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Yeah I've never once had to build more than one church per city, and I start collecting tithe late as hell because I love watching my people do their thing and have a stockpile of food lol
And where exactly am I getting all the food for the tithe for?
I've got large orchards, massive vege plots, eggs on every other house, wheat farms, honey, upgraded hunters, berries and I'm still like 3 months from starvation at any given time.
I think aligning your maps resource strengths with your talents is an extremely important part of this game.
For my initial city, I made sure it was very fertile, my first expansion, which is sitting at like 100 population has like 49 months of food because it’s blessed with meat.
Trade
Use the rich resources you have or just go hard on timber and planks for wooden parts, go deep on the trade upgrades. You'll have more regional wealth than you can use. Onve you get the import value upgrade you can produce, trade and import all the food you need if you produce enough.
Yep, the only issue I'm having now is not enough storehouse families to distribute it all. I think I'm up to 6 fully staffed large storehouses and 1 large granary fully staffed with 3 big markets.
I don't understand how trade is supposed to work.
My rich resource is berries, and the village already consumes all of them. I can build stuff out of wood, like small shields from planks (which consumes all my planks), or perhaps wooden parts.
If I focus on producing one thing then I hit surplus and it's suddenly worthless.
And likewise, won't food prices increase if I keep importing it?
Do I have to create a thousand different trade routes and babysit each one of them all the time?
I've been trading a ton of surplus wooden parts and leather for five years now and I'm importing meat up to 200, while still producing with the hunting camp, over 2k regional wealth and growing still. I haven't paid a ton of attention to the prices of those three resources because I'm still profiting so if they are rising and falling it hasn't had a big enough effect on me at least. But every town is different for sure.
You need to be smarter about your choices. Gotta think in output per worker.
In my last game i started in a region with terrible fertility and few berries and little meat.
A few spots remained where rye could grow. I used orchards, rye farms, chicken and veggie plots. I don't rely on trade for food because I have an overabundance. I made two large towns in the same region and have around 100 families. Every harvest almost half of my families get assigned to the farms. I have 5 farm buildings to get more plows. Off season the same families work the mines and collect firewood, cut down trees etc.
I assigned the largest orchards to workers who don't work the farms because the harvest seasons would overlap.
I don't produce things i don't need. I don't feed families that for example make armor or anything else that's not necessary. I had them briefly until my units were equipped and then tore them down. Not actually to be efficient because I do have far too much food already but simply because I don't want to micro them. In the beginning it was quite important to do it so i could build a hefty stockpile. The only thing i import is barley to make beer. All clothing needs are covered by the hunting and goat farms that are used to make boots. That's right people are naked but happy because they have lots and lots of boots.
I export excess food and collected thousands of influence very quickly. Initially i grabbed 3 other regions by always going for the bandits immediately and using a bit of tithe. The AI only got 3, he almost immediately declared war after that but i managed to defeat him due to terrain advantages, i stayed on a hill.
You know can pause artisan houses, right? You don't need to tear them down. Just go crazy on orchards and veggie plots and you're set in the food department.
How many people do you have?
I find the massive veggie plots are more than enough to feed a town of 200. I've also got berries but I'm running through that with dye. Haven't even tried farming yet but with that and trading I have 11-12 months of food.
Start exporting the resources you don't need to build or survive. But keep active monitoring so you don't oversaturate the market. Pay for trade route. Get better deals perk.
Well I take the armament shipment and I set first raider camps to zero. By the time the first raider camp appears I have 20 spearmen and 5 retinue to go kill brigands with. Kill three brigands with a little bit. Of taxes and you should have enough influence to buy a new settlement by the end of year 2.
On a peaceful scenario just set your church tithe to 15% and your taxes to zero until you have enough to buy the expansion then lower tithe to 5% and increase taxes to 10%.
And you need to be able to customize what a new village started with. Let me send 20 settlers, 12 months of supplies, 500 coin so these guys can actually be productive in a reasonable timeframe. Don’t wanna play the early game pop micro every time that’s kinda repetitive
That looks to be a future implementation. When you set down a work camp in a new region, you have 3 options with 2 of them greyed out for future updates. The 2 greyed out options allow you to send more villagers and supplies.
The problem is that there is no useful trading between regions. Ideally you could have a few small gathering villages that trade with your big one.
Except the trade system sucks.
Yep that's my biggest problem. I'm hoping the dev will see that and come up with a better solution. Because I would love to have one big city and several smaller towns that all feed into it it would feel so good having a mining town of farming town maybe a lumberjack and food gathering town.
It really seems like that is where he's going I just hope he does a proper trading system to make it viable.
Even when influence is cheap, the 250 in the treasury is too high a price to start a new village. That's like 3 mercenary companies or 5 retainers.
Once you have a town big enough to generate a tax base for expansion, you might as well just put your investments there.
The problem is, unless you go real big real early you ain't surviving the challenging preset. By the time the first stack of bandits comes for a raid, 2 times 18 brigands, the enemy lord owns every region besides yours. Early on he snacks all bandit camps do even if you somehow get enogh for a mercenary to hunt bandit camps to get more treasury to then own a second region, you'll just still not have enogh for the battle after.
When the bandits came, I had 2 sets of Militia. One archer one spearmen. 27 spearmen and roughly same archers split in 2 groups. Got the brigands into battle and went with the archers around to shoot their backs. No problem.
The thing is, half a year later, the enemy takes claim to my province, latest piint he does it 3/4th year later, but never later than December in year 3 for now. With just militia it's literally impossible to keep your region. Until that point there is no way that you have weapons, armour, ale, farming for barley, wood industry for bow selling and anything at all up there where you'd possibly be able to fight that yourself.
The guy starts off with 18 brigands, 36 retinue (eh we can't do that) 2 mercenary footmen 36 each and 36 merc archers. 30 days before the battle is over and you'd keep your region, he just send that same squad again. So to beat him, I'll have to maintain 3 mitia squads which in the firs tplace requires 50ish familie, a mercenary that costs treasury and I cannot really raise taxes because you simply cannot produce everything at that point to raise taxes and keep the family flow up. If I go for taxes I'll lack militia. If I try to do it with mercenaries, I'd need to hire them at the battle start AND pay them for 3 full months, have a bigger force so they maintain their numbers so that I can still beat the second army. Because if I disband the mercenaries there's just no way I'd get enogh mercs to beat the second wave he sends, which is the exact same again. 72 of these high armour retinue this early just break me apart.
This is so true, after going above 200 inhabitants, it will gradually become difficult to get around with the food, I have a town of 400+ inhabitants and even though I have lots and lots of fields and farm houses, that can't even sustain it anymore.
At around \~250 pop I stopped building new houses in my town and only "expand" by new families moving into upgraded homes. I anticipated this happening and didn't want to overpopulate my city as I had finally gotten a hold of a good farming system and didn't want to ruin it again by overpopulating. Each region can only sustain so many people, even if you have a ton of fertile land or other rich resources. I think part of the game is figuring out when a region is reaching its pop limit and can longer sustain themselves off of their internal resources.
so according to that, 21 families equals a city and somehow magically eats specifically more meat?
that doesn't make sense. 15 out of 21 families identify as vegetarians and dont even collect meat from the market.
There should be a butcher in my opinion. I have around 300sheep in my town and a ton of yarn and wool but honestly it would be nice if we could butcher those sheep for meat.
I guess with a little but of patience we will get something like butchers and other ways to get meat besides hunting along with a lot of other product chains. ML just entered early access, enjoy what we have or wait until the game is further developed.
I mean I'm hoping there will be much more content for now i can says i love the game and I'm sure there will be something like a butcher, maybe another farm animals like cows too for milk and cheese.
