This game has a surprisingly difficult learning curve, so I thought I'd post a few things I've learned so far. I've seen some great tips from other players in other threads, so I hope they'll share them here as well.

1. Gatherers Huts are a great source of food to start with, they produce a surprisingly large amount very quickly if you stick them in the right place. Gatherers also produce four different types of food, where most other sources only produce one. Very useful to provide early variety to your people.

2. Build an herbalist as soon as you can, until you have a lot of different food sources your peoples health is going to drop fast.

3. Don't build too many houses at once. Too many children will consume your food quicker than you can produce it. At the same time, don't wait too long to expand your population. The people will stop having kids at a certain age (around 40 years old) and your whole village can die out quickly if there are no young people to replace the elders when they start dying. I try to keep my child/student population no more than half my adult population.

4. Build your storage barns and stockpiles as close as you can to the production sources. Especially when it comes to farms. I couldn't figure out why my farmers couldn't seem to harvest more than half my fields before the snow hit and my crops died. They were just walking too far. But this goes for any production source, your people will produce a lot more of it if they can just quickly drop off their goods and get back to work.

5. Build a schoolhouse as early as you can. Once your students become adults they'll be a lot more effective workers.

6. Just like you want your storage places as close to the production areas as possible, you want your houses pretty close as well. So people take less time to stop, eat, and warm up before getting back to work. This is especially important early on when resources are tight.

7. Utilize Markets, to some people they might seem redundant, but it saves a lot of walking time if your people can get everything they need in one place. Not only will the vendor make sure to stock every type of food you produce, helping to keep your people healthier, the market vendor will fetch goods from distant stockpiles as well for your tailors/blacksmiths/woodcutters.

8. You don't actually NEED as many workers as the game might suggest for certain buildings. I get by perfectly well with just one herbalist per building, one vendor per market, and one trader (unless I want to move goods fast) most of the time. Be careful though, lack of workers at certain places will cut down on productivity. Experiment and see what works for you.

9. When they're not performing their regular job, workers tend to help out in other areas, especially when it comes to clearing areas for new buildings and collecting resources that may be lying around. For instance, you don't necessarily have to find other jobs for idle farmers during the wintertime. At the same time, sending your farmers to the mines or quarries if you've got extra space is a good way to boost productivity. Just don't forget to reassign them back in the spring time.

10. A town hall is extremely useful to keep track of how many goods you produce compared to how much you consume, helping you better plan what you need to build to keep up with increasing demand. Build one as early as you can.

11. Nomads are a great way to boost your population, just make sure you can handle the sudden influx and strain it will have on your goods. Having a boarding house ready before you let people immigrate can give you some time before having to build houses for all your new people.

12. This is a bit of a cheat, but it might save you hours of frustration. If you see a trade ship coming down the river, save your game right before it arrives at the trading post. Then if the trader doesn't have what you want, just reload your game. It might take a few times, but eventually they'll have what you want to buy.

13. You can never have enough food stored. It never goes bad, so stock up while you can. I always try to have at least two years worth of food stored, just in case I have a few bad harvests back to back.

14. Even if you have disasters turned off in your game, disease can still break out in your community and it spreads FAST. You probably won't need it right away, but a physician on hand as soon as you can afford one is a must.

15. Don't group the same type of production buildings, like fishing docks, too close together, they compete with each other and don't produce as much. Make sure they are out of their yellow circle area to maximize production.

16. As much fun as it is having livestock, set up your other food production sources first. It takes a while for your herd of livestock to reproduce enough to make it worth your while. I usually start off buying sheep first, then chickens, and finally cattle.

That's all I can think of at the moment, feel free to add your strategies.

People definitely walk faster on stone roads than dirt roads. It's worth building them in the highest traffic areas of a town at the very least. I can't say I've been able to see how much less firewood stone houses use but I'm pretty certain they are also more fire resistant. This could easily make the difference between an inevitable collapse and a recoverable situation if a fire breaks out in a larger town.

18. Firewood is probably the single best resource you can trade. It's renewable and you should be able to make lots of it once your town first stabilises. It has a value of 4, and given seeds usually cost 2500 it takes only 625 firewood to get new seeds.

19. Put gatherers huts, hunting cabins, herbalists and foresters together. The first three work best in dense forests, and the forester will maintain a dense forest.

I group my foresters/herbalists/gatherers together and my herbalists and gatherers have no trouble finding stuff. Especially with gatherers, a forest isn't really necessary, its more the ground clutter they need. If you zoom in enough (though sometimes its hard to see unless its winter or the iron and stone is already cleared out, you can see stuff like mushrooms and small plants on the ground. You need to put your gatherers where there is a lot of that. I keep my gatherers with my foresters, just because its an area I know I'm not going to clear out later for resources or to build on.

As far as mines and quarries go, yes there is plenty of stuff just lying around, but how far do your people have to walk to get to the stuff you haven't already harvested? That's the thing you have to consider before deciding if its worth it to build one. I do build one of each fairly early on but only assign one or two miners and stone cutters to start with. That way I always have a small influx of stone and iron coming in and I don't have to think about going out and finding more when I need it. One less thing to micro manage :)

This is not true at all. Gatherers and herbalists do not need "old" forests, what they need is areas with as many trees as possible (not naked land spots). Doesn't matter if the tree is a sapling or a tall mature tree. Foresters do not hamper this, even tho they cut down trees. I've had Gatherer/Herbalist/Forester trio's, all 3 buildings clustered right together, for years and years and they all produce top amounts possible.

