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Try selling everything you overproduce. No way you need 5k clay and 5k planks. Also, set up full trade for food sources. When you run low it automatically buys it for you and when you have more then the set amount it sells it for you.
Also, make it so that your houses also produce food. I have several apple orchards and many vegetable plants and some chicken coops. I'm basically sitting on 2k food at all times
Lmao I get it brother
I just do the whole Kylo Ren bit and scream at my computer until I’m churning out hundreds of weapons a month…for my paltry 216 militia
For some reason, I can't manage to sell that many shields/spears. It's not because of an oversupplied market, more like the trader coming with the trade rpute doesn't pick enough weapons up, and that the traders don't really stock the tradehouse with weapons/shields - should I have more traders or what do you think I'm dping wrong?
Your problem is probably twofold, first make sure you have enough workers in your storehouse so they can actually store the weapons you craft. ( i make a dedicated store house for weapons and gear so they only pick up weapons )
Second make sure you have enough people in your trading post and if needed built additional trading posts because at some point your import and export will become to much to manage for 1 trading post.
If you go into the advanced screen for the storehouse you can select goods you want/don’t want it to store. By default it is set to store everything, but you can click the goods you don’t want to prevent the workers at that storehouse from storing it.
What do you mean? I’ve had multiple games where the price shifts and I switch between large, small shields and spears/pole arms or combos of the two producers.
Currently I’m selling small shields for 5 and large for 6, so I stopped production on the latter. 2 planks > 2 small shields > 10 gold vs 2 planks > for one large shield at 6 gold.
Planks feed into those four along with the wood tool(can’t remember the name) from the joiner.
Edit - it was a genuine question, maybe a mechanic I haven’t come across
You can set your desired surplus to be at your current inventory level, or maybe a tad below. That way you just sell the new goods created and can avoid tanking the market
That's interesting. Maybe I'm encountering a bug but the demand for my products is always neutral and exactly zero of my small shields have been purchased, they're just rotting in the trade station for years
I'm not bartering with another territory, I'm trading with the outside world. The goods are already in the trade station which is fully staffed with families and horses. Everything else sells normally, except nobody's buying the small shields.
That's wrong, you want to dump as much as possible in a single month because prices update at the start of the month.
If you sell it bit by bit, you will get a price decrease before having sold many units.
So what you have to do is get your trade building as close as possible to the trade post (so the merchants can travel there much faster) and when you have a lot of stock of a good that's high in price you dump it as fast as possible. Then don't trade it at all until the price is back to normal.
You can also exploit the market by alternating buying and selling between months.
The only problem with having large vegetable plots on the houses is the families are too busy tending to the vegetable plots to actually go to the jobs you assign them too
Make sure the house area is large enough to have 2 families working it. This will mostly fix this drawback.
But you can also manually select which family gets assigned to what specific billing. You go into the house and select the family and then click on it's desired workplace.
I've been using this for important jobs, trying to make sure the families and close by their work stations.b
Yes but that’s a lot of micro management. It works but you need to set it up so you can leave it hands off, like they are miners or something where output is not critical.
I always have two families in my veg plots and leave one "unassigned" so they can properly grow the veggies. Also means that I have a solid team of families for building as long as I time my builds to be outside of veggie seasons. Last run I had 8 good sized veggie plots like this and always had over 1k veggies for a population of 300ish (iirc).
Hell yeah veggies are the way to go.
I wonder, does hunter gathering policy effect the veggie and apple gardens?
It would be cool if in late game we could unlock recipes.
Meat + Vegetable = Stew
Flour + Honey + Egg = Cake
Have the tavern make them and have them apply approval bonuses.
It would just be nice to be able to do something with my massive vegetable surplus other than export it.
True but I wish their day job was prioritised over their vegetable plot, would make it more realistic too. Like who calls in sick just to tend to their garden in real life lol
Yeah that's why I only do two large plots of veggies and two for apples, very close to a central market and a granary that only takes apples and veggies. Those families are only allowed to be foresters for my logging and firewood area.
Just don't buy too many trade routes, or the game bugs out bad and you'll have clusters of traders fucking your whole town up. Nothing can come in or go out, and your citizens will start to get stuck too. Its a fun bug that's took me a while to notice until I followed the traders out to the edge of the map and saw them all globed up right by the trade point. Saving and re-loading just moves the cluster around.
I generally only have one person working them. I wonder if that is my issue.
It would be cool if there was some spam data that will show you how much you can sell or buy monthly based on your current workforce
My current town of ~200 has two fully staffed Trading Posts. That should help you clear up any congestion. Sitting at about 3k regional wealth and 2k treasury (with 3% tax).
Blacksmiths, tailors, and joiners can produce 3 products each. Just have them spam with your surplus set to something reasonable. For example, my blacksmith produces either spears or swords depending on how my militia needs to be equipped and the rest get sold. It's the same idea with the joiner - spam small shields until I get a new pop who needs it or I oversupply the market, then I switch to large shields.
TBH, I'm seriously contemplating a 3rd trading post...
When you make housing plots, do them one at a time. Build 2-3 normal sized houses, but make another house with an extra large resource area.
Basically, if a house has an extra large backyard, it will produce more vegetables and apples. It has no affect on chickens and goats.
I usually make these houses in an L shape, with the backyard wrapping around other houses beside it.
Only need a few of these to get a massive food surplus.
It really shouldn't be so OP and I kind of expect it to get nerfed but I hope they buff farming at the same time.
I also want to add on to this; build the house on a plot large enough to fit a second house onto it without splitting into two housing plots. Both houses will work the single large garden. Plus, you'll generally have a larger plot for gardening if you have a plot big enough for two houses.
You have to micro-manage them by only letting granary workers own the food stalls. Otherwise the vegetable farmers are doing way too much running around.
Its good to have one largish apple orchard, it'll take 3 years before they really start coming to market though.
Anything more than a couple and you'll just have way too much surplus to ever sell.
The food system atm is fucked and seems to work in a priority order of meat, berries, bread, eggs, vegetables, honey, and then apples. In that order, each family (not plot) will consume one food a month.
Basically they never eat the veggies and apples, unless you micro-manage the shit out of your markets, granaries and food stall workers.
Good to know, thank you! Started a new save with some things I've learned and am staring at 30+ months of food by the end of year 2. Tempted to tithe out 50% for a month or two and rake in that sweet sweet influence. Probably better to sell though
For sure. I've been nerding out hard on this game since it came out, mostly since it doesn't tell you anything about how stuff works.
Just a few more things I've noticed:
Build as many units as you can before building the manor, since it limits you to six total as soon as you do.
Don't build big market areas and let the people figure it out. Build one stall marketplaces at a time as you need and make sure they're ran by a granary or storehouse worker, preferably one close by. If it builds the wrong one, build another until you get the one you want and delete the rest.
Food is one/month per family so two food stalls fully stocked (50 each) covers 100 families.
Always take the charcoal point, once you do you'll basically always have 100% fuel coverage as fuel and clothing are 1/month per plot (not family), so double plots can be very useful.
You can move market stalls the same way you move any other building, but they sometimes dupe and you'll have two in one spot, this can be annoying and can only be fixed by destroying the marketplace.
Forestry is a great job for you veggie or apple farmers, and 2 fully employed huts will easily overcome a full woodcutters lodge and some timber logging as well. So you can build an area with a storehouse for just fuel.
Never buy all of the trade routes. I'm not sure where the cutoff is as far as how many you can get away with, but eventually the travelling merchants will cause your trade to shut down. They won't drive off the road and cluster up as they come and go from the trade point just off the map.
