with the mod, you have to go through them all to find which is what. That is why I decided to put the wheel outside, to give the building something that visually defines it. You can still place the building up against a house, and pretend the actual work is being done inside during the summer.

I have no idea what I am going to do with the next level of all of these production buildings, they will all definitely be inside, so getting visual representation there is going to have to be signs and things.

A disclaimer about values/productions... this is something I have absolutely no idea about and is something that totally perplexes me when designing this stuff. I have lots of visual ideas, no functional ones. So any advice/feedback on improving chain values is helpful.

And the thing with twine, is the same with rope. I agree there should be at least no decrease in trade (break even) and for that the value of yarn/twine should be increased. However, I also wanted to add a cost for certain things. IRL, flax would make a lower quality rope or twine than hemp, which was the go to material for this sort of thing as it lasted longer and was more durable. Vice versa, with fabrics, flax based linen and cotton based cloth is better than hemp based canvas (for making sails etc.). Now, I didn't want to make a different type of material for each output (flax twine, hemp twine, flax rope, hemp rope etc.), that would be ridiculous, so it all can be used for making the same output. To represent the fact that some were better than others, I made it so that if you do chose to use flax, it will cost you more than hemp for rope. If you want to make sails/clothing in the future out of hemp, it will cost you more than out of flax. With that in mind, I will change the value of twine to be be equal value to the input value of flax. So if you use flax, it costs you more to produce but you break even. If you use hemp, it is less to produce and you make a profit.

Does that make sense?
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 04, 2017, 07:43:46 AM
@brads3 , it looks like you somehow work in politics in your normal life:  ;) ;D  Making fully correct quotes, but leaving out a part of it, to give it a different meaning. I wrote;  "I can't say, that this really disturbs me". It will be something completely different if you take away the part before the ","! ;)

Quoteat the moment it generates 1:2 lumber/firewood from 4 logs. I can change the amount of logs from 4 to 1 to quadruple firewood production, making the option worth while. Do you have an idea of how much firewood was produced in 1 year?

I saw these numbers, as I looked at your production sheet. A  vanilla chopper makes 4 firewood from 1 log and your other lumber cutter makes 2 lumber from 1 log. The original production of the Pine Cutter is much too bad. It will be a little bit better, if you would change it, the way you suggest but still, these workers would spoil a lot of material; the half of it compared to their colleges. I meant, this small slow cutter could make 8 or 10 firewood from one log (could be explained, that he uses the residue from lumber cutting as well). Lumber could be the same as the other; 2 lumber from 1 log; but he should work slower.

I'm not sure, that I let it run a whole year. I stopped it, as I saw how unskilled he was. Anyhow it was very little, just a small fraction of a vanilla cutter. I guess in the range 20 lumber or 40 firewood each year (compared to up to 1000 for a vanilla cutter and 700 for the small).

QuoteRe. Spinner... well here is a conundrum. I agree that spinning is an inside job, but there is an issue with visual representation in game, especially with small production buildings. Originally, it was going to be in a shed that can be placed next to or a joining a house, like the loom. However, you then get a bunch of nondescript shed buildings than unless you are very familiar with the mod, you have to go through them all to find which is what. That is why I decided to put the wheel outside, to give the building something that visually defines it. You can still place the building up against a house, and pretend the actual work is being done inside during the summer.

I have no idea what I am going to do with the next level of all of these production buildings, they will all definitely be inside, so getting visual representation there is going to have to be signs and things

As I said; the spinner looks very sweet, the way it is. My comment was more a small joke. I wouldn't mind, if it would stay an outside job. (I had to look up the word conundrum, but I did understand the joke) I fully "buy" your arguments. It's good, if you could identify a building at the first look. Maybe a combination; keeping a spinning wheel outside and still let the work be made inside. I'm confident, that you will find out something good.

QuoteA disclaimer about values/productions... this is something I have absolutely no idea about and is something that totally perplexes me when designing this stuff. I have lots of visual ideas, no functional ones. So any advice/feedback on improving chain values is helpful.

And the thing with twine, is the same with rope. I agree there should be at least no decrease in trade (break even) and for that the value of yarn/twine should be increased. However, I also wanted to add a cost for certain things. IRL, flax would make a lower quality rope or twine than hemp, which was the go to material for this sort of thing as it lasted longer and was more durable. Vice versa, with fabrics, flax based linen and cotton based cloth is better than hemp based canvas (for making sails etc.). Now, I didn't want to make a different type of material for each output (flax twine, hemp twine, flax rope, hemp rope etc.), that would be ridiculous, so it all can be used for making the same output. To represent the fact that some were better than others, I made it so that if you do chose to use flax, it will cost you more than hemp for rope. If you want to make sails/clothing in the future out of hemp, it will cost you more than out of flax. With that in mind, I will change the value of twine to be be equal value to the input value of flax. So if you use flax, it costs you more to produce but you break even. If you use hemp, it is less to produce and you make a profit.

Does that make sense?


OK, I can say much about balancing. I always check new buildings this way, so maybe I can help a bit. I start with a calculation of how much profit/loss 1 unit of the product makes. (Value of the  product - value of any rawmaterial) then I look a couple of years, how much is produced each year. It's important to check the location, if there's enough raw material close, where the workers live, if there´s enough storage to put the product..... This way, I can calculate an average annual profit. It takes some time but I have time by playing; not making any efforts by placing buildings and decorations.  :-\

It makes perfect sense, what you say. Of cause, some products/ways of production should be more profitable than others. But what do you mean with equal value? To me, it's not value in, same as value out; that's not "equal". Why should anyone work for nothing? To me, equal is about 150 (that's about the value of what one person need each year in food, firewood, tools and clothing). Unless there are some very special reason, I wouldn't set anything below that. I also think, that there should be some products, that are more profitable; suitable for export. As modder you can choose which. In your Canadian mod, I would choose some typical Canadian export products; you already mentioned lobsters. I think, they should be very profitable to catch. I would choose some more, probable export goods from this region. 

Vanilla Banished has firewood and ale. I find ale OK, make sense to produce and sell, even if I find the profit of a vanilla brewer too high (~2500 if it's good located). But firewood as export good? I don't like that. Weird.

Personally, I find what @brads3 says about food; an average of 500 is good in general. As I said, some chosen export goods should be higher; maybe 1000, at the very most 1500, no one less than 150.  More complicated products from several raw materials, could be high, same as endproducts from longer production chains, intermediate products in these chains low, like simple basic products from small cheap buildings, without input or space requirements. Productions from buildings, that need much space (foresters, gatherers, hunters) could be high. I don't say, that this is easy. There are several ways to go. High productivity and low profit for each unit, could give the same as a low productivity and a high profit.

If you want, I can try to help; test and calculate. I have started to look at the production but the game crashed, so I'm not done yet. Generally it looks like your buildings have a low profit but I can say more when I've played a bit more.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 05, 2017, 05:37:06 AM
I have looked a bit more on the production numbers. If I can decipher my notes, I'll make a small list of the yearly production for 1 worker. I've also calculated an annual profit, also for 1 worker. If I looked more than 1 year, I used the average value. Take it for what it is; a rough estimation, that can variate depending on a lot of things. All my people are educated. I hope the numbers are correct. I might have misinterpreted some numbers wrong. I haven't dubble checked, so no guarantee.

Shore fisher
Seeweed  560-663
Oysters     279-360
Scallop      375-468

Pine Lumber Cutter (I was a bit short on logs, so I only ran it 1 year)
Firewood   48     yearly profit:    0
Lumber      22     yearly profit: -88

Dock Lumber Cutter (I was a bit short on logs, as the production was low, there was always enough but not always close, but always a lot on the close stockpile, as the production was high)
Lumber    34-60  yearly profit 140

Pine Loom/Pine Spinner (I let them run only 1 year, I save flax for ropes. 1 gatherer must work 3-4 years, to get enough flax for 1 rope. I find rope need much too much raw material)
Linen      40     yearly profit 180
Twine      26    yearly profit  -26

Pitch Kiln (using pine bough, logs is a loss)
Pitch           52            yearly profit 26
Charcoal    116-140   yearly profit 420

Trapper
Wild animals 90-136  (It looks like the production gets down, as the forest grows dense. You can see the same in vanilla forester/gatherer; if you don't cut any trees in a dense forest, the production from the gatherer gets down. I guess the space for these resources gets too small. The radius is too big for 2 foresters to keep up the speed)

Skinner
4 random products 84 -86     yearly profit 200  (The profit varies a lot depending on how much furs are produced, The total production was very much the same but furs variate between 12 and 42, the 3 years I looked. Furs are worth 5, the others 1)

Pineforest harvester
4 random products 500-590  yearly profit 520-620 ( the production gets down here too, like wild animals but not so much)

Pineforester
Logs 70   yearly profit 140. (This is the production for one forester the last year. So far it has increased from year to year, as the forest has grown. It's still less than the vanilla forester (about 90). I'll continue to keep an eye on it and see if it's getting higher) 

One last thing; I can´t see how much charcoal´s needed for turpentine. The turpentine still had a production of 66 the year I checked.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 05, 2017, 09:43:07 AM
@Nilla cool. The update I am working on now is bug fixes, but I have done some work on create numbers and trade values so that at least nothing is negative. If you look at the spreadsheet I shared then the new numbers are on it including a break done of trade values in and out for each resource combination.

I've also added inventories and numbers to all production building UIs so you can see what is there and how much is needed.

I had a play through yesterday, and the lumber cutter was just terrible even for lumber. It has been re-vamped so should give a much better out put now.

Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 05, 2017, 10:40:29 AM
@Nilla update on lumber/firewood.

I've managed to make it so that out put is over 100 units of each in a year, at least with fully educated peeps.

Here are the vital stats...

Lumber = Value 4, Low Create = 4, High Create = 5.
Firewood = Value 4, Low Create = 3, High Create = 4 (Vanilla Numbers).
Logs = Value 2 (Vanilla Numbers)

Lumber Cutter = Build Time = 10, Work Required = 10 (between 1/2 and 1/3 as fast as a saw mill).

Lumber = Logs (# = 4, Value = 8 ), Ed. = 5, Value = 20, Gain = 12. Non-Ed = 4, Value = 16, Gain = 8.
Firewood = Logs (# = 1, Value = 2), Ed. = 4, Value = 16, Gain = 14. Non-Ed = 3, Value = 12, Gain = 10.

For every 1 log, an educated cutter will produce 1.25 lumber or 4 firewood.
For every 1 log, and un-educated cutter will produce 1 lumber or 3 firewood.


Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 05, 2017, 05:14:26 PM
I still see one problem, if it only makes 100 firewood. That's enough to heat only about 2 cheap houses. 1 worker working a whole year for that?  :-\
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 05, 2017, 05:43:04 PM
I agree... I played through and got annoyed with it. I think the only solution is to remove firewood from the cutter and have a separate wood chopper. If I reduce the work required and work time more, the lumber aspect will be over powered.

I also got annoyed having to build the huge vanilla trade post, so made a new one for the PEI shore set. It is small and gets the job done.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: QueryEverything on March 05, 2017, 08:53:28 PM
I think that was one of my earlier concerns we chatted about on BL about the power of the chopper vs the lumber.
I still think *cough cough* that a small 2 x 2 to match the tailor would be excellent, with a matching house.
They could then line up with the x4 house & the town hall etc, in nice pairs. :)
But that's just me.

Back to the numbers (and sidelining my 2x2 requests :)  ) I'm still having problems with the ropes and their speed etc.  Will certainly take a look now with your new updates.  2 per season change was quite frustrating.  But, we will see now :D
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 05, 2017, 09:00:37 PM
@QueryEverything rope isn't necessarily a problem with speed, it is more a problem with the amount of resources needed to make them. As for your question over at BL about load order, this is probably the first thing that I am possibly going to change from CC (I think I will definitely have to change). I had rope with CC values to make it compatible, but 150 ish hemp/flax for two rope? That is crazy high. I know it takes a lot to make rope, but still that is a bit extreme. A good hemp crop field only produces like 300 hemp a year, so you get 6 ropes with an educated worker. (Note, these are 1.6 numbers). My dock rope maker has the same work time/work required as the CC one I think. Also, the value of rope is 1 - quite high for something that will go into a resource chain but at the same time 2 - a massive loss in value compared to the amount of flax/hemp needed to make it.

This change is not yet in the new update, I didn't think about it to be honest you should have reminded me ;) but it will be changed soon.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: QueryEverything on March 05, 2017, 09:05:52 PM
If I reminded you about all my wishlist things ...  hahaha ...  :)

I think in your case, definitely still loading over CC, I don't mind the change in the icons & images, but because your content is pushed out more regularly it makes sense to me that yours above CC, and this is exactly why.  Correcting things on the fly, and altering existing numbers from resources. 

