I first played the game around November, so haven’t been around as long as others.
The terrain tool (flatten terrain) could be better. If its flattening a section of mountain so a mine can be placed, it would be useful of the tool to actually flatten the land even if it costs significant work time and gold just make it true flat for buildings, because the current tool is just about useless and tedious for anything that isn’t already relatively flat.
Animal farming seems to be subpar as well. Horses should be a viable source of meat production like cows and goats, shouldn’t need manual slaughter every year cause that is quite ridiculous. I don’t need to click the wheat to farm it, so why cant horses be slaughtered for meat?
Far too many herders are needed for each livestock other than the chickens. If number of herders for goats, cows, and horses is halved, then the paltry output of meat would make sense for each. It seems that the solution was to nerf the hunter cabins which is fair, but the issue is that it just doesn’t make sense to have 24 herders for 40 cattle. At that point, any farm would be operating in the deep negative especially if all 24 herders are full time year round. An actual farm can have 2 full time workers easily handling 40 to 50 cows for a year, with occasional assistance for other work. I could micromanage like crazy, fire the herders until breeding time, but then I don’t get as much milk.
The upgraded barn is still a net negative upgrade, unless the map is fully settled. And, once again, hunter cabins still outpace farming. The value of farming is that it produces more than hunting(source: literally all of human civilization) so barns need both decreased workers and increased birth rates to match actual farms.
And of course the T2 forager shack was super nerfed making it also significantly less useful.
Something that would be nice would be more camera movement to get some skyline shots.
Also, having the automatic building upgrades be a drop down list of different types so I don’t have to manually upgrade each garden or well or storage areas would be lovely.
In the animal buildings you can set the population limits so that slaughtering is done automatically. Especially chickens, I like chikenz. Limit is 24, I set it to 21, and the breeding rate is 4 per quarter, not yearly. Treat the other animals the same, except the horses, you never know when you may need eight cavalry, leaving one behind and any survivors to continue breeding.
The main output of barns is milk, not meat. In terms of units of milk produced per worker, they’re really not so bad. And milk is super easy to turn into long lasting cheese, and they’re a unique category of food for upgrading houses, so they’re really a very decent food source. And, on top of that, they’re a huge source of manure, which means more fertiliser, which means more fertile farmland, which means more food. That alone would almost be a good enough reason to get them.
The only “issue” with getting low meat from barns is that it means also getting low hides / tallow, both of which have irreplaceable niches. The only meaningful source of those is hunting. It’s kind of weird (and a late game balance issue) that barns can’t replace hunting as a late game source of those.
I do agree that upgraded barns / goat barns could do with a better worker-animal ratio than their base counter part. Doesn’t have to be huge but going, eg, from 6:10 to 10:20 would be nice. Balancing should be based on gameplay, not realism: a real farm doesn’t need 3 works per hectare after all. But even without that it’s not a net negative. You don’t need the map to be fully settled to get efficiency benefits from higher density: it means less time spent travelling to pastures, to get feed from the granary, to carry milk to the cheesemongers, for workers to walk home, etc…
The terrain tool, isn’t useless, you can even abuse it to create defensive cliffs! But it’s definitely super confusing and counter intuitive to use.
Auto-upgrading, or just placing the upgraded building straight away, would definitely be nice in the late game.
I suppose my issue with barns is that assuming all food is consumed at the same rate, a hunter can get roughly 200 food units. An upgraded cow barn produces roughly 2400 food units with 12 workers. Its the fact that it is a one to one ratio of food produced per worker that bothers me. There is no doubt its more space efficient to have an upgraded barn(especially compared to space needed for hunters), but even in towns of over 2500 people, I find no need for it because even on a small map there is plenty of room for livestock. Positioning barns near storage/farms is never really an issue, but the volume of food produced per worker is.
A non upgraded barn produces roughly 1320 food units for 6 workers meaning it technically is a better food producer per worker than both the hunter and upgraded barn(although some hunters can get reliably over 220). Its workers that are the limited resource, and even though barns are more reliable than hunters, as you said, hunters produce more hides and tallow. So with space and location not being an issue I’ve ever had, it seems an upgraded barn only truly benefits those that have limited space or that want to build smaller settlements.
Personally, the terrain tool is too over simplified compared to how other city builders handle terrain reshaping. So to keep it simple, have it make things actually flat, or have other tools that can make slopes for mountain access.
Where does the 1320 come from? Is that meat and milk? What about the fodder consumption? Because I’m pretty sure the amount of milk per cow is higher in an upgraded barn than an non-upgraded one. And each cow needs slightly less fodder too.
Also remember that you don’t need to fully staff each barn. If you’re worried about food/worker above all else, it might be more efficient to not fully staff them - although you’ll lose some food/cow if you do that (which, IMO, is often as important).
Yea 1320 is from combined meat and milk, mainly because I cant find if rates of consumption for food differ for different food types, so I assume its a ratio of 1 meat can be consumed or 1 dairy. Milk per cow is marginally higher, but not significantly so(less than 5% more). As far as I can tell, the less fodder needed simply refers to the pasture size not increasing in size, but winter feed still requires the same amount.
Not fully staffing a barn means less milk and less meat produced, and as with other buildings, means less overall efficiency of the building. Im saying that I understand its simply a game mechanic, but to me, the concept around how they handle farming of animals is too far from reality. It would be the equivalent of saying you need 4 people to drive a car efficiently, otherwise the car simply runs slower. Even with low numbers of animals in a barn apparently that means the herders are less efficient with less workers(this makes no sense too, but once again, I understand that for a game they use it as a way to simplify).
Farming should be stronger in game because its so ridiculously OP in reality. I’m not saying it needs to match something crazy like American ranchers with 900 cattle and 6 full time workers. But even single farmers can have 30 cows handled on their own. Simply half the required workers per barn would at least be reasonable in a game about survival(only 3 herders for 10 cows or 6 herders for 20 cows if all other aspects stay the same), because otherwise it is ridiculous that a hunter can be considered as efficient at food production.
Maybe something for future upgrades, both goats and cows can, in a T4 upgrade, differentiate into either a dairy farm or a meat farm, concentrating on one or the other. Set an age limit? After 5 years an animal is slaughtered for it’s meat anyway.
About parks and gardens, don’t forget that many of us like to have not all parks upgraded to T2. Many (including myself) love to have more rustic (T1) parks around depending on the areas and also to have more park variety (somewhat), so let’s not auto-upgrade them (or at least, not make upgrade mandatory). This is also the reason why we asked to remove the yellow arrow on parks and gardens.