REVISION 41E NOW IN THE EXPERIMENTAL BUILD

http://plantsinmotion.bio.indiana.edu/plantmotion/movements/leafmovements/pumpkingrowth/pumpkin.html

This was the pumpkin one. I just started with a search with plant growth at night as the search term - beware though as you will get lots of results about another very popular plant

 

That's interesting - think I will have a night of testing various crops and cooking, Maybe we should make a new thread as this is a bit off topic now. 'Farm experiments' or something like.

 

Will start a new thread ' Farm experiments and cooking' as we are possibly going a bit off topic and this discussion is likely going to take over the thread.

That's odd - that last post took a long time to appear so thought I hadn't posted it - duh.

 

Start of Week 3 food production still balancing on the edge of stable to keep the colony ticking over though have been very lucky and had next to no threat events trigger.



The larger pumpkin field I started middle of the second week as colonist immigration picked up. The wheat field was set up to test wheat yield and viability.

The main bottleneck for me now has nothing to do with crop production now, but rather the limits to my colonies kitchen man power, at this point I'm seriously considering building a 2nd kitchen to pick up the slack. Not sure if the intention with the changes is to drive colonies to need multiple kitchens placing the bottleneck in kitchen turn over rather than crop growth after the initial week or two of a colony but that seems to be the current direction crop, workcrew and immigration changes have taken things.

 

Still getting this in 41E.

 

1. I only enable farming on work crews that are maxed out. That seems to help. Having an understaffed work crew decide to till a farm seems inefficient.

2. I don't see militias doing many pushups or training anymore. Isn't that what "get swole" was supposed to do? My militas' military skill is still at "terrible".

3. Cooking speed cut in half for vegetables, and reduced by a third for meats has had a large impact. I can hardly keep up with food anymore if I don't have two kitchens full of steam ovens.

 

Farming definitely needs another round of tweaks. Very hard indeed to get wheat to grow - it is spoiling in the field at the same time as a colonist is working the plot. Indeed, spoiled just as it was being tilled

Cooking takes forever - not sure they use multiple ovens efficiently - if we have 4 ovens and 2 crew assigned, should they not be using all of them especially when assigned slow cooking items

Edit : Looks like the multiple ovens are used, not often.

 

I'm still getting the bug where the "scary" attribute or whatever it is doesn't go away even though all the bandits in a camp are dead. My people are stuck in a loop of trying to forage, then running away.

 

If you assign a NCO to a barrack and then removed him from the building the NCO becomes a normal crew.
I Saw him tend to the crops shortly after. Only way to get him back is to reassign him.

 

In regards to the first one, how do you ever survive the first 2 weeks or so then if you have no one farming?

With worker immigration events purely as a fixed time event as they are currently I'm pretty sure it's not possible to have any workcrew maxed out before quite some time into the 2nd week. And that's with using prestige to boost immigration numbers.

Wheat really isn't the "Go to" crop for abusing the whole farming system now like it was before that's for sure. It actually requires proper planning in terms of field size and manpower available to make wheat growing a viable option. Where as before a lot of people were just using wheat enmass and little else, abusing the heck out of it.

In the mean time with early colonies that don't have the manpower to sustain a 5x5 or larger wheat field, other crop like pumpkins (and with proper planning cabbages) offer the alternative to keep colonists fed.

Kind of wary of saying the current balance is broken or doesn't work, as in actual fact it does and rather well. But I'll admit the initial knee jerk reaction to it when following old habits is very much "WTF, this doesn't work and needs changing", when what it really needs is to sit back and think about how to approach it differently.

If you're finding your crops are spoiling before harvest, in most cases what happened was either:

a) You've made your farm plot too big in regards to current colony manpower per workcrew. Downsize your farms. With the changes made treat farming like you would large wood choping or mining jobs. Break it down into multiple smaller farms.

b) You're trying to grow certain crops too early. Certain crops such as Wheat are more something best suited to start planting after the first week is over with after one or two worker immigration events.