Thanks for doing all of this.  I've just grabbed Sherbrooke now, and will wait a little bit before loading a new map, there have been quite a few new releases today by members :D  happy days indeed!  :D
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 06, 2017, 04:52:38 AM
Quote from: QueryEverything on March 05, 2017, 09:05:52 PM

have been quite a few new releases today by members :D  happy days indeed!  :D

It's getting almost stressful with all those new things. There's so much new, I want to test. There are also some "old favourites" I want to return to. I'm retired with health issues, so I have a lot of time. Who said this is a dead game?  ;D

As next I will load the upgrades and go on with this game (if possible). Are the upgrades compatible?

I forget one thing: I wanted to tell you, how I like the small houses.

I very much like the look of them; both the colorful and the "tarred" design. It's really great to see, how the same buildings give the settlement a totally different look depending only on the color. I also like the look of the upgraded houses. They look a bit "crazy"; not so neat, rather "out of the  box". That's adorable.

But unfortunately, in a normal game, I'm sorry to say; I wouldn't build any of these houses. Why?

First reason, I don't like upgrading buildings. I rare cases, I can see there might be a point, to have an upgradable building; A small cheap production building or storage, could maybe be upgraded to a larger, more productive one, or the only upgradable building in a vanilla game; a cheap simple house could be upgraded to a more efficient later in the game. But in these cases; like the vanilla house; it should always be possible to build the upgraded version without the detour of the simple building. Why on earth should I demolish a whole house, throw its inhabitants out on the streets, just to extend it with a room on the second floor? I see only one case, where it has a sense; if you want to use more than 3 different building materials. (Like the more advanced houses in the early CC versions, before they got the clever idea of packaging building materials.)

Second reason, the basic houses are only for a 3 person family. In a normal game, they are useless. You have to upgrade. (Or use a lot of tedious tricks and micromanagement) You can't develop a settlement without babies, I prefere many babies. Only on rare occasions, playing real time (maybe with @Tom Sawyer´s ironman or other special difficulties) a house for a small family can be useful, if you want to slow the population growth down. You can do without tricks and micromanagement with 4 person houses, but not if you want the settlement to grow fast.

I can understand, that you choose these small families. The houses are small and cheap and should have some disadvantage to larger, more expensive buildings. You don't want to "overpower" anything. I like that thought, but it's a pity, if the consequences would be, that they seldom would be used.

If it was my mod, I would make the small version for a 4 person family, the upgraded version also buildable from the menu, without detour for 5, but especially the smallest version, only store a small amount of food and fuel.

The pictures show impressions from different parts of the same settlement; same mod, different look. :)
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 06, 2017, 07:03:52 AM
@Nilla all current versions of all mods are (should be) fully compatible, and load order doesn't really matter.

Regarding the houses, I like small ones with low families, if I know about it first! I used the log cabins in CC for years and had population problems, didn't realize until then that the family only has 1 child at a time. But once changing my style to accommodate this, they certainly have a use in game. When I start a game, for the first year, I only have one or two small houses as a place for food an warmth. Too many, and you struggle with firewood. Late game, for controlling population, they are great in mining/forestry outposts, and the upgrade function can be useful too. I see how having the upgraded cabins on the tool bar can help, but I kinda like this style of upgrade. If I want a bigger capacity, I upgrade before anyone moves in. It is a shame the upgrade system is so destructive in Banished because I would like to use it for the fishery buildings too so that things like dory can have more use to upgrade buildings when they 'run out' but it seems like too much to do. Plus you cannot have a circular update, i.e. you can't update to the same building, the mod kit gets stuck in a loop and crashes.

I've had a couple of people mention the same as you, but I can't decide what I like best. I think I will add more houses soon, that way you have the small cabins as a choice if needed. The upgrade will remain upgrade only though.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 06, 2017, 08:38:56 PM
@Nilla so I had a good play through this evening, and I now totally agree with you about the cabins! I had a few for a year or so, but once I started building the town up properly I found myself instantly upgrading them. For the next update I'll increase the family of the cabin to 4 and the upgrade to 5.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 07, 2017, 05:31:08 AM
I`pleased to hear that. :)

I like the look of these cabins and it would be a pity, if they had such a limited use to a player with little patience, such as me!  ;)

I have a few more production numbers. I didn't use the upgraded version of the Pine Set but the others. Everything is for 1 worker.

Mariteme farmer
Milk (Milk Pen) 360-420 

Goat milk 120-200
Wool        66-96  annual profit of Goat Pen 590

Egg       150-180
Feather 108-144 annual profit of Hen Hutch 290


I have some comments to this. As always; only my opinion. Take it for what it is! The production of milk is OK; about the same as protein from your shore fisher. This is a bigger, more expensive building, but you can put several farmers in it, so that's OK. I find, the production of wool from the goat pen too high. You need a large sheep pasture to produce the same amount. That's also the reason, the annual profit is higher than the other. The goat milk production is OK compared to the larger milk pen. I would reduce the wool production at least 50%. Your chicken farmer are really cruel; tearing feathers from living chicken; really bad people!  >:( ;) (They produce a lot of feathers but no chicken meat) Personally I don't like feathers as a product. In CC they can make pillows and some weird survival coats and maybe something else I don't remember, but as long as you don't have these production chains in your mod (and I would think once or twice, before I introduce something like that) I would change the output to chicken meat.

I haven't prodcued more domestic animals, than I need in my buildings. It seems like production cost=trade value, the farmer, who breed the animals, would work for nothing. So it's not a trade product. Of cause; not everything has to be a suitable trade product, but I find it's a pity to have a nice big building, that stands closed most of the time. You don't need that many animals yourself. I might be wrong, I don't play much CC, but I think their production cost is 200 for a trade value of 250. Maybe the "production speed" is too high for a profit of 50 for each animal. I had a feeling, that the animals, I needed were produced quite fast. I have a lot of corn at the moment (I even had to close my corn fields) so I will let it run a whole year to see how much is produced. As alternative you could make a butcher, that slaughtered the domestic animals and made meat/meat products of them.

Maple products


Maple sap 500  trade profit 100

Cider (apples)    190-260    trade profit 800
Whiskey             330           trade profit 1200     

The location of the maple boiler isn´t very good. The pine forest with charcoaler and the maple forest are located on each side of the settlement. The boiler is close to the maple forest, but they have to walk far, to get chatcoal, so a better location would probably increase the production. (pine forest and maple forest close to eachother) Most of the time, as I ran the alcohol producers, I bought maple syrup and apples, so the location close to the trading port is good, but I might have ran short on maple syrup some time.

If you want to use the alcohol for your population without additional mods, you'll need an inn. Now it's export only. Your people might get annoyed, never be able to taste these products. ;)

Maybe you should also think a bit about some industrial market/warehouse with vendors, who active gather rawmaterial together, where you can locate production sites close. It's not necessary. As you can see, the production numbers and the profit of these maple products are high as it is (but still only 1/3 -1/2 of the vanilla brewery :) ). But if you want to build large settlements, partly dependent on trade, such a market makes it easier. Without any it works as well, you have to think more about good locations, and that makes the game more challenging.

I also produced some rope. I will not write about the production. I think you're well aware of the fact, that it needs a lot of material and the loss of each rope in trade units is huge. I think you should do something to change this; I can see several ways to go: less raw material, changed trade values..... but why not keep it hard and expensive to produce. As long as you don't need much (and as I can see it, you don't). Just don't let it be a trade product: Let no merchant bring rope and the products you need rope to make, like dories. I think that's possible.

Picture

I've built your new small trading port. It works fine. It's small, you can't store much goods in it. It's more than enough, for this small settlement with only some 80 peeps. In fact, I have more things I want to sell, than I need to buy. But soon enough as the settlement grows, you will need a larger port. Do you have some plans for that?

You can see my inventory. I just noticed, that I have much too much food. (my usual problem) :-\ I've sent the fisher home and changed the production of the fields from corn to hemp.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: grammycat on March 07, 2017, 06:50:15 AM
I definitely agree with Nilla on the houses-they are rapidly becoming some of my favorite, except for the occupancy numbers and upgrading right off.  An upgrade to 5, as you suggested, would be so much better.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: QueryEverything on March 07, 2017, 02:15:12 PM
I love the houses as well, and I find even when not building near the water I am using the bright colours, even in my forest!! 
It will be great to have larger families :)  Thanks @Necora

@Nilla we have different play styles, and I don't always agree on 'the numbers', but, thank you for all the feedback you have been offering up, it gives a different perspective to the game. 
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 08, 2017, 03:49:18 AM
Yes, @QueryEverything, that's the cool thing with Banished; it's possible to enjoy playing in so many ways, everyone has their own. And to the "numbers"; when I make my comments and suggestions: It's only my opinion, based on my way of playing. I'm well aware, that other people may see it different. I don't expect, that a modder change everything, the way I think, would be the best. But I hope, that my suggestions and comments could be something to think about, a help to see things also from another point of view.

Anyway I started a new game yesterday evening. I added some more mods, I haven't played with: Red's Training camp, the Colonial Houses and Producers from Kid (I used them in the MegaMod but not as a separate mod) and some other smaller mods from @RedKetchup and @kid1293 .

I also use @Tom Sawyer's ironman. It is actually ironman not iron woman. ;) In my mod list I have one of each; the difference is that ironman is real time aging, iron woman is vanilla speed. I decided to keep it that way, to keep them apart. My Nordic games with this mods showed, that the speed in which the settlement grows, isn't that big after all. With the real time mod it's a bit easier, to control the population growth, so I chose it. If you haven't followed the development of the Nordic mod and my earlier testing blogs, I can tell, that with ironman/woman every Banni need the double amount of food and clothing. I wanted to test it in a game with vanilla game play. So far, I've only tested it in the North.

The picture shows more or less my whole settlement in year 14.

There's a forester, gatherer, hunter ( @Necora´s vanilla versions) just behind the "photographer". I can see, that the active circle is smaller than it was. :) Have you changed anything else with the output of the forester? Anyhow the production numbers doesn't seem to have changed a lot for one worker. Maybe the gatherers collects a little less, if you use 2 and the hunter also find in average one deer less, than he did with the big circle, but a single forester produce at least the same as he did with the large circle. (I haven't enough people to use more than 1, yet).

As I played the North on harsh climate, I got trouble, as soon as the number of children+student was more than 50% of the adults. Here with vanilla gameplay, the adults can support about 100%. That's a big difference; seems to be a faster growth and much less micromanagement in this game! :)

I've seen, that you've added a market to the Pine mod. It can hold a lot of goods, for the size and the cost. It also looks very much like the material storage. What are your plans? Will you leave it that way. I'm not sure, but I think I saw another design from you somewhere.

I can quote myself:
QuoteLet no merchant bring rope and the products you need rope to make
I think it is that way now. I also think, that no merchant bring any material with the "new flags". This is also something to think about. Should it stay that way? It's not so easy, to see the consequences, so early in a game. Do we really need to buy these materials? An easy way to go, would maybe be to make a little change of the merchants. Let the same merchant bring seeds and lifestock and let the free merchant bring all new materials (maybe with some small exceptions).

I've also seen one small thing to fix, that I've always forgot to tell; whiskey has no name in the inventory and at the merchant. It's just a barrel with no text. You can see it in the inventory at the picture from my last post.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 08, 2017, 06:45:08 PM
@Nilla I never got around to replying to previous comments so here goes.

Quote from: Nilla on March 07, 2017, 05:31:08 AM
I find, the production of wool from the goat pen too high. You need a large sheep pasture to produce the same amount. That's also the reason, the annual profit is higher than the other. The goat milk production is OK compared to the larger milk pen. I would reduce the wool production at least 50%.

Hmm. There is a problem with this and how the game works, and it is a big limitation in the game mechanics. It is the same issue with lumber/firewood from earlier. In the building, especially as this has no input, the only thing I can change is the work time/work required for the whole thing. You can't change the output one resource without changing the other, unless there is something I am missing. If I change the work required/work time, make it slower, then milk will also become slower. The high/low create values of a resource are in the file for the resource, not the building. So in this case, if I was to change the wool output and not the milk output, I would have to change the vanilla rawmaterialwool.rsc file to reduce the number of wool produced per work time/work required combination (high/low create values). This would also reduce it for everything else that makes wool, so it would be still comparatively overpowered.

The only option is to add another type of wool to the game, and I don't think I particularly want to do that.

QuoteYour chicken farmer are really cruel; tearing feathers from living chicken; really bad people!  >:( ;)

Or.. they pick the discarded feathers out of the coop, if you want to think of it in a nicer way ;). But I agree, feathers without killing is an odd one.

Quote(They produce a lot of feathers but no chicken meat) Personally I don't like feathers as a product. In CC they can make pillows and some weird survival coats and maybe something else I don't remember, but as long as you don't have these production chains in your mod (and I would think once or twice, before I introduce something like that) I would change the output to chicken meat.

Well, it will be too small a hutch to have chicken produced IMO. Maybe, but I'm not sure. I will use feathers later in clothing as a 'down' material. I'm still thinking through re-vamping the clothing options to make them more interesting, and adding more than just coats. It annoys me that my bannies are running around in nothing but a leather jacket... no wonder reproduction rates are often low.

