First I wanted to start from the scratch with "hard" starting conditions. After multiple rounds of starving, followed by rounds where I'd go for food and then freezing to death... and finally finding my destiny dying of old age without children (warm and stuffed, but without homes)...

...after all that I tried "medium"... still being too stupid.

...now I tried "easy"... see the attached screenshot: 19 of 25 citizens are in the food industry and within 5 minutes after this screenshot was taken they all die of starvation!? What the bloody fuckshell? I don't get it.

I played the tutorial and it seemed logical enough - but now me thinks I too damn stoopid. Meh. Halp!?

fishing docks produce more when there are no other fishing docks inside there circular radius they have when build, click on one of your docks and you will see what I mean. I bet your getting 500 to 200 from those docks, build 4 spaced out and you will get 1000 to 800 fish a piece, then have a gathering hut for some diversity in there diet and you should be all set. at least to expand to more food and more options.

Yeah...unlike some other city builders, you can't build some stuff right next to each other. The radius circle around a building is important, if it has one. That's the "area" of gathering/influence, so to speak, and multiples in the same space end up competing for the same resources so each one gets less and less. It's an over-fishing effect.

Don't overlap circles as much as possible with food gathering buildings.

Also, livestock is not the best thing to start with. I think the cattle pen has to actually fill up entirely before it starts doing the regular beef production. It's like with the fruit trees, that have 2 years or something of no food production at all as the fruit trees grow. So if you built that cattle farm a couple game-years ago and started with just a few cows or some such, you may not have seen any actual beef from them during most of that time. (if you started with a full pen, never mind).

If you have a choice in the matter, after fish/gathering I'd start with the crop fields first (cabbage, beans, corn, etc), not the orchard/livestock. Then once food is stable, go for the other things if you want.

In addition to the above advice, I would add that in your screenshot you seem to have quite a lot of children for only 25 adults - that's 14 extra mouths to feed who can only do basic labour. Early in the game I would only expand by 1-2 houses a year to avoid over-expansion and starvation.

Awe, thanks for the intel guys! These are quite a few promising ideas :-)

I know these light circles around some buildings - just didn't realize the fishers hut got a circle too. You think it's just important to not overlap two identical building types, or should I place the collectors hut far away from the foresters too?

It's fine to put gatherers, hunters and foresters together. Herbalists and foresters together isn't so good, because the herbalists needs to be in an area with ancient trees to work best.

According to this wiki, it's tree density, not tree age that matters.

Food is a hard thing to balance and you've got to harvest a lot more than you need to eat to make it through the winter months; a few tips from my playing;

1) Ensure you've more than enough supply storage space - two warehouses to really ensure that you're people won't end up losing stock

2) Use roads to speed up movement between the buildings

3) Avoid schools early on - education makes for more income per person; but it takes time to be educated and it eats up your new labourers as they appear until they are educated. Save it for when you've a healthy community

4) Ensure you've got a supply of tools to help increase output.

5) Make sure harvesting huts for food and hunting are not too close to town - you want them in the wilds to harvest. I've had good luck building little groups of foresters; hunters and gather huts together; but I've also spaced out a few food huts in independent locations.

6) Shift workers around. If you're not cutting firewood take the people out of that and put them into something else. Similarly if you're not building get your wood and stone harvesters and your builders into other jobs. Anyone can do anything in this game so feel free to move people around as you need to to ensure good output. Sometimes you have to avoid building or work with only a very small number of workers and builders and build slower so that the rest of the population can continue to function.

7) Crop rotation - whilst output of fields don't diminish (far as I know this was a feature that was later removed) if you harvest the same crop over and over you'll fast find you've got plagues wiping them out.

8) Leather - early on if you've got a few hunting huts build a tailor - not only do you get leather clothes to warm your people, but you should be easily able to over-produce your need here. That lets you build up a bulk of resources to trade with - as soon as you can afford it you want to buy in seeds so that you can begin to farm in more food. Esp as farms let you then expand and develop around your settlement since they don't require huge wilderness areas around them to function.

9) Space your harvesting sites out only as far as they need to be to function - you want short access routes to them otherwise even if you produce well your chain of supply is more broken.

10) Always try to overproduce on food so that when winter comes and population expansion takes place you've got a bit of a buffer - if you get a lot of excess its great as you've now go trade resources.

11) remember when you tell a trading post to stock X number of goods that value remains fixed even if you sell them on. Which means that the trading warehouse will directly restock from the stockpile to get back to that store value its set to. This can mean your production flow is crippled for a while. So when you sell something always check the stock level that the trading post is set to restock to and adapt the value as needed .

