Hey everyone! My Stormwind city has around 1.3k of pop, loads of houses and i’m having some issues.
I got nine 24x24 farm fields and near 20 compost yards (every single farm has the fertilizer dumped on it) the nearest possible to my houses and I’m having problems with cleanliness.
The compost yards are all full of trash so I need to keep building more and more which affects my urban landscape, also they dont seem effective cleaning the trash from homes.
I don’t think compost yards work at bigger distances. I tried to push them to the outskirts but aint working cause it gets more and more dirty and full of mice. This makes clear distance factor is really “heavy” in this game.
I would read some sugestions from you guys on how I can fix this issue without “spaming” compost yards all over my town and still keep 'em clean.
There seems to be a ‘soft limit’ on how far Composters will go to pick up night soil from houses. I say ‘soft’, because I can get an indicator over a house that it has ‘too much compost’, and then a few minutes later the composter gets to it and the notice disappears. Since other houses right next to it get no notice at all, the actual accumulation seems to be dependent on so many factors that it’s impossible to predict precisely.
I’ve found through experiments that the Compost Yard has to be 13 tiles from the nearest residence to avoid any negative Desirability.
The real problem is that the Composter will only go about 40 - 50 tiles to collect compost, which gives a relatively narrow band of 25 - 33 tiles from the nearest Compost Yard in which to put residences. Composters on all sides gives an area of about 60 x 60 tiles for housing unless you narrow the ‘desirability gap’ by placing gardens, garden trails, statues, and other decorations between the Composters and the nearest houses. Upgraded streets with stone surfaces also extend the distance a composter will work, but I haven’t had time to experiment and see just how much ‘extra’ distance this provides.
Consequently, I usually wind up with a roughy rectangular housing area in my towns, about 60 tiles wide and as long as I can fit in, with a central ‘plaza’ for the Town Center, Theatre, Temple, Library, and the Trading Post off to the side to be near storage facilities and production buildings to keep it stocked. At the ends of the rectangle sometimes go supplemental Theatres and Shrines, which if the Composter is placed behind them act to reduce the 13-tile desirabilty distance by almost half.
Rule of Thumb, which has worked pretty consistently since Version 7, is one Compost Yard per 100 - 125 population to keep up with cleanliness, but if you also have a bunch of barns (6 or more Upgraded) you may need an extra Compost Yard near the barns - those cows generate Steaming Heaps, too!
It would also be really nice to change the area of operation, add extra employees, and upgrade to hold more waste. I really think that’s one building that desperately needs additional employees and upgradeable stats. It’s a pretty important resource.
something is wrong you only need 1 per 10 manors. (less houses
is way more efficient than many smaller houses and same number of population)
it is all automatic anyway so you do not have to do anything.
yeah but if you have manor versus as an example shelters with same
population you do not need any where near the same number of compost yards
since they are making way less trips back and forth and as you know
this game is all about travel time. lol
me I do 1 compost per 10 manors (80 peeps) and never see compost go above
8 units in a manor and most of the time when i click a manor it is 0.
granted I do put the compost yards right next to the manors and then surround
the manors with +6 desirability urns to counter them. Looks like crap but
travel time for my town is all green everywhere for everything.
All production right next to manors etc… as well. My peeps walk out their
door 5 feet away they enter the foundry lol
I suppose I spent too much of my mis-spent youth playing the city building games like Caesar, Pharaoh and the like and too much of the last few years playing Anno 1800, but I can’t stand NOT trying to build a good-looking town. I confess to being a ‘Beauty Builder’, or as close as I can come to it: if I wouldn’t want to live there, I don’t want to see it on my computer screen.
The other side of that is that I have a little table of Undesirability Distances - the distance at which various buildings negatively effect housing (it ranges from 5 tiles for Brickyards and Firewood Splitters to 13 tiles for Tanneries) so that I can keep the Nasty Stuff at a distance - or know where to plan for one of your Walls of Desirability to compensate.
Much as I like efficiency in town planning, I’ll cheerfully sacrifice some of it for the look of the thing. The fact that bth of us can build working towns in the same game using different criteria is, to me, a sign of the strength of the game and its systems.
I hear ya but max efficiency is a thing of beauty also. lol
700 pop and I only need 5 builders and I have never had a single building
get the needs repair tag. everything and anything is done instantly.
I have labor force standing around with nothing to do so I created more
industries to sell more items in trade post. I can’t use the gold fast
enough that I make. That being said it is why I haven’t played
in a month. Just isn’t anything left to do and when you have millions
in gold it gets boring.
Tried a new map and found the only way to keep the waste clear is to build the compost yard near the shelters, this is ridiculous and spoils the game entirely. The shelters also produce way too much waste.
Part of the fun of this type of game is building a nice looking town, that would not include having the waste close to the houses, I would not like to live next to a dump, perhaps the person who thought this is OK lives next to one.
As I think we’ve shown, there are two ways to go with the Undesirable buildings like Compost Yards.
My way is to place them as close as possible without being close enough to negatively affect the residences. In the case of Compost, that’s 13 tiles from residence to yard. @Groovy prefers maximum efficiency for all of his workers, so he puts the Compost physically close enough to serve the maximum number of houses, but places a ‘wall’ of Decorations: statues, potted plants, gardens, etc, between the Compost Yard and the residences to compensate for the negative desirability.
Both work. My way is somewhat less efficient and requires therefore a few more Compost Yards overall, but costs less in the expense in Gold and resources to build all the Decorations. You take your pick, which as I’ve said is a sign of the essential good design of the game: there’s more than one way to accomplish most things that the game requires from you.
You need to have the required materials (planks, stone, logs, etc) and also have a market built to generate income since the compost yard has a fixed monthly cost and if you can’t pay for that then the worker there will stop working until you can pay again.
