I thought it would be fun to see how many people I could get in my settlement. The short answer: 41 before the game slowed down so much as to be unplayable. I'm sure someone with a better computer could get more. The long answer is going to be a moderately detailed explanation of exactly what I did, how you can easily do it too, and what I'm going to try next to hopefully minimize slowdown of the simulation and force more people onto the map. I guess this also functions as a step by step walkthrough on how to avoid murdering your people. I haven't seen anything like this on the forums yet, so hopefully this sort of thing is okay. After you start a new map, the first thing you need to do is locate the berries, mushrooms, and trees. Click in the middle of a cluster of berry bushes and forage them, then do the same with the largest cluster of trees, then queue up another forage order on the next largest cluster of berries or fungus. This will set most of your work crews into action while you survey the terrain and plan out your settlement. Look for a wide open area and set down a pair of cabbage farms on one of the edges. Size them 5x5 and make sure they don't overlap. Try to choose a space where you can easily set down a 4x4 square (16) of 5x5 cabbage farms. The space isn't all that important, but it seems like having a farm sized 5x5 has the same cabbages as a 6x6. This is mostly irrelevant because you are going to have far more space than you know what to do with. Now choose a side of the farming block and start building a Lower Class Dirty Hovel. Put a lot of doors in to minimize travel times. I placed tables and chairs around the sides to minimize eating times. The beds get used less so they are in the center. I also like decorations so I added some cabinets and pictures, but you can make it a spartan, communistic hell hole if you prefer. You can lay it out however you want; I didn't actually get to use both sides of my house. It'll look something like this when you're done: After you've finished designing your new Lower Class Fire Hazard, find another big group of trees and set up another Chop command. Forage another group of berries or fungus, use two or three orders if you have to. Try to be patient and not to queue up too many commands. Next, make two more cabbage farms in the same manner as before. Try to fill up the imaginary 4x4 grid of farms that will be the center of your community. While they decide who does those jobs, find the logs from the first forest you chopped down. You're going to individually select 10 of them and press Chop Into Planks. This will make the furniture you need for your Hovel. It doesn't need to all be done at once and 10 logs shouldn't flood the queue. While your workers are carrying out your new commands, set up a kitchen directly above the Hovel. Each overseer can have up to five workers, so five stoves will adequately cover everyone's cooking. I built two workbenches and some decorations, but I don't think they're necessary. When you're done, it should look something like this: At this point I would like to draw your attention to the immigration and supply drop events. Since we're trying for a maximum population, you are always going to choose the +3 people option. For supply drops, choose the building supplies option. This will give you the plates, pipes, and bricks you'll need for the stoves. You'll never need to become involved with mining or forging. Build a stockpile close by the kitchen so that your cooks and farmers don't need to travel far to deliver food. It should look something like this: Once you've done that, chop down another forest, and then find another 10 logs to make into planks. Send another pair of workers out to gather food. Also, you can select a military group and have them turn on Hunting tasks for a short while. This will open up a rain of gunfire on the cows and chickens, who will then be butchered for food. Add four more cabbage farms, bringing the total to 8. When the kitchen is operational, find out which overseer claimed the kitchen (text will pop up informing you when this happens) and fill his or her work crew with 5 people. Make sure the kitchen is always converting Cabbage into Cabbage Stew. You can also cook whatever assorted foods you have stored up. If you still haven't finished with your furniture, find more logs/planks until you are. At this point, you're basically done. You're going to have to wait until more people arrive, which happens every two days in the morning. You can add more hovels, kitchens, and farms to support your growing population. I had two kitchens, two hovels, and 20 farms prepared for my eventual population, but that proved completely unnecessary. At 40 people, the game became unbearably slow. Each person would take one step, walk in place, and then take another step. It took so long to go from day to night that I gave up. It ended up looking like this when I quit: You can see that I was prepared to feed and house far more than 40 people. I felt sorry for my chugging computer and gave it a break. The left fan on my computer sounds like a squeaky cog when it's on high. You, of course, can add more farms, kitchens, and houses as you need. It should be relatively easy to do. At that point, you can add a carpentry workshop, metal workshops, or really anything you want. There should be a lot of free people to do whatever you wish. I'm not sure if having less farms and houses would allow for the simulation to keep track of more people, but I think I'll try that next. The whole thing took maybe an hour and a half, and 20 minutes of that was the final afternoon. Questions and comments are welcome. I'm hoping there aren't any horrible formatting or grammar errors, if there are, let me know and I'll fix them.
