REVISION 37B NOW IN EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH

I started another colony, this time focusing even more on getting a steady supply of food going while carefully limiting my population growth. There were brief periods of starvation in the early-to-mid game but ultimately I wound up with a vast surplus of food and even managed to make two-component recipes for a while. Shame the game froze up when I accessed the work crew menu towards late game. The cooking system is a little wonky right now since there's no point to making anything other than Generic Stew(TM). Funnily enough, production slows down a bit when you set the kitchen to make raw food specific meals like bread, cabbage stew, pumpkin stew, etc. even if you have an excess of all the ingredients. This will probably be addressed later on.

I suppose food supply isn't quite as bad as I thought it was. The trick is limiting your population until you've got enough working fields and stored food ready to accommodate them. That, and make sure your farmer work crew is actually doing nothing but farming. Twice I had to disband (and once, eliminate) a work crew because some bug had prevented them from doing their job. It'd be nice to be able to disallow work crews from performing miscellaneous tasks like clear terrain and butcher.

That said, New Sogwood is still pretty ridiculous. And not in a good way.

 

I don't understand why you specialize your work-crews so much, can you walk me through the thought process there?

Each farm is one job ticket, so a specialized work-crew of 6 (5 labours+1 overseer) can work one farm at a time while a work crew of 3 (2 labourers, 1 overseer) can work 2 farms at a time. This also frees up 1 worker to go in some other work-crew, improving their efficiency. Overseers are the hidden modifier here. 4 workcrews of just 2 people (1 labourer, 1 overseer) outcompetes large work-crews as is because they simply handle more jobs. Not having a large pool of your available "work-power" be sucked up by endlessly repeating farm-jobs or doing nothing also reduces job friction in other areas of the colony, which bounces back around when other work-crows who would otherwise be hauling / chopping wood / foraging / etc. take care of other available farm jobs.

As the system is right now I've found that specializing work-crews in any way is a decision that only works for specific-output workshops where I need X amount of planks *right now*, and no, Cogsbronze, you don't get to sleep, back to work.

( This is also why doing multiple smaller forage jobs / mining jobs / chopping jobs ends up going faster than one larger job for one work-crew, it simply throws more hands at the job )

Once you get past 80-90 colonists your work-crews can be big enough to outcompete smaller work-crews because the sheer amount of labourers means even if half is resting, eating, sleeping and gossiping, the other half handles the job ticket but until then I think overspecialization is a net loss in terms of economic output.

 

Not dedicating work crews to a single job is usually fine. Farms are an exception. Even if your farm work crews stand idle at times you generally cannot afford a slowdown in food production*. You can get away with putting off that extra middle class house or mine, but you can't risk running out of food.

It takes a LOT of food to sustain a mid-sized or larger colony and it's very difficult to accumulate a surplus that will last them more than a couple of days. If most of your work crews are busy chopping wood or hauling rock blocks fields may go untended at some critical juncture in the food/supply cycle (and may even wither; this becomes more of a problem as the population rises and you establish more plots). Don't forget that even a dedicated farm crew may be busy sleeping or eating, so you have to have more than one and you should have 3-4 colonists per (plus the overseer). You could just enable farming for all work crews but this is a gamble; I've had better luck with specialized farming workcrews. And with the advent of the new overseer skills (and hidden lower class skills) dedicating a particular work crew to a single task ensures they get better at that task faster. Of course, then you run the risk of your production slacking off if a particular overseer dies, but you can usually compensate by assigning an extra work crew for a while.

I suppose you could have dedicated farm work crews AND enable farming in other work crews. Just make sure you don't let small work crews (1-3) work farms since plots can only be attended by one crew at a time; one colonist working a field when there are 3-4 colonists ready to go is unacceptable.

*Particularly if you use crops for purposes other than food, i.e. booze, grow non-consumable crops such as opium or flax or order your kitchen to prepare two-component meals.

 

Huh, interesting. Thank you for elaborating. It's kind of cool that the game can, even in early access stage, make people have fairly different strategies and build-assumptions. I like that. I do things entirely different than you, but it both seems to work.
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Anyway: Comments on 37B as is:

Fish-People:

This is multiple things, and I lost my console every time I tried to capture specifics.

• Colonists are very eager to move and work with fish-people corpses, which makes the job of "butchering them" harder for everyone as the corpse is often moved. I've mentioned this before, but this time it seems as if colonists will actually drop jobs to go move fish people corpses?
• You can cause the game to hang up if you delete "Butcher fish-person" jobs while you spot a colonists carrying a corpse - the game implodes and animations freeze in place
• When you grab an area and ask "Butcher Fish-person", the graphical representation of the fish-person corpse on the ground doesn't always correlate to where the fish-person actually is in the game simulation, this causes the little ring of light that connotates a job-node to flash at empty ground where the fish-person really.
• Sometimes, someone will wander over to this empty patch of ground 20 grids from where the corpse is displayed, chop at empty air and magically cause fish-people steaks to appear.
• Uh, I've got nothing. That's some weird stuff, that.
• Finally, sometimes colonials will - presumably because they're bored - wander off to where one fish person is placed in some out of the way corner like sixty grids out in the jungle, grab the corpse, and move i to some other part of the jungle. Why? Science knows not yet the answer, although Phrenologists are promising it is merely a matter of time!

