Except that ‘A’ gardener wouldn’t produce enough for even a small town, much less produce surplus for trade.
We need a dozen or more upgraded Forager Shacks to get enough Root to make them worthwhile.
A dozen people out of the labor pool, just to produce the same root two or three could harvest on a normal map, along with everything else they harvested.
之前建筑的产量确实太多了，对于小型定居点来说用不完。但现在的产量又显得很少，甚至不如可以进行采集的一级建筑。我觉得二级建筑应该保留采集野外资源的能力，同时可以进行种植，这样比较合理
In addition to the combine cultivation and ranged foraging, that range should grow. I’d like to see an added farm building if not a T3 to the forager of a green house, which can grow any kind of crop in any map (forager bonus) or increased yields (farmer bonus).
There’s one bug in particular about the T2 forager right now. If you have crops ready to harvest, and your forager is off shelter stocking somewhere, you can accidentally wipe out the whole crop by select a new crop. I expected changing the crop type would only be read at the beginning of the following year when planting starts just like the farms. Maybe lock the selection so you can’t change it until winter after the harvest. Ideally, you should be able to change it at any time and it will just use the current selection at the start of the next year, continuing to grow what was already being cultivated in the current cycle.
Are greenhouses a thing in keeping with the late medieval setting and aesthetic that the game goes for?
Maybe not so much by that name. Try searching for “Royal Orangeries” or “Early greenhouse-like structures”. From Google AI:
Early Structures (Roman Era):
Medieval and Early Modern Periods (1450 onward):
Nice writeup KS.
We have a Glassworks, so upgrading it from blowing glass phials and bottles, to rolling sheets of glass for windows and doors to make greenhouses would not be too much of a stretch.
Upgrading residences with a conservatory would be cool, and could provide a place for them to cultivate Spice on their own.
Get us from level 7 to level 8. 
It is why we’re getting achievements in the < 1% ranges.
I have absolutely 0 trust in AI for things like this, the odds of it hallucinating are too high. Not that it really disagrees with me in this case anyway.
Having a small scale building for a Roman Emperor is one thing, doing it in a medieval village is quite another. The ability to apply huge amount of resources and technical skill to a single project is simply not comparable between the two cases. Not to mention doing it on a sufficiently large scale for it to produce a substantial amount of food rather than merely as a curiosity. Going from blowing cloudy glass vials to transparent sheets of glass is a huge technological and industrial leap. It would be up there with replacing bows with flintlock muskets and weavers with the spinning jenny.
The earliest examples I can find in Europe (discounting the Romans) is late 17th century Holland, followed closely by Britain and France - Versailles’ orangeries being a famous example. But these are still high prestige buildings that sit at the very summit of imperial power, which don’t quite fit the theme of building a village from scratch in the wilderness. Not to mention that those examples are all well past the Columbian exchange, while the game clearly takes place before it - the devs have even explicitly said that’s a barrier they won’t cross when it comes to food.
But going beyond historical arguments to keep greenhouses out, there’s a basic gameplay one. The game works because food is hard to get and is restricted by the map (and the season). In the early game it’s limited by the foraging / hunting nodes within reach. In the later game, once those are exploited, it’s limited by the high fertility / high EFF land (and manpower), with the ability to grow different types of food by using soil fertility, or fruit tree fertility, or pasture quality. But in all cases, the map provides a challenge to growing food.
The problems (as explained previously) with T2 foragers, and any T3 greenhouse, is that they bypass that - any 2x3 group of tiles anywhere on any map becomes equally good at growing a wide range of food. And apart from a single upfront cost and minimal villager labour, there’s no management involved with it. You don’t have to maintain soil fertility, you don’t have to worry about crop diseases, you don’t have to worry about seasonal matching. It’s a “pay once, then never worry about it again” solution to the single most fundamental mechanic of the game and the key challenge the player is posed. If you want that, you might as well pick the “no villager hunger” option in advanced settings.
