irrelevant - Sink Mill: trying for 5000, got 6000 instead

[irrelevant]

Well, here's something I've never seen. This field of squash didn't get harvested, and it didn't die back over the (apparently) very mild winter. What will happen now that it's spring?

[Nilla]

I had that once. Nothing happened. I had to demolish that field.

31 trading ports. Hmm. To my experience you can support about 120 people with one trading port, if you use it full. Your 31 (or soon 32) ports will than support 3500-4000 with trade. That means you must produce 300 000 -350 000 food each year. I can't see the size of the fields but I don't think your fields are that big.

I have one suggestion to increase the farming area; demolish some of the roads in between. They are useful at the beginning, when you only have one farmer. But I suppose you have people enough to put 3 or 4 farmers on each filed, so they have time to walk a little bit longer/ slower. The area is more important as fields.

[Trizeropz]

i have one suggestion too. if i would go back in time and try it again i would buy 30k tools and cloth and demolish all tailor and blacksmith instantly. its expensive at first. but if you think about the space you get out of it for crops n stuff for the next 10-15 years, its totally worth

[irrelevant]

@Nilla once again, we have the same idea! I was thinking about removing the roads between the fields as I was driving to work this morning. Lots of wasted space there.

The fields mostly are 120-tile. Food production currently is ~285k. With the roads gone from between fields, perhaps another 30-35k. The roads bordering the barn/house strips will have to remain.

[irrelevant]

i have one suggestion too. if i would go back in time and try it again i would buy 30k tools and cloth and demolish all tailor and blacksmith instantly. its expensive at first. but if you think about the space you get out of it for crops n stuff for the next 10-15 years, its totally worth

That is something I may do eventually, but for now I need the coats and tools for trade to buy food and stone (in addition to the logs, iron, and wool to make more tools and coats). One coat buys 1 wool to make another coat, plus 9 food. Two tools buy one log and one iron to make two more tools, plus one stone or 8 food.

Also, the space those buildings free up will be inefficient to use for farms because of how they are sited. Most of them are adjacent to markets and not adjacent to each other, so those would make 4x8 and 5x8 farms, not very useful (can you even make farms that small?). But I could replace each one with two houses (each one has a road at each end so one of those roads can be recovered as well). That would allow me to preserve more of the pastures longer. I'd like to keep the pastures as long as I can because even though each one produces only about 600 mutton, I then use the mutton to by 3x that quantity of nuts. Doesn't sound like much but it is ~35-40k per year.

[irrelevant]

One big problem is the food limit! If I go over 1000k the farms cease production. I am bumping up against that limit now, and have to be careful of what I buy and when I buy it. It doesn't stay over 900k for long, but interfering with the harvest even one time would be a disaster.

It's ironic that relying so heavily on farming is preventing me from stockpiling a huge food supply!

[Nilla]

 

That limit of 999999 was not made in thoughts of 5000+ inhabitants. Actually it's less than 2 years food consumption.

[irrelevant]

Indeed it was not! Course you can circumvent the limit by buying all your food instead of producing it. How many TPs would that require for 7000??

[irrelevant]

Year 71 harvest is complete and many of the roads are gone. I notice that guys are now taking shortcuts across the fields in great droves. This reminds me of my first big town, which was the last one I made without roads surrounding all fields. Guys would walk across the fields regardless of crops being planted, with the result that many fields had wide cropless swaths worn into them. I need to be sure to leave some roads in high traffic areas (eg. at the ends of tunnels) so this doesn't happen in Sink Mill.

Also, since I am essentially going to be destroying all my fields and making new ones, I need to do them in small clusters. Pause, unassign workers from a few fields and destroy them, create new ones in their place, reassign workers, and unpause briefly before going on to the next cluster. What I don't want is a situation where I have to assign large numbers of farmers simultaneously; that could result in a map-wide farmer shuffle, and mass confusion come planting time.

[irrelevant]

Halfway through the farm project. "I have a bad feeling about this."

That's why I make so many saves 

[Nilla]

So,you're the film guy? (I had to google that quote, because I somehow knew it, but couldn't put it on the right place) I'm the music girl! So if I make some quotes, it's probably some 60-70 ies song!

Do you really mean that crop is destroyed if people walk across the fields? I have never seen that. As far as I know; they don't walk on fields with growing crops, only on empty ones. This might be problem enough, if the paths are getting too long from A to B.

You need to do this farm reconstruction with much consideration and feeling. I'm sure you can do that (bad feeling or not) 

[irrelevant]

@Nilla, yes, I love memorizing film dialog. 

I have seen mature crops with diagonal bare patches worn through them from heavy traffic. One or two guys walking through won't do it, but a steady stream will. It might need to be traders and vendors, I don't remember. I know I have one, but it would take forever to come up with the save showing that.

As I feared, despite my care the farm enlarging experiment was a disaster. Food production fell from ~285k to under 150k. Reverted to an earlier save, a whole day of very productive trading lost.

I'll remember that though, the roads between the fields really aren't necessary, unless it is a main traffic route. I'll also remember that fiddling around with farmer assignments in a large mature town is very dangerous.

[Nilla]

As I feared, despite my care the farm enlarging experiment was a disaster. Food production fell from ~285k to under 150k. Reverted to an earlier save, a whole day of very productive trading lost.

I'll remember that though, the roads between the fields really aren't necessary, unless it is a main traffic route. I'll also remember that fiddling around with farmer assignments in a large mature town is very dangerous.

That's interesting! Even with your careful approach! I never thought it would have that big impact, if you do it right; the way you did. But I think we all have noticed that it might take a year or two, until new fields are good established and proper planted/harvested. And a reconstructed field is basically a new field. And of cause a bigger settlement is more fragile than a smaller. I'm sorry it didn't work.

[irrelevant]

Early winter 73 - pop 4936

Pop is tracking nicely, just about the same number that I had in my previous go, but in that version the pastures were mostly gone and converted to housing already. Here, they still are untouched. And there also is space in the former cemeteries for ~50-60 more houses as well. Stockpiling lots of stone, going to stick with stone houses for as long as I can in order to save firewood.

Had a school crisis a couple of years back (which I also ran into the first time, and failed to deal with adequately). I just built 5-6 more schools mainly in central locations, and that seemed to take care of it; the number of students dropped by ~15% since then, and now hardly any of the schools are full. A few pages back I discussed the effect of schools filling up, and the way this tends to cascade through the entire town, delaying the entry of educated workers and eventually resulting in uneducated 10-year-olds.

Should get the next batch of nomads arriving next year. I will turn these guys away, and prepare things to accept the following batch 4-6 years later ("FY80"). I am stockpiling as much food as I can, and my goal is to have 300-450k food in my TPs by the end of next year, by which time I expect to be well into tearing out the pastures and replacing with housing. My goal is to reach pop 6000 or more by the time the FY80 nomads arrive.

I still am not planning to do away with smiths or tailors unless there just is no other space available to build enough houses in. I need the tools for firewood production, and there just is no way for me to buy enough tools to do away for the smiths' output. In fact my stock available for trade will be declining from here on out as I will need to rely less and less on trading firewood. There simply is not going to be enough, and I've got not much space for more choppers, just here and there where I can reclaim some stockpile space.

[irrelevant]

Starting to get the frustrating work assignments, workers commuting from the far side of the map, when there are houses with laborers right next to the producer. I've never been able to figure out what to do about this, but it is killing me now. Choppers and tailors with zero production.