Alcohol still literally not worth giving towns

[doesurmindglow]

I still think a fun and elegant solution to this persistent pain point would be Tier 2 pubs called Taverns and Tier 3 pubs called Inns.

They could upgrade to sell food, produce more income as a result, and the hearty grub could soak up some of the alcohol, reducing intoxication time. They could then upgrade again, offering villagers a bed to sleep it off, further increasing revenue and reducing intoxication time, and maybe conveying an interesting passive benefit like increasing the frequency or length of trader stops or function also as a temporary shelter.

It’d give a reason to build pubs even if their initial impact isn’t so great. I think it’d be a great thematic way around the whole “make every town dry” meta that most players favor to avoid the drunk and disorderly.

[Khalps]

It’s a game. Intoxicated villagers are amusing. Be amused, or don’t. For the record I drink when I’m happy every week. I just get more happy

[FrankvanDorp]

Thank you for pointing out that this is a game, I’m sure no one here was aware of that crucial bit of information.

[Clubfooted_Peon]

I haven’t played for quite a while, but I’m keeping tabs on development. I see pubs are still a trap. That’s a shame. Having a building and production chain you’re better off without is a waste.

[kendy4thestate]

I have one pub, yesterday three villagers died. Today I have no pub, and an export.

[phoenixwind]

The situation with pubs reminds me of how Sydney, Australia enacted lockout laws after one too many incidents of alcohol-infused violence. It supposedly resulted in fewer people dying from being punched in the head by drunks but the laws were eventually repealed because they did so much damage to the city’s nightlife and reputation. The problem isn’t the laws or alcohol itself but the country’s drinking culture.

We shouldn’t have to take away alcohol from our villagers in order to save their lives. If a town has a high rate of happiness then murder brawls shouldn’t happen at all, or only exceedingly rarely. I want to build pubs because they’re cute and I like the idea of my citizens enjoying their time off but I’m yet to build one because I’m so wary of the negative impact. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have downsides (like making villagers lazy and less productive), but it seems like right now they’re entirely weighted in that direction without any meaningful positives to make them worthwhile.

[EmpMing]

Just use it as export, simple solution:)

Thou after the update, even covering the map in bee hives I have no honey thanks to the t2 bakeries

[FrankvanDorp]

Well, turns out I was wrong. I was being too generous when I assumed they had fixed the bar fights, because they obviously did not.

Here a drunk villager absurdly killed two other villagers with his fists, because that is totally something that’s rEaLiStIc for a bar fight in a random medieval village.

And I don’t even have some police force or prison or executioner to deal with villagers like this. Not that it matters, because apparently every human being will turn into a serial killer if they drink beer. That’s how humans work.

Oh, and as you can see, his happiness is at 100%. So the claim that unhappy villagers will fight, which is a tip often shown at the loading screen, is simply false.

So even this awful aspect of pubs, that people here have been pointing out is an awful aspect of pubs for over a year on this forum, hasn’t been fixed yet.

It honestly makes me pessimistic for the future this game, because we’re at 0.94 now, way beyond the point that issues like this, game mechanics that are dysfunctional according to any serious game design philosophy, should have been fixed.
It just seems there is a massive unwillingness on part of the devs to even consider feedback, even when everyone points out a feature is not working, explains why it is not working, and give suggestions on how to fix it, and do so literally for years, it just gets ignored completely.
They can’t even be bothered to explain here why they think it should NOT be fixed. Complete radio silence on an issue everyone is complaining about, and it’s far from the only issue where this is the case. Not a good sign, for a game that’s nearing its official release date.

[doesurmindglow]

Yeah I also think having a police force of some kind would make sense, or at least allowing players to dispatch guards from towers or something that resolve the issue.

I don’t mind having intoxication and even resulting violence as a mild nuisance mechanic to plan for and deal with, I just wish the value was a little more obvious and the counterplay (ie. police forces or upgrades that mitigate the intoxication) actually existed. Obviously still some players might opt out of alcohol entirely rather than try to manage the downsides, but actually having the option of managing them would make that decision more interesting.

As an aside I do also think there should be more alcohol than beer: it’s funny to me that apple orchards are a big part of the game but that there’s only jam and no cider, despite the fact that historically cider was actually the dominant means of preserving fruit and preserves really did not become a huge thing until nearly the industrial revolution, if I remember correctly. But that’s a much more aesthetic quibble than the lack of gameplay balance around alcohol, which is something that needs another look.

[Ranamar]

I decided to do some A/B testing on this, where I saved right after hitting T3 (at the end of Y15) and, in one case I built a pub right away, while in the other case I built a medium statue in the same place. Also, I was playing on Vanquisher because I figured that would stress things extra.

In this case, though, I did the pub part first, and it turned out that, within 7 years, Vanquisher didn’t matter and the pub didn’t matter (probably). What did matter was how quickly I built housing. I initially forgot about the 400 population requirement for T4 when doing the pub path, which was what I was originally planning to try to get to, and when I did it the second time through with a better idea of what kind of resources I’d need to get population growing, I had more housing built in 4 years than I had built in 7 years on the first run. Similarly, I didn’t build a second work camp as early in the beer run as the dry run, and I don’t think the problem was that I didn’t have the workers; it was that I somehow thought I didn’t need it.