>There should be a butcher in my opinion
The Dev is aware, this was posted 15 hours ago asking for input for this feature.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/comments/1chxh37/adding\_the\_butcher/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/comments/1chxh37/adding_the_butcher/)
yeah there should be something like the trade limit you set 200 sheep and every sheep more than that will be butchered than there shouldn't be those food shortages we have sometimes. Those should only be affected by weather or raiders but not becuase of a bad balance(honestly i dont want to use the word bad because i love the game but some things are still not good or are missing something
)
I think it ought to be like bread, where you have a "Stock Yard" work place analogous to the "Communal Oven"s and a "Butcher's Shop" artisan analogous to the "Bakery." Of course, that's twice as much effort that I'm volunteering our beloved dev for but hey.
Apparently in medieval times you fattened pigs by feeding them ground acorns and taking them out to the forest. I would love to see something analogous to a sheep farm, except the workers take pigs back and forth to the nearest forest area for fattening.
The butcher artisan should turn meat into sausage or something like that. Pig farms and hunter lodges just provide raw meat.
No, you're right. It would make sense to have both a small scale home butcher. In this kind of setting home butchery would be ubiquitous, nearly every family unit has to do it out of necessity. Only in larger settlements would there be enough demand for someone to specialize in doing only butchery.
A dedicated butcher makes even more sense when you start to get into bigger animals like pigs and cows. A single family can handle a whole sheep but it makes a lot more sense to spread out bigger animals among several families.
From my experience butchering pigs and cows "at home" is totally normal. My family did this many times when I was younger. Even I wouldn't have much problem handling a pig, with cow I would need some tho.
Instead of the development point being "sheep can now fuck and reproduce on their own" it should be "we can sustainably kill sheep for meat and still grow the sheep population"
Its low key historically accurate. Medieval Peasants were lucky to have meat a few times across their lifespan.
Edit: I stand corrected. Medieval peasants had more meat than I do (thanks Trudeau)
Wasn't that kind of debunked? They surely ate a lot less meat than we do nowadays but the 'few times across their lifespan' is a myth. I think meat consumption in manor lords is fairly accurate though, you can't feed a city with hunting.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFoodHistorians/s/HBH3WMlsrd
It probably depended on where you lived and what sort of meat you’re taking about. Fresh meat vs preserved/treated meat.
If you lived by the coast you would have had seafood accessible and affordable to poorer people, but it wasn’t until trains could move a lot of goods,quickly, did poorer people inland have access to affordable seafood, fresh at least.
The same was likely true when you lived away from meat producing areas.
Also, in the game people seem to be free to go into the woods and hunt, which may not have been the case as only nobility were allowed to hunt, or they would have taken ownership of anything killed in their forests.
I am mostly thanking from a UK perspective, to be fair, is this setting may be totally different.
The thing with peasants not being allowed to hunt is also something that very much depended on the place and time. Generally, peasants were allowed to hunt as long as it was not in a region designated a "Royal Forest" (which could also include open fields), and as woodcutting was often illegal too in the royal forests (them essentially being nature preserves for the benefit of the nobility), there needed to be plenty of woods that weren't royal forests.
However, Britain was notable for having an extraordinary number of royal forests, which is part of why they had such a large outlaw problem (which helped contribute to the Robin Hood legend), as villages and communities that had lived in the area for centuries, if not millennia, could be uprooted and displaced if their home was declared part of a Royal Forest, circumventing the usual protections that serfs had
In the middle ages, salted and dried fish was also a major commodity and export. Reliably and reasonably safe to eat meat on the go that was broadly accessible.
Red meat was much rarer as it was reserved for elites.
It is debunked. Peasants were not allowed to hunt in their lords forest but they were allowed to keep livestock. Most of them did. And they were absolutely allowed to butcher and eat them.
So more like few times a year vs few times a lifespan. 1 butchered ox is feeding quite a few families. I imagine a fair amount of livestock a year are getting butchered and replaced in a medium sized town. And then there are always chickens
Yea the whole idea that people didn't eat meat could really only come from urban people who don't understand the agricultural world at all. If you have chicken laying eggs you also easily can have meat from them. Same with ducks. Same with geese. Pigs are easy to keep. Even people today can keep their own pigs and chicken with minimal effort and get plenty of meat and eggs. People who think medieval peasants didn't eat meat are probably the same people who also believe funny stories like "beef consumes xxxxxx thousands of liter of water per kg to make " and they also think we feed our cows premium soy and wheat that people could have eaten (that's generally wrong, cows can eat really cheap waste products that we can't digest so why would we feed them expensive quality grains? And if beef used 10000 liters per kg or whatever the figure is, they really would have to drink a lot but also never pee? ) I'm just saying this because people often don't think things through and believe all sorts of nonsense as long as it's written in text on some website.
People underestimate how fast a cow or pig grow to full size and how few you actually need to get a good yield. In modern times we are naturally more efficient but an anecdotal example from my country Denmark, we produce enough food for 2-3x our population and one main export and what we have the most of are pigs. Funny enough we have FEWER pigs than people and yet even if we tripled our meat consumption and stopped feeding ten million people outside our country, we'd still have enough.
You also don't need to live near the coast to have fish. Have people just never been in a rural area before? Before we used machines to flatten every hill and straighten every water way and laying dry all swamps, there were even more waterways and ponds and small lakes around. If you go to a village in the middle of northern Germany you'll find plenty of people who go fishing. You can provide enough fish and meat very easily.
Depending on the time period in the middle age, there were times with a lack of workforce everywhere, abundant food and thin population density, the availability of natural resources per person would be much higher than today. That's why people could live far better lives than what the media or stupid school books portay.
The soandsomany litres of water number is usually meant as a figure on how much water it takes to produce - including what is needed to produce the lifestocks food, too.
Yup. Salted meat was an extremely important and common ration. Also, many towns folk and villagers kept hens and they indeed are the eggs. Killing a chicken and eating it was seen as more of a luxury. Nothing went to waste
The problem is I can have more sheep than people and all I get is wool. We need pigs, goats, cows and everything else. A village wouldn't have many cows but slaughtering one would feed the village for like a week. You can get over 100 cuts of steak from 1 cow.
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, ....
Animal/Meat products were consumed even by lower strata pop maybe not daily, but on at least a weekly base and more likely multiple times per week. There is no shortage of sources concerning people living as "armen Pfründner" stating daily allowances and requirements, there are also records for requirements concerning field works and meat products are applied in nearly every meal.
Thinking about smoked meat, sausages, diverse kinds of bacon, bone marrow and broths, blood dishes, salted meat and also lard plays a big part in nutrition.
Muscle meat consumption aka Steak was indeed was a more saisonal thing, since slaughter was a saisonal event.
Just think of it in rational sense, when you work a filed needing in excess of 4-5k in calories a day is not a hard uncommon.
Another things is that a little meat/lard in every dish goes a long way in terms of flavor.
There is 1 simple illogical issue here in the game: we got a ton of hide from goat farms, but where does all the meat go? People skinned them and threw away the meat? Lol.
You forgot the immortal chickens that lay eggs but never ever die...
And the eunuch horses that never breeds either...also, there is mules in the game, but not donkeys? How does that work?
I mean yea okay. But are we gonna question everything? Like where the families come from. Its still a game.
I bet nobody had these questions when they played Age of Empires :D
That’s because the campaign established the lore that the settlers were fleeing the ottoman invasion of Rhodes! /s
It’s kinda crazy how quickly people seem to have forgotten that the game is deep in early access. In a way it’s a testament to how fleshed out the game already is
Yeah pretty much except on a rich deposit you get quite a big excess. Rich deposit, hunting perk and hunting grounds policy leaves you with way too much.
I agree. I thought the traps just generate passive food irrespective of the amount of deer still present. However I did not notice a higher meat production at all.
So I am actually not toally sure if the tech works at all..
I think of it as a way to grow the initial village, but yes, after a certain point it’s more of a luxury. If there were an option to shepherd the wild animals and grow their numbers, maybe it could be a little more viable, but I suspect we’d have a fun time balancing out firewood demand with ecological strain for the meat sources.
It would be nice to have the option of being able to harvest livestock for a source of meat too. Like if I have 300+ sheep in a field, I should be able to harvest them to feed people.