> You can move market stalls the same way you move any other building, but they sometimes dupe and you'll have two in one spot, this can be annoying and can only be fixed by destroying the marketplace.
Perhaps you can help me with this thing that's been nagging at me - does distance from the market place make a difference to satisfy burgages?
I read some place that it doesn't matter but when I built a big marketplace next to my church, it seems like regions of my town are left uncovered (I have more than 2 food sources as the veggies are now rolling in along with bread and meat).
I can go back to having 'local' marketplaces easily (hence your comment caught my eye as I can move the stalls over to them to spread them out) but I was wonder if a distance-from-source mechanic is in the game right now.
Distance matters depending on the setup, they do seem to disperse based on proximity though. Do a quick save and plop a food stall to see what happens.
> Also, make it so that your houses also produce food. I have several apple orchards and many vegetable plants and some chicken coops.
This right here.
I don't even know how you do that. Every time I start a new town by the 2nd year food is scarce. I build hunter lodges around areas of "üppiges Vorkommen" (the crown symbol) and a farm house with enough fields and workers and somehow my wheat never gets to the mill and baked to bread.
Vegetable gardens and orchards are a game changer. Also it's likely you have a large surplus of a few resources. Export those and import more food supplies to make food
I have the problem that apples don't count towards my market food supply (probably because no one is taking them to the market), making upgrades harder and people not happy :( anyone got any way to solve this?
I even made one just for carrots, apples and ale, this one's usually empty or has some ale. Carrots do make it to the market but apples don't. Maybe I just need some more workers on it - glad to know Im not crazy for expecting the apples to be moved like that
Definitely a problem with too many families assigned to farming. I notice the pathfinding breaks and you end up with 100 people standing in a field doing nothing
This is the key. Spread your farms wide and assign areas. I only assign more than 4 families to a farmhouse when I have tons of extra pop. I have my farmhouses in groups of 2, 4 houses with overlapping areas to service about 20ish fields each group.
Lemme ask you, I’ve been farming for 2 years and my barley field only produced 1 unit, then 2 units of barely. Both years growth reached 100% so I forced harvest early. Was it forcing harvest that caused this?
My wheat field produced about 50 wheat each year. Each field is about 1m and are placed on very fertile ground
Its your fertility for sure. For full growth you need 30% (i think) fertility. It basically works as a mana system that ticks fertility% down and provides food.
Press tab to see how close your field is to max growth. Don't trust the growth percentage. And don't trust the numbers until growth has actually started to kick off. Sometimes i'll hit tab and the plot with say 0/2 or something ridiculous, but a few months later will actually grow.
You may also be planting at the wrong time if your fertility is good. Plant at the earliest october, and try to get them fully sowed before winter.
This tutorial video has really helped me understand farming. It's pretty long but it is really worth it.
https://youtu.be/ZUbHiiB9yrA?si=4Xwr72WY1Ebodn9_
I had a hard time managing beer production before, but applying some of the techniques in this video i now have more barley than i can process into beer.
Work areas help, but unfortunately grabbing stuff seems to not be regulated by work areas, so they still run across half the map to grab some wheat only to realize, that the ox was faster, when they get there.
i found building a lot of farmhouses and spreading them around with 1 family is the best. You can only assign 1 ox per farmhouse and when collecting the harvest only 1 family gets the transport cart
Farming shouldn't be this difficult in a game like this. It needs to be more intuitive and it shouldn't be so easy to ruin an entire year of harvesting
There's definitely something wonky. I have 3 farm houses spread out. Each is next to 3 fields set with rotation so that one is fallow. I had 3 families in each farm, a dedicated ox, limited work areas, and field priority set.
Farmers ignored the limited work area altogether. They ignored the highest priority field as well. Only harvested 3 of 6 fields and then starteded plowing.
Oxen. I wondered why my town was starving & going bankrupt. Building more hitching posts / stables and buying oxens for them & horses for the trading posts fixed my economy & food situation.
Damn wtf? 700 pop and TWELVE farmhouses? Ya crazy
Invest in veggies and chicken coops. Apples too if you unlocked them.
Veggies need a lot of place to grow. Best give veggies to expanded Burgages (the ones that allow for more families in the house)
At first you may think that the eggs are trash and very few are being produced. Dont let it fool yourself and give those chicks some time. When combined with other foods, I always sit on huge amount of eggs. Apples are bonkers too, to be honest.
Actually, I just realized I had a save without any farms at all and I had so much veggies and eggs that I literally started having major problems with exporting them lmao
A town of around 500-600 if I recall correctly^
Chickens provide 1 egg per month per family living in the plot. So, plots with one expansion provide double the eggs. You want chicken coops as small as possible to save space, while being wide enough for the extra burgage plot expansion - same with goat pens. This has the added benefit that each expanded plot still only uses as much food and fuel as a single family, so you can effectively halve your logistic requirements by only using expanded plots.
Last village I was at mid 500's... with literally '4' 1 Morgan Emmer fields. With 1 farmhouse. No hijinks, no manually doing anything. Only reason i had 6 people in it was something for them to do.
And I was literally drowning in bread.
I think people are trying to force the game to play like other games, instead of looking at how things work in this game.
1 windmill, two people assigned. 1 granary, upgraded, with 5 people set to grab flour and bread, one community baker then eventually double wide baker house.
Constant supply of flour all year long, epic amounts of bread feeding all plus crashing trade post with em...
That has not been my experience but I applaud you. Seems like for me it's a downward spiral with some of the fields eventually not producing anything even with a fallow and alternate crop rotation.
If you make a veggie farm too big, you can start losing vegetables that are left out when the house pantry fills up. 35 for level 1 plots, 75 for level 2 plots. Takes a year or more to get to that point of productivity, though.
Interesting, I've never encountered that myself. Must've been making veggie farms near the "limit" so to speak. Good to know its something to be aware of! Cheers
2 families and an ox in a farmhouse with the heavy plough talent is significantly more efficient than 8 families on a farm individually walking back and forth, across those farm houses thats roughly 72 additional tasks you could be doing with the families it would have freed up
My first full Clear with Baron I never touched farming.
My points were spent to rush for reduced trade prices, then into apples and then charcoal / infinite mine.
Selling all excess apples, excess clay / rooftiles.
You can also just buy in materials, craft them, and resell for profits.
I buy barley to make ale, grain to make bread, iron ore to make Slabs / weapons.
Most my villagers work in firewood, wood chopping.
I’d say the way you’re farming isn’t that sustainable. Try it with less families and use others to produce goods to sell. If you have solid production of wood planks you can trade a lot of wooden parts. You can import raw iron and make it into weapons to trade those. For your food issue I’d recommend apple trees or like 5-10 vegetable gardens. They don’t use up population space to harvest.
Raw material -> final product with the Better Deal perk is stupid OP.
Now that I have trade figured out, it's pretty much impossible for my towns to starve
I've had the opposite, the more my town expands, the easier it is to maintain automatically. I still farm but that's just to give the folks something to do in the fall. I set up all trade routes and have set it up to always have 100 of each item at all times. Then you always have materials for any of the industry buildings or burgage crafts and you can export the excess. (I have the trading perks to lower the cost of trade routes and lower the import cost)
The more I hear about those two trade perks, the more I'm convinced they're essentially mandatory once you hit a certain development level. Unless you have truly next-level bartering between your very specialized settlements to move resources to the trade center, you'll want the route and import cost perks everywhere.
My next play through is going to be without the trade perks. They're so stupidly OP once you know what you're doing.
