I decided to try again giving towns alcohol and it’s literally a waste of time and resources.
this is pretty routine.
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Looks like my kind of routine
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Strongly agree. Intoxicating system needs to be revised. Technically, intoxicating should mostly affect unhappy villagers, but in reality you get a lot of intoxicated people even if happiness is at the top for all the voices. I simply refuse to produce alcohol because currently it’s the perfect way to mess things up in my town.
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I get, that this is a bit annoying. They got rid of the really drastic alcohol consequences like raging soldiers. Would you want to get rid of deseases as well and other needs? Than the game would not be worth playing. Aactually like that some people will get intoxicated. The game is altogether not completely realistic (it’s a game and does not need to be) but to show this effect and also the typical use of beer as a drink in the middleages with all the consequences … don’t know a game with that dynamic.
I don’t see any harsh problems in my towns. Might be because I build more libraries than Pubs, create enough books aso and slo limit the amount of beed production.
If you don’t produce beer, you won’t have propper immigration and growth. And it’s a very good trading #item for early game.
this reply is not well thought out and you should think before you type.
Alcohol is a huge resource drain, and a negative for your city. Diseases are environmental hazards, trashing your workforce productivity for no real gain (you can get the happiness boost from just building more parks, etc) makes the entire mechanic useless.
i don’t know about you, but i think games shouldn’t have useless mechanics.
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Definitely agree, I don’t really understand the balance at the moment. IDK, if someone has made pubs “make sense” I’d love to hear it.
Whenever I build a pub, the huge loss in productivity from intoxication (even in very very happy settlements!) makes the gold & entertainment output entirely not worth it…especially when you can just sell the beer and build other entertainment which have minimal costs by comparison.
There’s no advantage to building them.
I reiterate, booze is best sold, not drunk.
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It’s a shame that this can’t be resolved quickly.
Well, so let’s not go as far as to redicule ones ability to write answers just because you don’t have the same opinion, shall we? There might be spelling errors, the idea of my answer is pretty solid. This is a forum, let’s debate it.
The mechanic and hazards (even the benefits) of alcohol in a society is as real as a diseases or environmental factors. It’s a choice of crate to include the mechanics to their liking, I seem to like it, you don’t. But really, why don’t you like it? Because no other game does it? Because of resources / imbalance?
I don’t cuncur with your opinion that it is a “huge” drain/ imballance.
It will consume some wheat which is the most plentifull crop and some honney, which they will ramp up again. In short: Breweries don’t consume essential goods. The needed workforce for brewing is minimal. My 1500 pop runs on 8 brewer workers, considering i am selling a third of production and you get a kick back in the pub as well.
The screenshot of the stall and drunkeness - it’s more “funny” than hazardous. I bet no horse died, the amount of horses is maxed out anyway. So absolutely no loss. It was too much when soldiers were rampaging but now…?
What really tickles you the wrong way that you dislike it that much?
Let’s stay friendly and have fun with the game.
Probably, the most hated aspect of alcohol is that although it’s stated that “sad villagers” can become easily intoxicated and violent", you get more than half of your villagers intoxicated and some even violent despite the happiness is at its very top.
This creates the bad feeling that the whole pub/alcohol system is absolutely useless, because the cons are way more severe than any little/potential pro you can get. It’s fine to have cons by having villagers drinking at the pub, but it’s absolutely silly that 70% of your population becomes intoxicated despite being very happy, slowing down everything in the town workflow.
You can argue that having pubs and alcohol is not mandatory, but at this point we could even cut down entirely this production chain, because having it does not provide any tangible benefit, while you can easily see how it messes your town up severely.
In my town I built pubs just for eyecandy, because I like how they look like; but I have no breveries built, so they do not provide entertainment.
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OK, @Ro84 . I never had 70% intoxicated. Could that be an overstatement?
