Hello Crate.
First of all: you’ve got me. Again.
At first I thought the genre of Farthest Frontier “wasn’t for me”.
Tried it for a couple of hours and now I’m addicted.
Congratulations on creating yet another absolutely fantastic game.
Now some feedback about the Market:
The Market desperately needs a “State Breakdown” window.
I know this may be weird because the “working” state of a market is the same as “transfering goods”, but I at least need to know the idle time. If their idle time is 10% or less, then I know I need to hire more grocers, or build more Markets.
Why? Here’s my starting experience as a new player:
I just spent 10+ hours in game trying to fix the wrong problems because I didn’t have the above information.
My people were unhappy about food, cleanliness, luxury items, etc.
So I made more fishing huts, more farms, more soap factories, bigger and larger pottery industry, etc.
My production kept growing and growing and growing… and the people were always unsatisfied.
It felt especially frustrating when all the food started spoiling, so I stopped and searched the internet for answers… and I found them:
- A single market cannot provide groceries for 60 houses, despite having a huge area of effect that can easily fit said 60 houses (and more).
In the end I had a distribution problem, not a production problem.
It’s true that this is a newbie problem to have, but as I’m slowly learning the game’s systems, I feel that distribution+storage problems are currently hard to detect / learn. I think this change to the market would help.
Were all your houses within the market’s work radius? If not then the villagers in those houses will have to stock them themselves rather than the marketeers doing it. Also do you have max number of marketeers in your markets?
Yes, every single house was in the market’s radius. I planned the entire settlement in a big circle around the market exactly for the purpose of the market’s efficiency (and taxes). I didn’t realize that poor “city planning” would be my people’s downfall.
Yes, I had the max number of grocers in my market (4). I’m not sure if my villagers were stocking their own houses, but I suspect they were.
Another idea that may help “learning” about this problem: add an “efficiency” helping text to the market, with a recommended number of houses serviced for the player to read.
A bit like what the Shrine has:
I honestly still have no idea what this number is for the market. I’m experimenting and trying to discover, but it’s hard to tell when this problem is happening. I don’t know how many houses 2 grocers / 4 grocers can service (assuming storage is close, of course).
I found a way to measure the efficiency of a market. Just sharing here in case someone else has the same problem in the future.
Click a market, then click one of your grocers. Place your mouse over the information icon on the top right corner of that worker’s window, and you can see that worker’s idle time:
Repeat for all 4 grocers and you can tell if your market is over/understaffed. Tedious… but it works.
Do this on month 12 just before the new year starts, otherwise I think this window’s data resets at the start of a new year, so data may be inaccurate.
My current strategy is: if on average my grocers are above 40% idle, I fire one. If they’re below 10%, I hire one (or build a new market if that one’s full).
On my current city, a full market with 4 grocers can serve around 25 houses with its workers at around 10-15% idle time, so this is what I aim for, city-planning wise. Take this rule of thumb with a pinch of salt because it obviously greatly depends on how upgraded your houses are, how many different goods you have to distribute, how far food / goods storage is, etc.
At least with the method above, you can now measure for yourself and come to your own conclusions.
Have fun.
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