I think there is a good argument for keeping that designation.
We don’t have a true day/night cycle in the game. Therefore eating dinner and sleeping don’t actively take the workers away from their tasks (would could say that finding food and seeking shelter are those things). If the villagers were in the pub without a status telling us what they were doing we would see bug threads and suggestion threads asking for it to be addressed as everyone wants to know what they are doing.
I think the Pubs are a fun mechanic, and honestly I don’t feel they are unballanced. I do see intoxication and fights, people leaving their job… Im fine with that. I do find it funny all the people who want the game to be as real as possible, who don’t like this. Either they really don’t want the game to be as real as possible, or they don’t know the actual stats (at least in the US) for the amount of people who can’t get to work because they are intoxicated, or lose their job because they are intoxicated at work.
What I find awesome, is that some people claim (I haven’t tried it so I am relaying information) they they are able to meet the desirability requirements. So if you don’t want pubs and intoxication in the game, you can still meet the goal. The great thing is by having it possible with and without pubs, players can choose the manner in which they want to play… (and dare I say, if they want to enforce prohibition, they are able to )
They don’t just drink at the bar. They drink everywhere. I have watched my farmers and hunters and guards and such just stop what their doing and stand there. When I click them, it says they are getting drunk. Middle of the field, Middle of the road, anywhere. I have seen guards pop out of their towers to randomly attack someone passing by and it says they are intoxicated. Villagers can drink and get drunk anywhere.
And yeah you can meet the desirability requirements without them, but then your happiness stat tanks for a lack of beer. The is an actual stat specifically for beer in each villagers happiness rating. Add to that the reduction in your entertainment category. I am expected to maintain a village of drunks.
As for only getting violent when they are unhappy, they get unhappy from not having beer, then go drink the beer and get violent. No other problems but withdrawal and that’s enough apparently to shank another villager.
Maybe I would have less problem with it if they reduced the frequency with which everyone drinks and made it so villagers did not use weapons on each other. They can bare knuckle brawl all they want but I don’t need a pile of corpses because some guard got drunk and hacked up everyone he saw, and then just goes back to work like nothing happened.
For me they simply need to add town guards that will be responsible for taking care of brawls. Right now we have barracks with idle soldiers if there are no enemys and towers that are also idle when nobody is attacking but we lack simple town guards and thievery.
I very, very strongly disagree. Drinking in the pub is something that happens in the evening for all but the absolute alcoholics, so it’s just as dependent on the day/night cycle as all other activities I mentioned.
Let them carry beer with them the same way they carry food with them. We don’t see bug threads complaining they don’t go home to eat the food they’re carrying with them. Likewise, I don’t think we’re going to see bug threads complaining they’re not going to the pub to drink beer.
And in the unlikely event that we do see those threads, then those people starting these threads are simply wrong.
And pubs absolutely ARE unbalanced. Taking time away from a villager’s schedule is no small thing in this game, it has a huge impact on the functioning of your settlement, and pubs effectively deactivate multiple villagers for long periods. If you have a precious balance between the goods you produce and consume, which is always the case in this game, taking away a villager from a key profession could suddenly create firewood shortages and cause dozens of villagers to freeze to death, it could cause a preservist to stop working and reduce the expiration date of your food supply by several months, and so on. A small happiness and desirability bonus is minuscule compared to that.
And I believe that it’s possible to meet desirability requirements without pubs. That’s not the point at all, of course you can just build theaters, I think it’s probably easier to succeed if you don’t build pubs. But the thing is, I WANT there to be a pub, but I want to be rewarded for investing resources to build one, not punished. Why would I ever build a building that only harms the success of my settlement?
Well then this is “a hole in my bucket, dear Liza” because if they actually worked more intelligently and cooperatively they WOULD be happier as the village would have more food, more firewood and generally thrive better. My villagers will not be allowed beer again until their AI has improved in other areas of their lives.
If I pushed my RL standards on my villagers, they would be drinking quite a lot more than they are doing right now and working even less. But hey, this is a game, not RL, so this is a strict commune where everyone needs to work and slacking is not allowed.
If it were a capitalist society, pubs as they stand now would make sense - the pub owner makes money, the workers getting rowdy is mostly a problem for the guards and the workers slacking off is someone else’s problem too.
But as we as Big Brother, I mean the omniscient government, collect the revenue from the pub, but also from all other businesses (and without paying wages other than food and shelter in most cases, despite taking some taxes…), we have no incentive to entertain pubs - as long as they do more harm than good to the society overall.
Wish is represented by all the players realizing this and simply forgoing pubs altogether.
And that’s why I agree that pubs need to change, say by the increased happiness also increasing work efficiency. If happiness were then also harder to keep high, especially on higher tier citizens/houses, all buildings raising happiness would become more attractive and the pub could better counter its disadvantages. Plus, there’d be a reason not to upgrade houses.
I think in general the balance between money making via trade and mining to money making via taxes and luxury goods is a bit off. And it’s far too easy to make money anyhow. And it actually gets a lot easier over the course of the game, disproportionately to the rising costs. I don’t think the game should be hardest at the start and then get easier, imho. But that’s getting slightly off-topic…
Well supposing there was an actual interpersonal social system, and men and women needed to meet and start a relationship before they could start their own household and have kids. Then a pub might help the population to grow. At the moment I think houses are just like dormitories, they fill up in order of who arrives and is homeless rather than being a family home.
I don’t think alcohol consumption positively affects birth rates of a society, even when it gives a social gathering place (I assume the townhall, theatre, maybe someday churches all offer that too). They’ll arrange their marriage and whether the offspring even reaches childhood is dependent on mortality, not social cohesion. Meeting a partner is not the problem holding back population growth in any Medieval society, I don’t think.
Strange things happened. The happiness level of the villagers is as high as 98% and the entertainment level is 97%. There are still violent incidents of drunkenness. Fortunately, the unarmed villagers cause less damage and fewer deaths.
OR to “balance” the pubs and keep it true as how much people used to drink (and still do for most of us) you could build pubs at every corner of your city and solve the problem being villagers going too far to fetch a beer.
Also, for reality’s sake you could consider them leaving for a well earned refreshment as the time they go to sleep (as none of them actually do)
Cheers
I think what we need to keep in mind is medieval water quality, we’re aware of it with all the cholera and typhoid and intestinal worms the villagers suffer from, that’s because water from the well was not always safe enough to drink, hence, most people drank beer, it was safer. I have no doubt it also caused many chronic health and social problems, but them’s the breaks, alcoholised water was safer than water straight from the ground. Most large towns had hundreds of brewster wives (brewing was a woman’s job) making goodness only knows what quality of beer in their backyards. I like that pubs and breweries don’t come without their own problems, that’s a bit like real life…
I just had a soldier get drunk and kill a bunch of people. Because he was armed and armoured he could just kill with impunity. I had to walk him half way across the map to get him to stop. Drunk soldiers are the worst!
)