QuoteI haven't produced more domestic animals, than I need in my buildings. It seems like production cost=trade value, the farmer, who breed the animals, would work for nothing. So it's not a trade product. Of cause; not everything has to be a suitable trade product, but I find it's a pity to have a nice big building, that stands closed most of the time. You don't need that many animals yourself. I might be wrong, I don't play much CC, but I think their production cost is 200 for a trade value of 250. Maybe the "production speed" is too high for a profit of 50 for each animal. I had a feeling, that the animals, I needed were produced quite fast. I have a lot of corn at the moment (I even had to close my corn fields) so I will let it run a whole year to see how much is produced. As alternative you could make a butcher, that slaughtered the domestic animals and made meat/meat products of them.

I'm not sure about the newest incarnation of CC, by my numbers were from Kralyergs' stable mod. If they have changed the numbers, I will do so as well. I like the domesticated animal resource, you don't just start a goat pen with no goats, so it makes a nice bit of complexity and realism to the game. I would, however, rather that they had a better purpose i.e. that you need a constant supply of them to produce things not just to build the pens. After all, it is hard not to overpower the pens that even if they need 12 animals, they then produce food for nothing forever. It would either make the building need to be re-build it or keep supplying it with animals to produce stuff. That would need a lot of work balancing though, for example you'd be looking at trying to make it use 2 domesticated animals a year to produce say 700 food for a 200 unit profit. I've no idea how to make a building work that slow.

Re. Alcohol - I just made a tavern, and a matching (but two story) hostel :) Pic attached.

Re. Vendors - I didn't want to make a whole set of small markets, there are plenty out there already and mine would not be too different visually. I really like the market puzzle mod by @kid1293 but not sure if it is updated yet for the new flags. I did want at least a central market for each set though. We'll see how it all develops!

Re. Rope: You can't stop a merchant from bringing individual items, but you can stop them bringing all of that flag, so in this case the 'crafted' flag. While I agree that is a good idea, it will vanish as soon as you add other mods that re-introduce the flag.

Re. Port: Yup, there will be one in each dock set (PEI, NS, Offshore) and even some specialized ones which I use heavily late game.

And the next one...

Quote from: Nilla on March 08, 2017, 03:49:18 AM
Yes, @QueryEverything, that's the cool thing with Banished; it's possible to enjoy playing in so many ways, everyone has their own. And to the "numbers"; when I make my comments and suggestions: It's only my opinion, based on my way of playing. I'm well aware, that other people may see it different. I don't expect, that a modder change everything, the way I think, would be the best. But I hope, that my suggestions and comments could be something to think about, a help to see things also from another point of view.

Totally appreciate the feed back. From reading the boards, I think a lot of the time unless there are bugs in the mods that need to be fixed, they get downloaded and used, and very little info comes back to us about what people think of them in terms of not only visuals but the actual play ability of them in terms of production chains etc. So this is great.

Re. Forester: This one is complicated. I did reduce the radius, and it does have an effect on the other buildings too, but not much effect on the forester itself. I don't know how or why the output is different from vanilla, it shouldn't be. After all, the vanilla radius is huge compared, and at the start of the game you are not filling it with 4 workers, there are not enough bannies. I am not sure, apart from increasing the amount of log produced in the rawmaterialwood.rsc file, that I can improve this output.

Re. Market: Yup the structure will stay the same, but I will decrease the radius and storage. At the moment it is vanilla to make sure it works. While I will keep it the same style, I am planning some decorative market add-ons that you can use to add whatever visual stalls etc. that you want to all markets. It will give some good variation I think. And yeah, there is another one in the Sherbrooke set which is currently under testing.

Re. Merchants: I am wondering if there is something I forgot to do with the new flags there. I will ask people. I noticed some // in the file and not sure if I need to remove that or not.

Whiskey has been noted.

Thanks!
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: kid1293 on March 09, 2017, 12:32:00 AM

Short reply - I have not added any new flags to Market Puzzle,
I want to ensure the flags are being used and not placed on the wrong
market stall. I know this a cowardly way to do it (you jump first) :)
but most of my mods are in fact only vanilla resources.
One more thing. I wait for Luke to release 1.0.7 with maybe some changes and
CC to go modular using the new flags. Then I go over my mods again and update.

If you have any suggestions for flags and improvement I am all ears (eyes ? ).
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Tom Sawyer on March 09, 2017, 12:58:13 AM
The wool output of sheep is not defined in the wool resource @Necora. So if you decrease the production of your pen it does not influence sheep pastures. And you also can do it by worktime instead of create values.

Vanilla sheep produce 4 wool per year on 16 game tiles. So 1 wool per 4 tiles. That's a reference value for other wool producers. Actually I don't like wool from goats. Maybe goat hair with much less amount than wool and higher trade value or so. Or better just meat and milk from goats. It's all up to you but it would be cool to not replace our cute sheep by an overpowered milky wool goat. :)
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 09, 2017, 04:41:50 AM
@kid1293 I'd say that is smart not cowardly, better be sure than have to re-do it all again.

@Tom Sawyer interesting. The way I understand it, and correct me if I am wrong, is that the pasture is set up to drop 4 wool per year per sheep as you say, so 4 instances of wool being harvested. However, that does not mean that you get 4 wool per sheep per year, but 4 wool drops. Each wool drop will produce 6/6 high/low amounts of wool according to the wool template. That means that you actually get 6*4 or 24 individual counts of wool in total from each animal. And it is also the same between educated and non-educated workers. Now, I could change the work time and work required to reach 24, but this would mean also reducing the amount of milk produced. The building produces both items 'at random'...

ConsumeProduceDescription consumeproduce
{
Product _products
[
{
ComponentDescription _produceMaterial = "Template/RawMaterialGoatsMilk.rsc";
ResourceLimit _resourceLimit = Food;
}
{
ComponentDescription _produceMaterial = "Template/RawMaterialWool.rsc";
ResourceLimit _resourceLimit = Textile;
}
]

float _workTime = 8.0;
ToolType _toolType = Hoe;
int _workRequired = 10;
int _initialProduct = -1; // -1 for all products

}


So increasing work time/work required would decrease the amount of both resources, not just one. I don't believe we can change the frequency of each individually? This is why I mentioned changing the high/low create of wool is the only way to separate wool production from milk production in this building, but in doing so it will also decrease the amount produced by the pasture.

I could increase the create values of goats milk to compensate for this, it is currently 10/8 high/low. As long as I remember this when I make bigger pens or put them into a pasture.

However, I'm not planning to put them into a pasture, because I have no idea how to animate them.


QuoteActually I don't like wool from goats. Maybe goat hair with much less amount than wool and higher trade value or so. Or better just meat and milk from goats. It's all up to you but it would be cool to not replace our cute sheep by an overpowered milky wool goat

But what about cashmere? That is goat wool, not hair. I think it would perhaps be better to add this as a new resource, rather than use wool even if I want to ultimately use it for the same things in the clothing chain.

I would like to add meat for them, same with chicken meat for the hutches, however it doesn't really work for these buildings. They are small pens, so constantly producing meat will mean that you are constantly killing your only goat. The idea is to replicate having a small family yard with one animal that they saved up to buy (expensive domesticated animal resource) that will provide a constant yet low supply of milk or eggs or wool etc. that can feed the family and add a little to sell.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Tom Sawyer on March 09, 2017, 06:54:53 AM
The pasture is not involved in wool production. The output is only defined in the sheep resource "float _additionalCreateInMonths = 3.0;" means 1 wool per 3 month and animal. These 4 wool per year and animal drop in a pasture in stacks of the create value of the wool resource = 6 when the animals in this pasture reach this amount. If you decrease the create value to 3 it drops in stacks of 3 but more often because the stack is full earlier. People have to walk more often to empty the pasture but the amount of wool per year will be the same. The balance comes by "int _requiredArea = 16;" per animal and that's why I said 1 wool per 4 game tiles in a year as reference. Or 4 wool from your pen if you simulate a single goat there. You could do it by a very high worktime of about one year. Then your goat will be sheared once a year or so. It's difficult with these small pens. I don't like them in general because they create a second livestock system using the boring production mechanic. The original system simulates livestock breeding much better.

And cashmere is right, yes. I thought about it when talking about goat hair with low amount but high trade value. I would not expect cashmere in Canada but it can offer more flexibility for your balance. Anyway the problem is the pen, not the goat or the wool and you would easily just create an overpowered cashmere pen. :)
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 10, 2017, 05:05:26 AM
First, some comments to the comments of my comments! ;)  ;D

Animal pens: I don't mind, having a second way of breeding lifestock. Like @Tom Sawyer, I prefere the traditional vanilla way, especially for sheep and beef cows, but these small (or larger) pens are fine as well. I think they are good suitable for egg- and milkproduction. It's also good, if there would be an option to breed animals to sell. (Theoretically there is in your mod @Necora but as I said, the farmer would be working for nothing, so it's no real option).

Maybe you could change the pens to produce milk and eggs. It's not defined, which kind of animal a building holds. There could be several kind of animals in the same pen. Let the big ground floor of the barn, hold cows and chicken, to produce milk and eggs. Let a small pen, hold a goat and a few chicken and also produce milk and eggs, but less. We will get rid of the overpowered wool and the annoying, cruel feathers. (To my knowledge chicken feathers are too hard to be used for pillows and down clothings, anyway. They are from see birds like duck and geese). If you like to have an input, it could be some grain as fodder, in that case, of cause, you have to increase the output to keep it balanced. (If you're not stealing @RedKetchup´s hay  :-\)

Markets: These small markets: Kid´s market puzzle, the beautiful CC market stalls and other specialized markets are really nice to look at, but they have a big disadvantage in Banished. Bannis are not like people; strolling along a market, buying a little something here and a little more there. They go to the closest market, grab all they can carry and as they need more food; they go there again. That means, that people in houses close to such market stalls, more or less only get one category of food and their health gets down.

Forest circles: The output of one forester is about the same as in a vanilla game, also with the small circles. But somehow, it takes a long time for the pine- and maple foresters to get to that production. Finally, they do, but it takes something like 10 years. I've seen it in all games so far and can't explain it. As far as I can see, the trees grow faster and there are no/not much vanilla trees, stone and iron left. It doesn't seem to change much between this version with the small circles and your last version with the large. As long as we know, I think we can live with it.

Have you increased the output of the maple gatherer? They gather a lot of fruit. It seems to be a bit more food than a gatherer in a vanilla forest. I still think, it's in an acceptable range. If you would plant the active area with orchard trees, you would get a lot more. (But you would need more workers, to pick the fruit) It's also good to have an early reliable fruit producer. You can start to "harvest" long before the trees are grown. The small circle works fine. There's enough space for two gatherers to work in.

The smaller area of a hunter works as well. Maybe a hunter kills one deer less, than he would in a big circle each year,  but it's still enough. I don't even know, if it's possible, but I wouldn't think, that a second hunter in a cabin, would give more.

The only workers, I've seen so far, that gets a significantly lower production in the small circles, are herbalists. The first year, they pick a lot of herbs, but the next years hardly none. The herbs grow too slow. (You can see the same in a vanilla game: 2 herbalists in the same location do pick more the first year, but after that, not more than 1.) I don't think, you should change anything here. A much bigger circle, than the forest circle would be weird, unless there are several foresters close. They also have the purpose of healing people, so a location close to where people live, is as important, as getting enough herbs.  If you really need a lot of herbs, you could always have herbalist buildings in several forests and let one herbalist change between the locations.

Now to my game.

I started a new game. Why? I don't want to play real time aging after all. It's too slow. I like the normal aging better.

So, ironwoman it is. No changes in aging, just +100% more food and clothing. (Tom also says, that there are some changes in probability of getting ill, if the health is bad, that I haven't noticed)

I just see, that I didn't make many screenshots of my settlement. Anyway it's not much new to show. Here is one, where I compare the production of the vanilla and the maple gatherer. I have also seen, that the output changes a lot. This year it's quite high.

I have a question to this picture: Why is the radius from the gatherer smaller than from the forester? I didn't realize, until I looked at this picture now. But I have noticed, that there are always a lot of bowls close to the outher border of the forest. I thought that the gatherers were too lazy, walking that far, but now I see, it's not inside their circle.

Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 10, 2017, 06:51:55 AM
@Nilla so I was stewing on farming last night while I couldn't sleep and with your comments here I think we've come up with a really nice solution to make it a) well functioning and b) realistic. So here it is...

1 - We start with a feed supplier. This takes your choice of one of the 4 grains (Barley, Oats, Corn, Wheat) and makes a generic feed. Let's call it 'Fodder' to be compatible with @RedKetchup 's cool new stuff (Red, I hope you don't feel like I'm stealing your idea here, please shout at me otherwise).

2 - This feed is used to feed the animals in the pens.

