One of my biggest issues that I have had while playing is that after the farming season is over, my farmers don’t do anything all winter. I have to manually unassigned them so that 40-70 farmers are not just standing around for three months. And then if I forget to reassign them to farming before the next season starts, they miss a whole crop because they weren’t assigned when the crop started.
I propose that a mechanic be added that allows farmers to be worth something during the winter without having to manually assign and unassigned them yourself.
Let me know if anyone else has noticed this or done the same thing. I know it isn’t a big deal, but it can be really annoying having to do this every single year in the game.
I feel like this shouldn’t be necessary for a healthy village as the game is currently balanced assuming those workers won’t be busy over winter. The fact you can put in the extra effort of clicking a button 5-10 times during a struggle year for that worker boost is an interesting mechanic. If it was changed to make it easy to set as the default behavior then the game would need a slight rebalance, and you’d lose the ability to get a bandaid boost when needed.
If you are finding that it is necessary to release your farmers every winter then you should be looking at other ways to improve the efficiency of your economy for a longer term solution.
“If you are finding that it is necessary to release your farmers every winter then you should be looking at other ways to improve the efficiency of your economy for a longer term solution.”
I think you are completely missing the point.
You are confusing the poster’s individual game play techniques with game design. The point is not that the player could potentially be more efficient in other areas of the game, to compensate for poor implementation of the feature under discussion, but to improve the feature actually under discussion!
The op said [quote=“SirArtixIII, post:1, topic:130751”]
it can be really annoying having to do this every single year in the game.
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My point is that if they feel like they have to do this every single year, then they’re doing something wrong because it is not necessary. I’m saying that the feature is already well implemented imo, in that it acts like a bank overdraft where the fee is the tedium of remembering a few clicks. If we take the suggestion then we’re just getting a bigger bank balance, ie making the game is easier, which is a rebalancing.
While I can see the appeal for some players to have farmers and other professions that are idle over winter turn into labourers the downside for me is that when spring comes they’ll all rush back to their jobs and suddenly your labour pool shrinks by a massive amount. I already find keeping an eye on my labour pool when I’ve set production limits on things like firewood splitters and planks is a bit annoying and that’s with much lower numbers than labourers suddenly rushing off to become farmers again would be. Atm I have 6 firewood splitters and 8 sawmill workers while my farms have 60+ farmers. That’s a big change for the labour pool to deal with when they all go back to planting their fields. If you’ve got 150+ labourers then it’s not a big deal, but I often am below the recommended minimum number to keep things running efficiently in my towns.
Maybe make it an option to be able to have them become labourers, but don’t make it the only option. Let those of us who don’t want that to happen have the option to keep things the way they are.
Well, the whole point is that while you think the feature is well implemented, many others think it is very poorly implemented, and there are two main reasons for this:
It isn’t in-game efficient.
It is suspension of disbelieve destroying a.k.a. not realistic.
These are two very different propositions.
You are saying that you don’t have to be so efficient because, being less than efficient is sufficient. But that is only true, of course, for your personal level of sufficiency.
But that isn’t the real problem, IMO, which is the second point. In a pre-industrial society, people simply couldn’t sit around for a quarter of the year doing absolutely nothing productive. But that is exactly what the game has your people do - IF you leave them to their own devices. Idle villagers should, as a default, automatically enter the general labour pool.
I appreciate all of the different ideas and opinions on this. @MeowBeep to your point, if I did play “efficiently” and had a healthy village then yes, I probably wouldn’t need to mess with my farmers every year. Is there a guide on playing a perfect game and to have a perfect economy? Am I going to sit and watch videos on playing the game so that I can play the game perfectly? Doing this would defeat the purpose of the game and rid the game of creativity. I do not believe that the farmers being switched to the labor pool over the winter would unbalance the game. In fact, it is really just making the game harder for no reason. If the difficulty of the game hinges on how many clicks you have to do between seasons, then the game wasn’t designed very well. I do not believe this is the case. The developers have already made changes to the game to make things more stream lined, like having compost automatically distribute to each farm. In a city builder, you can’t control every element or you get overwhelmed. The point is that you are building an engine.
Back to the point, I see a lot of potential lost when your farmers are sitting there doing nothing for 3 months. At early game, I need a lot of stone and other things harvested that I cant do with a labor pool of 10 because those 10 are busy doing other stuff like stocking homes or collecting honey or whatever they do. There is an awkward population gap where you have too many to feed but not enough laborers. So a three month window is perfect to drop 30-70 farmers into the labor pool to collect stone until the next season. But that is too risky to do if you lose track of time and the season starts and you lose a crop rotation. Then your people starve.
@medea_fleecestealer to your point, I would agree that maybe some people don’t want their farmers dropped into the labor pool. I think a toggle or something would be great. I don’t really care what they stop doing if spring cuts them short as long as they are planting crops. Food first, stone second.
@exculcator Thank you for seeing my point. I would add more but I agree with what you have stated and I would just be reiterating what you said if I said more. I also hit on some of your points in my above paragraphs.