What *does* help gatherers/herbalists is clearing only the stone/iron out of the area they're in, because (I guess) that means more trees per square inch in the same space.

The odd thing about Foresters is that I often see a tree being chopped down outside of their circle radius - which is why they can chop down orchard trees far away.

Edit: @crystraldragon - I know they need the "ground clutter" but I thought without the trees, the ground clutter won't respawn. Like if you clearcut an area with minimal trees but had a lot of herbs lying around, the herbs never grow back. I'll have to observe some more.

I can only go by what I see in-game, and the herbalist that was close to a forester was getting naff all. 12 a year and such. Then I put a different herbalist only next to a hunter, and she picks up 200 herbs a year.

The herbalist with the forester will do well in the beginning due to the old forests with lots of small growths on the ground, but over time it will reduce quite drastically, at least in my experience. If it works for you, that is great, but I've changed my setups now due to what I have observed over time in-game.

It's possible when you moved the herbalist building, the worker also moved to a house that was closer to the herbalist building (or at least was closer to any house, period) and thus was wasting a lot less time walking when hungry (their own house)/cold (any house) etc.

The game tries really hard to shuffle workers around like that when you build new houses/worker buildings.

P.S. Is 35 years a long enough time to see this drop? Because that's how long they've been working at full production for me (200population now). :)

That's what I was thinking too. Either that or the cap on herbs had been reached, and there was enough different types of food so health was steadily high, so they didn't need to collect many herbs to begin with. I've got my herb cap set at 100 and it always seems to be at max so the herbalists never need to collect much to keep it there.

There's also the distance to the closest storage barn issue, which is similar to the housing distance issue. If both the houses and the storage barn are a substantial distance from the herbalist/gatherer/hunter building, the time spent walking can reduce output by a whole lot.

eg, walker gets hungry, goes to house, starts walking back to work building, gets cold, goes to nearest house, starts walking to herbalist building, collects herbs, starts walking to storage building with it, gets hungry, drops the herbs and walks to their house....heh. Silly workers.

I have all those things in order, so that's not the cause.

You don't believe me and that's fine, but I am just telling you what I see in my game. The herbalist that was next to a forester was getting no luck at all, and in the end I just tore down the place as it was pointless for them to sit there all year and picking up 10-20 herbs. The other herbalists I have, on the other hand, WITHOUT a forester around, are picking up 100-200 herbs a year.

Should be said that it works well in the beginning, because then there are already old forests and lots of herb plants on the ground. But after a while their yield tends to go down, and from what I have seen, a forester will push it further down than normally.

Look, it's not that I don't believe you're experiencing something in your game. It's just it's not the way the game is supposed to behave, so we're trying to figure out why you're getting that result. :)

It could be one of the many random, temporary glitches the game has. For example, my very first map, I built a cherry orchard. And then I waited, and waited, and waited. The trees grew, but after 6 years there was no harvest of cherries, ever. Orchards are supposed to take something like 2-3 years before they produce (gotta wait for the trees to mature), but not 6. So I deleted that orchard, then built a new orchard in exactly the same place. That time, it behaved like it should have and I had cherries 2-3 years later.

So perhaps your first herbalist glitched like that. Who knows. At any rate, herbalists are supposed to work just fine next to foresters - if they're not for you, and you've found another way around it, great.

Err, in fact, acording to the tutorial, it's the way the game is "supposed to be".
I don't say it's the way it IS (I didn't really look at the herbalist's productivity), and maybe the dev changed his mind and tree density is really the important stat, but the tutorial clearly said "old trees"

1.make forester
2.make plant only
3. everybody is right

Well, therein lies the rub, I suppose. Depends on your definition of "old." I take that to mean "not saplings" - eg, visually full grown trees. Visual tree growth seems to have a few stages, takes a few years. I kinda doubt old specifically means "20 year old trees" or something but I can't read the creator's mind obviously.

If you watch the forester, after a few years the area of his circle tends to have a lot more adult trees than the default tree areas, almost nothing but tree canopy, even if he is cutting down trees and planting saplings. Actually, once past a certain point I rarely see any saplings at all. Perhaps that's a bug in itself or perhaps at that point he's planted so many vs. how many he cuts down that it doesn't make much of a dent. At least in my game.

Again, in my game, sometimes the gather/hunters etc. do have brief cycles where their production may drop a little, possibly from a "overhunting" concept, and the workers may start trying to go farther out to get stuff (taking up time). Then it jumps back up the next year. Sometimes it even feels like it works better/more consistently to have only 3 workers on a fishery or gatherer hut because of this, but that could just be my imagination. :) It is a bit odd tho.

::Edit:: It's possible, perhaps (?) that the foresters have similar long term cycles. Almost all mature trees for years, then at some point there will slightly less of them for a few years before going back up again, causing the herbalist to drop production for a short while. Dunno. Anyway, by then I have so many herbs I may not notice short deviations I suppose. In my towns I haven't had much need for herbs once you have all the food groups going/distributed. The stock of herbs almost never goes down because everyone is 5-star healthy. Seemingly.

Quill18 released a video a while back, where he debunked the whole "old growth" myth for gatherers and herbalist. It pretty much confirms what KrankyKat and the others are saying (and I've seen in my games as well).