I didn’t need as many words 
Greenhouses before the Renaissance were only small garden beds, and only really used in the middle ages by rich lords to give them their favourite food for their personal consumption across the year. They were not used in any mass crops or for commoners, like farming is for in this game.
The best you could even hope for is something on the level of a Tier 2 Forager, with a limit of 1. Even that is a stretch. Anything else would be completely historically inaccurate.
Before merely quoting the AI, I looked up these statements through other websites and videos. That is why I didn’t post anything about the remarks on monastery gardens because they appeared to be outdoors and not sheltered under glass. The response from the AI was just organized well so I went with the part that made sense to use.
The game allows us to upgrade shelters all the way to Mansions, so I don’t see why we wouldn’t have some kind of greenhouse either in a T3 forager or a standalone building. Assuming the mansions themselves made the spices would not work with the supply and demand component of the game because the consumer is the producer in that scenario. A greenhouse add-on to a T3 forager could expand its list of products to include spices, and unlock all items in the T2 range regardless of the map type. The T2 forager already does not have to deal with fertilizer, sand/clay levels, or any of the things the farmers deal with so they are already a set and forget kind of shop. The greenhouse upgrade would just make them more proficient and more capable in even the hardest maps. They would be oriented towards players pushing greater than 1000 population cities (after adjusting the max limit of course).
I’m glad this idea elicited such a broad range of responses though. These all provide good feedback for the devs to make informed decisions about what makes sense and what players might enjoy. I read once a long time ago that they are not necessarily targeting a specific time span or world geography as much of what we have very well could have been built in the 18th century. This reluctance to lock in a time period in the setting allows for flexibility in their decision making.
Indeed, and my prior post was that this design for the T2 is fundamentally flawed. A T3 which is the current T2 on steroids would share all those problems.
IMO, the T2 (and any hypothetical T3) forager should work like the T1 but maybe get a 10% bonus on everything it forages, or you pick one of things in its forage range and get an extra 50% of that (modelling a garden growing stuff available in the local environment). Not super exciting, but that would make it an improved version of the T1 - which is what an upgrade ought to be - rather than a bypass-the-map option. I don’t know if the devs agree with me on this, but they did say after the 0.9.7 playtest that they were substantially reworking the building.
Growing spice locally would likely wreck the late game economy. At the moment spice is an investment: you buy it from the trader and then get x4 the money in luxury taxes over time. [This is the opposite of all the other luxuries: you can make them locally, but buying them returns you less than half your investment in taxes]. Remove the need for that initial investment for spice and you simultaneously: open the money taps wide open for the player, and remove a big outlet for late game spending. I don’t see that being a good scenario. I’m also not aware that greenhouses were used for mass spice production even in the Enlightenment, rather than for exotic or out of season fruit.
Not that I’m a huge fan of how passive the current system for spice is, and simply having to hope that the trader RNG means that you get it at a good price often enough. To throw ideas out there: having a dock where you have to build ships, load them up with cash, and they then sail off to find spice before returning a year later would be more engaging and very much in keeping with the later medieval / early renaissance themes of the spice trade. Obviously, this wouldn’t work with every map, but maybe a caravanserai that requires many horses rather than a ship would work.
Yes, it’s as much a low fantasy setting as it is a truly historical one. But it is fairly grounded in late medieval technology IMO. For it to be the 18th century without potatoes, tomatoes, cotton, automatic looms, or steam engines is very odd. It doesn’t have guns of any kind; by the 18th century those had gone through many evolutions (handgonnes, arquebuses, matchlocks, flintlocks, bayonets, etc…) and had been integral in warfare for centuries. The game doesn’t even have a printing press, placing it before the 16th century. It does, however, have crossbows, heavy plate-harnessed-cavalry with lances, and the bubonic plague - all things which fit far more comfortably with the Hundred Years War than the French Revolution. Of course most things that existed in that earlier period kept on existing into the later so their existence in the game doesn’t preclude it - but the lack of in game elements that originated in the 18th (or 17th or even 16th) century speaks volumes about the setting we’re intended to perceive it in. Now I’ll be the first to admit that gameplay trumps historical accuracy but, well, I absolutely don’t buy the gameplay argument for greenhouses either.