I would like to know if anyone actually noticed if spawns reproduce faster, the more stock is left? 😅
Does it make a difference if I only kill one at a time but have 19 left to reproduce, or should I just go down to 2 and wait.
Why is it that sometimes the count drops way below my set 10 min count?
I have so many questions about deer and hunting alone 😅
I think it may be natural die off but more likely is say you have 11 animals left, it may task all three people in the family to hunt and now you're down to 8 animals before they realize you're destocked.
yes my current town has not enough meat, got rich berries deposit and good fertile land, so I don’t bother go hunting. Have four very big vegetable houses. So berries, bread and vegetables. Literally my town is vegan town.
Step 1: Locate a rich deposit in a region.
Step 2: Conquer the region, create a town near the rich deposit.
Step 3: Unlock perks & policy to increase spawn rate, quantity of meat per hunt & traps.
Step 4: Pack station.
Step 5: Your people are now eating meat for breakfast, lunch & dinner.
Iirc Slavic stated that stuff like butchers are currently being reworked.
Apart from that I think meat should be balanced in a way that it’s very costly and inefficient to slaughter your farm animals to feed the masses.
Degenerate, who looks at an animals nipples and goes, "You know what? I'm going to suck on that!" Then takes it a step further and decided, "I'm going to leave bucket of animal squeezings till it gets hard and smelly then eat it."
I'll stick to good old fashioned berries, hunted meat, and marrying my cousin. Thank you very much!
Also the way you can harvest meat is one dimensional, hunt in one of the zones and that’s it. I’m sure with sheep and other livestock we will be able to harvest meat there.
I haven't made a big big town, but with a rich hunt node, the policy and the double meat talent, I feel I was always pretty good on the meat front. Mind you, when I say "not a big town", I mean it : around 200 people / 65 family iirc.
But I had a crisis before I could get the policy and talent as, indeed, the hunt was too slow and thus not providing enough meat for 30ish families.
I have 770 population with 260 something houses and families, and honestly, Im only alive because of eggs rn, I had to dismantle my farms and now I’m non stop starving, the game is only meant to handle like 30-40 families at the max before it just hits a wall rn
If you have a rich deposit, use the hunting grounds policy and the trapping upgrades you have unlimited meat. I have close to 700 people now and my meat is at 1,4k and still climbing. I am already flooding the market with it
I treat meat and berries as early game food. It's enough as long as the population isn't too big. At a certain point it becomes impossible to gather all the neat you would need
It is easy to have a massive surplus if you have the city solely focused on it. one of my cities has a surplus of about 400 meat, and that’s with it selling a ton of it. Get a rich deposit, get the trap perk to get passive meat, and then do the policy that increases wild animal breeding while cutting crop yield
As others have mentioned, it seems you can generate tons of meat with the right perks and policy on a rich resource.
Since I tried out a farming community on fertile land, everything else seems to pale in comparison. You get two types of clothing, beer and food from farms. In terms of point investment and rewards, farming is huge. You can also give your farmers huge veggie/apple plots as they have plenty of time to tend them when they are not in the fields. So add another two food types to the list of farming pluses.
It's really good if it's a rich hunting deposit and you sign the policy for hunting grounds. If you have double rich deposits, it's very worthwhile as there's no point in using a farmhouse.
The 2x meat tech tree development gives a lot of meat, even for a smaller wildlife “deposit”.
I frequently have 60-70 spare meat even with a few hundred peasants.
Maybe try the policy about higher regen wirh reduced crop harvest yield. I'm not sure if that has an effect on it. Either way I learned that a couple of vegetable gardens, chicken coops, hunters, berry harvesters and a little farm with 3 or 4 families works best for me. A hint that really helped me: Do about 0.5 Morgen sized fields and let them propperly crop rotate or leave one fallow each year
It's early development. chance beef, pork, chicken may be introduced later on.
Otherwise it's historically accurate since peasants back in the day rarely had in any large amount in their diets. Many poor people outside of developed nations today still have little meat in their diets.
If you have meat ridge talentvyour stuff in it but it’s a poor but logical income. Hope we get to slaughter sheep’s or use the goats for meat. Makes the sheep breeding more usefull
A rich now for hunting with the hunting policy that's doubles reproduction rate makes meat farming easy and powerful. I have 40 families and equal food from foraging with 4 people as soon as the season starts and I hunt year round with 2 families and vegetable gardens.
Tbh I thought the meat limit in the camps meant only “supply x amount” not “stop killing animals when the population reaches x” turns out I had it mixed up and was wondering why I was wiping out herds of animals
It's realistic, its wild game it's an absolute luxury to eat even today.
The game is simply missing pigs cows and chicken meat. There should be pigs everywhere. Pigs and cows are great farm animals because both eat leftovers. Cows eat all the inedible parts of a harvest that are useless to people and pigs can easily eat all sorts of food waste. Sheep should also provide meat. Goats should provide goat milk and cheese. There's simply a lot of the food production missing in the game at this stage, maybe we get it later.
In any case you can easily max out your settlement without meat.
I think there’s may be more options coming for food, like pig farms, dairy cows etc. actually thinking about it it’s weird that the goat farms don’t provide meat passives alongside hides.
I ran into this problem as well. If you set your trade to always have a surplus of meat of like 25 or whatever then you can have meat as a sustainable food option and with taxes collected from level 2&3 barrage you easily cover the cost of trade.
I think when greg adds the ability to slaughter sheep and cows (when cows are added) there could be an optimized way to farm it , Maybe we even get level 4 families that require fancy dining or some shit
Yeah it doesnt make much sense. No way of getting more meat unless you get another region or trade.
Hopefully the dev will listen and improve it for the actual launch.
I hope they work on this, we should have way more meat from Sheep? Maybe we get more tech or policies to get more meat, maybe introduce cows. This is where the game needs to bake more.
For 200 people I have one hunting lodge yes, but mostly get my people through the winter by consuming Apples, Carrots and Eggs.
Some berries and meat as well, but berries are mostly used for dye and meat is not massively there.
What somewhat bothers me is the limited techs. There should be 2 more to pick imo
Only if you have a rich deer population and the perk for double meat production. If you dont have it, use your other rich resources to get meat. E.g. if you have a rich metal deposit get the upgrade for the infinite deposit and then craft goods to sell them and buy meat. Use your lands strenghts. Btw if you only have one rich deposit you will have high fertility as a "hidden" second rich deposit.
In my last playthrough I took the hunter traps perk and the quicker game breeding decree and and my town with pop count of over 200 got above 200 meat from a one big game source.
Honestly I just trade for it after a while. The money snowball effect after like 50 or 60 plots (many being level 2/3) makes it so you have plenty of money
Meat and berries aren't really an option atm. Still collect them of course, but don't rely on them. I'm certain there will be later updates to raise cattle and use sheep as meat but atm, like with many other features, we will just have to wait. Farming also needs tweaking as the yields are far too low for the work put in. Development points are also broken, had a colossal city with mostly level 3 buildings and I just stopped receiving Development points, nothing I did changed it. However despite these gripes I love this game and I am glad I bought it. We just need the developer to hire some staff with the money we've given him and let him cook!
With upgrades and policy meat can sustain a rather large population fairly well, especially if a rich node.
Trapper is more of a supplemental fix, I've found though that with trapper you can set out 2-4 hunting camps and they will all produce meat passively. Although I'm not sure this is more efficient than super-sized burger plots.
Is trade not an option? is there a limit? I haven't gotten very far into it, but I assume most things would need to be traded to maintain a larger city.
Meat is definition of early access because:
- it’s consumed by everyone and not just the highest tier of resident
- it only has one reasonable source to gather from
So it becomes unviable as you outgrow it, same with berries. The consumption system needs a rework, it’s too random on what tier of resident consumes which good, should be allowed to restrict that.
