irrelevant: Frenchman's Bend: trying for a soft landing

[Nilla]

I hope you make it. It would be fun to see how the look of the settlement changes. I have no big experience on loading my mods to old games. Tried a bit at mod-beginning, but left it after a few crashes. I had crashes not only as I started the game, it often worked if I tried to start it a second time (have you tried that?) but also during the game, with no to me explainable reason.

Maybe you have to start a new game. I can strongly recommend to "steal" the idea of no barns from me. It works, but changes the gameplay in an interesting way.  But that's maybe too much to ask from a "barn spammer" like you.

[RedKetchup]

colorful little house is another mod. it cannot be a problem

like i said : tailor hunters, blacksmith, (and their residence) cannot be a problem because i didnt touch those over a year. LOL

if you dont have one 1st floor medieval residence somewhere, then the only possibility : you had another mod ON and this mod is not there anymore.
and you dont remember ^^ and this is why you crash.

[irrelevant]

@RedKetchup  here are the mods in use:

RK Warehouse
RK Irrelevant Tweak Crop
RK Creamery and Dairy
RK Decorative Items
RK Small Chapel
RK New Medieval Town
RK Small House
RK Monastery
RK Grain Silo
SJGL Small Markets
SLGL Snug House
SLGL Lawn
JamieIdleAleAndFirewood
JamieIdleMerchantsAndTradeFixSlower
Pangaea Longer-living Orchards
Better Fields
BobbiDoctorHouse
Flatten Terrain
Pangaea No Wind

These have all been in use from the start, and I have never made any changes, adding or deleting. I learned my lesson with Quatre Bras, don't add mods (read the first post in this thread)! 

@Nilla I wear the title Barn Spammer with pride 

[irrelevant]

Year 87 - pop 595

Keeping an eye on maintaining pop (600) and children (70-90). Just started watching the number of families as well, maybe I can figure something out there too.

[irrelevant]

Year 104 - pop 663

Moved up to a higher level of pop, still maintaining number of children ~80, although there was a bit of a spike a few years back. Using number of children to determine housing builds, it is too complicated to try to take into account other factors. 

[irrelevant]

Year 112 - pop 688

The past 8 years have built just 5 houses. Pop is slowly bouncing between 680 and 700. The number of children is now ~90-100. Nothing much happening besides trading at 5 TPs. This town is on auto-pilot. I think if I reduced TP inventories some (currently @75%-85%), I'd be able to set up auto trades, and let this one run overnight.

I have 3353 books. 

Image 3&4 - an NMT tavern burned a couple of years back. The residence did not burn however; here you can see that it consists of a stairway, a door, and three windows. 

[RedKetchup]

lol and you accept this like that ? destroy the residence or rebuild your tavern IMO

[irrelevant]

Of course I rebuilt the tavern immediately! Must have ale.

[xyris]

I'm glad you're back on this.  I'm intrigued by the population curves in this game.  I've played a lot of city building games and one thing I like to do is to be able to build a stable town that runs by itself. 

[irrelevant]

@xyris thanks! It's good to know who's interested.

Some observations about auto-trading:

• If you are auto-buying food, honey screws up your calculations. It counts as all four food groups, and so if you are trying to buy some of all four types, you will really load up on honey
• If you are stocking iron tools in your TPs, a few rounds of auto-trading can burn through your stock of tools fast, so don't keep 1000 tools in each TP, keep more like 250.
• If you are trading firewood, the auto-trader will as likely as not trade all your firewood (and nothing else) away to the food merchant at 3
• Items in stock towards the bottom of your list will rarely be traded away
• Who knows what books count as, but they are either iron, textiles, or tools. I bought all the books on two boats and that blew away my entire trade stock on two TPs 

[Nilla]

Yes, autotrading is a bit tricky. It works very well if you only sell stuff you don't really need, like ale and pies (pie is food and couldn't be used for everything). If you sell firewood, you must not be too greedy, and say to yourself; "Even if I only get 3 for it. it's a good business". The bigger problem with firewood is (unless you do like @Trizeropz and more or less only sell firewood) that you also need a lot of it yourself. If I trade firewood, I seldom buy food with autotrade, not mainly because of the lower price, but because too much of might be traded away.

If you really want to let this settlement be self running without attendance, I think you should eather trade as little as possible and only order the things you really need or build a couple of more trading ports and use them differently. Sell some things at some ports and other things at the others. Here too; not too greedy, it's not necessary to buy everything that's possible. ( I see that you're not using the specialized TP, that would also have been an option)

I'm sure you will find a way, and as always; I'm looking forward for the next report.

[irrelevant]

@Nilla  Last night after my brief auto-trade fiasco, I cut way back on the amount of firewood, tools, and coats I keep in the TPs. Coats and tools, perhaps I shall remove altogether, although I currently have 4500-5000 tools in stock; it may be reasonable to keep 250 in each TP. Tonight I am going to build the first apiary I have built in any town. I have avoided them up to now because they seem OP, but I need the honey to make pies, and auto-trading for honey is unworkable. My auto trades will be for iron, steel tools, leather and wool, cherries, milk, and pecans. I'll first need to finish removing books and honey from all my merchant orders. That will take a few years.

Currently my books all are stored in the TPs. I'll probably build another warehouse just to keep the books in. I don't really want to trade them away for food, I've been stockpiling them for the purpose of buying construction mats for eventually converting this town to NMT. I did finally get NMT added to my mod list, and made a successful test of building a large number of NMT markets and 3-story houses.

I also will need to set production limits for food, firewood, tools, and coats. I have been setting them high to give me alarms if stocks get too low, but now I shall set them so I do not over produce and fill up all my barns and stockpiles overnight.

[irrelevant]

Year 117 - pop 746

Pop has jumped to a higher level. Children up to 100. Have built just 5 houses in 13 years and none in the past 5, so this spike is due to oldies dying off. Not sure if I should build a modest few more houses or not. Children are 13% of pop, so that is in the lower range of target. I'd prefer to support a new, higher level of pop than to risk getting a sine wave started, no matter how flat.

Took out an old forest node, replaced it with pastures, orchards, and 2 apiaries. If I'm going to do auto-trading, I figure the more self-sufficient I can be in more things, the better things will work. Also took the opportunity to alternate pastures, in case of overnight infestation.

The only other thing that's going on is getting the TPs ready to cut over to auto trade. In order to do that I first need to streamline and balance my orders so, on average, the merchants are bringing me everything that I need, and there is not any single resource that will be over- or under-bought. 

[Nilla]

What about wool (and leather). If you build a lot of pastures, aren't you afraid, that your barns will be overfull of these materials?

And your strategy of never having more than one pasture with the same animal, close to each other is wise. But I wonder; are the ones on the pictures spread enough to prevent the illness to spread? Could be, but I'm not sure.

The same with your orchards. I wouldn't have built them so close, as you do on the upper side of the picture. If one gets ill, sooner rather than later, everyone will get it. And if you do nothing, it's mean. I once made a test with infestation of orchards. One tree dies, diligent farmer plants a new one at once, before the infestation is is gone from the orchard. New tree gets ill and dies, farmer plants new one without end.

[irrelevant]

@Nilla I don't think there is much danger of filling up with wool and leather, I'm still importing it as it is, and selling some warm coats.

There are 8 tiles between the two cattle pastures in the center of the image there. I think that probably is too far to allow any infestation to spread. Is that distance known for pastures? For crops it is just 4-5 tiles, and orchards seem to be the same.

You're right about the orchards though, I need to re-do those two new ones, just make one long one above the pastures, and maybe fill in the other space with barns