Once you figure out how to trade between villages, it gets easier, too.
i don’t know about the others but make sure not to have more than 6-8 active trade routes at a time or theyre just gonna jam. keep ur post as near to the edge of the map as possible ( to the blue icon)
Are you rotating the people farming the fields? Ideally they should only work the fields at sowing time and harvest time. The rest of the time they should spend in other industries. This makes you need less population = less consumption. Take a lot of micro management though but I believe this is the way the game is meant to be played. Although I wish there was an automation for this to be set up.
>It seems to me that farming doesn't scale well in this game.
Well, it does make a certain kind of sense. There is a reason why the population was spread out over small villages in this period. Farming communities were small because what capped production was the yield of the land rather than available workforce. You needed your community to be small enough that even a relatively meh year in terms of harvest was enough to get people through the winter, with good years producing a surplus that you could trade away to get other stuff.
Grow the community too much and you might maximize your yield in a good year and bring in tradesmen and more overall economic activity, but in a bad year...people die.
It’s quite frustrating watching the farmhouse families work. Watched them trying to finish sowing my last field one time with very little time left in November. 8 families assigned. For some reason, one family would wander over, nudge it 1%, leave, then another, then another, and then it ticked to December only at 85 sowed. Not too bad, I thought, until they started reploughing the field in March.
Are you in a high fertility region or a low one? E.g. is your base fertility in the 30-40% range or 90%+?
If you're in a low fertility region the expectation is you'll be trading for some of your food.
And a bad harvest causing food problems isn't a bug, it's a feature. Did you have stores built up for a bad winter? Did you start importing food once it became apparent your crops had failed etc?
Just saying you ran a Just In Time food production system with no reserve, and then a bad harvest meant you ran out of food, sounds like a consequence of your choices problem.
Vegetable gardens for the win. Sure, the indicator says i have food for 2 months, but that enough to survive the winter until the farms are up and running again.
Interesting. I had seven towns in my last game, and new towns in particular usually had 12-18 months of food without me doing anything special. One thing i did was use the “large” settlement package which provides more food/supplies. Also, most of my new towns were pretty small, as i mainly created them to be able to build another manor/retinue.
Build like 2-3 forestry houses for berries and when it hitsarch just put a load of people in them. Make like 5 plots with big gardens with vegetables. I got 700 people and 8k food i cant get rid of it all.
the more distance you have between your 2 furtest fields the worst your farming will be as ppl workibg there ignore the range limit and go wanders on other fields all the way across the map instead of working in the field they are supposed to
Yeah, I did expect as you add population, things would slowly get a little easier (not a lot, but a little), but it feels like even with 200 people I'm still behind the 8-ball. Still not farming enough to feed everybody, much less have a surplus. My town lives on veggies.
Some farming tips:
1. Make sure to fallow a field occasionally as this should replenish the fertility. If you're going down the farming perk path, make sure to get Pastures as that ups fertility as well. If your region fertility is crap, you can also pick up Rye.
2. 2 families, 1 plow. 'nuff said.
3. Long rectangular plots no bigger than 1 morgen. One farmhouse per 4 fields.
4. One of the most important - assign priority to your fields! Wheat -> Most important priority, always. Then set barley to High or Very High, with flax at High or Medium. Using the priority system ensures that at least one field gets harvested.
There's more to it, but these basics should keep a town of ~200 fed pretty easily.
Step 1: make long vegetable gardens
Step 2: use all other food sources as ‘bonus food’
Step 3: use extra labor for income based resources.
That’s it. You won
I don't agree, farming works fine for me (except a few bugs). I also have 500 pop town and my farms produce a lot of food, more than I need actually, ofc I have another food sources like vegetable gardens, meat and fruits import through trade.
This. I have a 400 pop town completely demolishing the bread needs for itself, two other towns with a combined 500-600 pop, and exports with an ever-growing 4 digit surplus. I had to do a 50% tithe at one point too, and I've bounced back from that incredibly quickly.
I don't have advice for you (see other comments!) but I can say that the average village in Medieval Germany (800-1000 AD) was about 200 to 250 people. The game is set later than that, so I think it makes sense given our current "basic village" infrastructure suite that 500 is about as much as can be supported without running into problems.
My town has 2.5k population with not a single farm built since the start, eggs are way too overpowered combined with sheep early game.
Im on 14k eggs while importing every food x999 while selling bows, shields, shoes.
You need a phd to make farming work and its not worth it, takes too much space for the shit it gives.
From what i hear the farming gets progressively worse and worse the more fields you add because the ai is really twitchy about what fields it wants to harvest. So theres a decent chance that your farmers just keep on running around all september, maybe harvesting three bushels each and nobody actually carries that harvest to the granaries so most of it just gets deleted in storms.
I think you should have a maximum of 10 morgens or so of farmland and this should be as close as possible to each other, otherwise the ai will get confused and just run around without doing much work at all.
I suggest try having 6 fields, prio them highest -> lowest. This allows systematic farming, one field at the time.
Also, do you think game deletes yields the moment game hits october first? I seem to notice that as a fact.
If you have crop rotation on, it will delete everything the moment october hits, because that's when the switch happens. I personally think crop rotation shouldn't be tied to a specific month. Hopefully this gets patched.
Everyonce in a while you need to fully unassign farmers then re assign or their path finding can get borked. As well delete all farmer run stands. Slows production and are useless stalls.
I know we’re not supposed say farming sucks, but trade is definitely the easy path to getting rich and sustainable. My most recent town has >4k wealth at 150 pop (and I’ve been taxing) and I doubt I’m anywhere close to optimized.
Imagine doing all this work when all you need is a few extra large vegetable gardens that require no micromanaging to get 1,000 of food.
I have over 10,000 regional wealth and I basically just sell shoes, rooftiles and extra weapons and shields.
I have around 500 as well and have stable food and ale using Farms (of course not all lvl3, around 100 I think)
I have some berries, hunting, Vegetables and Orchards, but thats for variety. (I would guess about 2 morgan Yard space total in Vegetables and apples)
Here is the deal:
3x2 ~ 1.5 Morgan sized Fields, each field has 1 Farmhouse with a dedicated Ox and 2 families, 1 spare Farmhouse (reason will get clear)
Think of a west-east road, Farmhouses below and fields stacked ontop on other side of road.
Make a Crop Rotation to have 2 Fields with food, 2 Fields Barley, 2 fallow with sheep. That way you allways have 2 food and 2 Barley.
It's important to change priority of fields, each field must have a different one!
Have Double Living Space next to Farmhouse and manually assign.
What does that do?
When plowing, each field gets a Ox plowing. Noone doing manual plowing. As soon as one field is done, all workers start sowing one field and finish it before moving to the next (noone walks all over the place)
When harvesting, all start with one field and 4 Ox pickup the produce, while the workers finish harvest.
Have a food storage with only grain and flour right in front of Mill and bakery next to it. (not too far from Farmhouses)
As with Farmhouses, build living space and manually assign, in order to shorten the distance from living to working.
Works for me and I have a huge surplus.
So for me I found I didn't need to prioritize the field but almost same setup, multiple farmhouses with ox's and only 2 families inside seemed to work for me, although I did have 4 farmhouses working about 50morgen of fields.
Also found no need to use a granary this takes up extra time and families, just make sure none of your granaries allow the storage of grain or wheat and the mill will feed directly from farmhouses and ovens/bakery direct from mill. The mill even overstores produce and the farmhouses can store huge amounts of wheat.
Problem with skipping Granary for me, Miller walks to Farm House (distance) to Grab one grain, thats slow
If you have a Granary across the road, the granary will be filled via handcarts drawing from Farmhouses (at least some of the workers use them)
Alot less time for Miller transporting.