3 - Small pens and hutches - I purposely left these basic huts empty inside, I like using ghost decorations to decorate my game, and although I don't have many decos at the moment, it is the plan that using things I come up with later or other decorations, the player can design the fencing/decorations to fit the situation to the players liking. What I can do, is remove the multi item dynamic from the buildings, and instead put in a drop down menu to choose what it produces. In the hutches, you can have a drop down of 'Eggs' for chickens, 'fur' for rabbits etc. (rabbits were mentioned some time back as a request somewhere). In the pens, you can have a drop down of 'goats milk' from goats, or 'wool' from sheep. Again, it would act like there are 1 or two animals per pen, so if you want more, you build more pens (they can be build side by side or arranged in a compound and look good). The pens need feed to produce the item (easier to balance 1 item at a time rather than multiple ones simultaneously) and will need 'domesticated animal' to build.

4 - Cow Milker - I will keep this as is, but introduce feed as a requirement. Pastures do not need feed, the point of them is to let the animals graze. But in these buildings, you really do need feed to be realistic, and to prevent the overpowering something from nothing.

5 - Stable - I will change the input to feed and make the animals have a profit so they are useful for trade. I will also have to balance the value/amount of feed for the domesticated animals some. I want them to be expensive, but they still need to be worth while.

6 - A new idea to add some difficulty/realism/use of DA resource - Put a limit on how much the small pens and hutches can produce, like what the iron mine has. So for example, 1 domesticated animal will last 2-3 years (well, the resource output equivalent of 2-3 years depending on the building). When that runs out, you need to re-build it. Unfortunately, we cannot use the upgrade because you can't upgrade to the same building, the mod kit gets stuck in an endless loop. Also, there is no 'build 0' option so even if you upgrade the building is visually completely dismantled first, so we may as well just destroy it and re-build. See it as cleaning out the pens and introducing new animals. After all, animals don't live forever, and the pens are too small to have a breeding stock like the pastures (which won't work if you only have 2 or 3 animals unless you are very lucky).

1 to 5 is the main idea, 6 is an option I was thinking of to make the domesticated animals have more use rather than just to build a pen once and that is it.

What do you think?

Re. Foresters - I found the same thing, I had nothing produced for the years while the forest was growing, then it seemed the forest was fully grown and still nothing, then suddenly a very good output, and the expense of clearing most of the forest. Then it settled a bit.

I think the foresters have a kind of circular production output between years, a least until the resource limit is reached and the forest becomes in a stable cycle of growth and cutting. When you start off fresh, like you have to with this, you see this dynamic much more clearer because the majority of trees in the radius will come to maturity at the same time. When you use vanilla, if you place it right, there is already a standing crop of trees to be used. Unfortunately, with the dynamic of the foresters in game, they only cut a certain tree combination, and ignore the rest. To make them work as well as vanilla, I need to change the starting tree seed to have only maritimes (or a good proportion of maritimes) trees.

Re. Radius - yup that is because I don't like overlapping radius. Gatherer, hunter, trapper, and herbalist have a radius 2 tiles less than forester. This is so that if you place all 4 in a tight square around the tower, all 4 should fit into the radius with nothing going over the edge. The reason I did this is because it allows you to place forestry areas right next to each other, and not worry about the production buildings having overlapping radius.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: RedKetchup on March 10, 2017, 06:59:26 AM
no problem @Necora ! if you want my files i can send you ( to stay compatible )

btw, in case you tried this... foresters seems not working with things flagged as "health" or "Edible" but everything else works fine.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: grammycat on March 10, 2017, 08:00:06 AM
I'm not Nilla, but have been testing your mods also.  The realism idea is good but seems off at 2-3 years.  Farm raised chickens can live between 5-15 years and cows live to their 20's.  If you're going for bannies age of 5 yrs in 1, then it's still a little low;  maybe up it to 4-5?  I like your radius, it works perfectly.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 10, 2017, 09:40:44 AM
@grammycat you're not Nilla? Darn, you'd have thought your name would give it away ;)

That is a good idea, I had not thought about comparing years for realism. 2 years was just something I came up, but I like the idea of making them roughly realistic.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: grammycat on March 10, 2017, 10:27:44 AM
 :D  I wish I was Nilla-my little bannies would live in a much prettier town.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Tom Sawyer on March 10, 2017, 11:23:31 AM
I don't think so @grammycat. Probably your bannies would struggle without tools as poor survivors, freeze in harsh climate and finally die to starvation in a Nilla-test-game. ;D

The idea of feeding animals in pens and stables sounds very good @Necora. It's reasonable in comparison to free range breeding where animals get their food from the pasture as you said. It connects the production of your livestock to required area (cropfield). Maybe you can find a good amount of food input by area or so. But what for this step to create fodder from food and not just feed the animals in pens with grains as options or only with oat? It could be a special reason to use oat in game. :)
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 10, 2017, 12:10:49 PM
@Tom Sawyer I originally thought of using corn, as that is grown in abundance around here mainly as a feed crop. So perhaps that is an option to skip out the fodder step. The other grains, well, you can only really choose 1 or you have a load of drop down options, the idea of a generic feed was to avoid this and be more flexible in the production. But then, if I use just corn, it will mean I can reduce the trade value of the feed (corn is worth 1, you'd have to make fodder worth more to make it worth while producing it, then you'd have to make sure the food production represents the increase in trade value) and more easily balance the food output.

@RedKetchup so the foresters don't like edibles? That is a shame, because changing the forester to a farm and growing corn, or wheat, or other grains in such a radius rather than a crop field would look awesome - it would allow us to break away from the square fields and have odd shaped farms. Maybe the foresters could plant 'invisible' trees that spawned the fodder or hay? So all you can see is large areas of hay and not the invisible tree. Then you can have the foresters just set to plant, and a new gatherer set to pick up the hay. It would mean 2 bannies for the chain, but you could increase output to represent this.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 10, 2017, 03:15:26 PM
if the forest produces oats so it is in-edible and then you send it to a mill and make flour, will it change it to edible flour? in NECORA'S case the bani in-edible grain would still be usable to the stables. using the mini building mod sized circles,will a "forester" produce enough feed? it would be useful to have a different size fields.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: RedKetchup on March 10, 2017, 03:39:56 PM
Quote from: Necora on March 10, 2017, 12:10:49 PM
@RedKetchup so the foresters don't like edibles? That is a shame, because changing the forester to a farm and growing corn, or wheat, or other grains in such a radius rather than a crop field would look awesome - it would allow us to break away from the square fields and have odd shaped farms. Maybe the foresters could plant 'invisible' trees that spawned the fodder or hay? So all you can see is large areas of hay and not the invisible tree. Then you can have the foresters just set to plant, and a new gatherer set to pick up the hay. It would mean 2 bannies for the chain, but you could increase output to represent this.

they seem to plant without problem, it is when they need to harvest, there seem to have something hardcodded somewhere that rule the game : if edible = only farmer, herb = only herbalists. of course, if you tag it for remove, then the game bypass that rule and get harvested.
it seems there are some hidden rules that bride the process.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 10, 2017, 04:04:13 PM
@RedKetchup yeah I think I remember reading someone say that somewhere. These forums are so full of information I have no idea where!


So @Nilla I feel bad as we have kind of taken over your thread, so I'm moving the development discussion over to my work in progress thread :)
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 11, 2017, 04:52:56 AM
Quote from: grammycat on March 10, 2017, 10:27:44 AM
:D  I wish I was Nilla-my little bannies would live in a much prettier town.
Thanks for that! Sometimes, I find my towns really nice looking, too but it's not because of my talent. It's the talent of the modders, who make such beautiful things. My towns are based on efficiency, not beauty. We have a proverb in Sweden "Sometimes even a blind hen finds a grain" or..... sometimes even Nilla builds a beautiful town.   ;D ;)

Quote from: Tom Sawyer on March 10, 2017, 11:23:31 AM
I don't think so @grammycat. Probably your bannies would struggle without tools as poor survivors, freeze in harsh climate and finally die to starvation in a Nilla-test-game. ;D
That's not my fault either! Like the beauty, it's only because a certain modder makes such impossible options! :)  ;D

It's good to move the discussion to your "Work in progress" where it belongs better. I don't mind having it here, but it's always annoying to have the same discussion on several places.

To my game.

It's really a nice game. As I played ironwoman in the North, I had some mixed feelings about it. It was possible to run but I had to micromanage a lot and also keep the population growth down. It was a challenge, but a tedious challenge. In a game with a vanilla gameplay with a few other mods, it's different. It's still a challenge. You can't relax one moment. If you're not expanding food production continuously, the stores are getting smaller. But you can develop a settlement in a normal speed. You don't have to micromanage more than usual (switching between blacksmiths, tailors and woodchoppers, as long as you don't need them run continuously and such things). This, additional to testing to me new (and beautiful) buildings makes a lot of fun.

First picture

I've noticed, that you've changed the menus for the production buildings, to see the stored raw material. That's good. But sometimes it's too small, to see all, like the maple syrup at the cider press. The production buildings on the docks (rope, dories, lumber) still have the smaller menu.

Second to fourth pictures

Some impressions from my settlement. You can see I'm using a mixture of your small houses, Necora and Kid´s colonial houses for a family of 5. I try to adapt the look of the houses to eachother; white or blue colonial houses with the small color houses, dark brown together and houses built of new wood to the new wood on the docks. I think it works that way. I micromanage the houses a little bit, to get more children: From time to time, I look into the big houses. If a family, where no more children could be born lives there, I let them swap with a young family, who lives in a small house. From time to time, when my builders have little other work, I let them upgrade the small houses. This gives a reasonable growth.

The nice bigger blue shore building on the third picture catches lobster. I'm a bit disappointed. It's complicated and expensive to build, but the fisher catches less, than the small shore fisher. You can put two fisher in it, but they don't catch more than one. (And I don't think the other options of catch give more). I can agree, that lobster is no mass product, but if you keep the low production, I would suggest, that you increased the trade price (4?). I think it would be realistic, if they would be a real good export product.

Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 12, 2017, 07:57:15 AM
I played a little again yesterday.

I relaxed a bit; the food graph started to turn down (first picture), so I have put some effort, in increasing the farming. It didn't take long, until everything was back on track! :) Farming is indeed, a very powerful food producer. I make fields of 100-120 tiles and use one farmer, that's 700-800 food each. As long as there's land enough; farming is most efficient. But other food producers make more fun, so I will make a mixture. When I feel, that I'm a bit short on food; I will increase farming. If there's a lot, like now, I will make other things. I also buy a little food.  At the moment, the production is normally a few 1000 less than the consumption. I buy maple syrup for my alcohol production. The maple press doesn't work, so I sell the maple sap instead. Probably I would have done it, even if it had worked. If my notes are correct, the profit was very low.

As I said, I also play with the colonial buildings from @kid1293. I must ask you Kid; why does your windmill destroy food value; the value of the input is higher than the output. Why would anyone let such a building run? Not me! I will let my windmill stay there, as a decorative item, but I will buy flour, if I want to make bread.  :-\

I like the watchtowers from @RedKetchup. I can confess, I'm not very fond of the idea of "war elements" in Banished. But the watchtowers (and the cool butcher- and hospital tents) have to me no military function. It's a good alternative hunting tower. It's good balanced; it looks like, the average is a little less than a vanilla hunter, and that's good, because I think, they have no active area; so in theory, you can put them close to each other without losing production. What's fun, is that the production varies a lot; some years it's only pheasants and hares (each 20 meat), other years a lot of large bears and bison.

I will now write a little bit about your storage's @Necora. Don't get me wrong; I do like your mods! Maybe it doesn't seem that way; I always find something to complain about.  :-[ You've made some changes in what material could be stored in your barns in your upgrade. That means we have:

"on land"
1. food: cellar 5000
2. stockpile materials: storage 10 000
3. food+other "barn stuff" : small barn 8000
4. food+other "barn stuff": large barn 11 000

"on shore"
5. food: store 1000
6. other "barn stuff" 2000
7. food+other "barn stuff" 9000

1. I've talked about the cellars before. I like them very much. The idea of these small (but deep) cellars is great! I wouldn't mind, if they would take longer to build and if they would need some more stone but, it's still OK, the way they are.
2. This building is great! Nothing to complain about at all! It contains more than a stockpile of the same size but is not so huge, that it doest get full, if you produce a lot of material. Perfect! ;D I have no stockpiles in this game!
3. This barn was for "other barn stuff" only, before the upgrade. The things you can store in such a barn is often heavy, so the size wasn't that bad  The way it is now, also storing food, I find it contains much too much. Look at the first picture; it shows this tiny barn close to a large. The difference in how much these two buildings can store, isn't big. I would change it back to "other barn stuff" only.
4. Compared to other storage, this huge building doesn't contain much.
5. This is a very nice storage. The problem is, that it contains very little. Mine are full most of the time, so I don't build them anymore. They are useful only at the beginning of a game. It's a pity, because I like the look very much. I would increase the storage capacity, to make them more useful in a longer game.
6. This barn was, as far as I remember also for food before the upgrade. You don't produce anything that needs such a specialized storage on the docks. But maybe it could be useful close to a trading port, if you buy (and maybe sell) such materials. I don't think we need another food storage on the docks, but I would increase the storage capacity a little bit.
7. Among all your beautiful buildings, this is one of the nicest. I do like it! It's expensive to build (you need rope and lumber) and is rather big. But it doesn't contain much more than the tiny land barn (If I remember it right it's the same as a vanilla barn). It could be more.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: kid1293 on March 12, 2017, 01:21:28 PM
So sorry Nilla!
I don't remember this error. Must have been when comparing CC files
and writing the numbers for the mill. Now it should be better. With a small profit.

