Could Use Some Advice

Hi folk, just browsing some of the posts and was amazed when I read that players have 70 - 140 citizens. The best I have managed is 38 with 10 buildings. Then along comes a foreign army and - bang - I am down to ten with only three overseers, a heap of damaged buildings, and citizens standing around doing nothing. No actual they do eventually die on me.

I have tried different arrangements when building the workshops and put in heaps of housing for the workers. Even managed to get they housing up to +4. Then my citizens will just walk passed the non built door of a building that is desperately needed - the Public House is one.

So far the one thing that really bugs me about the game is having to get the citizens to flatter the land. It takes up so much time. I would dearly like to see the creation of a land scaping mod.

Can those players who are having success with the game - enabling them to get so many citizen - please give me o few pointers, particularly in the order you build the work places.

Thankyou

 

Hmm. Well, if I need to flatten land early on I tend to do it via multiple 'strips' (3-4 wide) along the long axis of the depression. Each job can only have one workcrew on it, so this makes it happen faster due to more workers...uh...working.
If you do need to flatten alot early on, don't build a stockpile till later, and limit the woodcutting/mining/foraging. Flatten is a low priority job.
Generally, my build order is thus: Farm, carpentry, kitchen, labourer house, mine (anywhere, its for sand/clay/etc but usually on a nearby node), ceramics. Barracks before or after, depending on need and a public house (even if no booze, they'll drink 'tea'). Lab, 2 overseer houses, trading post, foreign office. Then chemist and chapel. That's about the basics.
All subject to change depending on need. More overseer houses early on for extra crews, labourer when needed for certain crews (usually farm/kitchen/military).
Shrines in every building, glass mainly towards bric-a-brac and boosting workplaces to 7+, houses to 4+/6+ for labourer/overseer.
Then you just keep adding stuff. More farms, houses, mines, metalworking, etc.
The first few houses have 7 beds (for labourer) or 5 beds (for overseer), so that everyone has a bed. End up with a pretty cheery colony. Foreign office lets you boost relations with the 'hostile' nation to the point they won't attack. Do it fast enough, and they never will.

 

Thank you Satha I will give that a try

 

Regarding the "flatten" and every other take, try to keep the Assignments list low, if is looks like this, may take a while to get things done.



But another important thing is, if you workers try to do a job in the "woods", where they get scared by "something", they will flee back to the town, just to start the job over again, If you don't stop the job this can continue forever, so click on the job icon and cancel.

I can't know, but it is likely this is what stop's your job beeing done, normaly flattening does not take long, if the area is fairly level.



Another trick: dont put beds in your first 4 worker homes, just set them up with 2 windows - that will give you 12 workers very fast, and you can always give them cots later.

 

I have had 100+ a few times, and the easiest way to do it (or the way I did it)

Before you really start, you just invest the first day to flattening. I try to do 7 flattening jobs to cover as much area as I can get flat (7 because you have 7 overseers) or do 6 and just chop down a couple trees, and mine one or two rock nodes.
1. Carpentry - make planks with your overseer and one other worker and make the benches youll need.
2. Build one farm, give the other worker (if you are on a map with food you can forage, to hell with the farm for now if you are not, then build the farm ASAP)
3. Chop a few more trees (don't start like 30 jobs doing this just do a few or you will get bogged down)
4. Find any clay on the map, mine the clay, also mine just a few more nodes of stone, just try to keep your jobs list kinda small.
5. build ceramics workshop and build a tiny trade post (3x3 is fine) -
6. make bricks out of every bit of clay you have.
7. Build overseer homes before you build labor homes (you can do them at the same time, I just do overseer homes first because the game works infinitely better when people are happy, and laborers are influenced by the happiness of the overseer, thus you want to have overseers in an overseer home and happy as fast as you possibly can. I build as many overseer homes as I can with dimensions of 5x7 and have 4 beds one in a corner and a one space gap between them all the way across one wall. You might need to make them 6x7 now with the rugs being worth less, (running beds along the 7 tile wall) I build 5 of these homes before day 25ish, 5 will get you to 13-14 before you get the quality up high inside and get you to 20ish when you have the quality. I also sometimes will make a 5x9 to have one with 5 beds if I need to balance the numbers since the way population is kept is not related to number of beds (for some reason) but rather to quality of house.
8. Build barracks (can do this anytime before this, but I like to get as much tree chopping and mining as I can before I lock an overseer up)
9. Build a couple laborer homes 5x9 (5 beds, the dimensions I am saying aren't what you have to do, I just do 5 beds for labor homes)
10. make beds to cater to how many colonists you have at the time for each type of colonist, and if you are in the desert, you are lucky cause you can make bric a brac out of glass which is the best way to do it. If you are not, start making bric a brac with planks, then again, if you are in the desert you need to be careful how you use your logs and planks cause there is not much wood. Make sure to trade for every single log that comes through the trade post.
11. Another farm, and a kitchen, and 3 or 4 stoves.
12. More labor homes,

