Resolved Seriously... is there ANYONE who knows how settlement-economy even works?

[Hammerhi99]

Developers? Community? ANYONE?

Because I, after over 400 hours of playing this game, still have no clue how prosperity, food, hearths do correlate, whether it´s still buggy or it somehow works like intended... i simply don´t get it! Because the whole system isn´t intuitive at all and the game doesn´t tell you either.

Is there really nobody who can explain how this mechanics work or should work? I´m not talking about vast clues or suspicions, but really KNOWING it!

Because I for myself meanwhile got the suspicion, that the developers just don´t have a frigging idea themselves. It feels like the guy who originally was working on this part of the game just finished halfway and left the team and now no one has a f*cking clue what the guy was doing.

In terms of starvation the changes in 1.4.1 seem to be nothing more than a lazy workaround which may work for towns, but don´t seem to work for castles in sufficiant way. Garrisons may starve a little bit later but hey STILL starve after a decent point and the main reason for this is, in some castles foodstock will ALLWAYS remain at 0, no matter what i´m doing at all and no matter how long i wait for measures to take impact. And as long as the issue with the uppiling peasants in settlements isn´t fixed, garrisons will keep thinning out both, by quality and quantity.

 

[SoKiel]

Very much second that.
The mysterious catch 22 combo of Prosperity and Food.. The more prosperity, the less food, the less food, the less prosperity.. And pumping tons of food into town does not solve the problem in the slightest.. Is there a way to balance it? How is it supposed to work? And there are lots of such questions.

 

[Alenovic]

Well, I will try to explain my observations.

Prosperity = how rich a city is. the higher the prosperity the more goods it has and better prices. The more caravans it should attract. Prosperity also indicates more people living/working over there, resulting in higher food consumption. Town prosperity is directly dependend on the villages it has bound . The more villages the more goods/food which means higher prosperity potential. Prosperity also increases the militia. more people + more riches = more soldiers. Also the higher the prosperity the more "luxury goods" it wants/needs to consume. Low prosperity towns usually only consume food. However later on they start to consume horse saddles, leather, armor, bows, tools, beers, hides etc etc. Which increase the demand for goods, but also the profits for traders. Luring caravans to the town. This also affects the amount of food present.

The bound villages has its prosperity/size/potential indicated in Hearths. You can take it that a hearth is something like a fireplace. A fireplace is seen as an household. Each household/hearth increases the village size and thus its production and amount of militia it has. The hearths are also indicating how much food it grants its town. For example I've had villages which started at +4 food to town and after a while these villages had grown so much that they were delivering +15 food to the town. Image if you got a town with 4 of these villages. That is +60 food every day, without trade.

In order to grow your town, you need your surrounding villages to grow as well. In one of the later patches, they changed one of the town focus options in "increase hearths for villages" IMO this is the most important focus long term.

Food supply: This indicates how much food is left in the castle and town. IT is decreased by prosperity and garrisons, however it is increased by unraided villages. The more hearths a village has the more food it provides to the town. Food supply is thus affected by war and consumption, but also by trade. higher amount of foods generate more food supply but also diversity in food is important for the food supply rate. For example if a town has 100 grain and 5 cheese. you can hold over your mouse on the food supply to see how much this changes the food supply.

Positive food supply increases prosperity, which eventually will cause the food supply to go towards 0. IF your garrison is too large. then the food present at the castle or town is not enough to feed these soldiers. Which in turn will get wounded or die. This means that you either have to decrease the garrison or try increase the hearths of the villages to find a equilibrium. However if a village get raided. the castle or town will lose the +X food supply per day and result in losses until the town is back on track. However raided villages will have a diminished hearth amount and will not trade or produce any goods until they lose the "looted" debuf.

 

[Alenovic]

However currently . or last time i played. the trading mechanics were not working. Caravans would just plunder all the food available at the city which could cause starvations. Sometimes cities would get blockaded by bandits. this could either cause fast growth of prosperity or steady decline, as this city or town would be unable to get caravans and villages to trade. For Revyl this was sometimes positive as there would be no caravans buying up all the food on the markets.

However currently the bare foundation is available. However i believe it is Not really working as intended, however still there is some economy-mechanics that make it feel like a real economy. With changing prices and different price ranges in different regions. But the main problem is that it is not sustainable. For example after each day each city gets X amount of items and X amount of Gold for free in order to make the economy not explode.