I don't know if it will be recognized in game if you just load the new version.
You maybe have to demolish the mill and rebuild.

(Hoppas det funkar nu, annars får du skälla på mig.) :)


Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 15, 2017, 03:52:54 AM
Det finns ingen orsak att skälla, Kid; bara att säga tack!  :) I didn´t even had to tear down the mill. It works perfect, as you said, a small profit.

I was a bit hesitant, wheather I wanted to try the new upgrades or not. My last game crashed, as I loaded the upgrade before this. That didn´t matter much but this game is nice, rather a keeper, I want to play a little bit longer. But yesterday I felt brave and upgraded. I´m happy to say, everything works fine. No crashes. I haven't demolished and rebuilt anything, except my full food storage on the shore. Maybe the new merchants don't arrive to my old trading port, but the old kind of merchants now bring material with the new flags, so it doesn't matter much.

There's not much new to tell. The game goes on like it has. I´m in year 36. The population has just passed 250. I was too busy doing other things, so I forgot to build enough schools. Now I have 2 uneducated. I guess they will chose professions, where they really do a lot of harm with their clumsy craft! ;)   >:(

Since I´m used to write loooong texts, I will write a little about how hard balancing is.

The maple boiler didn´t work in the last version. It does now; 20 maple sap and 2 charcoal make 8 maple syrup. If we look at it this way: With an input worth 28 you make 8 units food. If you sell the ingredients, you could buy 28 apples. A Banni doesn't care, if he eats maple syrup or apples. Why should we run such a boiler, "destroying" food?

Maybe, if we look at it in this way; maple syrup cost 4 in trade; so if you sell the maple syrup, it's actually a small win of (4*8-28=4/8=) 0,5 trade units for one maple syrup. I´m not 100 % sure of the annual production, because I was a bit short on charcoal, but I think it would be about 300. That means a maple boiler makes a profit of 150 each year, if you sell the syrup. Not much, he would do a lot better, if he was sent to an orchard or in the woods to collect apples, but at least not a loss. But this is also not the full truth.

I produce maple whiskey,(a decent profit of around 800 each year) and need maple syrup as a raw material. If I order it, it cost 5 to buy. So if we recalculate the maple press again as an alternative to ordered maple syrup it's (5*8-28=12/8=) 1,5 trade unit for each syrup, we can say, the boiler is a decent alternative, making a profit of 450 each year.

But it's not that simple (who would have thought that?)  :-\ Even if the whiskey need maple syrup, the people still use it as food, carrying it into their houses!   ;D

Could this be done in a to me better way? I mean yes. Look at @RedKetchup´s butcher tent. I produce roast from venison (you can process all other meat too). 1 venison makes 2 roast, the trade value of venison is 3, of roast is 4, the average annual production around 600. Same calculation again. The butcher produces a surplus of 300 food each year. If you chose to sell it, it's a profit of (4*2-3=5/2)=2,5 for each or 1500 each year. It's a lot, but still far less than a wood cutter.

Now you might say; it's unrealistic. How can a butcher make two from one and increase the amount of food? I´m not familiar with boiling maple sap, but I guess, that the amount decreases a lot, in the process and that's why, your 20 sap gives only 8 syrup, @Necora. But I say, think out of the box. A Banni doesn't count in kilos or liters, not even in pounds and gallons, like you "crazy people" from the other side of the big pond do! A butcher makes 2 pieces of roast out of 1 piece of meat like a maple boiler could make 2 jars of syrup out of 1 bucket of sap.

I´ll show you 2 pictures.

The first is an over all picture of most of my settlement. The second just a small impression. It makes fun to build the shore buildings on the small stream!
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: QueryEverything on March 15, 2017, 04:08:23 PM
@Nilla I do always enjoy your posts :)  Also, re the trader, I do think (it's been a couple of days, so forgive the memory), you need to demolish existing traders and then build new ones, I think I read that on @Necora download page.    Can't find where I read it, I must've dreamt it ...  carry on :D
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 18, 2017, 05:23:13 AM
I've played my nice little game some more years the same way, as I did the years before. I'll show you some screenshots and tell a little about my strategies in this game. Year 43, just passed 350 inhabitants.

First picture

This poor lady actually starved to death!  :'(

I've seen it before on jetty parts, not only on yours, @Necora: As long as the parts are not ready built, the Bannis have no problems at all, jumping up and down on the construction, swimming/walking in the water. But as soon as the part is done, they don't even dare to take the short jump to the shore. They wait until they are rescued from the other builders, finishing the neighbor part or, like this woman, they die!

Second picture

This is how the part of the settlement from my last picture, looks now. If you look at the profession menu, you may see, that I have a lot of these small shore fisher. I ususally place them in groups. I do like this "cluster", at the lake; a mixture of different sizes in different directions, not in a straight row. (A row along a small stream looks good, too). But this picture reminds me on real fishing huts on the west coast of Sweden. I spent one summer there as I was young; a summer job at  restaurant. Good memories! :)

The picture also shows the production menu. You can see, that I need to buy some food, mostly apples and maple syrup. This is iron woman, so my 350 people need a lot of food. If I think, I will be a bit short, I expand farming, otherwise I build these lovely shore fisher. A farmer produces double compared to a shore fisher. But of cause, farming needs space. The many shore fisher make, that the settlement stays small and compact, that's big advantage. First I produced a lot of seeweed (it gives the most food) but I've changed the most to scallops (the best protein). I realized, that I was short on proteins. The butchers had no raw material, because the people carried all venison into their homes, I even bought some nuts. I hope, I soon produce enough proteins.

The production menu also shows, that I sell firewood to buy logs, stones, iron and coal to build and make tools. You may see, that last year I needed more tools, than I produced, so I just built my second blacksmith. The small blacksmith from @Necora is nice and cheap but produces less than vanilla. It's perfect for the start but I have replaced it with the colonial blacksmith from Kid (It looks like it has vanilla values) and as I said, now a second.

Third picture


Another impression of the same area.

Fourth picture

Here I've built the shore fisher in rows. I'm a bit cautious, not blocking any rivers or streams. It might cause trouble by the merchants. You can see on the food graph, that I've built a lot of new fields. It also shows the "out of the row" purchase of nuts. As I said, I didn't buy the nuts, because I needed food, just because I was short on proteins. The store of food might be big, but really not that huge. It's not much more than one year's consumption. But I will not need any new fields for a while.

I see I wrote nothing about balancing this time. Hmm.......... I might get some withdrawal problems..... ;) Perhaps I should write a little more later this afternoon.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 20, 2017, 06:21:28 AM
I have no new pictures to show, so I will write a bit more about balancing.  :-\ There's another aspect of balancing, to which I haven't said anything, yet. To my opinion, modders who make a product chain, not only have to think about a reasonable production/profit from each building. (I've written a lot about that) but also think about the balancing between the buildings. I'll explain what I mean taking @Necoras buildings as an example.

Let's start with something easy:

A trapper catches around 100 wild animal each year. These wild animals are useless as they are. (Not good to sell, because they are only worth 1 and that´s OK, who wants to buy dead animals). A skinner has to process them to something useful. He makes 4 different products, which one seems to be random. From each wild animal, he can produce 6 game, 6 feather, 6 eggs or 3 furs. My skinner processes about 30 wild animals each year. That means; for each trapper, you'll need at least 3 skinner to process the wild animals. Is this reasonable? 

I would prefere, that 1 skinner could take care of all wild animals a trapper catches or maybe even one skinner for 2 trappers.

(I'm not even sure that you'll need 2 profession. A vanilla hunter can process the deer to venison and leather. It's really strange, that you need a skinner to produce eggs. But maybe, it make sense to have a separate profession for the expensive and complicated furs. I would find it better, if the trapper collected the eggs himself. It would also give the trapper a well needed higher productivity. A skinner could then make furs and maybe some meat (much of the meat from fur animals is, as far as I know, not eaten, but I guess there might be some). I'm not sure about the feather. If feather at all, maybe some valuable down from sea birds, that could be used by a tailor for warm clothes or be sold for a profit, not cheap common feathers. This has nothing to do with the balancing I wanted to talk about, just some other thoughts.)

If we go to the maple prodcuts it's getting more complicated.

The special gatherer in the maple forest collects maple sap. In one forest 2 gatherers gets an average of about 300 maple sap each year.

You can make maple syrup from maple sap using carcoal. A maple boiler makes 8 maple syrup from 20 maple sap. It can produce 300 maple syrup each year (maybe more?). That means one maple boiler needs 300/8*20=750 maple sap each year. To run it continuously, you'll need the sap from 5 gatherers in 3 maple foresters.

To make maple syrup as food is very bad business, but you can process it further to cider or whiskey with a reasonable profit. You can't prevent, that some maple syrup is carried into the houses, so one maple boiler doesn't produce enough, to support one cider press (1 syrup for 1 cider) the whole year.But if you have enough grain (1300=2 farmers), it can be enough, to make whiskey (½ syrup for 1 whiskey) For whiskey we will also need charcoal and that's another production chain.

Charcoal is made from pine bough (logs is also possible, but bad business). 2 gatherers in a pine forest collects enough bough to support 2½ charcoaler. 2 charcoaler make enough, to run one maple press and one whiskey boiler, but it will not be enough, if you also want to process the pine resin from the same forest to turpentine.

Conclusion:

If you want to run these nice new forests and use its raw material in a way, that makes sense, you'll need:

3 maple forests with 2 gatherers in each
2 pine forests with 2 gatherers in each
1 maple boiler
1 whiskey still
5 charcoaler
5 turpentine stills
5 trapper (one in each forest)
15 skinner

As you can see, it´s possible but I would like it to be easier. Maybe something like this:

1 maple forests with 2 gatherers in each
1 pine forests with 2 gatherers in each
1 maple boiler
1 whiskey still
1 charcoaler
1 turpentine still
2 trapper (one in each forest)
1 skinner
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 20, 2017, 10:12:45 AM
@Nilla I like the little dock areas you made, they look cool.

Regarding Trapper - The hunter kills a deer, and animals in game are allowed to drop/produce many resources (same as pasture animals) so you can get your venison and leather from one kill. I don't know how to animate, so I cannot add more wild animals even if I would want to. So the other option is to have them spawn in the forest as they do currently. So the wild animals are not hunted like deer, they are harvested like berries. The downside is you can only have 1 resource produced from each thing this way, not multiple ones like the animals. So I could have either 1 mesh/resource for each type of thing the trapper will produce, which is how I originally had it, or have the trapper collect a generic resource which is processed by the skinner into different wild foods/products. It adds an annoying extra step, but it is probably best, other wise it is hard to balance what the forest produces if there are loads of other things being spawned along with your usual fruits etc.

I purposely made them useless for trade, to encourage people to process them. I can play around with the production of the skinner, to make furs rare and others more common, so you can increase the output of it and not get overpowered with lots of high value fur.

Maple is a hard one because I initially wanted to keep production low, but as you say it is a food. Banished does not handle food very well, maple sap is currently a fruit. I don't like it as a food at all, I would love an extra category like 'luxury food' or something, 'sugars' which does not count as one of the 5 a day that the bannies need, but gives a happiness boost or something. I could make it a luxury item, but then it is only consumed in taverns. Either that, or I make it inedible and only useful for making other products, which might not be a bad thing. Either way, I really don't like it as a food, same with sugar and things.

Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: kid1293 on March 20, 2017, 10:23:30 AM
@Necora
Correct me if I'm wrong -  Maple sap is not really food. It's a middle-product on it's way
to become food? In that case you should definitely make it inedible.