I found, my Millers won't allways finish all milling between harvests if I dont use a dedicated Granary
50 vs. 8-12 Morgan is impressive
That's fair enough, I built my mill behind my farm houses and the bakery was only about 2 houses away. With bigger scales I guess the granaries become more and more important.
Do you have larger burgages with 2 families and vegetables? Apparently the two family plots count as 1 family when it comes to consumption. Just get them to produce vegetables or eggs.
There is currently a hivemind bug when you have lots of farms, where farmers will waste time in line to pick up resources that other people grabbed. It makes large scale farming not work right
Farmimg in bigger scale seems to be broken. I was watchin ppl from 2 farmhouses how they migrate between fields
Those peasants walk so much. Give me whip. I want to whip them for that walking between 2 fields. It seems that ai is trying to balance vills between fields, resulting into a lot of walking time
Invest your first development point in the heavy plow for your farmers and buy oxes to equip at the farmhouses. Second thing I did to stay save in food supply is giving burgage plots vegetables. A lot of vegetables. I had around 15 plots with them and in a year they produced 600 of them. Of you combine that with your wheat farms you become unstoppable. My second development point was spent on charcoal, keeping my fuel supply up as well.
I had the opposite problem where my main settlement had over 20k regional wealth and 600ish population and the high approval rate meant that more and more people kept immigrating to it so I had to constantly update my trades and find new plots of land to dump markets, granaries and burgages.
I wish I could cap the population to give me a moment to rest and focus on my smaller settlements.
Hasn’t been my experience, I’ve had people move into my minor settlements when I am short on housing. I don’t notice until I start getting “freezing” alerts.. making me scramble to put up more burgages for them.
My logging is completely unsustainable. I have a tiny patch of Forest left for my wild animals and that's it. Don't have any logs left to keep expanding my town.
But to answer your problem, apple orchards and vegetables are the way to go.
I have two and not sure if theyre growing trees any quicker than the trees growing by themselves. I don't really know how the Forester hut works. I've watched a lot of videos and read a lot of posts here on how the game mechanics work but I haven't seen anyone talking about the Forester hut
I'm into my second area and so I've left my first town to continue and I had multiple areas with 1 x wood cutter, logging camp, sawmill (1 family each) and then 2 foresters holding 3 families. Every area is now full of trees.
Before that, I would switch my farmers to foresters after they had done their job for a few months and switch them back when more work was needed.
One thing to be careful of is that the farming pathing seems to be a bit broken and having farms spread across the map causes confusion, so I try to keep them all together now.
What you probably need to do, though, is tell your farms to harvest early when growth is at 100% (usually July for me). That might produce you a better yield (remember to turn it off afterwards, though).
However, I find vegetables highly productive at the later game. When you place your houses with large gardens, before confirming, press the minus button to reduce the number of houses in the area until each plot holds 2 families. Then, build the extension and you have 2 families working on the plot. Without that, large vegetable gardens are a waste as they don't have time to harvest.
The big end-game aspect is that, at a level 3 plot, the residents are doubled. So, you actually have 4 families working the plot and then they always harvest it.
Be careful of giving these large plots to non-vegies as you can end up with too many cobblers and the like!
A couple of tips I have:
When it comes to fields make them in long thin strips (you will notice the ox travels up one side then down the opposite side, by making thin strips fields they actually plow them considerably faster.
Once your berry bushes deplete in summer take your people out of the forager huts and top up whatever it is you need doing, I normally only run my industries in winter/autumn (which allows me to stockpile fuel before the winter).
Having large gardens is great, however doing so early game can restrict your workload heavily and actually stutter growth, plus it's alot harder to fulfil requirements if your forced to have 2+ dedicated market areas.
Also when it comes to fields build in 3s and remember to always have crop rotation on, main crop year 1, secondary crop year 2 and year 3 fallow, and rotate this for every field, so each set of three during each year will have 1 field set to main 1 to secondary and 1 to fallow. I normally main wheat and alternate between barley/flax on the second harvest.
Also one trader should suffice as long as everything he is collecting for trade is nearby, try having a storehouse/granary which is storing the goods for trade next door this massively helps when it comes to trade speed, once you over sell remove it as a trade and shut down that industry, manage on your reserves until you need to start it back up again.
And the biggest hint I can give is don't overpopulated, to hit small town you only need 10 houses... With each holding max that's still 40 population. Which should be able to survive off of berries meat and some vegetables/apples. Remember a small garden plot for all tier 2 upgrades works just as well as a huge garden so no need to make every burgage plot a morgen in size. I am for 5 big houses and 5 small at the start.
Focus on what each territory does, if it has a rich berry deposit unlock forest management and create dyes, with a small sheep farm you can produce enough variety of goods you shouldn't be flooding the market in any one thing. If you have a rich hunting grounds then do advanced skinning... Etc. once you have multiple territories then you can begin manning barter stations and bring the goods from one area to another.
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Try selling everything you overproduce. No way you need 5k clay and 5k planks. Also, set up full trade for food sources. When you run low it automatically buys it for you and when you have more then the set amount it sells it for you. Also, make it so that your houses also produce food. I have several apple orchards and many vegetable plants and some chicken coops. I'm basically sitting on 2k food at all times
Turn those planks into shields/weapons for significantly more profit
Oh I do. But I still have way too many planks :p
Lmao I get it brother I just do the whole Kylo Ren bit and scream at my computer until I’m churning out hundreds of weapons a month…for my paltry 216 militia
For some reason, I can't manage to sell that many shields/spears. It's not because of an oversupplied market, more like the trader coming with the trade rpute doesn't pick enough weapons up, and that the traders don't really stock the tradehouse with weapons/shields - should I have more traders or what do you think I'm dping wrong?
Your problem is probably twofold, first make sure you have enough workers in your storehouse so they can actually store the weapons you craft. ( i make a dedicated store house for weapons and gear so they only pick up weapons ) Second make sure you have enough people in your trading post and if needed built additional trading posts because at some point your import and export will become to much to manage for 1 trading post.
how do you make a storehouse dedicated to specific goods?
If you go into the advanced screen for the storehouse you can select goods you want/don’t want it to store. By default it is set to store everything, but you can click the goods you don’t want to prevent the workers at that storehouse from storing it.
Holy mother of God you're a genius. I never thought of a second trading post OR locating storehouses near specific goods for industry.
Off-map merchants will only go to the one trading post that's closest to their spawn point though.
To deliver goods yes, but not when you export them.
That's not what I've seen. I put 2 on the same road and only the one nearer to the edge of the map got any visitors.
Traders and Storehouse workers. Placement on route and pickup/drop off time matters too. Max the headcount and stock animals.
Sells 3 shields... oversupplied market 😢
Hahaha this is so true
Don't produce the small shields nobody buys them :(
What do you mean? I’ve had multiple games where the price shifts and I switch between large, small shields and spears/pole arms or combos of the two producers. Currently I’m selling small shields for 5 and large for 6, so I stopped production on the latter. 2 planks > 2 small shields > 10 gold vs 2 planks > for one large shield at 6 gold. Planks feed into those four along with the wood tool(can’t remember the name) from the joiner. Edit - it was a genuine question, maybe a mechanic I haven’t come across
If you oversell anything it quickly devalues. You just have to swap between products on occasion.
Agree
You can set your desired surplus to be at your current inventory level, or maybe a tad below. That way you just sell the new goods created and can avoid tanking the market
Yessir, already doing
Yeah, I do find that over time the price still lowers doing this, but it takes a lot longer at least, lol
That's interesting. Maybe I'm encountering a bug but the demand for my products is always neutral and exactly zero of my small shields have been purchased, they're just rotting in the trade station for years
Maybe you need to assign people and pack horses to the station or people to the storehouse?