One trick I've found is if you don't mind having no food available at critical times, you can get juuuuust get away with 3 wheat farms for 40 people. Basically how that rolls (BREAD PUN) is one bread will keep a colonist fed for a day, and three fields gets you around 30-40 grain bags a harvest. If you start with this setup at the beginning by the time you reach 40+ people you'll have a large surplus of grain being constantly made into bread. At the start hunting will usually keep your colony fed until the first harvest comes in (Or the occasional fishman that wanders by). The downside of this is the grain gets EVERYWHERE and makes your colony look a total mess. Took me about 20 days to reach that population, and I probably gone up to 50 people before my computer set itself on fire. But yeah, from all this the main thing I've probably learnt is the supply drops are almost necessary in order to get all your furnaces going to make cogs and pipes of your own.
Heheh, wanna challenge yourself? try getting all that without any use of any supplies from the colony (other than the bonus prestige of course). It might be a bit dependent on a good starting position resource-wise, but its pretty fun to calculate the amount of starting resources in order to make your colony entirely self sufficient aside for immigration, which pops ever so often with the increased prestige. I managed about 60-70 ppl that way, not a single person died to starvation or pummeling
I actually did exactly that the first time. I built a big hovel and one stockpile in the middle of a field of cabbages and got past 40 people (the most my computer handles at the moment) the same way. I just figured that having a kitchen would be a more efficient use of workers for higher populations, rather than having everyone messing about with uncooked cabbages.
You guys talk about your computers burning up or grinding to a halt. What are their specs. I just ordered a new computer to play CE. Want to know what to expect.
I have a laptop with an i7-2630qm@2.0GHz and 8GB ram. I think a lot of it is the simulation not being optimized, just because of the ten thousand other things that need to be done first, like fixing crashes, save games, and making some of the crazier building/zone layouts not cause user insanity, etc. In the earliest days of Prison Architect (another good game), for example, it used to slow down immensely at around 150 people for me. The alpha 15 update had a hilarious chart of the framerate problems where that map had gone from 4 frames per second and then with the new update up to 50 frames a second. It's not actually even a frame rate problem, its an issue with the simulation working like a turn-based game. As of right now, each turn is called a frame, which is different than the frames used in films or graphics. As the game gets to 40 people for me, there are so many different things going on that each turn takes several seconds to process. This gives the appearance that people and objects walk in place for a bit before they move. It's a different problem than when your computer starts to skip or lose frames and the display becomes choppy. When you program graphics, you don't actually move the things around. Each animation frame literally gets placed on top of the last one. Strange Things begin to happen if you do it in a different way, which is why this game and every other game does it this way. Of course, its a lot more complicated than how I've simplified it. I'm not sure if this last paragraph of explanation is at all necessary, but I can't see anyone getting hurt by it.
Yeah, but i meant not just a kitchen, you can build all necessary workshops and continuously expand (can start producing bricks, pipes and plates very early on) and then have as many kitchens as you want Regarding the choppiness, i noticed that it doesn't appear to happen at a set amount of settlers but rather start at a different number with every play run. I'd say for me it usually starts between 40-60 settlers. My specs are i7-2600k@3.40GHz, 8g RAM, 560GTX, but as Ghin said, its not likely performance-related.
Using Ghin's strategy I was able to get 48 colonists before I retired for the night. Building nothing but houses, farms, and a single kitchen with lots of stoves, I was able to keep everybody fed and happy (well, as happy as can be expected). I'm not sure of it was thanks to changes in 27C or just the fact that I had fewer workshops and was more careful about assigning jobs, but my job queue remained manageable, my framerate stayed decent (definitely slower near the end, but playable), and I experienced no catastrophic fishman massacres. People even chopped trees occasionally! I did build fewer farms than shown in Ghin's screenshots. Four or five 6x6 cabbage farms were spitting out so much cabbage I was reaching almost 200 raw cabbage in stock near the end, and that was with 40+ people in town. Previous attempts at growing a large colony resulted in a massive job queue that brought the game to its knees when opened, tons of infinitely delayed jobs, and always ended with a single fishman rounding my entire colony up on a stockpile and systematically pummeling them to death one by one. This playthrough was a lot more fun! Thanks for the tips. PC is an i7-4770k@4ghz, 16g RAM, 560GTX, running on an SSD (not sure if that makes a difference in CE)