The furs are, as far as we have come with animating animals, only of imaginary origin.
You could have a lot of static animals be that would be boring. So a generic product
taken to the skinner is probably best. Why not put some time in the thought of making
traps as visible items? The trapper 'plants' traps and then 'harvest' furs...  ;)
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 20, 2017, 10:28:18 AM
gm NILLA. the balancing of these new mini-mods seems to be debatable. some of the mods over-produce in relation to their size. and as you have found the other side of the debate is when they produce in relation to their size then its low per worker. i like to use some of these mods to add variety to the diets. more like i think people would do  realistically. if you was stranded living in an area without  stores, you would not want to eat all of one type food either. but i don't approve of it becoming a cheat to where you just fill barns constantly either. i do try to get my food workers to average out about 3-500 food each.
   i will argue with your numbers a bit though. the maple gatherer also finds apples and cranberry. did you add that in? when you say 2 gatherers,do you mean 2 caches or 2 at 1 location? normally 2 at one location doesn't double the output. very seldom will i put 2 workers at 1 location. i do on crops if i double the field size to 20x10 or so. the other time i will add the 2nd worker is if my food is dropping too fast.
    i don't leave the maple forester planting and cutting constantly. i let him cut old trees and plant the maple and apples for a few years usually 3-5. just enough to get a good growth. then i disable the forester. so that may affect my numbers. i am using the forget about orchard mod.my immortal tree mod is not active. my maple cache is pulling about 250 maple but also 300-400 aples +blueberry and cranberry. overall total near 1000. true that doesn't keep the boiler busy all year. when banis aren't busy they become laborers to help with clearing land for expansion. plus when the banis have down-time they can restock their homes. the trapper in that forest is only getting 15-20 animlas. there are some buildings on the edge of the circle but 75% is trees.together with the skinner the production is lousey but i have furs and feathers.
    the furs i use to make coats but i don't need many feathers.i can't just dig a hole and throw the feathers away so later i will have to make survival coats.without Cc the only thing you can do is dump the feathers thru the trader for 0. one problem i noticed with NECORA'S set is none of the tailors seem to use the furs. i built RED's training camp tailor.
     the boiler has a firewood option which you already have. why would you use charcoal? i didn't build a cider press yet. the banis eat the apples so i don't have enough extras.
    the overall total on the forest with 1 maple cache,1 boiler,1 trapper,and 1 skinner is about 1000 fgood plus some textiles. considering the boiler and skinner only work half a year i am getting roughly 300 food per worker. i also have 2 of RED's tower hunters on the outer edges of the forest. my food per worker is about right. my textiles might be low even including the leather. however,the banis have enough clothes stored so they aren't running low.
     i just started to plant a pine forest and plan to add more buildings then.by playing this way i do use the mini foresters to supply logs for firewood.
    i agree that finding a balance with these mini type mods is tough. its a fineline between overproducing based on their size and not producing enough. personally i try not to trade items the banis need. i will do even swaps of vegetables the banis have farmed for grains and variety. i try to use clothing,ale or cider,and candles or furniture. i mainly try to trade for seeds and then livestock.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 20, 2017, 02:49:13 PM
@kid1293 yup maple sap is already an inedible food (fruit in fact) but it is the maple syrup which is the one I'm not so sure about. Edible or no?

Re. furs, I am currently doing an over haul of the natural resources in the Pine Set to improve the visuals, so yes traps would be an interesting one to add there for the wild animals. I also want to make a start condition with just maritimes trees and resources, so will add some more interesting things there as well.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: QueryEverything on March 20, 2017, 03:47:42 PM
Quote from: Nilla on March 20, 2017, 06:21:28 AM
... A trapper catches around 100 wild animal each year. These wild animals are useless as they are. (Not good to sell, because they are only worth 1 and that´s OK, who wants to buy dead animals). A skinner has to process them to something useful. He makes 4 different products, which one seems to be random. From each wild animal, he can produce 6 game, 6 feather, 6 eggs or 3 furs. My skinner processes about 30 wild animals each year. That means; for each trapper, you'll need at least 3 skinner to process the wild animals. Is this reasonable? 

I had thought about the eggs (I got a pleasant surprise when I was able to build a chicken pen from the dock set because I had eggs. Completely forgot about them in this mod @Necora ;)  Ooops.), that rather than from the skinner, they are dropped directly from the forester source, for the gatherer to find?  X berries; x apples; x ABC; x eggs
It would seem reasonable to me that gatherers would find abandoned nests, disturbed nests etc, and be able to gather the eggs from low lying nests :) 

Which of course, may be one of the issues you already mentioned, about the resource drops.  I'd be happy to have my eggs handled differently than the other animal by-products that the skinner produces.

I must be hungry, my focus is on the eggs ...  haha ;)

Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Tom Sawyer on March 20, 2017, 04:18:04 PM
Quote from: kid1293 on March 20, 2017, 10:23:30 AM
Why not put some time in the thought of making traps as visible items? The trapper 'plants' traps and then 'harvest' furs...  ;)

This idea is good and I played around with the forester function for my trapper some time ago but they did strange things and I could not solve it. One thing was that they also harvest trees and gather stones and so on. Not so cool as trapper. Another thing were far too much planted "traps" and I found no way to balance it. They also use a weird hoe ... :-X
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: kid1293 on March 21, 2017, 01:35:05 AM

Yes, they keep their profession but clear out trees and stones where they want to plant.
Why no make 'camouflaged' traps in form of several different bushes and trees? Should look natural.
You can make them with billboards (flowers in summer and moving) and not dependent on temperature.
Then your trapper can work all year and the forest looks like a forest, not an alien landscape. :)
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 21, 2017, 09:44:38 AM
what controls how many wild animals are added to the circle per year? if you build a trapper on the map by itself will the animals appear so he can collect them?? if so why does my trapper only find about 20 each year?some years closer to 10.also am i wrong in how the forests work? the forester plants the trees and then the trees produce the pine boughs and resin.and this forest would continue to produce as long as the trees aren't cut down. reason i ask is my pine numbers seem to be low and 1 year i didn't get any pine,just flax and fungus.my maple cache seems to be working though its production is down to 4-500 each year.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 21, 2017, 09:49:35 AM
@Necora! The dock areas look cool, because you made cool buildings! My contribution is very small. :)

I know, that there are a lot of limitations in what's possible by modding. I'm apologizing, if I suggest something that can't be done. I know nothing about, how it is to work with this, as it seems, limited modkit. And I do admire you all, who succeed in making such good things. As, always; take my comments for what they are: The thoughts of an old lady with some experience but limited knowledge.  :-\

And yes, @Necora, your way to adapt to these difficulties, when it comes to the trapper, do work. A second profession, to make mainly furs is alright. I think we can live with the side effect; that the trapper needs a second person to check, if the eggs are alright. We use to buy eggs from a neighbor, who has some hens as hobby. She always look at the eggs under a special light, to see if they are alright and not "fertilized". We can say; that's what the skinner does with the eggs the trapper brings.  ;D But the suggestion from @QueryEverything; that gatherers collect eggs, could work as well.

@brads3 , I haven't seen you writing comments in my blogs for a while. I thought you might have bin angry, after I called you a politician some time ago.  :-[  Even if it's not always easy for an elder person to read your modern language, it's worth the effort. I'm glad to see you back! :)

But I think you're making a mistake by closing your forester after planting. To my experience; that gives less food from the gatherer. I'm not 100% sure when it comes to the maple forest but I guess, it's about the same as in a vanilla. I've studied these forests a lot. To my experience, you get the most from a vanilla gatherer in a forest with 3 foresters cutting and planting, 2 isn't much different. With 4 foresters you get a bit less, as well with 1. But you get the considerably less from the gatherer if, you have a thick forest, witout any foresters (or even worse with foresters planting only). I don't know why, but I've always thought, that if the forest is too thick, there's not enough room for fruit to grow, and the gatherer have to walk around all these trees, that it takes longer to find something useful. I know, there is one "Banished myth" that says, that food only spawn on mature trees. But that's not true. You can see it very good at a freshly planted maple or pine forest. (There's a lot of these "truths" out there, since the earliest Banished days, that often proves to be wrong, if you look carefully)

To a second worker (or 3 or 4) in the same building; yes, I have noticed, too, that sometimes it doesn't bring much more to put more workers in the same building, but often it actually does.  And these 2 gatherers in a maple forest, certainly bring much more than 1. I have 2 maple forests, in each 2 gatherers are busy collecting different fruit. It varies a lot between different years, how much is collected. Last years production was:

Apples           1105  1625
Blueberries     374    352
Cranberries     532   420
Maple sap       288    374

And Brads you are so right; i do realize, that it's very hard to balance new production sites; to make them produce enough but not too much, to make chains fit in a way I wrote in my last thread. I do feel a bit bad about criticising as much as I do. Necora´s mods are great, they do work, the way they are balanced. But to me, there are a few things, that could be improved to make it even more enjoyable for a player like me.


Maple syrup inedible:

I dislike the principle of inedible food ! Why on earth should people starve, when the barns are full of food, that some dictator has decided; this is not for you! I think, I understand why someone came on this, to me weird idea in the first place; it's easier to run production chains, without the disturbance of people carrying the rawmaterial into their homes. But beside the weird thought, I find it's some kind of cheat.

Maple sap is OK. I don't think it's a food in real life. Maple syrup can maybe be compared to honey. In real, both are rather spices, than basic nourishment, but I wouldn't take any of it away from the citizens, even if it would make the production of cider and whiskey easier.

A luxury? It would have bin a good idea, if luxury products had an influence on the people, that they actually would have bin happier, healthier, more productive, more reproductive............ if they had access to some luxury goods. But as it is now? Please not.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 21, 2017, 10:02:28 AM
I just saw what you wrote @brads3. I guess that the output of your gatherers would increase on long term, if you started your foresters again. At least I would try that.

The pine forest give much less than the maple forest. I just made a screenshot. It shows my second pine forest. It's not fully grown, so it's the one with less resources harvested. 1 forester has worked there for some years alone, starting the maple forest up. He just got a college. There has been 2 gatherers for some time.

My trapper had 84 animals last year. That, too varies a lot, I have seen more than 120 but also something like 60.

Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 21, 2017, 03:06:47 PM
NILLA,i am sorry you thought i was upset. i wasn't at all. i was harrassing you at the time even. didn't think either of us was intending to be mean. for a while i had the older versions of NECORA's mods. up til recently i was behind like 2 versions. since the 1.07 and the community button,there seemed to be problems with mods. i tried to wait for bugs to be worked out also.
   i agree with you on the inedible foods. i think NECORA ment just the sap though. he does take ideas and criticism well too. plus you are critical of numbers not his mods or him. NILLA ,these posts are confusing me. i don't think it is you i must be tired.i am going to grab dinner and a shower and try to argue with those ideas and numbers later.
  what do i write that you don't understand? i have tried to not short type and use full words and sentences. i even take time to think and reword thoughts so they should make sence. should i use smaller words??? hmmm
  ohhhh be careful using the word "dictator". TOM about threw me out of the north and told me to swim to florida after he tarred and feathered me for that.i was only joking at the time too. i don't think he is still mad at me though.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Tom Sawyer on March 21, 2017, 04:11:33 PM
You swam up to Florida because of me? Why? I was not mad, not even because of dictator which does not sound very funny where I come from.^^ I also have no feathers in my mod... thats Necora. And tar comes earliest in the new version. Maybe you should be more careful then. ;D
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 21, 2017, 05:26:59 PM
lol i have tried dear sir.<<<bows
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 21, 2017, 06:07:30 PM
lets see if i can get my brain to work for a minute.NILLA,i argue with you to show a different approach to using the mods.if you are right with your explanation then the game is wrong. It has been only recently that i tried planting forests and not leave the forester alone to cut logs for firewood.
     the new CC journey has foresters for orchard fruit trees. i planted apples,maples,walnuts ,and some grapes with somewhat overlapping circles. i was hoping for a forest with some wild apple trees and a field of grapes near the center where i planned to build a woodland town center. it would have worked better if the dang grape planter was smart enough to plant grapes where land had already been cleared. these banis never do what we want. i rotated the forester from 1 to the other every 3-5 years.it took a while to get this planted and some growth from the trees. the vanilla gatherer works to harvest all this.i had 1 gatherer in the middle of the forest with good production numbers. apples,maple sap,grapes,and walnuts mixed with the usual gatherer items.i did not see a drop off on anything. since the gatherer window doesn't have enough spaces to show all the items collected, i would have had more than the numbers would show.i don't think i had the forever-tree mod on then either.
   in reality,i can take you to maple trees that the squirrels planted many many years ago and they produced sap when i was a kid. and if we tap those trees i assure you we will have sap. those trees are smart enough to produce sap with nooo help at all.  the pines and apples and other trees will grow that way too.
and the animales won't care much 1 way or the other about how old or young the trees are.beavers will cut them down,deer will hide in them. Turkeys and pheasants might like them more dense,but foxes will prefer the meadows with them to chase fieldmice in. now berry bushes won't grow as well under the trees. they prefer the edges where they get more sunlight.
  once the initial trees are planted they should grow and mature by themself. therefore they should produce constistently after the trees have some growth to them. so if it doesn't work that way the game is wrong. that isn't NECORA's fault. he can only do what the game lets him do. that is why i asked what controls the amounts of items to the gatherers. to me a gatherer placed in the middle of town by itself should propogate berry bushes and find items without a forester at all.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 22, 2017, 05:31:12 AM
@brads3; I can say nothing about the CC foresters for orchard trees. I haven't tried it and don't know how it works. What I said, is based on vanilla forester/gatherer. You seems to be upset, that a natural forest doesn't give as much food/resources as a forest, that's tended by foresters. Once again, I must argue withe you @brads. ;) :-[

Opposite to many other things in Banished, that's how it works in life too. At least if the forestry is made in a sustainable way. Of cause a wild, unattended forest produce wild food and animals live there in big diversity, but if it's attended in the right way, it can produce more. The conditions for useful plants and animals could be improved, just the way it is in Banished. Of cause, if you look at the modern, industrial, monocultured wood industry of a forest, it's not the case, the same thing we probably would see in Banished as well: If we could put 10 foresters into the cabin, I'm pretty sure, there would be very little food to collect in that area.