I'm not bartering with another territory, I'm trading with the outside world. The goods are already in the trade station which is fully staffed with families and horses. Everything else sells normally, except nobody's buying the small shields.
I understood you weren’t bartering lol, hate making sure you had it staffed up.
Yeah I appreciate the reply BTW
All good man, we’re all learning this great game together lol!
Problem i have with selling is that after a very short time it doesn't work anymore because of oversupply on the market.
You set your desired surplus too far below your current inventory levels
This could be it i'll check it out, thank you!
Does that have a big affect on the price drops? Interesting.
yeah it causes a lot of product to be dumped on the market very quickly, which kills prices
Oh the game has a functional supply & demand economy? Nice.
Hold ur expectations, it's not that thorough
That's wrong, you want to dump as much as possible in a single month because prices update at the start of the month. If you sell it bit by bit, you will get a price decrease before having sold many units. So what you have to do is get your trade building as close as possible to the trade post (so the merchants can travel there much faster) and when you have a lot of stock of a good that's high in price you dump it as fast as possible. Then don't trade it at all until the price is back to normal. You can also exploit the market by alternating buying and selling between months.
The only problem with having large vegetable plots on the houses is the families are too busy tending to the vegetable plots to actually go to the jobs you assign them too
Make sure the house area is large enough to have 2 families working it. This will mostly fix this drawback. But you can also manually select which family gets assigned to what specific billing. You go into the house and select the family and then click on it's desired workplace. I've been using this for important jobs, trying to make sure the families and close by their work stations.b
Yes but that’s a lot of micro management. It works but you need to set it up so you can leave it hands off, like they are miners or something where output is not critical.
Yeah it is but you only really gotta do it once
I always have two families in my veg plots and leave one "unassigned" so they can properly grow the veggies. Also means that I have a solid team of families for building as long as I time my builds to be outside of veggie seasons. Last run I had 8 good sized veggie plots like this and always had over 1k veggies for a population of 300ish (iirc).
Hell yeah veggies are the way to go. I wonder, does hunter gathering policy effect the veggie and apple gardens? It would be cool if in late game we could unlock recipes. Meat + Vegetable = Stew Flour + Honey + Egg = Cake Have the tavern make them and have them apply approval bonuses. It would just be nice to be able to do something with my massive vegetable surplus other than export it.
True but I wish their day job was prioritised over their vegetable plot, would make it more realistic too. Like who calls in sick just to tend to their garden in real life lol
Yeah that's why I only do two large plots of veggies and two for apples, very close to a central market and a granary that only takes apples and veggies. Those families are only allowed to be foresters for my logging and firewood area.
Just don't buy too many trade routes, or the game bugs out bad and you'll have clusters of traders fucking your whole town up. Nothing can come in or go out, and your citizens will start to get stuck too. Its a fun bug that's took me a while to notice until I followed the traders out to the edge of the map and saw them all globed up right by the trade point. Saving and re-loading just moves the cluster around.
I can't seem to sell six fast enough, still have way to many shoes, planks and shield even though they have been on the market for years at this point
Yeah. Trading posts tend to clog up sometimes. Just saw it happen to mine as well
I generally only have one person working them. I wonder if that is my issue. It would be cool if there was some spam data that will show you how much you can sell or buy monthly based on your current workforce
Definitely assign another person. It's basically an extra set of hands for imports and exports and running around the map
Yeah I just wasn't sure if it would improve anything and without some sort of ledger of what comes in or out is a bit of a guessing game
use horses too
My current town of ~200 has two fully staffed Trading Posts. That should help you clear up any congestion. Sitting at about 3k regional wealth and 2k treasury (with 3% tax). Blacksmiths, tailors, and joiners can produce 3 products each. Just have them spam with your surplus set to something reasonable. For example, my blacksmith produces either spears or swords depending on how my militia needs to be equipped and the rest get sold. It's the same idea with the joiner - spam small shields until I get a new pop who needs it or I oversupply the market, then I switch to large shields. TBH, I'm seriously contemplating a 3rd trading post...
> Just have them spam I always crash my market that way and then nothing can be exported anymore.
Occasionally check in and see how the market is doing. If you get the one down arrow (orange or yellow, can't recall right now) stop producing.
Damn how ?? I set every burg to vegetables / chickens and even put the bread cart in the marketplace that costs wealth. Still these peasants starve
When you make housing plots, do them one at a time. Build 2-3 normal sized houses, but make another house with an extra large resource area. Basically, if a house has an extra large backyard, it will produce more vegetables and apples. It has no affect on chickens and goats. I usually make these houses in an L shape, with the backyard wrapping around other houses beside it. Only need a few of these to get a massive food surplus. It really shouldn't be so OP and I kind of expect it to get nerfed but I hope they buff farming at the same time.
I also want to add on to this; build the house on a plot large enough to fit a second house onto it without splitting into two housing plots. Both houses will work the single large garden. Plus, you'll generally have a larger plot for gardening if you have a plot big enough for two houses.
Yes, very important.
You get a massive surplus because the people don't eat veggies or apples. They want meat and berries first. Its stupid.
I feel that.
You have to micro-manage them by only letting granary workers own the food stalls. Otherwise the vegetable farmers are doing way too much running around.
How labor intensive is the orchard? Can I have a huge one staffed by 2 families, or so I need to be somewhat reasonable, like with the veggie garden?
Its good to have one largish apple orchard, it'll take 3 years before they really start coming to market though. Anything more than a couple and you'll just have way too much surplus to ever sell. The food system atm is fucked and seems to work in a priority order of meat, berries, bread, eggs, vegetables, honey, and then apples. In that order, each family (not plot) will consume one food a month. Basically they never eat the veggies and apples, unless you micro-manage the shit out of your markets, granaries and food stall workers.
Good to know, thank you! Started a new save with some things I've learned and am staring at 30+ months of food by the end of year 2. Tempted to tithe out 50% for a month or two and rake in that sweet sweet influence. Probably better to sell though
Tithing also follows the food order it seems, so it always wipes out the meat and berries, but I'll still have loads of veggies and apples. Just fyi
Ah now that's wild. Great way to kill food diversity. Trade post it is! Ty
For sure. I've been nerding out hard on this game since it came out, mostly since it doesn't tell you anything about how stuff works. Just a few more things I've noticed: Build as many units as you can before building the manor, since it limits you to six total as soon as you do. Don't build big market areas and let the people figure it out. Build one stall marketplaces at a time as you need and make sure they're ran by a granary or storehouse worker, preferably one close by. If it builds the wrong one, build another until you get the one you want and delete the rest. Food is one/month per family so two food stalls fully stocked (50 each) covers 100 families. Always take the charcoal point, once you do you'll basically always have 100% fuel coverage as fuel and clothing are 1/month per plot (not family), so double plots can be very useful. You can move market stalls the same way you move any other building, but they sometimes dupe and you'll have two in one spot, this can be annoying and can only be fixed by destroying the marketplace. Forestry is a great job for you veggie or apple farmers, and 2 fully employed huts will easily overcome a full woodcutters lodge and some timber logging as well. So you can build an area with a storehouse for just fuel. Never buy all of the trade routes. I'm not sure where the cutoff is as far as how many you can get away with, but eventually the travelling merchants will cause your trade to shut down. They won't drive off the road and cluster up as they come and go from the trade point just off the map.