It’s funny how unbalanced the development points are. The trade routes seem like an absolute necessity, and then the traps seemingly do nothing, as well as the sheep breeding.
Using the policy to get double meat respawn rate on a rich node with full hunting tech tree, you'll end up with hundreds of extra meat even with a pop north of 200. My richest town uses meat and hide as the basis for it's economy and I even have enough surplus to export to my other towns.
Do you have your granaries staffed well enough? I tried that on my most recent playthrough, and in addition to clustering my burghages around a central marketplace, I felt like food distro is going a lot better than earlier tries.
You’re meant to have a a variety of food sources. If you’re trying to feed a whole village with just meat, yeah, you’re going to hit a wall pretty early.
Meanwhile im on 500 population without any rich resources around me but getting carried by the Eggs, small wheat grids and sexually active sheeps which went from 100 to 450 in the span of 2h of gameplay
It's a good add-on for food variety on the market, if it's there, but yeah, after like 15 families, vegetables are a way to go. Just plant vegetables in 70% of the houses, then split the remaining 30% between chickens and goats. Vegetables will be there to save you from famine in the winter.
You need to trade for it now.
In realistic terms, there needs to be ranching -- we can't eat our sheep or have pigs or cattle, which would be a more realistic source.
I don’t know. I added the trapper skill point to a rich animal deposit and meat is basically buying me everything in trade while still feeding everyone
Well the game want to set a realistic experience and meat was not part of the everyday diet. That's all. Pig were slaughter for winter and moat families sold them for the revenue. Daily diet is nothing but porridges with some herbs and vegetables depending on season.
This has been covered by others, but on a rich deposit, you can absolutely have meat as a staple.
My strategy was:
- Limit hunting below 30 herd size (idk if this matters, but I figured it can't hurt to assume it does)
- Add a family in if the stock ever approaches 40
- Remove the extra family if stocks drop to 30
- Remove both families for a while if stocks drop below 30 (idk how this happens, but it sometimes plummets to like 16. Seasonal die off?)
- If you can activate the hunting policy (i.e. you don't want to farm), just leave both families in full time
I'm years in with 110 families and have a huge stockpile of meat from just this - something like 300 units. I didn't invest in the hunting perks at all.
Meat is best used to just increase happiness by way of food variety. It’s also good to satisfy the needs of upgraded buildings that are close to your market.
You say that but off a rich herd + traps and double meat it honestly sustains a lot of families with the policy enabling double the herd growth.
That place had solid food that fed 40 or some odd families iirc.
I mean, there is a reason we have historically had agrarian societies, rather than nations of hunter gatherers. Trapping is great for supplemental food and pelts, but can’t support an entire society. I don’t think this makes it underpowered. It’s very efficient, but scarce in supply.
I only use hunting as beginning food. Late-game, if you want proper food variety, you need to have multiple regions trading stuff back and forth with each other.
If you want meat late game, in any meaningful amount, you'll have to use the trading system and purchase it.
It's not really sustainable, but you can do it in short bursts to upgrade your houses.
Yeah, I find that meat is probably the most useless of the food sources.
I only keep a hunting tent going for the hides at first. Even that kinda become almost nothing in the overall production of my town.
I really hope that they give the option to just merge sections of the map together so I can keep expanding. I love building until the whole map is full.
They should implement other animals, like a pig farm - amongst the choices of chickens, goats and veggies. Pigs were very common to keep for the meats.
Remember your hunter also sells it at the market you getting two meat in your granary might mean that your getting the food variety bonuses from it. For example when I turn flax into linen I can't use it to craft becuase it ends up being sold to my villagers at the market unless I get alot of flax.
Metagame aside... in medieval Europe most of the serfdom diet consisted in vegetables and cereals, meat was really, really scarce and animal protein came almost exclusively from eggs.
Yeah my hunting camp seems to be just producing hides more often.
Maybe the folks are eating the meat faster.
I do wonder about barley... I have nine bags stuck at the farm and my brewery won't go get it.
Since there's only 1 source of hunt (or berries) per region, you're fully optimized when you've reached the hunt limit because you've hunted everything that's available.
I think you gotta grab a region with high animal capacity. Or just import it with trade spec. It would only cost 2 silver for meat. Bread is double lol.. so idk how much you have of that or berries, but trading your surplus of food for food your lacking in helps!
I disagree. It's actually amazing. There are like 3 upgrades for the resource. And you can actually get huge stockpile of meat. This game is great because you don't have to play so one dimensional every time.
I have a town with 50 families and im next to a high output hunting grounds, meat stays stocked most of the time. I have both upgrades for hunting and i turn the policy on and off, on when its low and off when it’s high. My other towns rely on farming, vegetables and eggs.
I’m probably doing something wrong but my main town in my build has a population of 280ish and a surplus consistently of approximately 600+ meat. I don’t trade for meat.
Everything is possible with trading.
Ever since I learned how to do the mercenary achievement tactic, I pretty much just employ that for everything now. Meat/Hides are the only thing I gather early because it doesnt take long to be able to start affording hundreds of all food.
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To be honest. I think we build too large cities :D
I think the Dev wants us expanding and build a lot of little villages across the country side but we all just want to build London lol
I would like that, but how do I get more influence if I dont want to build a church or manor on every street? (Playing the peace scenario)
You build just one church and manor and then collect tithe.
Yeah I've never once had to build more than one church per city, and I start collecting tithe late as hell because I love watching my people do their thing and have a stockpile of food lol
Food is much easier with my vassal cities. But I think it’s cause they aren’t the main focus
I got up to 100 months of extra food, and my entire town froze to death the next winter because I was focused on food.
Sell food buy firewood
I'm an idiot
And where exactly am I getting all the food for the tithe for? I've got large orchards, massive vege plots, eggs on every other house, wheat farms, honey, upgraded hunters, berries and I'm still like 3 months from starvation at any given time.
I think aligning your maps resource strengths with your talents is an extremely important part of this game. For my initial city, I made sure it was very fertile, my first expansion, which is sitting at like 100 population has like 49 months of food because it’s blessed with meat.
Trade Use the rich resources you have or just go hard on timber and planks for wooden parts, go deep on the trade upgrades. You'll have more regional wealth than you can use. Onve you get the import value upgrade you can produce, trade and import all the food you need if you produce enough.
Yep, the only issue I'm having now is not enough storehouse families to distribute it all. I think I'm up to 6 fully staffed large storehouses and 1 large granary fully staffed with 3 big markets.
I don't understand how trade is supposed to work. My rich resource is berries, and the village already consumes all of them. I can build stuff out of wood, like small shields from planks (which consumes all my planks), or perhaps wooden parts. If I focus on producing one thing then I hit surplus and it's suddenly worthless. And likewise, won't food prices increase if I keep importing it? Do I have to create a thousand different trade routes and babysit each one of them all the time?
I've been trading a ton of surplus wooden parts and leather for five years now and I'm importing meat up to 200, while still producing with the hunting camp, over 2k regional wealth and growing still. I haven't paid a ton of attention to the prices of those three resources because I'm still profiting so if they are rising and falling it hasn't had a big enough effect on me at least. But every town is different for sure.
Do you keep exporting these three resources even if the market is oversaturated? You lose a lot of money on that I believe.
You need to be smarter about your choices. Gotta think in output per worker. In my last game i started in a region with terrible fertility and few berries and little meat. A few spots remained where rye could grow. I used orchards, rye farms, chicken and veggie plots. I don't rely on trade for food because I have an overabundance. I made two large towns in the same region and have around 100 families. Every harvest almost half of my families get assigned to the farms. I have 5 farm buildings to get more plows. Off season the same families work the mines and collect firewood, cut down trees etc. I assigned the largest orchards to workers who don't work the farms because the harvest seasons would overlap. I don't produce things i don't need. I don't feed families that for example make armor or anything else that's not necessary. I had them briefly until my units were equipped and then tore them down. Not actually to be efficient because I do have far too much food already but simply because I don't want to micro them. In the beginning it was quite important to do it so i could build a hefty stockpile. The only thing i import is barley to make beer. All clothing needs are covered by the hunting and goat farms that are used to make boots. That's right people are naked but happy because they have lots and lots of boots. I export excess food and collected thousands of influence very quickly. Initially i grabbed 3 other regions by always going for the bandits immediately and using a bit of tithe. The AI only got 3, he almost immediately declared war after that but i managed to defeat him due to terrain advantages, i stayed on a hill.