But not only arguing, I must make a compliment to you, as well Brads: I do notice that you're making big efforts, writing for us elder people. It's a big difference from how it once was. I do understand what you write, I did before as well, but it took some time. I appreciate your efforts! :)

Perhaps we should all be careful: Necora doesn't have tar, but pitch and feathers could work as well.  :o I´promise I will be nice! From now on!  ;D ;)

I got another idea yesterday, that might explain the few animals your trapper gets, Brads. As I've said; my trapper caught much more wild animals, than my only skinner could process. I solved this by letting the trapper work a year or two, then closing his shop some years, until new animals were needed. If I've understood it right, the wild animals "spawn" like mushrooms in the forest. I don't know, how often a new animal apperas and how long it stays, if it's not "picked". I guess; when a trapper first get into the forest, he finds a lot of animals, that have bin there for some time. But once these are "harvested", not enough new animals appears, to keep up this high production. I guess this is another difficult balancing problem.

I tested this theory yesterday, and I can say; yes it's a part of the explanation, but maybe not the whole truth. I let the trapper run continuously another 5 years. I also built a second trapper, to see what happens at the beginning. And yes, the production gets down. The yearly production of the original trapper was 84-72-48-62-62-48. The second trapper: 116-70-66-96-56. You can see,  that the yearly production gets down, if you let the trapper work continuously, but the variation between the years is very large. I can't explain that. It does explain my estimated 100, but not your 10 animals from the trapper each year, Brads.

I didn't make one screenshot yesterday. There's not much new to show. Year 49, 470 prosperous inhabitants. It's quite obvious, how your mod saves building area. Look at the map up in the left corner on the screenshot, I just made: It's a medium map, maybe 1/5 of the map is used. There are forests and fields, not only dull export industry. I can really recommend this mod to people, who have slow computers, but still want to build large settlements. (If you didn't knew this; small maps causes less lags, than large on slow computers, at least on my old one)

I killed the first hunter in the tower in the front of the picture.  :'( Somehow she could enter it, but as she wanted to get down, to get home and grab some food, she couldn't leave because the ladder ends in the water. (Don't understand how she got there in the first place) Stupid as I am, I also killed several obedient builders, who followed my first orders of demolishing. They, too climbed the ladder but couldn't get down. Finally, I got the idea of the jetty. Why didn´t I think about it in the first place. :-[
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 22, 2017, 09:10:39 AM
i told you i was tired when i read those posts last night so if i said something that didn't make sence you all would ignore it. i didn't sleep well either so my brain still isn't as awake as it should be. not sure why i just fel zoned out.  noo i am not upset with the game. somewhere between confused and frustrated. but i have been that way since the CC journey and then the changes after added to it. i changed some mods and regrouped my game to a 1.06 and a half. but that is a different story.
    we are going to have NECORA all messed up when he gets back from trying to plant trees. i am sure he has had fun trying cause every time he digs a hole the wind blows snow back in it.one minute NILLA argues with me and the next agrees. by now i think we are both confused. if my mind worked, i would go read the BL page and figure out some of how this mod works.
     1st lets split the forester from the gatherer and trapper,NILLA. to me they should work separately. your arguement as to a forest giving more if it is worked is debateable. yes a forester will work to maximize log output . however, in doing that they will weed out berry bushes and disturb animal habitats.
     in a vanilla game,a gatherer by itself should plant berry bushes and harvest foods by itself with no forester in the circle. is this wrong?? this brings up my question as to what decides how much stuff appears in the circle. is it the game and map itself??? it seems to be because while the banis are clearing land for crops and houses the 1st year they will find foods. this does not include "tree-fruits" or items.
      the trapper ,acting as a gatherer of animals instead of berries ,should produce animals without a forester also. yes you can outfish a lake or over hunt an area.so the idea that the trapper chases animals away or disturbs them is valid. however, the game was changed a long time ago so the banis are not environmentally stupid. the overhunting was fixed so the banis work with nature more so like the american indians did.
       now maple sap and apples are dependant on trees. we go back to your idea that a forester should work and get more from it. i will agree with you to a point. with a forester out there working,he should be planting more trees and weeding out less productive trees. there is a limit to how many trees a forest can have. taking your theory,  the area should produce more the 2nd and 3rd year than the 1st with a forester working. and this should continue foe several years. my theory is also right . x number of trees will produce x amount of apples and sap and this number should be fairly consistent from year to year depending on the weather. one factor that could affect this is the aging rate of the trees. the age mods affect the banis but i do not think they have any affect on nature. so what is the rate of growth or aging of trees in the game?? is it 25 years to 1 game year? this could cause a die off of trees earlier and therefore a drop in production.
        NECORA has control and can change items and rather they are dependant on trees or not. however the game has its own limits. in theory there are x number of spaces per circle and a gatherer covers x number of spaces per year to collect items.hmm did he change these numbers in his code?? i realize the circle is smaller but the production should have balanced in relation to that. say the circle is 75% of the original forester,then the gatherer should collect 75% as much as an original.hmm in that case,NILLA i should collect roughly half as much as your total unless my bani is leaveing items. that is quite possable since NECORA changed what the gatherer can collect.
      wow this post seems way too long. does it make sence??? did we solve anything? i think we might confuse NECORA as much as ourselves.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 22, 2017, 09:57:05 AM
NILLA,not to derail our discussion but did you go thru all  the trade values yet? i just started a trader and the turpentine seems low. it is equal to firewood but takes firewood or charcoal to make. that is a bad loss.my candles with 2 workers 1 for the bees and 1 to make the candles is 8,double the turpentine.and that doesn't include the honey bonus output either.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 22, 2017, 04:48:00 PM
NILLA,i did turn the foresters back on for a few years.i also added a forest outpost gatherer to the pine forest,since that is about the same size circle.i worker at the pine cache=740 overall total-352 blueberry,72 maple sap,260 apples,and 56 cranberry. that is with the forester turned back on for 2years.
with it on for 4years i have 1658-1100 apples,264 sap,154 blueberry,and 140 cranberry.i also have 38 wild animals from that forest,finally.the pine forester
with 4years extra growth gave 512 total-130 flax,144 resin,110 fungus,128 pine boughs. the hunter is stable at 600 venison. this trapper here still only got 15 animals.my added F.O. gatherer collected 384-148 blueberry,126 onion,88 mushrooms,and 22 roots.so that is 900 for both gatherers in the pine forest. i saved the game after i turned both those foresters back off. i want to see how bad the dropoff is tomorrow.
   comparing the pine and maple gatherers to the forest outposts gatherers that are about the same size circles,the numbers are close with the forester turned on.i think the apples pay out a lot per bucket which made those numbers look high. i think the map is generating vanilla fruits in the circle and with the forester on it changes them to NECORA's items.therefore the 2 sets of items are competing for the available space with the forester turned off.it doesn't even sound right but that is the way it looks. this may be coded where it can not be corrected. since the tree count stays the same, the forester should still yeild the same number of items.the only other idea i have is the gatherer,even though it is not a vanilla gatherer is affecting the items per space.
    not sure where but i sence a gremlin in the coding changing the items from NECORA's set to vanilla.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 23, 2017, 05:16:57 AM
I started a similar experiment as yours yesterday, @brads3. I have 2 pine and 2 maple forest, so I turned the foresters off in one of each. I hope, I can buy a bit more logs, to get along without these foresters. I only played three years without foresters but there is no dramatic drop in production, at least not yet. I have noted the numbers: maple forest 2854-2375 each year, pine forest 1367-880 The lowest values are actually both from my dense forests. The trapper hasn't shown any drop so far, they are both between 94 and 48. I will run it for some more years (or at least as long as I can manage without the extra logs.)

To your question about trade value and profit, I can say; yes, compared to vanilla buildings and those from from Red and Kid, most of Necora´s have a low production and a low profit, but mostly, it's some profit.

I made some notes of the production in my buildings in this settlement. I hope, I don't mix anything up. My notes are not always 100% readable.  :-[ :-\

Let's look at the pine forest and its products. Except my favourites (in life, I use to pick them myself); the chanterelle and maybe flax for ropes, nothing else of it's resources could be used by your Bannis, they are export goods, in one way or another.

2 gatherers collected as average in my forests the last few years :
Pine resin          336     
Pine bough          286
Chanterelle       383
Flax                   111 (worth 222 in trade)

If you eat the chanterelle and sell the rest, it's a value of 383 (food) + 884 (trade) or around 630 each for a gatherer in a pine forest

I process pine bough to charcoal, I need them for the maple products. You can also make pine pitch but that's for export only and the production numbers are about the same as charcoal, so I prefere the charcoal. (Maybe it's also better, not to have any pitch for all those feathers, that's produced  ;D, who knows what will happen? ) My charcoaler produced as average around 130 charcoal (152-104) each year. 3 pine bough gives 4 charcoal, each worth 4. That means: input 3, output 16, profit 13 for 4 charcoal or 3,25 for each or 422 for one worker. To make 130 charcoal, you need 97 bough. To process all of the pine bough from 2 gatherers, you'll need about 3 coaler.

The pine resin could be processed to turpentine. It has no use (at the present? ) for the Bannis. It's export only. My still produced as average around 140 (128-152) turpentine each year. 3 pine resin and 1 charcoal gives 4 turpentine, each worth 4. That means: input 7, output 16, profit 9 for 4 turpentine or 2,25 for each or 315 for one worker. To make 140 turpentine, you'll need 105 resin and 35 charcoal. To process all resin from 2 gatherer, you'll need about 3 stills.

From flax you can make rope, twine or linen. You'll need a few rope, to build some jetty buildings, but the other products are only export. I hope that the tailor will be able to make linen clothes in the next version of your mod, @Necora . To make 2 ropes, you'll need 175 flax. That means, that every rope has a production cost of 175. You can buy (cheap import) rope for 35 ???, so I will not write more about this. My sweet little spinner produces average 65 (56-72) twine each year. 5 flax gives 4 twine, each worth 6. That means: input 10, output 24, profit 14 for 4 twine or 3,5 for each or 228 for one worker. To make 65 twine, you'll need 81 flax, so one spinner can process most of the flax from 2 gatherer. My weaver produces average 56 (52-60) linen each year. 7 flax gives 4 linen, worth 8. That means: input 14, output 32, profit 18 for 4 linen or 4,5 each or 252 for one worker. To make 56 linen you'll need 98 flax, so one weaver can process most of the flax from 2 gatherers.

Normally, I would not run an export production with these low values (200-300). In this game, I run one of each, just to test. And of cause, I sell the products and from time to time, when the stores get too full, I also sell a little flax and resin.

I run 5 charcoaler, but that I don't sell. I need it for my maple whiskey production. It gives a profit of about 1000 each year, with ordered maple syrup. If you don't count the woodchopper with vanilla values, who can make crazy, overpowered 3000 and the gatherers in the maple forest, who make around 1300, it's the most profitable of Necora´s buildings, as far as I have seen.

We can compare it with the tailor from Red, who makes fur coats, with a profit of 25 for each coat, with a production of 80-100 coat each year. It would be a profit of more than 2000 each year, if all of the coats could be sold. But they aren't. In fact, the people fancy these fur coats much too much, so not more than about the half, is actually carried into the trading port. You may say; half of 2000 is still good profit, but math isn't that simple. If only half of the coats are carried into the trading ports, it's not much profit to produce fur coats. ( If the tailor produce 100 fur coats, it will need 200 furs; value 4000. 50 coats are sold for 65 =3250, rest of the coats are used by the people. A warm coat has a value of 20, so if we add the value of 50 coats =1000, you'll get 4250, a trade profit of only 250. :-\) Now, I run this tailor anyway, if my people want fur coat, they can have them. No political correctness in this town!  ;D

Again, I want to say: Balancing is difficult. For a geek like me, it makes a lot of fun, to investigate the buildings this way. It's not easy to choose the right buildings, if you want to run the settlement efficient. No, let me correct myself, it is very easy! Make firewood! As much as you can! But of cause, that makes no fun.  :P

I made some screenshots yesterday, just to show you my dfferent forests. The thick dense, ones with the "sleeping foresters" and the "industrial" with 2 foresters. The look of the thick forests are indeed much nicer. The third picture shows a new forest. If I want to play with closing forests, I´ll need more logs, so I started 2 new forests. You can see very clear, that there are only tiny trees, but new resources. No need for mature trees, to get fruit and animals. You can also see all of the things, I have in my inventory.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Necora on March 23, 2017, 06:58:29 AM
@Nilla Now to clothing? Another can of worms! Haha. The short answer is yes, I am adding more. I am also changing rope, and thinking of adding twine and pitch to tools to make new steel category tools, like one with a nice twine handle and one treated with pitch to make them last longer and more durable. These more advanced things, however, might not be in the pine set as I wanted this to be a basic level set. So they will be added to the larger smithy and tailor in the sherbrooke set most likely. I don't plan on adding bigger and better buildings to the pine set. It was all initially to be one large mod, so breaking it down into smaller ones has been a challenge!