Well, when you had 6 intoxicated workers out of 8 in the mine, 2 of 2 in the woodchopper, 5 out of 7 in farm(s), 4 out of 6 in the book binding office… and you had 100% “very happy”, I’d call it roughly 70%, yes. Hence why in my current run I did not built any brewery.
Ok, I got that. The brewery alone won’t let the people consume beer. You need the pub for that. And just for fun i build two extra pubs in my before well oiled machine of a town. It’s drunk city now. Soooo. It’s about controlling the amount of pubs and alcohol as it seems.
Nobody criticized your spelling. You logic was criticized.
We covered why we don’t like it - because it has nothing but downsides. The “upside” of desirability boost/entertainment can be gotten through means without all those downsides.
I wanted to discuss this a bit, your mind is set and you don’t seem to understand an other valid viewpoints. Don’t worry, but this discussion does not make any sense for me anymore.
Although I think other people already explained it well enough, let’s address this anyway.
That alcohol has “real hazards” is undoubtedly true, but this is a game mechanic, and game mechanics require a kind of balance. There have to be upsides to choosing to build a Pub, and although it’s fine if there are downsides, they should be more than balanced out by the upsides or otherwise there is no reason to ever build one.
And that is why “but alcohol has real hazards” is a completely invalid argument, because it doesn’t matter how real it is if it doesn’t work as a mechanic in the game. And right now, it doesn’t work. The happiness boost is insignificant and the downsides are crucifying, which means it’s a badly balanced mechanic that needs fixing.
So:
“But really, why don’t you like it? Because no other game does it? Because of resources / imbalance?”
Obviously, because of imbalance. That no other game does it is completely irrelevant and no one suggested otherwise. Resources are not a problem either, because beer is still useful as an export product as merchants often buy it. That’s the only purpose for beer in this game right now.
But imbalance is an absolute core concern for any game, when a game is unbalanced it means that entire mechanics fall by the wayside because it’s not worth using them, and the effort by the developers to create the mechanics is completely wasted.
" it’s more “funny” than hazardous. I bet no horse died, the amount of horses is maxed out anyway. So absolutely no loss. It was too much when soldiers were rampaging but now…?"
Again, you’re missing the point by a mile. Yes, the damage does not literally destroy your town. You can survive despite of it.
But it’s still a complete downside, and there is no real upside to offset it, which means that building pubs is never a good decision. You don’t build buildings in your town “because the damage isn’t that bad”, because you don’t build buildings to damage yourself in the first place. You build buildings because they make your town better. Right now, pubs do not.
“What really tickles you the wrong way that you dislike it that much?”
I think I explained it now. I really hope you take this seriously and don’t just strawman my valid criticism of this mechanic in its current form just to be able to dismiss it, like you did with some of the other critics here. Like Denidil who made the very valid point: " i think games shouldn’t have useless mechanics." You seem to have ignored that point completely.
For a game in development, it’s crucial that game devs learn it when a mechanic is completely dysfunctional, and it really doesn’t help when people go around blindly defending the game without even seriously considering the points the critics make.
This isn’t even hard to solve as a problem, for example it can be easily offset by having villagers work HARDER when they live near a pub (having a beer after work can be quite motivating), and get a productivity bonus, with the downside being they get drunk and aggressive if they aren’t happy.
That would be a balanced mechanic: upsides and downsides that are both meaningful, and it becomes a skill issue for the player to maximize the upsides and minimize the downsides, by knowing when to open pubs, and when not to.
Right now, this question does not exist for the player because opening pubs is always a net negative. Skilled players won’t build them. Unskilled players will build them once, in their first game, and not build them again in subsequent games because they learned their lesson. A waste of a potential great mechanic.
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Ok, thanks for trying to stay at the fact side of the game.