After playing for a while all the weaponstores will be overloaded with weapons. As armies are not really consuming the weapons. Because of the prosperity eventually there will be food shortages (however this is quite realistic, until the 1970's wide-spread starvation was common. Especially after a war.) There should also be other mechnics, like raiding towns so that the prosperity drops drastically and nearby towns should get a share of the prosperity the raided town lost.

In short a lot of things are not working as intended. however the bare bones of the economy is there already. It just needs some finetuning.

 

[ishkiniza]

game is a half broken mess that didn't deserve the price we all paid for it. set battles are lovely and it's fun to adventure around the whole map for a 100 hours or so but there's a _lot_ of work left on this game

 

[Hammerhi99]

@ Alenovic :

Thanks for your effort. ✌

Some of your explanations aplly to me and I´m sure they at least should work this way. But many of them don´t, especially not for castles because they simply don´t trade, like towns do.

The hearths are also indicating how much food it grants its town. For example I've had villages which started at +4 food to town and after a while these villages had grown so much that they were delivering +15 food to the town. Image if you got a town with 4 of these villages. That is +60 food every day, without trade.

As far as I know, towns can only have up to 3 villages. Many of them only have 2. And here comes the problem for many castles. When a castle has only 2 villages, its food-supply is capped at +45 (+15 for each village and +15 for gardens). +45, thats it (maybe some points via policies like hunting rights). This is consumded by 2.250 prosperity. And for me atm thats just a theoretical value with no significance at all. The only thing I know is, it´s too high for this castle and theres nothing I can do about this. I CAN put some troops into it´s garrison but not many. Theres no indicator for me at which point my garrison will starve.

I for example own Lavenia Castle, it has a prosperity of ~2.350 and it´s built to the max, also its villages (there are only two) are maxed out. PLUS the empire I belong to has hunting rights as active policy. That gives me a food surplus of 47, which is totally eaten up by my prosperity. I put 24 men into my garrison which leads to a contsant food shortage of -1 and theres nothing i can do about it. Eaven IF there would be a way to reduce my prosperity (which i don´t see), reducing prosperity to be able to maintain a bigger garrison just makes NO SENSE at all. And we are talking about times of peace, no enemy did the slightest harm to my villages yet. If just a single peasant in one of my villages gets the flu or eaven sneezes, my castle might rush into deep depression.

And then i come upon a castle that belongs to a KI-enemy.... Like I came upon Varagos Castle lately. This castle has also just two villages and allthough i raided one of them AND lay a siege on the castle right afterwards, it was able to maintain over 400 militia + over 400 garrison and STILL made a slight food-surplus!... HOW?! ?

 

[Keldar]

game is a half broken mess that didn't deserve the price we all paid for it. set battles are lovely and it's fun to adventure around the whole map for a 100 hours or so but there's a _lot_ of work left on this game

I so completely agree with this statement. I understand its early access but when you charge FULL price for a game that has this many problems, many of which have been there from DAY ONE and have not been fixed or have even gotten worse then I question what the devs are focusing on. A lot of fixed stuff seems to be cosmetic, how about fixing the serious game breaking problems.

I for one currently don't have a kingdom and so have only 1 party and a max of like 190 troops, because I can't man a garrison in any of the I think 5 city castles I have I am constantly having to go back to them when they are attacked so they aren't taken. Like someone else mentioned, somehow the computer player has upwards of 700-800 and more sometimes of garrison with food production being steady.

Clearly the computer player has it figure out or like most games the computer player isn't restricted or bothered by issues like the player is. What a JOKE. I have this game thumbed down on steam and until so many game breaking issues are ACTUALLY FIXED I will not be playing the game, I will actively talk my friends out of buying it AND my review will stand at a thumbs down.

SHAME ON THE DEVS FOR CHARGING SO MUCH FOR A BROKEN GAME.

 

[Hammerhi99]

I for one currently don't have a kingdom and so have only 1 party and a max of like 190 troops, because I can't man a garrison in any of the I think 5 city castles I have I am constantly having to go back to them when they are attacked so they aren't taken. Like someone else mentioned, somehow the computer player has upwards of 700-800 and more sometimes of garrison with food production being steady.

You don´t need a kingdom to have more than one party. You can have up to 4 parties (including your own) via your companions.

 

[uçanbiblo]

Hello, sorry for the late reply. We have fixed a considerable amount of the problems we have encountered so far and improved the game performance with the multiple patches we have released. Please make sure that your game, your drivers, and OS are up to date and the game has necessary permissions over your security software. Please let us know if the problem persists after completing these steps and verifying the integrity of the game files through Steam.

 

[sule]

Hi, I will mark the issue as resolved. If you encounter the same one in the latest version, please let me know. Thanks!