Military Concerns For The Colonial Beaucrat

• Gabions can be constructed by the eager colonists looking to fortify their homes, this is okay.
• Landmines can be handled by untrained civilians, this is a little excessive.
• It's impossible to cancel orders to place landmines once you realize your civilians are handling high-explosives, causing (if they don't fulfill the order because something scares them en-route to the mine-site) endless displays of "need landmine to complete landmine job despite the presence of available landmines.
• Particularly brave NCO's in her Majesty Armed Forces have been known to do so many push-ups that they've become capable of firing blunderbusses and muskets as if they were pistols, one-handing the rifles when they fire
• If bullets won't shatter the fish-people confidence, clearly an arm-wrestling match between us and them will.
• Alas, as with landmines, it is impossible to order that gabions not be constructed once the order is given. Dedicated colonists will refuse to allow you to cancel the job of gabion construction.
• Muskets say they require iron, planks and cogs but colonists also use iron pipes when constructing muskets

Botanical Taxonomy For The Profit-Inclined

• When harvesting Coconuts from Coconut Palms, colonists will sometimes cause the entire tree to disappear, uproot and move a few milimeters which-ever way and or turn upside down, blink in and out of existence rapidly and then ultimately be replaced by a grey cube of textures.
• Whatever the stage is between "Coconut palm tree" and "Coconut palm tree without coconuts", something is eating signals between the rendering.
• Naturalists once sent to your Glorious Colony will wander about to investigate the delightful properties of local flora and fauna. Then they'll get stuck doing grass-removal and terrain-flattening jobs, even if they're not allowed to do anything. Alas, the naturalists are so in love with grass that nothing can dissuade them from picking it up and stuffing it in their pockets.

The Delightful Varied People Of The Empire

• Anyone with the "Fishy" trait will be instantaneously reduced to a gibbering, maddened husk of a colonist the moment they see a living fish person. Even if they're fresh of the zeppelin. Even if they're a battle-hardened brave NCO. In one early colony this event transpired with 4 people simultaneously, after colony generation. Perhaps a bit much, that. Some alcohol or laudanum to handle initial-setup shocks would be a good addendum to next colonial attempts.
• Seeing a fish-person corpse has no such effect, not does killing a fish person or carrying a fish person. Only seeing one that is alive and, presumably, gurgling.
• Glorius Pillars of Society, like our esteemed Gilbert Chainsly of Chainsly Capital Investments and the storied Lady Crimble of Crimble-shire, The Sevententh of her name, have an fascination with corpses bordering on the scandalous. Because they can't be expected to sully their hands with mere menial work, our upper class people are often left bored and so wander off to bury a corpse and or explore the wilderness near beacons set out by the colonial management. It seems odd that upper class citizens consistently handle and bury corpses. Perhaps it gives the aristocracy some whiff of danger to mess about with shovels and graves.

General Spatio-Temporal Discumbulation.

Somehow it seems as if time and space are crunching in on themselves, imploding the world into a curiously garbled mess where in parallel lines meet. Colonists zoom from place to place without crossing the interveening distance, flourish meat from empty air, stack maize in piles reaching ino the sky or suspended at oblige angles, they mine wood for stone and stone for wood and generally display a frankly bothersome disregard for the esteemed laws of Movement and Kinetics as described by Lord Palmerstoke. You'd think the peons would at least display a modicum of respect for the sancticity of time and space. I mean, just look at Misses Pugil here - how dare she! Even if she has mastered the ability to transcend the barriers of space and time, she least she can bloody well do is pretend distance is a tangible concept for the rest of us.

And could you cut that out? Stop trying to mine the bed-post and the people sleeping in them for stone! We can't use brain-matter to shore up the kitchen and also every time your pick hits the ground it leaves a wailing hole in the walls of reality, and I'm growing tired of the hissing sounds from the things beyond!

Now what is this? What in Cog's damn name are you doing there? Stop that! Stop it now! You're going to have to walk to the boulders to pick the damn things up anyhow, so I don't see why you're all so intent on mining air-molecules for rock when you're still going to have to pick them al up later on!

Dear queen, you'd swear this entire colony was---
what in

Gilbert! What are you doing? Stop threatening the peons with pistols, we've talked about this man! I don' care how you motivate your textile workers back in the home-countries, this isn't the time for your new-fangled "hands-on management"!
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Oh, what now? Hattie did what? Escaped dying by dying? So she died? And so couldn't die? Speak some sense, man! Oh... oh sod it all, forget it, I've got my ministerial gold bar, I'm out of this place. I hear there's an opening for Science Crater Shaker back in the Capital, that has to be a more coherent job than this!

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/g29632tjf7pru8o/AADjzzEGVu08VgF09yHwFrW5a?dl=0
(replay,save,console)

 

Interesting cult interactions - If you assign an artisan who is overcome with visions and has started to attempt forming cults to the Chapel job, the "Preach in Chapel" and "Pray" jobs overrule "Embrace Maddening Visions", and it never happens.

If you un-assign them from the chapel, they go back to having "Embrace Maddening Vision" jobs (and also go back to starting cults). This isn't the case for congregants, who will attempt to start cults so long as they are mad enough to do so. It only applies to the artisan who becomes the vicar.