The longer discussion is that clothing is, IMO, an unfortunately limited aspect of the game. I can see why, this is after all an originally simple survival game that we have made into something that barely resembles the original, with increased trade, products, chains in various mods. This is fantastic, but we are really stretching what we can do.

With clothing, we are limited by the fact that there appear to be only two levels. They seem to be controlled by a hidden flag, 'Clothing' which we see and 'ClothingWarm' which seems to be a sub flag of clothing, rather like protein etc. is a sub flag of edible food. As we only have 2 types, we can only really have 2 trade values (unless there is a third I don't know about). A 100 value top quality fur coat will be used in the same way as a 20 value vanilla winter coat in the same category, just the same way that a fine mature 100 value cheese would still be eaten as just a 2 value cheese as it is still just a protein, the same way that a fine aged wine will be drunk the same as moonshine as it is still just a luxury. So introducing furs, which historically have a lot of value, is limited in game as to what you can actually do with the fur coat especially if you want to trade it. We can, of course, just increase the value of the fur coat like @RedKetchup has done, but at the basic level it will still be consumed by your bannies at the same rate as a lower value winter coat, as it has the same warmth benefit so the increased value does not represent the usefulness of the coat. Now, IMO, you should very much get a good trade return on clothing. After all, it is a highly consumed necessity, so if you do produce enough to trade, you should be rewarded for being a good mayor and making sure your citizens have enough good clothing that you can sell the left overs for a good price. Unfortunately, the value of clothing is not set up in such a way. We could really do with at least one if not two new levels of clothing to increase value and start combining things. What I would like to do is be able to make a range of simple clothing, linen undergarments, leather coat, breeches etc. that can be combined into a third, high value clothing option of full out fitters or something which would have a high trade value and warmth value and can also account for high value fur coats. I mean, currently, our bannies are running around in nothing but a leather coat, and that seems a bit mean! Maybe this will be the reward, a trade only clothing category that uses other clothing (and adds things like shoes and fur hats... their real valuable use of fur) to make something with a good return.

Compare clothing to tools. Tools, at least, we can change the quality of in the template file. So we can have a quality and trade value that are linked together, and have as many categories or types as we wish. It would be way better if we could do the same for clothing, actually change the quality/warmth provided value of individual cloths, so you could increase the warmth given by a fur coat to represent the value of it, and make it so is is consumed less by the bannies.

I am also trying to find ways to make some of these things more consumable, like rope for example. I can make the dory be consumed by a fisherman, who takes 1 dory out to sea and a month later comes back with 200 lobster or something. Doing this a few times a year should give a nice return of lobster and makes more of a use for rope and lumber rather than just for trade once you've built a couple of buildings.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 23, 2017, 09:39:51 AM
I can follow your thoughts @Necora and I agree, it's a pity about the clothes. It would have been nice, if there would be different kind of clothing, that would have a real influence on the game. Clothing is not so much different from luxury goods; it has very little impact on the gameplay. Unless you play the most harsh climate, you will hardly notice any difference, if people have warm clothes, normal clothes or no clothes at all!  :( 

So putting much effort in making a lot of different funny art of clothing, seems to be a waste of time: just another trading good! And I guess, there will probably be other more interesting trading goods to create. Of cause, you can set your own trading price, but as you say, the expensive fur coat isn't more valuable to the bani, than a simple coat of wool and leather. Same thing, you can let a baker bake a complicated birthday cake with 10 different ingredients worth 100 in trade. But if you label it grain, the Banni will grab some of these cakes and consume them, as likely as kernel of wheat. I've always wished, that there was a way to make food processing more valuable for the Banni, that he would need less, that unprocessed food can't be stored long, that processed food make the bani more productive or something like that. But as I understand; no one has found a way to "cheat" the game in a way like this.

What I really was asking for, when I asked about the linen clothes, was a way to make use of the linen cloth from the weaver and inderect of the flax from the gatherer. Now you have to sell it. It would be nice to have the possibility to make some vegan clothing, especially as the rawmaterial flax, is already there.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 23, 2017, 10:50:11 AM
wow,NILLA we play so much different. yet at times we agree and play similar.lol you tend to always have trouble with having enough logs.mine is usually enough food. with the aging mods ,you are 4-5 times as big. you seem to use trading a lot more than i do.i normally only trade for seeds and livestock.not that i play right.i debate that with myself lately. with CC i have too many merchants i don't need and you need them.
    i was looking at trade values wrong. i saw the price of item against item and didn't take into consideration the total output per building for a year. i use my candles and furniture,22 each, for trades. i also trade survival coats and hide coats after i build up wool and furs for the banis.way i see it is i already have logs so furniture makes sence. the bees give me food and the wax for candles is a free bonus. i don't buy food unless i really need it. i do even swaps for variety. lately i have started to send surplus food to the trader as a safety.
    i started the pine forest to get the charcoal for the cider press. the sap i can use firewood. that may or may not be profitable as you say.but it makes sence to use what i already have and save a step. i have tested NECORA's mods a few times but i know he has made changes. i don't see me having all those forests just to make turpenine to trade. i am surprised you need so much to keep the still busy making whiskey.i haven't built 1 yet since it reads i need grain. i just recently got sorghum seeds planted.
     you seem to like micro-managing the banis. i do that with adam and eve starts for a few years. after a few groups of nomads,i use a float method. i set workers to work knowing they will run out of materials or hit their max limits. then those workers automatically become laborers to help clear land. plus with this down-time they can stock their houses or move goods around. the only big problem to this is if farmers get too far away from their fields. if the sap boiler runs out of sap,he just becomes a laborer for a while.same with the pine workers. just a different way of playing and using the mods.
      you said with 2 workers or gatherers you get more. but are you getting double?? i always thought we agreed that 2 on the same building does not normally give you 2x the output? if the second worker is obnly giving you 75% of the first,then that same worker will give 100% on a different building.other than doubling field sizes, i seldom put 2 workers on 1 place.
  where is everyone else at??? this site has been quiet lately i thought it would have done that when they all were rewriting codes to the community icon. even ABANDONED quit telling us stories.i think QUERY is busy at BL.do hope they are all ok.
   
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 24, 2017, 04:13:50 AM
Yes, at times we do agree @brads3 ! :)

And of cause, since you play with real time aging:The first 50 years or so, there are more children and students, than in my vanilla aging and more mouths to feed for the adults. Since I play 4 times your speed, I need to build 4 times as much as you and need a lot of logs (and other building materials). And you are right, the CC merchants are very annoying. I wouldn't need many of them either. I use to buy building materials. I need a lot of it and avoid to build mines and quarries (ugly with a low productivity) and if I played CC, I would also buy most of the advanced building materials, too. Like Necora´s rope, they are mostly a loss to produce yourself.  I also use to buy some food, not that I use to have too little of it, more to balance the diet. And of cause, like you at the beginning seeds and animals.

It's right, you can't look at the trade values only, when you chose a good trading product. A high price isn't always the same as a good profit. The highest profit from one worker, that I have seen is the CC charcoalburner; a product with a low price. It's only worth 3, but it needs very little raw material (1 log gives you 11 charcoal, if I remember right) and the productivity is huge (more than 2000 each year.) That means a profit of around 6000! I haven't played the latest version of CC, so this might have changed. The same, what I will say about your precious candles: last time I played CC, candles wasn't a good trading product. It's not a loss to produce, but you need a lot a wax and the productivity is low, so the annual profit was less than 100. Of cause the best trading good is something, you don't need yourself; like the beeswax, but if the production numbers haven't changed, it's better to sell the wax and let the candlemaker go fishing. (or work as a second gatherer) ;)

I use to micromanage a lot in the North. In this game not so much; only if I have too much of something, like the wild animals, I might turn the trapper on and off every couple of years. As the lovely small houses only could hold a family of 3, I let the people swap houses, to get more children. I sometimes change the products I sell in the trading ports: Necoras mods have many products you can't use (yet) but the space in the small port is limited, so I sell one of these spare things at the time. And sometimes I change the production of some fields or of some of the shore fisher, so maybe you're right. I do micromanage more than I though, also in this game.  :-\

My experience is, you can't say, how much more a second (or 3 or 4) worker in a site gives. It's very different. It can be between 100% and 0. I can only recommend, to check it out. A good strategy is to start with just one (or 2 if it's a vanilla gatherer or fisher for 4 workers) and if you suddenly realize, that you need more food, it's faster to increase the number of workers in an existing site, than build a new.

I almost forgot; I played a few more years to study my forests and yes; the production in the dense forests is a little bit lower, but not so much, that it explains your numbers. The last 3 years the total average production was; pine forest; 810/1126, maple forest: 2460/2750. For the trapper it's hard to see a difference. It varies a lot and is low in both forests, (average 48). For some reason I don't understand, the dense pine forest makes 28% less, the dense maple forest only 10%. There must be some other reason, that yours give so little. Are all stones, iron and vanilla trees cleared out of the forest? Is the circle of the forest limited from buildings, mountains.....? Do you have enough free laborers to carry the stuff out of the woods or must the gatherers/trappers do it themselves? Is there enough room in close barns? Do the workers live far away or close? Many things can have an influence on productivity. Probably more than if there's an active forester in the forest or not.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: brads3 on March 24, 2017, 08:28:24 AM
after all that testing,we still don't have a solid answere.you still say to leave the foresters on.and i still say i shouldn't have to.lol i did go back a few pages and reread some of your notes. to get a good output i need to let the trees grow longer. leave the foresters on for 8-10 years should give good outputs. i do think a FO gatherer added  to the pine forester helps. i don't want to risk it and add 1 to the maple. i actually wonder if the vanilla items and NECORA's compete for spaces. my trappers did improve . like you,the skinner doesn't keep up so i have a surplus of wild animals.
    funny you should mention the CC stacks burner,i noticed a glitch yesterday with that.was using it to make furnace fuel to process iron.NECORA's mods changed the charcoal tag so the burner won't work.i'll have to move his mods below CC. minor adjustment.i agree with you on the CC production chains. they can be overwhelming and you always end up with too many of various items. i don;t think it was designed to balance.
     since the CC journey and then the community icon button,i haven't figured out my own game play.i have ran lots of tests. as i am watching checking numbers i slow down my play. even this game i have 15 laborers more than i should and that many houses short of where i should be. i wasn't running short of anything other than the iron glitch. i get where i feel like i am fumbling around and can't get into a rythm. like i am losing my focus i guess.not sure why.
         i upgraded to the 1.07 but left most mods as 1.06. the CC journey was just before the 1.07. i have only added a couple mods to the community icon.
the way i set my game and mod order works good. i have to move the CC up above NECORA's and i might turn on the immortal tree mod to see if it helps these forests.
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 24, 2017, 09:59:53 AM
I'm sorry Brads, if I influenced you, to look too much on the numbers.  :-[  It's my way of playing, I know, it's not for everyone. And I'm sure, you're right about CC. It's not designed to be balanced. But still it works. If you enjoy playing it, don't look too much into the numbers. Make what you like to make, produce what you feel right. The way I see it, some buildings are terribly overpowered, others make a huge  loss, but it doesn't really matter. Let the "good one" support the people, and you can afford to "play around" with the "bad". It works. The main thing is, that you enjoy the game. :)
Title: Re: Testing Necora´s Canadian mods
Post by: Nilla on March 25, 2017, 09:57:59 AM
I have decided to leave Monstowns. It's a good town. It will do very well without me.

A summary of my testing. I like Necora´s mods. The design has its own personal look; very nice and sweet. I also very much like the Canadian theme, with special products and new chains. It's a WIP. There are some "lose ends"; products, that can only be used for trade, so far. The thing I've written most about; the balancing, isn't as bad as my long texts might imply. But of cause, some adjustments here and there, could give an improvement. But I think, it's important, for you @Necora and for every other modder, that you have some kind of thought, when you set the production numbers and trade value of a product. What should the output be, related to outer buildings? What is the use of this product? Does it replace anything? Is it harder or easier to produce my way? Is it hard to get the rawmaterial? ......  I do realize, that it's not easy, to set the right numbers, even if you have something in mind. That it needs a lot of testing. If you want to, I would be pleased to test your future expansions!