Ended up taking a fresh 41E new start up to 75 colonists or so well into the 3rd or 4th week after other attempts to get familiar with the farming changes. And only during the later days when jobs that needed to be done flooded the colony and tied up my non-workshop crews as they tend to do with so much going on did I ever have crops spoil.

But kitchens are definitely iffy at the moment, I've noticed a lot of times colonists will no longer walk off to do other cooking jobs and instead will stand at the oven they're using waiting for the meal to cook. This combined with the fact that kitchen workcrews can now only have 4 workers means the kitchens are a HUGE bottleneck.

I ended up building 3 different kitchens to keep my colony churning over.

 

I am now using lots of small 2 oven kitchens and small 1 x 5 and 3 x 3 fields - seems a lot more efficient with the large amount of overseers and small crews. Also using standing orders a lot more.

 

I was using the "start with 21 people" scenario with that one, so I could be maxed from the start.

 

Ah, makes sense.

Sounds like you came up with a similar approach so good to see as it means there's a good chance that really is the better way to go about it now. Though 2 oven kitchens seems a bit low, 4-5 seems optimal and any more than that just a waste due to colonists ability to handle multiple cook tasks at once being broken and only kicking in on rare occasions now.

Worker immigration more than anything is the thing that feels 'broken and unbalanced' to me now.

 

Poor lad stuck in a forge ... now starving to death

 

Yaaaay Script errors!

 

Havent been playing as much this weekend, but by day 5 have 10 overseers and 2 laborers. Would rather have some earlier laborers than overseers, as between farm/kitchen/milita, if get any event early I am screwed with single NCO.

Also still have that dead animal too close to area that wont get butchered, jobs just sit there forever and even made a few more hunting enabled. Anything killed outside the main area works fine that I can see.

Would love to have in future priority list for hauling, annoying that meat outside colony never seems to get hauled right off the bat and my kitchen crew wastes time going to get it for cooking.

 

Hearing these discussions on the new farming makes me think:

I've actually been comparing this game to Banished alot as I play thru, and one thing that really turned me off in that game was the amount of research players did, on their end, to get the most out of farming, and the wiki-homework it ended up needing.

It was like "Crop fields should be 8x4 BUT FOR GODS SAKE NEVER 4x8, build them 4x8 and you might as well just build 11 fisheries instead! Tree orchards shall never be 2x2, excepting that you then proceed to 3... and 5 is right out!"

It's like why give me choices when there's only one good one?

 

I agree, why is the farming the main thing to figure out in this game when all the other workshops are not as critical really except its counterpoint the kitchen.

Also I am not sure if noticed it as much as last revisions but a lot of folks seem to sleep during the day now, which I wouldn't have a problem with if they actually worked at night. Why is it that they will sleep on the floor at the beginning until I can get some cots up but as soon as I have some built they only will sleep on the cot, so everyone staggers their sleeping now.

Add to this is my constant juggling of work crews to make sure the farming overseers that are sleeping now have their lots tended.

I make a slightly bigger lot and add more commoners and what happens the next day he works a small plot, so I have to constanly play musical chairs with my work force. I don't mind micromanagement but with the interface its a pain to scroll down and adjust , not to mention finding which workcrew is working where.

Can maybe in the future as well give us an option to NOT auto assign laborers when we get them?

I also noticed a button for renaming colonists, has that always been there? Doesn't seem to work but wondering if this is the addon for when it is.

I know in DF, that game had a steep learning curve at the beginning but never had to juggle farming/cooking as much as I do in this game, and while I do enjoy the game, I am losing my patience for that aspect of it.

 

Don't you just love it when you set up your militia to stop a herd of beetles coming to eat your crops, and then right when they get in shooting range, it turns into night, so all my militia give up and go home to sleep? lol

 

Basically (in my opinion)? Not all the content is in yet, and secondly, so after release it won't be. Crop choice and layout shouldn't have either one clear winner (wheat prior to 41E) or not really matter at all (initial earliest access). There will always be optimising players, but it does seem that the Venn overlap between them and EA players is strong. So by testing it to breaking point now, it can get the right importance weighting by release relative to everything else.