I am a real nerd for this game, i noted down/ export the data / statistics. After looking at a 10 year differential of the game with and without pubs, you are right: in the statistical middle, the all about productivity (depending on raids, droughts and so on) will vary, and it varies more with pups. Immigration will increase by about 8-21% by beer (due to different ratios between growth benefit to city size, in my messurement from 450-600 pop). It’s really difficult to be as unbias here as possible because so many other factors are to keep in mind (happiness, food etc).
If you look at this logarithmicly, and look at the longterm factors, faster growth will have way bigger influence on the success of the town (meaning affordable military size and thereby raid loss, resource availability aso) that pubs benefit in the long run even more.
If you play the game on tripple speed and don’t want to get as many people as possible in a quick time, it annoys you not to have constant production , don’t use pubs. If you want to take the extra challenge, boost growth and can live with the persentile variability of production , use pubs. It’s a kind of disjuncted feature were you can really choose.
The stated 70% reduction of production of goods is not exactly true though. I looked at several industries. In a small game with 400 pop without raids there was a of max 20% and and average of 4% p. A. reduction, keeping in mind, that an affected production will not be affected for more than 1-2 seasons every couple of years and a 8 worker smelter will be less effected than a 2 worker mill. Still the variation over more than 3 years is no visible any more. Animal farms seem to be especially effected.
If you want to check the numbers yourself really quick, look at the production of milk (if you only have barns). The exterior factors like droughts aso should be minimal. If those little idiots get drunk, remember the year. If you don’t have any other factors, you will probably come to the same conclusion.
If you have bigger cities, it is quasi impossible to compare the numbers. Keeping in mind, that you have many production sites for the same good (for example i have about 12 mills for 2000 POP) and not all buildings are effected, I guess the variability in production is way less relevant in bigger cities.
I think we have one thing in common: we have a lot of fun with this game. Let’s agree to disagree. I wish any No-pubers as much fun as possible. Bye for now
I have real doubts if any of those positives you mention can be attributed to pubs, or just to the fact that your city grows, so many other metrics will increase along with it, like immigration. How do you know you aren’t just looking at the natural growth of the town that would have happened anyway, with or without pubs?
After being away for a year I started a new game three weeks ago, and today decided against my better judgment to build pubs again, and I am once again convinced that they are TERRIBLE.
And the thing is, while the upsides you attribute to pubs in your post are quite speculative, the downsides are very visible in the statistics. Here are my preserves losing a full 40% because the workers are drunk:
The previous year, smoked meat production was cut by something like 60%:
Pottery ground to a standstill in the same year. The graph is hard to read due to a huge trade a few years earlier, but it went from 54 per year to 24 per year, again a reduction in productivity around 55%:
I didn’t get into real trouble because I always make sure I have a big food surplus and pottery isn’t essential, but if this would happen to some of my firewood splitters, a lot of people could easily freeze to death.
But that’s beside the point, it doesn’t matter if the negative is big or small, because if there is no positive, it’s bad game design.
And all I see my pubs doing is generate a miniscule amount of gold, and give some desirability and happiness I didn’t need in the first place.
You call it “variability in production”, which sounds like a euphemism for “decreases in production”. Because I’ve never noticed any increase in production anywhere. Once again, the feature would be a lot better if there was such an increase to balance out all the negatives (or ANY positive AT ALL for that matter), but I’m not seeing it.
It also doesn’t help that people usually get drunk together with their entire house, and because the game often places people with the same jobs in the same house, this becomes especially crippling. It would be much more manageable if the number of intoxicated villagers were more evenly spread across the town (but again, it would still be a terrible feature without any worthwhile positives to offset it).
And about the duration, I’ve tracked one house full of drunks from the first moment I noticed them, and they remained intoxicated and completely unproductive for well over six months, which is ridiculously long, and another thing many people pointed out as a problem over a year ago already. For some reason, once intoxicated, they just keep going back to drink, again and again, and I can’t even instruct my publicans to stop serving them.
And I can’t even salvage their production of goods by removing them from the building, because whenever I remove a worker from a building and add one back again, it will almost always be the exact same villager I just removed.