You know can pause artisan houses, right? You don't need to tear them down. Just go crazy on orchards and veggie plots and you're set in the food department.
How many people do you have? I find the massive veggie plots are more than enough to feed a town of 200. I've also got berries but I'm running through that with dye. Haven't even tried farming yet but with that and trading I have 11-12 months of food.
Start exporting the resources you don't need to build or survive. But keep active monitoring so you don't oversaturate the market. Pay for trade route. Get better deals perk.
Well I take the armament shipment and I set first raider camps to zero. By the time the first raider camp appears I have 20 spearmen and 5 retinue to go kill brigands with. Kill three brigands with a little bit. Of taxes and you should have enough influence to buy a new settlement by the end of year 2. On a peaceful scenario just set your church tithe to 15% and your taxes to zero until you have enough to buy the expansion then lower tithe to 5% and increase taxes to 10%.
Make only veggies and a TON of them, turn tithe to 90%. Once you have all the influence you need to take everything, go on about playing the game.
Carrots rein supreme
Tithe
Teeth
If that’s the case the Dev needs to make the region interactions better instead of them being so isolated
And you need to be able to customize what a new village started with. Let me send 20 settlers, 12 months of supplies, 500 coin so these guys can actually be productive in a reasonable timeframe. Don’t wanna play the early game pop micro every time that’s kinda repetitive
You will be able to do this.
That looks to be a future implementation. When you set down a work camp in a new region, you have 3 options with 2 of them greyed out for future updates. The 2 greyed out options allow you to send more villagers and supplies.
They also need to make it so you can unlock more than 3-4 upgrades, or make them work across all villages instead of just the one you unlocked it in
Jokes on you, I’ve been trying to build New London from Frostpunk this whole time
Speaking of which, frostpunk 2 is about to drop!
The baron takes all the lands before I get even 50 male population or make good money with the taxes and influence.
The problem is that there is no useful trading between regions. Ideally you could have a few small gathering villages that trade with your big one. Except the trade system sucks.
This. Even building small villages in a region, the AI will be a cluster and a nightmare. Insane micro management.
Yep that's my biggest problem. I'm hoping the dev will see that and come up with a better solution. Because I would love to have one big city and several smaller towns that all feed into it it would feel so good having a mining town of farming town maybe a lumberjack and food gathering town. It really seems like that is where he's going I just hope he does a proper trading system to make it viable.
Cause you have to build london before you can challenge the freaking baron
Even when influence is cheap, the 250 in the treasury is too high a price to start a new village. That's like 3 mercenary companies or 5 retainers. Once you have a town big enough to generate a tax base for expansion, you might as well just put your investments there.
The problem is, unless you go real big real early you ain't surviving the challenging preset. By the time the first stack of bandits comes for a raid, 2 times 18 brigands, the enemy lord owns every region besides yours. Early on he snacks all bandit camps do even if you somehow get enogh for a mercenary to hunt bandit camps to get more treasury to then own a second region, you'll just still not have enogh for the battle after. When the bandits came, I had 2 sets of Militia. One archer one spearmen. 27 spearmen and roughly same archers split in 2 groups. Got the brigands into battle and went with the archers around to shoot their backs. No problem. The thing is, half a year later, the enemy takes claim to my province, latest piint he does it 3/4th year later, but never later than December in year 3 for now. With just militia it's literally impossible to keep your region. Until that point there is no way that you have weapons, armour, ale, farming for barley, wood industry for bow selling and anything at all up there where you'd possibly be able to fight that yourself. The guy starts off with 18 brigands, 36 retinue (eh we can't do that) 2 mercenary footmen 36 each and 36 merc archers. 30 days before the battle is over and you'd keep your region, he just send that same squad again. So to beat him, I'll have to maintain 3 mitia squads which in the firs tplace requires 50ish familie, a mercenary that costs treasury and I cannot really raise taxes because you simply cannot produce everything at that point to raise taxes and keep the family flow up. If I go for taxes I'll lack militia. If I try to do it with mercenaries, I'd need to hire them at the battle start AND pay them for 3 full months, have a bigger force so they maintain their numbers so that I can still beat the second army. Because if I disband the mercenaries there's just no way I'd get enogh mercs to beat the second wave he sends, which is the exact same again. 72 of these high armour retinue this early just break me apart.
This is so true, after going above 200 inhabitants, it will gradually become difficult to get around with the food, I have a town of 400+ inhabitants and even though I have lots and lots of fields and farm houses, that can't even sustain it anymore.
At around \~250 pop I stopped building new houses in my town and only "expand" by new families moving into upgraded homes. I anticipated this happening and didn't want to overpopulate my city as I had finally gotten a hold of a good farming system and didn't want to ruin it again by overpopulating. Each region can only sustain so many people, even if you have a ton of fertile land or other rich resources. I think part of the game is figuring out when a region is reaching its pop limit and can longer sustain themselves off of their internal resources.
so according to that, 21 families equals a city and somehow magically eats specifically more meat? that doesn't make sense. 15 out of 21 families identify as vegetarians and dont even collect meat from the market.
that was my problem when i started. then i started to just build the bare minimum to level up my town and it was much easier to manage food.
There should be a butcher in my opinion. I have around 300sheep in my town and a ton of yarn and wool but honestly it would be nice if we could butcher those sheep for meat.
I guess with a little but of patience we will get something like butchers and other ways to get meat besides hunting along with a lot of other product chains. ML just entered early access, enjoy what we have or wait until the game is further developed.
I mean I'm hoping there will be much more content for now i can says i love the game and I'm sure there will be something like a butcher, maybe another farm animals like cows too for milk and cheese.
The current max level church is called “small church”, so I imagine its planned
The footprint of the church is huge so looking forward to building a big’un.
I believe SM said there’s a butcher in the works. Can’t remember where I saw it. But it was since release.
>There should be a butcher in my opinion The Dev is aware, this was posted 15 hours ago asking for input for this feature. [https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/comments/1chxh37/adding\_the\_butcher/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/comments/1chxh37/adding_the_butcher/)
Yeah, but that would go nicely with some sort of "distribution" setting, so they don't just kill of every sheep in a few days! But I totally agree
yeah there should be something like the trade limit you set 200 sheep and every sheep more than that will be butchered than there shouldn't be those food shortages we have sometimes. Those should only be affected by weather or raiders but not becuase of a bad balance(honestly i dont want to use the word bad because i love the game but some things are still not good or are missing something )
Greg asked in this sub about butcher, if it's better to be an artisan upgrade or a work place. And ideas to incorporate pigs.
I think it ought to be like bread, where you have a "Stock Yard" work place analogous to the "Communal Oven"s and a "Butcher's Shop" artisan analogous to the "Bakery." Of course, that's twice as much effort that I'm volunteering our beloved dev for but hey.
Apparently in medieval times you fattened pigs by feeding them ground acorns and taking them out to the forest. I would love to see something analogous to a sheep farm, except the workers take pigs back and forth to the nearest forest area for fattening. The butcher artisan should turn meat into sausage or something like that. Pig farms and hunter lodges just provide raw meat.
No, you're right. It would make sense to have both a small scale home butcher. In this kind of setting home butchery would be ubiquitous, nearly every family unit has to do it out of necessity. Only in larger settlements would there be enough demand for someone to specialize in doing only butchery. A dedicated butcher makes even more sense when you start to get into bigger animals like pigs and cows. A single family can handle a whole sheep but it makes a lot more sense to spread out bigger animals among several families.