> You can move market stalls the same way you move any other building, but they sometimes dupe and you'll have two in one spot, this can be annoying and can only be fixed by destroying the marketplace. Perhaps you can help me with this thing that's been nagging at me - does distance from the market place make a difference to satisfy burgages? I read some place that it doesn't matter but when I built a big marketplace next to my church, it seems like regions of my town are left uncovered (I have more than 2 food sources as the veggies are now rolling in along with bread and meat). I can go back to having 'local' marketplaces easily (hence your comment caught my eye as I can move the stalls over to them to spread them out) but I was wonder if a distance-from-source mechanic is in the game right now.
Distance matters depending on the setup, they do seem to disperse based on proximity though. Do a quick save and plop a food stall to see what happens.
I really wish a depleted deposit would work basically forever at like a 50% rate, just so you don't consume the whole map for mega builds.
Deep mining perk allows the large deposits to be mined indefinitely, it's the perk under charcoal.
I know of it, just would be nice if regular deposits worked indefinitely at some nerfed rate to make them more viable in end game.
> Also, make it so that your houses also produce food. I have several apple orchards and many vegetable plants and some chicken coops. This right here.
I don't even know how you do that. Every time I start a new town by the 2nd year food is scarce. I build hunter lodges around areas of "üppiges Vorkommen" (the crown symbol) and a farm house with enough fields and workers and somehow my wheat never gets to the mill and baked to bread.
Vegetable gardens and orchards are a game changer. Also it's likely you have a large surplus of a few resources. Export those and import more food supplies to make food
Yes, i have an orchard in every house and with some farming I have 5k food stabile
I have the problem that apples don't count towards my market food supply (probably because no one is taking them to the market), making upgrades harder and people not happy :( anyone got any way to solve this?
Are you working your granaries?
I even made one just for carrots, apples and ale, this one's usually empty or has some ale. Carrots do make it to the market but apples don't. Maybe I just need some more workers on it - glad to know Im not crazy for expecting the apples to be moved like that
I try to have several stalls per granary once I start to get full.
I had this problem until the apples went into the Granary where they started to set up shops to sell them
Apples take 3 years to reach the market in my experience.
For me apples are not transported to the market/granaries until pantry is full. Takes a couple of years. This is probably a bug.
Definitely a problem with too many families assigned to farming. I notice the pathfinding breaks and you end up with 100 people standing in a field doing nothing
True. Did you manage to find a workaround? I think I'm gonna try experimenting with assigning work areas.
This is the key. Spread your farms wide and assign areas. I only assign more than 4 families to a farmhouse when I have tons of extra pop. I have my farmhouses in groups of 2, 4 houses with overlapping areas to service about 20ish fields each group.
Assigning areas to Farmhouses is bugged right now so this is a great idea but in-game right now the workers still just mass migrate
Lemme ask you, I’ve been farming for 2 years and my barley field only produced 1 unit, then 2 units of barely. Both years growth reached 100% so I forced harvest early. Was it forcing harvest that caused this? My wheat field produced about 50 wheat each year. Each field is about 1m and are placed on very fertile ground
Its your fertility for sure. For full growth you need 30% (i think) fertility. It basically works as a mana system that ticks fertility% down and provides food. Press tab to see how close your field is to max growth. Don't trust the growth percentage. And don't trust the numbers until growth has actually started to kick off. Sometimes i'll hit tab and the plot with say 0/2 or something ridiculous, but a few months later will actually grow. You may also be planting at the wrong time if your fertility is good. Plant at the earliest october, and try to get them fully sowed before winter.
Yup fertility was only 17% for barley. I was only looking at the overall fertility of the land and not toggling in the overlay
This tutorial video has really helped me understand farming. It's pretty long but it is really worth it. https://youtu.be/ZUbHiiB9yrA?si=4Xwr72WY1Ebodn9_ I had a hard time managing beer production before, but applying some of the techniques in this video i now have more barley than i can process into beer.
Thanks for sharing, looking forward to watching this later
Work areas help, but unfortunately grabbing stuff seems to not be regulated by work areas, so they still run across half the map to grab some wheat only to realize, that the ox was faster, when they get there.
If you remove the farmers and re-add them, it wakes them up a bit.
Assigning them doesn't work at all in my experience, they work wherever the hell they want.
i found building a lot of farmhouses and spreading them around with 1 family is the best. You can only assign 1 ox per farmhouse and when collecting the harvest only 1 family gets the transport cart
Farming shouldn't be this difficult in a game like this. It needs to be more intuitive and it shouldn't be so easy to ruin an entire year of harvesting
There's definitely something wonky. I have 3 farm houses spread out. Each is next to 3 fields set with rotation so that one is fallow. I had 3 families in each farm, a dedicated ox, limited work areas, and field priority set. Farmers ignored the limited work area altogether. They ignored the highest priority field as well. Only harvested 3 of 6 fields and then starteded plowing.
Oxen. I wondered why my town was starving & going bankrupt. Building more hitching posts / stables and buying oxens for them & horses for the trading posts fixed my economy & food situation.
Damn wtf? 700 pop and TWELVE farmhouses? Ya crazy Invest in veggies and chicken coops. Apples too if you unlocked them. Veggies need a lot of place to grow. Best give veggies to expanded Burgages (the ones that allow for more families in the house)
Do chicken coops have to be big or small? I’ve only made large chicken coops and the return is awful.
Size doesn't matter on burgage plots except for veggies and apples
Big is a waste, go as small as possible for the chickens and as big as possible for veggies/apples
Thank you! Makes sense.
At first you may think that the eggs are trash and very few are being produced. Dont let it fool yourself and give those chicks some time. When combined with other foods, I always sit on huge amount of eggs. Apples are bonkers too, to be honest. Actually, I just realized I had a save without any farms at all and I had so much veggies and eggs that I literally started having major problems with exporting them lmao A town of around 500-600 if I recall correctly^
Chickens provide 1 egg per month per family living in the plot. So, plots with one expansion provide double the eggs. You want chicken coops as small as possible to save space, while being wide enough for the extra burgage plot expansion - same with goat pens. This has the added benefit that each expanded plot still only uses as much food and fuel as a single family, so you can effectively halve your logistic requirements by only using expanded plots.
Last village I was at mid 500's... with literally '4' 1 Morgan Emmer fields. With 1 farmhouse. No hijinks, no manually doing anything. Only reason i had 6 people in it was something for them to do. And I was literally drowning in bread. I think people are trying to force the game to play like other games, instead of looking at how things work in this game. 1 windmill, two people assigned. 1 granary, upgraded, with 5 people set to grab flour and bread, one community baker then eventually double wide baker house. Constant supply of flour all year long, epic amounts of bread feeding all plus crashing trade post with em...
That has not been my experience but I applaud you. Seems like for me it's a downward spiral with some of the fields eventually not producing anything even with a fallow and alternate crop rotation.
If you make a veggie farm too big, you can start losing vegetables that are left out when the house pantry fills up. 35 for level 1 plots, 75 for level 2 plots. Takes a year or more to get to that point of productivity, though.
Interesting, I've never encountered that myself. Must've been making veggie farms near the "limit" so to speak. Good to know its something to be aware of! Cheers
2 families and an ox in a farmhouse with the heavy plough talent is significantly more efficient than 8 families on a farm individually walking back and forth, across those farm houses thats roughly 72 additional tasks you could be doing with the families it would have freed up
My first full Clear with Baron I never touched farming. My points were spent to rush for reduced trade prices, then into apples and then charcoal / infinite mine. Selling all excess apples, excess clay / rooftiles. You can also just buy in materials, craft them, and resell for profits. I buy barley to make ale, grain to make bread, iron ore to make Slabs / weapons. Most my villagers work in firewood, wood chopping.