IT's a tricky game and often you have to speed things up and develop the settlement slowly through patches to gradually build up and then grow into the expansion. Foresters should be ok - so long a they are replenishing the stock and not stripping out the trees. Far as I know you can run foesters near to each other and get good success because they replace what they take in their radious

Another thing about the fishing huts - some say that the amount of actual water that's within the "circle" affects production numbers. So if you place one where the circle is mostly over land, it won't produce as many fish. I don't know if that's actually true or not, haven't tested. Lastly, how far workers have to walk back to their homes when they get hungry or cold can also affect things a bit, as the more time they spend walking/at home the less time they're producing. So sometimes helpful to build a few houses closer to the buildings at hand for at least some of those workers to hopefully shuffle into at times.

Also, foresters seem to like to chop down trees in orchards. Whether intentional or a glitch I don't know. So don't put your tree-orchards too close to forester buildings. Actually, orchard-trees seem kind of glitchy in general... Only if you have disasters on, I think. 30+ years of farming the very first plots I created, all still fine. Although it's possible it would happen eventually. Not like I've played for 100 "years" yet.

I think this is correct. Therefore I try to make them in bends in the river, to get even more water. I assume they would be pretty darn effective in lakes too, but I haven't stretched that far out yet in my current (finally successful!) map. Year 13(!) and we haven't faltered yet.

The main thing in the beginning is to get on top of food production. That means gatherers, hunters and fishers. A herbalist is good too. I would also suggest an early foresters hut, as it takes a few years before the yields start to really go up (the trees have to age first).

Yeah, tis working now! I just didn't realize that circle for the fisher huts. Since I closed two huts and replaced them (one still to build up) and added another gatherer and hunter (upper right on the screenshot) I had not a single person dying of starvation! :-)

But I fear they're going to freeze to death again. These foresters and wood cutters aren't very effective, eh? Any idea on the proportions of foresters and wood cutters? 1:! or 2:1? And how many wood cutters per household?


Thanks so far for the help - you guys made my day! :-)

I think you need to put a stockpile in your main town - someone correct me if I'm wrong, but at the moment your woodcutter and your foresters will be wasting a lot of time walking all the way over the bridge and back to drop off their resources. Same goes for your miners and stonecutters actually.

Yeah...you can put a small stockpile near the cluster of forester/woodcutter that you have. Doesn't have to be a big one. If walking distance for a task is too far, during the winter workers are even likely to get cold and turn around to get warm back in their house before even making it to the task (better clothing helps with that somewhat, too).

I've had one forester and 3 woodcutters before, so it's not necessarily 1:1. Don't forget to click on the woodcutter/forester and increase the "max production" number or whatever it's called, as the town grows, or they'll stop production at a low stored amount. 200 stored firewood isn't enough for a growing town. Make the number something like 500, then 1000, etc.

Anyway, depending on population, whether workers are Educated + walking time/building locations + how warmly dressed they are, one forester can be enough for multiple woodcutters after a few years. Foresters do take a bit of time to start pumping out a steady stream of logs. You can always turn off the "plant" part of their duty temporarily to speed up cutting for a while.

Aye, was just about to report my findings regarding the stock piles. Until discovery I believed that the warehouse will replace the stock pile as "better version" - but stock pile, warehouse and market store very different kinds of stuff.

Most of my problems with production vanished when I placed some stock piles here and there! Awesome!

The remaining problem now is aging and birth rate. I'm not sure what circumstances are needed for those folks to start breeding, but my population just dropped from 55 + 4 kids to 30 + 6 kids. There even are empty homes now. A huge food pile of ~7000, a church, tools, clothes... most of them are happy with 4 stars... but they refuse to fuck! Such faggots -.- ...just kidding, I've got no problem with them - unless they ruin my towns population that is!

Ps:
I need to say... never had a thread on the GOG forums that offered THAT MUCH valuable intel as this one. I've +rated all of you guys! Thanks again :-)

Pps:
Oh, another thing. Now I don't have enough people to work in the mines and I collected most of the iron that's laying around. People crave for tools and my blacksmith has near to never any iron and/or coal. There are only few people in the mines - but even if there is enough iron in storage, the blacksmith won't have any and/or doesn't seem to produce any tools. Do I need something special near the blacksmith to store tools? Can I somehow force those fellas to transport specific goods to specific places? Can I buy more people!?!? ;-)

Adults can only have children until about age 40. Once they're past that age, they will have no new children.
So houses with couples that are older, will not have any kids and you have to wait until they die and someone else takes over their house. The other side to this is that when children turn into adults, they do not move out of their parents house until there is an empty house to move into, and new adults who still live with their parents also do not breed (but still keep aging).

If you wait too long to build new houses, when you do build new houses, you'll only have 'old" people to move into them. It's a balancing act to build houses in cycles to try to match the birth rate, mature to adult rate, and death rate.

Mines ... if you don't have enough laborers (or off-work farmers, during off-season), the iron/coal piles up outside of the building (you can see it piling up) because they are all too busy to run to the mines to pick up the coal/iron and run it to a stockpile for your blacksmiths to be able to use it.

Clearing land takes laborer precedence over almost all other commands, so if low on free labor, don't highlight a giant area to be cleared if you want your laborers/builders etc. to focus on other stuff first.