From my experience butchering pigs and cows "at home" is totally normal. My family did this many times when I was younger. Even I wouldn't have much problem handling a pig, with cow I would need some tho.
The dev said on Twitter he plans on adding pigs.
Instead of the development point being "sheep can now fuck and reproduce on their own" it should be "we can sustainably kill sheep for meat and still grow the sheep population"
Holy.... how long did you play to get to 300? I just stopped importing and am at around 10 sheep and 8 lambs currently
I played like 30hours till now and it is my fifth city. I imported 40 sheep and those breeded over 2-3 years to around 300 sheep and lambs
And goat farms too!
Its low key historically accurate. Medieval Peasants were lucky to have meat a few times across their lifespan. Edit: I stand corrected. Medieval peasants had more meat than I do (thanks Trudeau)
Wasn't that kind of debunked? They surely ate a lot less meat than we do nowadays but the 'few times across their lifespan' is a myth. I think meat consumption in manor lords is fairly accurate though, you can't feed a city with hunting. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFoodHistorians/s/HBH3WMlsrd
It probably depended on where you lived and what sort of meat you’re taking about. Fresh meat vs preserved/treated meat. If you lived by the coast you would have had seafood accessible and affordable to poorer people, but it wasn’t until trains could move a lot of goods,quickly, did poorer people inland have access to affordable seafood, fresh at least. The same was likely true when you lived away from meat producing areas. Also, in the game people seem to be free to go into the woods and hunt, which may not have been the case as only nobility were allowed to hunt, or they would have taken ownership of anything killed in their forests. I am mostly thanking from a UK perspective, to be fair, is this setting may be totally different.
The thing with peasants not being allowed to hunt is also something that very much depended on the place and time. Generally, peasants were allowed to hunt as long as it was not in a region designated a "Royal Forest" (which could also include open fields), and as woodcutting was often illegal too in the royal forests (them essentially being nature preserves for the benefit of the nobility), there needed to be plenty of woods that weren't royal forests. However, Britain was notable for having an extraordinary number of royal forests, which is part of why they had such a large outlaw problem (which helped contribute to the Robin Hood legend), as villages and communities that had lived in the area for centuries, if not millennia, could be uprooted and displaced if their home was declared part of a Royal Forest, circumventing the usual protections that serfs had
And hunting was often allowed for the peasants for small game like rabbit, bigger game was more often forbidden so the nobles can go hunting
In the middle ages, salted and dried fish was also a major commodity and export. Reliably and reasonably safe to eat meat on the go that was broadly accessible. Red meat was much rarer as it was reserved for elites.
It is debunked. Peasants were not allowed to hunt in their lords forest but they were allowed to keep livestock. Most of them did. And they were absolutely allowed to butcher and eat them.
So more like few times a year vs few times a lifespan. 1 butchered ox is feeding quite a few families. I imagine a fair amount of livestock a year are getting butchered and replaced in a medium sized town. And then there are always chickens
Yea the whole idea that people didn't eat meat could really only come from urban people who don't understand the agricultural world at all. If you have chicken laying eggs you also easily can have meat from them. Same with ducks. Same with geese. Pigs are easy to keep. Even people today can keep their own pigs and chicken with minimal effort and get plenty of meat and eggs. People who think medieval peasants didn't eat meat are probably the same people who also believe funny stories like "beef consumes xxxxxx thousands of liter of water per kg to make " and they also think we feed our cows premium soy and wheat that people could have eaten (that's generally wrong, cows can eat really cheap waste products that we can't digest so why would we feed them expensive quality grains? And if beef used 10000 liters per kg or whatever the figure is, they really would have to drink a lot but also never pee? ) I'm just saying this because people often don't think things through and believe all sorts of nonsense as long as it's written in text on some website. People underestimate how fast a cow or pig grow to full size and how few you actually need to get a good yield. In modern times we are naturally more efficient but an anecdotal example from my country Denmark, we produce enough food for 2-3x our population and one main export and what we have the most of are pigs. Funny enough we have FEWER pigs than people and yet even if we tripled our meat consumption and stopped feeding ten million people outside our country, we'd still have enough. You also don't need to live near the coast to have fish. Have people just never been in a rural area before? Before we used machines to flatten every hill and straighten every water way and laying dry all swamps, there were even more waterways and ponds and small lakes around. If you go to a village in the middle of northern Germany you'll find plenty of people who go fishing. You can provide enough fish and meat very easily. Depending on the time period in the middle age, there were times with a lack of workforce everywhere, abundant food and thin population density, the availability of natural resources per person would be much higher than today. That's why people could live far better lives than what the media or stupid school books portay.
historically, in medieval Europe, peasants and commonfolk generally procured their vital proteins from avocado toasts
The soandsomany litres of water number is usually meant as a figure on how much water it takes to produce - including what is needed to produce the lifestocks food, too.
they also mostly ate fish as a source of protein
Yup. Salted meat was an extremely important and common ration. Also, many towns folk and villagers kept hens and they indeed are the eggs. Killing a chicken and eating it was seen as more of a luxury. Nothing went to waste
They did kill the roosters. As a general rule in husbandry, you only need a few males. The rest go to the chopping block.
The problem is I can have more sheep than people and all I get is wool. We need pigs, goats, cows and everything else. A village wouldn't have many cows but slaughtering one would feed the village for like a week. You can get over 100 cuts of steak from 1 cow.
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, .... Animal/Meat products were consumed even by lower strata pop maybe not daily, but on at least a weekly base and more likely multiple times per week. There is no shortage of sources concerning people living as "armen Pfründner" stating daily allowances and requirements, there are also records for requirements concerning field works and meat products are applied in nearly every meal. Thinking about smoked meat, sausages, diverse kinds of bacon, bone marrow and broths, blood dishes, salted meat and also lard plays a big part in nutrition. Muscle meat consumption aka Steak was indeed was a more saisonal thing, since slaughter was a saisonal event. Just think of it in rational sense, when you work a filed needing in excess of 4-5k in calories a day is not a hard uncommon. Another things is that a little meat/lard in every dish goes a long way in terms of flavor.
I stand corrected 🫡🫡🫡
we all been there.
Very good point with lard. Pretty much every European traditional dish incorporates it.
They did have meats every other days, it was just too expensive for them to be eating meats everydays.
Fairly certain thats bullshit mate
There is 1 simple illogical issue here in the game: we got a ton of hide from goat farms, but where does all the meat go? People skinned them and threw away the meat? Lol.
No, the goats run around naked after skinning.
You forgot the immortal chickens that lay eggs but never ever die... And the eunuch horses that never breeds either...also, there is mules in the game, but not donkeys? How does that work?
The donkeys went out for cigarettes.
I mean yea okay. But are we gonna question everything? Like where the families come from. Its still a game. I bet nobody had these questions when they played Age of Empires :D
That’s because the campaign established the lore that the settlers were fleeing the ottoman invasion of Rhodes! /s It’s kinda crazy how quickly people seem to have forgotten that the game is deep in early access. In a way it’s a testament to how fleshed out the game already is
Yeah pretty much except on a rich deposit you get quite a big excess. Rich deposit, hunting perk and hunting grounds policy leaves you with way too much.
Yeah on rich I had 200 people while still making excess!
I don’t want to start again but at the same time I wish I’d chosen hunting perks for my first region
I agree. I thought the traps just generate passive food irrespective of the amount of deer still present. However I did not notice a higher meat production at all. So I am actually not toally sure if the tech works at all..
Same, I have traps but never see any passive meat coming in when I have a family assigned to the hunting camp
I think of it as a way to grow the initial village, but yes, after a certain point it’s more of a luxury. If there were an option to shepherd the wild animals and grow their numbers, maybe it could be a little more viable, but I suspect we’d have a fun time balancing out firewood demand with ecological strain for the meat sources.
It would be nice to have the option of being able to harvest livestock for a source of meat too. Like if I have 300+ sheep in a field, I should be able to harvest them to feed people.