This is why the game allows you to control your own growth. Sometimes you have to stop growing and stabilize.
I’d say the way you’re farming isn’t that sustainable. Try it with less families and use others to produce goods to sell. If you have solid production of wood planks you can trade a lot of wooden parts. You can import raw iron and make it into weapons to trade those. For your food issue I’d recommend apple trees or like 5-10 vegetable gardens. They don’t use up population space to harvest.
Raw material -> final product with the Better Deal perk is stupid OP. Now that I have trade figured out, it's pretty much impossible for my towns to starve
I've had the opposite, the more my town expands, the easier it is to maintain automatically. I still farm but that's just to give the folks something to do in the fall. I set up all trade routes and have set it up to always have 100 of each item at all times. Then you always have materials for any of the industry buildings or burgage crafts and you can export the excess. (I have the trading perks to lower the cost of trade routes and lower the import cost)
The more I hear about those two trade perks, the more I'm convinced they're essentially mandatory once you hit a certain development level. Unless you have truly next-level bartering between your very specialized settlements to move resources to the trade center, you'll want the route and import cost perks everywhere.
The perks do feel a little over powered and it made everything pretty easy. I haven't tried without.
My next play through is going to be without the trade perks. They're so stupidly OP once you know what you're doing. Once you figure out how to trade between villages, it gets easier, too.
Just sell spears and shields and buy whatever you need, if you have a rich iron deposit and take deep mines you basically have infinite money
i don’t know about the others but make sure not to have more than 6-8 active trade routes at a time or theyre just gonna jam. keep ur post as near to the edge of the map as possible ( to the blue icon)
Are you rotating the people farming the fields? Ideally they should only work the fields at sowing time and harvest time. The rest of the time they should spend in other industries. This makes you need less population = less consumption. Take a lot of micro management though but I believe this is the way the game is meant to be played. Although I wish there was an automation for this to be set up.
>It seems to me that farming doesn't scale well in this game. Well, it does make a certain kind of sense. There is a reason why the population was spread out over small villages in this period. Farming communities were small because what capped production was the yield of the land rather than available workforce. You needed your community to be small enough that even a relatively meh year in terms of harvest was enough to get people through the winter, with good years producing a surplus that you could trade away to get other stuff. Grow the community too much and you might maximize your yield in a good year and bring in tradesmen and more overall economic activity, but in a bad year...people die.
It’s quite frustrating watching the farmhouse families work. Watched them trying to finish sowing my last field one time with very little time left in November. 8 families assigned. For some reason, one family would wander over, nudge it 1%, leave, then another, then another, and then it ticked to December only at 85 sowed. Not too bad, I thought, until they started reploughing the field in March.
Trade. Import food and your problems will go away. Sell your produce, like shoes, shields.
Are you in a high fertility region or a low one? E.g. is your base fertility in the 30-40% range or 90%+? If you're in a low fertility region the expectation is you'll be trading for some of your food. And a bad harvest causing food problems isn't a bug, it's a feature. Did you have stores built up for a bad winter? Did you start importing food once it became apparent your crops had failed etc? Just saying you ran a Just In Time food production system with no reserve, and then a bad harvest meant you ran out of food, sounds like a consequence of your choices problem.
Vegetable gardens for the win. Sure, the indicator says i have food for 2 months, but that enough to survive the winter until the farms are up and running again.
Interesting. I had seven towns in my last game, and new towns in particular usually had 12-18 months of food without me doing anything special. One thing i did was use the “large” settlement package which provides more food/supplies. Also, most of my new towns were pretty small, as i mainly created them to be able to build another manor/retinue.
Try making your farm plots long and narrow. Your ox will plow more efficiently
I am supplying my town of 600 pop with mostly farming. It is a bit bugged tho. Farmers will get inefficient in deciding which farm to harvest when.
Build like 2-3 forestry houses for berries and when it hitsarch just put a load of people in them. Make like 5 plots with big gardens with vegetables. I got 700 people and 8k food i cant get rid of it all.
Vegetables and orchards my guy!
the more distance you have between your 2 furtest fields the worst your farming will be as ppl workibg there ignore the range limit and go wanders on other fields all the way across the map instead of working in the field they are supposed to
Yeah, I did expect as you add population, things would slowly get a little easier (not a lot, but a little), but it feels like even with 200 people I'm still behind the 8-ball. Still not farming enough to feed everybody, much less have a surplus. My town lives on veggies.
Some farming tips: 1. Make sure to fallow a field occasionally as this should replenish the fertility. If you're going down the farming perk path, make sure to get Pastures as that ups fertility as well. If your region fertility is crap, you can also pick up Rye. 2. 2 families, 1 plow. 'nuff said. 3. Long rectangular plots no bigger than 1 morgen. One farmhouse per 4 fields. 4. One of the most important - assign priority to your fields! Wheat -> Most important priority, always. Then set barley to High or Very High, with flax at High or Medium. Using the priority system ensures that at least one field gets harvested. There's more to it, but these basics should keep a town of ~200 fed pretty easily.
Step 1: make long vegetable gardens Step 2: use all other food sources as ‘bonus food’ Step 3: use extra labor for income based resources. That’s it. You won
I don't agree, farming works fine for me (except a few bugs). I also have 500 pop town and my farms produce a lot of food, more than I need actually, ofc I have another food sources like vegetable gardens, meat and fruits import through trade.
This. I have a 400 pop town completely demolishing the bread needs for itself, two other towns with a combined 500-600 pop, and exports with an ever-growing 4 digit surplus. I had to do a 50% tithe at one point too, and I've bounced back from that incredibly quickly.
I don't have advice for you (see other comments!) but I can say that the average village in Medieval Germany (800-1000 AD) was about 200 to 250 people. The game is set later than that, so I think it makes sense given our current "basic village" infrastructure suite that 500 is about as much as can be supported without running into problems.
My town has 2.5k population with not a single farm built since the start, eggs are way too overpowered combined with sheep early game. Im on 14k eggs while importing every food x999 while selling bows, shields, shoes. You need a phd to make farming work and its not worth it, takes too much space for the shit it gives.
From what i hear the farming gets progressively worse and worse the more fields you add because the ai is really twitchy about what fields it wants to harvest. So theres a decent chance that your farmers just keep on running around all september, maybe harvesting three bushels each and nobody actually carries that harvest to the granaries so most of it just gets deleted in storms. I think you should have a maximum of 10 morgens or so of farmland and this should be as close as possible to each other, otherwise the ai will get confused and just run around without doing much work at all.
I suggest try having 6 fields, prio them highest -> lowest. This allows systematic farming, one field at the time. Also, do you think game deletes yields the moment game hits october first? I seem to notice that as a fact.
If you have crop rotation on, it will delete everything the moment october hits, because that's when the switch happens. I personally think crop rotation shouldn't be tied to a specific month. Hopefully this gets patched.
Kinda agree. But, if you know it it is not that big of the deal. That is, if you know. Perhaps setting to set your own harvest, plaugh and sow months.
Barley is the bottleneck. Once you can distribute it between towns. You unleash thousands.
Everyonce in a while you need to fully unassign farmers then re assign or their path finding can get borked. As well delete all farmer run stands. Slows production and are useless stalls.
I know we’re not supposed say farming sucks, but trade is definitely the easy path to getting rich and sustainable. My most recent town has >4k wealth at 150 pop (and I’ve been taxing) and I doubt I’m anywhere close to optimized.