The result is that population growth in the beer run looked like this:

… and population growth in the non-beer one looked like this:

Population growth was actually faster for the first two years of the pub run than it was for the non-pub run, but after that it stagnated because I forgot to build enough housing (and did, in fact, have a wood shortage that I wasn’t handling well).

I think I’ll try one more pub run with everything I know now to see if I can match the performance of the non-pub run, because I suspect the truth is that it doesn’t matter a whole lot, in the end: Beer sets people’s happiness to 100% at the cost of losing some amount of productive time, but it also gives you more gold, and the swing against 1000 gold cost for a statue versus extra gold from the pub is at least briefly a drag. (Also, towns just run a lot more smoothly at 300 people than at 200, at least the way I play this game, TBH.)

[FrankvanDorp]

How do things like birth rate, immigration rate and so forth compare between the two runs?

[BBQ]

I also never build pubs. Just not needed and there’s no positive effects with other sources of entertainment. I still produce a ton of beer since I have so much extra grain and just sell it even if it’s at the lowest price, just because of how much I make and that most traders seem to buy it.

[Ranamar]

I did the third run that I had mentioned, so we’ve got lots of data. Here’s
I think I’d describe things as a bit all over the place. Lots of housing definitely drives growth, with food mattering but being apparently kind of secondary.

In this one, I basically only built housing as population grew, at least initially. (Also, there was a pub.) I moderately severely mismanaged my food supplies.

In this one, I built ~350 housing before year 20, because I knew I needed to get things to grow. (There was no pub.) Food supplies mostly felt sufficient, although I definitely needed to expand them as the population more than doubled.

In the final one, I built ~375 housing before year 20, because I had learned that housing significantly drives growth. (This once again had a pub.) Food supplies were constantly short, and I think I bought an average of 500-1000 food per year off the market, usually when someone who offered discounted beans or grain showed up.

Incidentally, the reason the last two sets are a year earlier than the first one is that, for some reason, the next bandit raid came a year sooner for those two. In fact, the last one demanded a ransom, which would have been much smarter to pay, but I figured it was a fairer comparison to fight it out instead.

Bringing this back around to beer a bit, it definitely felt like beer brewing was a drag on my grain supply in the final one, although, objectively, I think it was only about 100 grain per year. It’s possible that the real problem was just that I had wildly outstripped my food supply in all respects, since I had also tuned the bread-baking targets higher, but, honestly, the amount of available bread basically wasn’t much because, well, I’d sort of mismanaged my food supply.

Oh, yeah, one more thing: I would say that happiness was about the same across all three runs, and I didn’t significantly notice the effects of intoxication, even though I know they exist, since I’ve seen soldiers fall on their faces on the way out of the barracks before. (Showing up to muster drunk is an instant fire, every time.)

[Bas]

@Ranamar

Lots of housing definitely drives growth, with food mattering but being apparently kind of secondary.

In my experience if your population is worried about the food supply not many immigrants will show up. (I’ve had issues growing my town with plenty of houses and trinkets, but I didn’t notice my food supply was only just enough to not starve anyone )

[Ranamar]

@Bas

In my experience if your population is worried about the food supply not many immigrants will show up.

The thing here that’s not obvious unless you’re watching closely (which I was, after all, since I was working on my “grow quickly” skills) is that the game checks several times a year whether anyone wants to immigrate. One time in the third one, I hit 0 food over the winter, but, ironically, I think it was year 18 or 19 (when immigration was merely low) and not year 16 (when immigration was literally 0), because I made sure to shore up my food supply quickly that spring. I also even had immigrants showing up at times when I only had 4 or 5 months of food instead of the 6 mentioned at the beginning.

With all of that said, you are broadly correct: You get a lot more immigrants when you have a larger food surplus. Year 21, I had 20 people request to move in all at once, which I think was a combination of >50 available house space and having actually hit around 8 months food supply for a bit.

[Richard46]

I have given up on brewing entirely partly because the benefits look marginal but mainly because honey is now so scarce, plus it is also now used by the bakers.

[phoenixwind]

The more I think about it the more absurd the impact alcohol has on towns becomes. Fair enough for some workers to become lazy and have the occasional brawl that results in an injury or two, but mass murder? Really? Why? There’s no realistic precedent for this behaviour. Berzerking villagers should max out at 2-3 victims, who should then be carted to the hospital to have their broken bones mended.

[TrevTheRev]

Yes: I also disabled Brewing, and at last I can bake pastries. Previously, half the workers at many places came to work drunk. Unless the game adds a concept of “day night cycle” so that workers can have a beer in the evening, this feature doesn’t work for me.

[Richard46]

Although to be fair if we lived in a village beset with regular snow storms; drought; plague; constant bloody howling wolves and pillaging raiders every four years we would all no doubt turn to the bottle.

[FrankvanDorp]

Sure, that’s why it should be linked to unhappiness, which is how the tips at the loading screen claim it works, but not how it works in practice.