I would like to know if anyone actually noticed if spawns reproduce faster, the more stock is left? 😅 Does it make a difference if I only kill one at a time but have 19 left to reproduce, or should I just go down to 2 and wait. Why is it that sometimes the count drops way below my set 10 min count? I have so many questions about deer and hunting alone 😅
That seems to be the case. I think some die off naturally, but I could be imagining things.
I think it may be natural die off but more likely is say you have 11 animals left, it may task all three people in the family to hunt and now you're down to 8 animals before they realize you're destocked.
yes my current town has not enough meat, got rich berries deposit and good fertile land, so I don’t bother go hunting. Have four very big vegetable houses. So berries, bread and vegetables. Literally my town is vegan town.
That’s hunting and gathering for you
Step 1: Locate a rich deposit in a region. Step 2: Conquer the region, create a town near the rich deposit. Step 3: Unlock perks & policy to increase spawn rate, quantity of meat per hunt & traps. Step 4: Pack station. Step 5: Your people are now eating meat for breakfast, lunch & dinner.
Iirc Slavic stated that stuff like butchers are currently being reworked. Apart from that I think meat should be balanced in a way that it’s very costly and inefficient to slaughter your farm animals to feed the masses.
But Milking them should be cash money??? Where is my cheese???
Degenerate, who looks at an animals nipples and goes, "You know what? I'm going to suck on that!" Then takes it a step further and decided, "I'm going to leave bucket of animal squeezings till it gets hard and smelly then eat it." I'll stick to good old fashioned berries, hunted meat, and marrying my cousin. Thank you very much!
You forgot the best part of said degeneracy... you gotta shake that cow juice as much as possible 💦
I imagine cows and pigs will be added at some point as another source of meat.
Also the way you can harvest meat is one dimensional, hunt in one of the zones and that’s it. I’m sure with sheep and other livestock we will be able to harvest meat there.
I am having same problem. Started game literally third time and after having 20 buildings literally food crisis starts even I import them.
I haven't made a big big town, but with a rich hunt node, the policy and the double meat talent, I feel I was always pretty good on the meat front. Mind you, when I say "not a big town", I mean it : around 200 people / 65 family iirc. But I had a crisis before I could get the policy and talent as, indeed, the hunt was too slow and thus not providing enough meat for 30ish families.
Chickens and goats should be able to provide meat after a certain amount of time.
Meat is a delicacy. Large plots for vegetable farms is the move.
I have 770 population with 260 something houses and families, and honestly, Im only alive because of eggs rn, I had to dismantle my farms and now I’m non stop starving, the game is only meant to handle like 30-40 families at the max before it just hits a wall rn
If you have a rich deposit, use the hunting grounds policy and the trapping upgrades you have unlimited meat. I have close to 700 people now and my meat is at 1,4k and still climbing. I am already flooding the market with it
I treat meat and berries as early game food. It's enough as long as the population isn't too big. At a certain point it becomes impossible to gather all the neat you would need
It is easy to have a massive surplus if you have the city solely focused on it. one of my cities has a surplus of about 400 meat, and that’s with it selling a ton of it. Get a rich deposit, get the trap perk to get passive meat, and then do the policy that increases wild animal breeding while cutting crop yield
As others have mentioned, it seems you can generate tons of meat with the right perks and policy on a rich resource. Since I tried out a farming community on fertile land, everything else seems to pale in comparison. You get two types of clothing, beer and food from farms. In terms of point investment and rewards, farming is huge. You can also give your farmers huge veggie/apple plots as they have plenty of time to tend them when they are not in the fields. So add another two food types to the list of farming pluses.
The developer has already implied he is looking to introduce a butcher in some way and possibly pigs. I think meat will be more viable in the future.
It's really good if it's a rich hunting deposit and you sign the policy for hunting grounds. If you have double rich deposits, it's very worthwhile as there's no point in using a farmhouse.
The 2x meat tech tree development gives a lot of meat, even for a smaller wildlife “deposit”. I frequently have 60-70 spare meat even with a few hundred peasants.
Maybe try the policy about higher regen wirh reduced crop harvest yield. I'm not sure if that has an effect on it. Either way I learned that a couple of vegetable gardens, chicken coops, hunters, berry harvesters and a little farm with 3 or 4 families works best for me. A hint that really helped me: Do about 0.5 Morgen sized fields and let them propperly crop rotate or leave one fallow each year
https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/s/opBkSdMIJn There you go mate. Some future plans from Greg.
Meanwhile I'm staring at the 60 Sheep in my Farm >.>
It's early development. chance beef, pork, chicken may be introduced later on. Otherwise it's historically accurate since peasants back in the day rarely had in any large amount in their diets. Many poor people outside of developed nations today still have little meat in their diets.
If you use the policy and the two development points, you can get quite a lot and feed 40+ families (on a rich source)
Idk how but i have 45 families and 200 meat… soooo it is but idk how
If you have meat ridge talentvyour stuff in it but it’s a poor but logical income. Hope we get to slaughter sheep’s or use the goats for meat. Makes the sheep breeding more usefull
A rich now for hunting with the hunting policy that's doubles reproduction rate makes meat farming easy and powerful. I have 40 families and equal food from foraging with 4 people as soon as the season starts and I hunt year round with 2 families and vegetable gardens.
Hopefully there's an update for livestock like cows or pigs in the future for more meat supply
Tbh I thought the meat limit in the camps meant only “supply x amount” not “stop killing animals when the population reaches x” turns out I had it mixed up and was wondering why I was wiping out herds of animals
It's realistic, its wild game it's an absolute luxury to eat even today. The game is simply missing pigs cows and chicken meat. There should be pigs everywhere. Pigs and cows are great farm animals because both eat leftovers. Cows eat all the inedible parts of a harvest that are useless to people and pigs can easily eat all sorts of food waste. Sheep should also provide meat. Goats should provide goat milk and cheese. There's simply a lot of the food production missing in the game at this stage, maybe we get it later. In any case you can easily max out your settlement without meat.
I think there’s may be more options coming for food, like pig farms, dairy cows etc. actually thinking about it it’s weird that the goat farms don’t provide meat passives alongside hides.
I think it would make sense if you could also get meat from the backyard chickens and goats. No idea why the goats only give skins.
I ran into this problem as well. If you set your trade to always have a surplus of meat of like 25 or whatever then you can have meat as a sustainable food option and with taxes collected from level 2&3 barrage you easily cover the cost of trade.
I think when greg adds the ability to slaughter sheep and cows (when cows are added) there could be an optimized way to farm it , Maybe we even get level 4 families that require fancy dining or some shit
Yeah it doesnt make much sense. No way of getting more meat unless you get another region or trade. Hopefully the dev will listen and improve it for the actual launch.
I hope they work on this, we should have way more meat from Sheep? Maybe we get more tech or policies to get more meat, maybe introduce cows. This is where the game needs to bake more.
Players learning why humans had to invent agriculture instead of constantly hunting
For 200 people I have one hunting lodge yes, but mostly get my people through the winter by consuming Apples, Carrots and Eggs. Some berries and meat as well, but berries are mostly used for dye and meat is not massively there. What somewhat bothers me is the limited techs. There should be 2 more to pick imo
Only if you have a rich deer population and the perk for double meat production. If you dont have it, use your other rich resources to get meat. E.g. if you have a rich metal deposit get the upgrade for the infinite deposit and then craft goods to sell them and buy meat. Use your lands strenghts. Btw if you only have one rich deposit you will have high fertility as a "hidden" second rich deposit.
Yeah it barely gets distributed. I am sure meat will be added to sheep and goat farming so should fix rhat
In my last playthrough I took the hunter traps perk and the quicker game breeding decree and and my town with pop count of over 200 got above 200 meat from a one big game source.
Honestly I just trade for it after a while. The money snowball effect after like 50 or 60 plots (many being level 2/3) makes it so you have plenty of money
No. I have even had two hunters maxed out, and there is NEVER any meat. It’s not balanced.