Six patches of Medicinal Root in the wild can render between 50 to 100 root.
After the cost of all requirements and upgrades (the hut itself is not the only one required), and the labor invested, a total of 4 root per year, per hut.
In order to equal what two or three foragers can gather in the wild (in addition to everything else they collect) now takes some 25 specialists, who do nothing else, all year long.
This is not balance, especially in a game that is already luridly labor intensive.
You do make a good point about the differences of the levels of technology in glassworks, blown v sheet.
Perhaps at these low levels it does not make sense, maybe when we get our town hall to level 20?
For now, maybe sheet glass could become an item like Spice, a Merchant-Only import?
Ordering it in color could become upgrade materials for the Temple.
Stained glass windows could give a serious boost to the faithful and add desirability.
Why are we doing this again… “can” is pulling a lot of weight in that sentence. I’ve never seen patches of medicinal root produce that much, maybe it’s an idyllic fields pioneer with forageable slider pushed to max kind of thing? What if you’re map doesn’t have so much medicinal root? Or it’s somewhere too far / dangerous to get? Or you need more than what the natural patches provide? T2 forager trades all that variability and uncertainty and inconvenience of being at the map’s mercy to growing as much as you want, where you want, on your schedule. That trade comes at a cost - one off payment of materials and lower worker efficiency. Is that an upgrade? Sometimes, sometimes not, it’s more of a sideways step really. Just because there’s an arrow on top of the building doesn’t mean you are compelled to press it in every situation (you can even turn them off with F2 if it bothers you that much). Everyone agrees that the current implementation is not perfect; that, however, no reason to wind the clock back to when it broke the entire balance of the game.
Maybe stained glass could be in the tech tree? +x% desirability to all buildings that cost glass to make or something like that. Or unlocks a T3 Temple upgrade that requires glass. Seems like the kind of additional perks that such a mechanic would be well suited too. Adding a whole new item for a minor perk like this risks creating more clutter than anything IMO (and there are a lot of items I’d like to see added before: sheep, wool, grapes, olives, wine, oil, barley, steel, etc…)
The game already imparts that there are some sort of glass windows in the upgraded levels of homes, not in construction costs, but in the final result’s artwork, the windows are there.
Some form of greenhouse should become available in future upgrades.
Doing the math out, that’s 8-16 roots per patch, which is very much in keeping with what I’ve seen in the wild, and even on lakes or plains, that’s not an uncommon number to see in a single swampy area where they spawn. The upshot of this is that my experience of medicinal roots is either “not present on map” or “far more than I have any use for”.
All of that is, of course, aside from whether I think that the T2 forager garden should offer the productivity of 6 patches of anything, as opposed to, like I actually think, one to three patches. (and certainly not the 10+ patches it was not too long ago!)
Devs are already working on fixing the Tier 2 Forager misalignment. Yes, having a trade off is not an upgrade, and yes, having that constant upgradability arrow does push you to do it just because it gets in the way of seeing the building you might have behind it, if you should happen to have one. It’s not an upgrade until there is no compromise to capabilities. Other buildings might have increased upkeep, but they don’t take away any usability features. Why should the Forager then? That is the problem Crate is working to address. Simply changing it from one mode of use to another should be like choosing to simply cycle which mode you want to use rather than upgrade it. Kind of like how you can use a slider in the hunter cabins to control if and how many traps are used, but they still do the same job without them. The forager could have either a mode toggle when upgraded, or a slider to determine how much time is spent cultivating and how much time is spent foraging. Or it can simply do both full time.