It’s a really bad feature right now, for all intents and purposes it has only negative effects, so it needs to be fixed. I was honestly disappointed to find out it wasn’t fixed already, because I (as well as many other people here) already addressed this problem well over a year ago, in this thread: Why are pubs so astonishingly bad?
The only thing that seems to have fixed since then is the bar fights. But they still haven’t gotten around to giving the pubs a noticeable upside, or reducing the time villagers remain drunk, or any of the other countless ways they could have been improved. At this point I’m really wondering what’s going on in the heads of the devs.
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There are good points being made here. This is something the devs really should address once they have a moment to circle back to balance issues.
I, for one, enjoy the eye-candy of having bustling pubs in my town and a brewery busily stewing up casks of beer. I enjoy that my villagers get to go get drunk after a long day of toil and it adds a bit of flavor to the limited routine activities of the population. (I understand that we’re about to get more variety of idle villager behaviors and animations in the next patch.)
Yet from a gameplay mechanics perspective it does seem that the downsides far outweigh any benefits to the player, who is after all trying to keep a city functioning. Surely there is a way to make pubs a worthwhile institution in the life of the town with only a little fine-tuning of the variables involved.
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Thank you @FrankvanDorp for going through this in such detail.
How do I get my statistics?
I am a lunatic with too much passion for this game. I switch off/on the pubs and beer production in a testvillage of about 500 people and let it run for a couple of years.
Messure: You can’t really “messure” you are right, you can observe and conclude. So how do I “messure”
I don’t take food in genreal as a messurment exactyly because what you said: Because there are too many other factors for food. Droughts, some behind the scenes balancing issues I guess, traveltime, pests aso. Just to understand the impact just take milk production (which should have little to none outside factors if you have enough hey) and wait for drunk herders. I expect, that the impact of alcohol is about the same for a herder (which I “messure”) and a pottery production (which has too many other factors and I can’t messure".
Pottery: Pubs don’t make any sense when you have only one production line of a god (meaning one pottery building). You need redundance. The risk of a momentary gap is too big, I build pubs, when I have about two prod lines of everything. I wouldn’t normaly build a pub in a 500 pop town, 800-1000 maybe.
Benefits & Difference in strategy:
You are absolutely right: if the benefits do not outway the loss, this would be bad game design, I see it the same way. We just don’t agree on the amount of benefit here. You say there is none, I say there is some. As I read through these posts here, it became clear to me that I kind of expected all of you guys to play the game the same way as I do. Which you probably don’t. I am a pub building horder. I always have above 20 food suply and huge amounts of daily goods (1000 people: 400 pottery, 400 shoes aso). So these “dents” in production don’t agrevate me at all, barely have consequendces. I play on Vanq.
So to add: if you are not a horder but a just in time producer, only have one production line or are just bothered by the idea of alcohol: don’t build pubs.
I can see the difference of growth - well I was on 0.93, haven’t done it on 0.94 - when switching pubs and beer prod on/off, the numbers were to the best of my knowledge right. Let’s look at 0.94 and await some changes.
Optimisation / suggestion:
We are ALL bothered by not exactly knowing the impact. You guys get annoyed, I do stupid crazy statistics. So the intransparency is what bothers us ALL. Not pubs or alcohol.
Solution(?): farms have impact statistics for deseases, stones and overgrowth, rigt? Why don’t we see some numbers as well for alcohol in the production building?
Better even: we see spoilage, raids, usage aso in the statistics graphs. Why not “~loss by drunkeness”?
We could maybe even counter act by limiting the amount of beer in the pubs (min/max). Too little beer: little growth but no beer income and no growth. Too much beer: Spring break crazyness with huge production loss.
This game is awesome, I never dove in so deep, wrote in forums before and it’s still in early access.
If I might be so blunt: @Zantai is there any statement reagrding alcohol impact from you guys? How does it change growth and production?
Thank you
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