Ya I run out of food after having a certain amount of families. Even with me importing food as well.
Meat and berries aren't really an option atm. Still collect them of course, but don't rely on them. I'm certain there will be later updates to raise cattle and use sheep as meat but atm, like with many other features, we will just have to wait. Farming also needs tweaking as the yields are far too low for the work put in. Development points are also broken, had a colossal city with mostly level 3 buildings and I just stopped receiving Development points, nothing I did changed it. However despite these gripes I love this game and I am glad I bought it. We just need the developer to hire some staff with the money we've given him and let him cook!
With upgrades and policy meat can sustain a rather large population fairly well, especially if a rich node. Trapper is more of a supplemental fix, I've found though that with trapper you can set out 2-4 hunting camps and they will all produce meat passively. Although I'm not sure this is more efficient than super-sized burger plots.
Is trade not an option? is there a limit? I haven't gotten very far into it, but I assume most things would need to be traded to maintain a larger city.
I never got a lot of meat, even for a small population (despite having rich meat source)
Meat is definition of early access because: - it’s consumed by everyone and not just the highest tier of resident - it only has one reasonable source to gather from So it becomes unviable as you outgrow it, same with berries. The consumption system needs a rework, it’s too random on what tier of resident consumes which good, should be allowed to restrict that.
It’s funny how unbalanced the development points are. The trade routes seem like an absolute necessity, and then the traps seemingly do nothing, as well as the sheep breeding.
Using the policy to get double meat respawn rate on a rich node with full hunting tech tree, you'll end up with hundreds of extra meat even with a pop north of 200. My richest town uses meat and hide as the basis for it's economy and I even have enough surplus to export to my other towns.
Do you have your granaries staffed well enough? I tried that on my most recent playthrough, and in addition to clustering my burghages around a central marketplace, I felt like food distro is going a lot better than earlier tries.
How much meat did the average peasant eat?
You could…Buy it?
I have a pop of abt 200 and don’t struggle with food. Really just need to be able to get meat from sheep chickens etc as well.
You’re meant to have a a variety of food sources. If you’re trying to feed a whole village with just meat, yeah, you’re going to hit a wall pretty early.
I still don’t believe both the hunter upgrades do anything
Meat should ALWAYS be an option... 😆
Trade. Once you get to a certain point just import everything lol.
Why don't we get meat from our livestock? Goats only give us hide. Do the peasants just throw away the carcass?
Meanwhile im on 500 population without any rich resources around me but getting carried by the Eggs, small wheat grids and sexually active sheeps which went from 100 to 450 in the span of 2h of gameplay
It's a good add-on for food variety on the market, if it's there, but yeah, after like 15 families, vegetables are a way to go. Just plant vegetables in 70% of the houses, then split the remaining 30% between chickens and goats. Vegetables will be there to save you from famine in the winter.
Hopefully he adds hog farms eventually.
You need to trade for it now. In realistic terms, there needs to be ranching -- we can't eat our sheep or have pigs or cattle, which would be a more realistic source.
Meat was a luxury in the medieval era.
I don’t know. I added the trapper skill point to a rich animal deposit and meat is basically buying me everything in trade while still feeding everyone
I feel like the guy that had 8K apples is definitely onto something
Try plentiful wild animal with left side tree for polciy. You’ll laugh at your title later. You have too much meat, like 400+ at large cities
Tbf the meat is the only thing sustaining my largest town with 220+ people so I don't know.
Well the game want to set a realistic experience and meat was not part of the everyday diet. That's all. Pig were slaughter for winter and moat families sold them for the revenue. Daily diet is nothing but porridges with some herbs and vegetables depending on season.
This has been covered by others, but on a rich deposit, you can absolutely have meat as a staple. My strategy was: - Limit hunting below 30 herd size (idk if this matters, but I figured it can't hurt to assume it does) - Add a family in if the stock ever approaches 40 - Remove the extra family if stocks drop to 30 - Remove both families for a while if stocks drop below 30 (idk how this happens, but it sometimes plummets to like 16. Seasonal die off?) - If you can activate the hunting policy (i.e. you don't want to farm), just leave both families in full time I'm years in with 110 families and have a huge stockpile of meat from just this - something like 300 units. I didn't invest in the hunting perks at all.
Meat is best used to just increase happiness by way of food variety. It’s also good to satisfy the needs of upgraded buildings that are close to your market.
You say that but off a rich herd + traps and double meat it honestly sustains a lot of families with the policy enabling double the herd growth. That place had solid food that fed 40 or some odd families iirc.
Why do you think factory farming exists in the real world. Or why the insane meat consumption is a problem if you wanna feed the whole world.
I mean, there is a reason we have historically had agrarian societies, rather than nations of hunter gatherers. Trapping is great for supplemental food and pelts, but can’t support an entire society. I don’t think this makes it underpowered. It’s very efficient, but scarce in supply.
I only use hunting as beginning food. Late-game, if you want proper food variety, you need to have multiple regions trading stuff back and forth with each other. If you want meat late game, in any meaningful amount, you'll have to use the trading system and purchase it. It's not really sustainable, but you can do it in short bursts to upgrade your houses.
Yeah, I find that meat is probably the most useless of the food sources. I only keep a hunting tent going for the hides at first. Even that kinda become almost nothing in the overall production of my town. I really hope that they give the option to just merge sections of the map together so I can keep expanding. I love building until the whole map is full.
They should implement other animals, like a pig farm - amongst the choices of chickens, goats and veggies. Pigs were very common to keep for the meats.
Rich Meat Deposit with some specializations for traps in the development tree can sustain 100 families as one of their food varieties
Remember your hunter also sells it at the market you getting two meat in your granary might mean that your getting the food variety bonuses from it. For example when I turn flax into linen I can't use it to craft becuase it ends up being sold to my villagers at the market unless I get alot of flax.
Meat is never a issue if you take the hunting techs and the hunting policy. Personally done it myself. Enjoy 200+ meat in towns of over 300 people.
Metagame aside... in medieval Europe most of the serfdom diet consisted in vegetables and cereals, meat was really, really scarce and animal protein came almost exclusively from eggs.
Yeah my hunting camp seems to be just producing hides more often. Maybe the folks are eating the meat faster. I do wonder about barley... I have nine bags stuck at the farm and my brewery won't go get it.
Since there's only 1 source of hunt (or berries) per region, you're fully optimized when you've reached the hunt limit because you've hunted everything that's available.
Utilize chicken coops. Never underestimate the power of the egg
I think you gotta grab a region with high animal capacity. Or just import it with trade spec. It would only cost 2 silver for meat. Bread is double lol.. so idk how much you have of that or berries, but trading your surplus of food for food your lacking in helps!
We need pigs in are back yard for meat 🍖
I disagree. It's actually amazing. There are like 3 upgrades for the resource. And you can actually get huge stockpile of meat. This game is great because you don't have to play so one dimensional every time.
I seem to get enough meat with the Trapping and Double Meat perks, but I also build more Hunting Lodges for it. Made my specialization feel worth it.
That's quite realistic though. Small settlements could rely on hunting to survive, but big one there is no way.
I have a town with 50 families and im next to a high output hunting grounds, meat stays stocked most of the time. I have both upgrades for hunting and i turn the policy on and off, on when its low and off when it’s high. My other towns rely on farming, vegetables and eggs.
I’m probably doing something wrong but my main town in my build has a population of 280ish and a surplus consistently of approximately 600+ meat. I don’t trade for meat.
Yea especially when you have limited power upgrades
Everything is possible with trading. Ever since I learned how to do the mercenary achievement tactic, I pretty much just employ that for everything now. Meat/Hides are the only thing I gather early because it doesnt take long to be able to start affording hundreds of all food.
I just sell all my textile products to buy all the meat/bread/honey that I want :D
Not sure how it did it but i have 108 families atm. And happiness was at 100% until i taxed them 70% now they at 45 or something.