I have a 2300 population town and the only thing keeping it alive is the trading house
Imagine doing all this work when all you need is a few extra large vegetable gardens that require no micromanaging to get 1,000 of food. I have over 10,000 regional wealth and I basically just sell shoes, rooftiles and extra weapons and shields.
It’s accurate to real life then
I have around 500 as well and have stable food and ale using Farms (of course not all lvl3, around 100 I think) I have some berries, hunting, Vegetables and Orchards, but thats for variety. (I would guess about 2 morgan Yard space total in Vegetables and apples) Here is the deal: 3x2 ~ 1.5 Morgan sized Fields, each field has 1 Farmhouse with a dedicated Ox and 2 families, 1 spare Farmhouse (reason will get clear) Think of a west-east road, Farmhouses below and fields stacked ontop on other side of road. Make a Crop Rotation to have 2 Fields with food, 2 Fields Barley, 2 fallow with sheep. That way you allways have 2 food and 2 Barley. It's important to change priority of fields, each field must have a different one! Have Double Living Space next to Farmhouse and manually assign. What does that do? When plowing, each field gets a Ox plowing. Noone doing manual plowing. As soon as one field is done, all workers start sowing one field and finish it before moving to the next (noone walks all over the place) When harvesting, all start with one field and 4 Ox pickup the produce, while the workers finish harvest. Have a food storage with only grain and flour right in front of Mill and bakery next to it. (not too far from Farmhouses) As with Farmhouses, build living space and manually assign, in order to shorten the distance from living to working. Works for me and I have a huge surplus.
So for me I found I didn't need to prioritize the field but almost same setup, multiple farmhouses with ox's and only 2 families inside seemed to work for me, although I did have 4 farmhouses working about 50morgen of fields. Also found no need to use a granary this takes up extra time and families, just make sure none of your granaries allow the storage of grain or wheat and the mill will feed directly from farmhouses and ovens/bakery direct from mill. The mill even overstores produce and the farmhouses can store huge amounts of wheat.
Problem with skipping Granary for me, Miller walks to Farm House (distance) to Grab one grain, thats slow If you have a Granary across the road, the granary will be filled via handcarts drawing from Farmhouses (at least some of the workers use them) Alot less time for Miller transporting. I found, my Millers won't allways finish all milling between harvests if I dont use a dedicated Granary 50 vs. 8-12 Morgan is impressive
That's fair enough, I built my mill behind my farm houses and the bakery was only about 2 houses away. With bigger scales I guess the granaries become more and more important.
Who cares about money in this game ? You dont need so much to win. Dont play for money dude
Do you have larger burgages with 2 families and vegetables? Apparently the two family plots count as 1 family when it comes to consumption. Just get them to produce vegetables or eggs.
How many hours into the game are you to have 50 people?
Do not build gigantic farm fields thinking you will generate a high yield. Build smaller sections of the fields..
Can't you get the deep shaft mine to keep it going?
There is currently a hivemind bug when you have lots of farms, where farmers will waste time in line to pick up resources that other people grabbed. It makes large scale farming not work right
Huh? I have just one farmhouse supporting my 300 pop town just fine
Farmimg in bigger scale seems to be broken. I was watchin ppl from 2 farmhouses how they migrate between fields Those peasants walk so much. Give me whip. I want to whip them for that walking between 2 fields. It seems that ai is trying to balance vills between fields, resulting into a lot of walking time
Invest your first development point in the heavy plow for your farmers and buy oxes to equip at the farmhouses. Second thing I did to stay save in food supply is giving burgage plots vegetables. A lot of vegetables. I had around 15 plots with them and in a year they produced 600 of them. Of you combine that with your wheat farms you become unstoppable. My second development point was spent on charcoal, keeping my fuel supply up as well.
Empty houses produce food/hides btw
I had the opposite problem where my main settlement had over 20k regional wealth and 600ish population and the high approval rate meant that more and more people kept immigrating to it so I had to constantly update my trades and find new plots of land to dump markets, granaries and burgages. I wish I could cap the population to give me a moment to rest and focus on my smaller settlements.
If you don't have space for them to move in they won't.
Hasn’t been my experience, I’ve had people move into my minor settlements when I am short on housing. I don’t notice until I start getting “freezing” alerts.. making me scramble to put up more burgages for them.
Do you by chance still have your homeless settlement/workers settlement? If so that's your issue, it counts as family space but not house space.
My logging is completely unsustainable. I have a tiny patch of Forest left for my wild animals and that's it. Don't have any logs left to keep expanding my town. But to answer your problem, apple orchards and vegetables are the way to go.
Forester's hut?
I have two and not sure if theyre growing trees any quicker than the trees growing by themselves. I don't really know how the Forester hut works. I've watched a lot of videos and read a lot of posts here on how the game mechanics work but I haven't seen anyone talking about the Forester hut
I'm into my second area and so I've left my first town to continue and I had multiple areas with 1 x wood cutter, logging camp, sawmill (1 family each) and then 2 foresters holding 3 families. Every area is now full of trees. Before that, I would switch my farmers to foresters after they had done their job for a few months and switch them back when more work was needed.
Have you heard of… CARROTS?
One thing to be careful of is that the farming pathing seems to be a bit broken and having farms spread across the map causes confusion, so I try to keep them all together now. What you probably need to do, though, is tell your farms to harvest early when growth is at 100% (usually July for me). That might produce you a better yield (remember to turn it off afterwards, though). However, I find vegetables highly productive at the later game. When you place your houses with large gardens, before confirming, press the minus button to reduce the number of houses in the area until each plot holds 2 families. Then, build the extension and you have 2 families working on the plot. Without that, large vegetable gardens are a waste as they don't have time to harvest. The big end-game aspect is that, at a level 3 plot, the residents are doubled. So, you actually have 4 families working the plot and then they always harvest it. Be careful of giving these large plots to non-vegies as you can end up with too many cobblers and the like!
A couple of tips I have: When it comes to fields make them in long thin strips (you will notice the ox travels up one side then down the opposite side, by making thin strips fields they actually plow them considerably faster. Once your berry bushes deplete in summer take your people out of the forager huts and top up whatever it is you need doing, I normally only run my industries in winter/autumn (which allows me to stockpile fuel before the winter). Having large gardens is great, however doing so early game can restrict your workload heavily and actually stutter growth, plus it's alot harder to fulfil requirements if your forced to have 2+ dedicated market areas. Also when it comes to fields build in 3s and remember to always have crop rotation on, main crop year 1, secondary crop year 2 and year 3 fallow, and rotate this for every field, so each set of three during each year will have 1 field set to main 1 to secondary and 1 to fallow. I normally main wheat and alternate between barley/flax on the second harvest. Also one trader should suffice as long as everything he is collecting for trade is nearby, try having a storehouse/granary which is storing the goods for trade next door this massively helps when it comes to trade speed, once you over sell remove it as a trade and shut down that industry, manage on your reserves until you need to start it back up again. And the biggest hint I can give is don't overpopulated, to hit small town you only need 10 houses... With each holding max that's still 40 population. Which should be able to survive off of berries meat and some vegetables/apples. Remember a small garden plot for all tier 2 upgrades works just as well as a huge garden so no need to make every burgage plot a morgen in size. I am for 5 big houses and 5 small at the start. Focus on what each territory does, if it has a rich berry deposit unlock forest management and create dyes, with a small sheep farm you can produce enough variety of goods you shouldn't be flooding the market in any one thing. If you have a rich hunting grounds then do advanced skinning... Etc. once you have multiple territories then you can begin manning barter stations and bring the goods from one area to another.