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.