13. whatever you wanna do from here. But make sure you are making bricabrac and putting décor inside your kitchen and homes and workshops, keeping overseers happy will make growth go much faster.

A suggestion for going past 12- if you can find a way to have a church before day 20 (this is pretty tough no matter how long you've been playing, it just takes stumbling into all the stuff really) then you are winning. But just place décor in all the overseer homes before the laborer homes. Then in the workshops, then in the laborer homes. You might consider putting décor in the kitchen before the overseer homes, just because food is vital.

I suggest building overseer homes before laborer homes for sure though for the aforementioned reason. Overseer happiness is biggest priority in the game. You can build overseer homes within 4 or 5 days of starting. Day one is flattening, even part of day 2 is flattening, then the next couple days will be carpentry and making planks with 2 colonists, finding some clay and not having a long list of jobs which makes getting around to clay take too long.

By day 7-8 you should have 2-3 overseer homes (no beds will be in there yet obv but you should be making some by now) and 1-2 laborer homes.

 

Thank you everyone

 

Can you tell me if there is any way to remove a graveyard while it is empty?

 

To my knowledge, no

 

This is helping me a lot. A couple more questions

Can we befriend the fish people
Will eating human or fish people flesh hurt my citizens

 

"Then along comes a foreign army and - bang - I am down to ten with only three overseers, a heap of damaged buildings, and citizens standing around doing nothin"

Make a foreign office after you get your first set of new overseers, write to the foreign country that hates you the most and avoid the invasion completely.

 

You can't "befriend" the fish people but they will leave you pretty much alone if you don't attack them, leaving them alone is a good thing to do at the beginning of the game when you don't have very many people in your colony and they do kill bandits which is nice but they will also scare away any and all traders that are trying to come and trade goods with you, so I always wait until I have a bigger colony before I attack and kill them.

Eating fish flesh doesn't really hurt your colonists, it just makes them feel strange and long for the sea, the first long pork (human) you eat will earn you the cannibalism badge.

 

Do it , and then right after check the colonist that ate it, will show how it affected his mood. The great thing it this game is that everytime you try something, you can check the effect by opening up the colonist "page".

 

The workaround is, of course, to make the fishperson/human meat into (generic) pies or sausages. No mood debuff that way, and fishfolk meat is supplied at a pretty steady pace.

 

Unless you are in a hunger situation, where you may prefer the high outcome from Fishperson Steak to the more expencive Bushel of Sausages

 

I am having much better success in the game thanks to the previous help but have encountered a couple of other problems

When I place a gabion and select Done, a row of gabions appear shooting out from the last one I placed.
How do I prevent this happening?

When I remove a farm and place a new one two farms still appear in the building list even though I only have the one.
Any suggestions on how to solve this problem

 

I always thought that this was intended behaviour to ease making lines of gabions...so i can only do a wild guess here, try to put down a gabion, leave the gabion placement menu (select stockpile or something like that) and then select gabion in the placement menu again...don't know if this helps though

This was a known bug although i am not sure if it is currently known for 1.0

 

Sometimes when I get my citizens to do a job -for example flatten terrain I am left with an area coloured red. is this also a bug?

 

Yes, it think it is, I got them too.
The only way to avoid them it to reload as soon as you get one.

 

I have another problem I have built a Public House and while waiting for it to be completed, I had the carpenter craft all items to go inside. I have everything needed but no one will build the steps to the door even though there are heaps of planks and logs.

Does anyone know how I can get the to finish the door way.

I have even tried clearing all other work from the list and left only the one construction job

 

Are you able to delete the "door" ?
If yes - Have you tried to replace the door to another location, just to check if that will work ?

If you can't delete - it is a bug, and you either have to reload, or place another door or living with the "shadow" door forever.

I have had these "placement" bugs many times - I try to always reload, because i got the idea that it corrupts my saves, even though if not sure there is a connection.