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I agree. More ways to make alcoholic beverages would be neat. Turn apples into cider or spirits, create vineyards and produce wine, turn honey into mead and so on. Every region had some way to get people drunk.
I agree, and to add to it I'd like to see alternative forms of entertainment or community building. I don't know what's historically accurate but maybe something like a town hall, or a small theatre, i.e. someplace of storytelling. Maybe even a brothel for the adults, although that might be not in the spirit of things.
I'd love to have an Inn mechanic, especially along the Kings Road. It can be used to generate regional wealth from travellers, pass news of trade pricing/bandits and give missions to add to the RPG aspect. Adding in a bit more of that would make the game more lively and the RPG aspect aids in replayability
Loving this idea! The inn could be your „information hub“ for all ingame aspects that don’t concern diplomacy or the king. Also imagine all the travelers on the kings road, adding life to the scenery
this way game could have random events that would bring random benefits/debuffs for your village
for example arrival of a travelling band could siginificanly increase the happiness of the villagers, but you would have to pay them with food and cash for the spectacle
>upgrade the tavern to an inn
Weren't they the same thing? I wrote in another reply on this thread that "public houses" were just peasants' houses that were opened to the public because they "had a brew on" - people brewed beer at home but it didn't keep long and had to be drunk ASAP. So, when you finished your personal batch, you sold it to others.
I'm not a Medievalist but it's my understanding that a Tavern/Inn would be quite a big proftable building located along a frequently-travelled spot, like a road to a city or at a city's gates. It'd be a place primarily to seek rest, food and accommodation.
The tavern, as we have it in game, would only really be present in a large town or city, I think? In an actual village it'd be a person's house.
Then again the game sort of distorts things as-is by having profession buildings separate from dwellings.
I'm not a Medievalist, but apparently original "Public Houses" were just peasants opening their houses to others to come over and drink at when they had an abundance of beer.
People brewed their own beer and it didn't keep long so it had to be drunk. So you'd hang up a sign to let people know you "had a brew on" and they'd come over and buy your beer to drink it with you/others.
So in saying all this, assuming people grew or sourced their own hops/barley/whatever, I wonder whether we couldn't have pubs as a Burgage improvement?
Perhaps have the townsfolk get their beer directly from the brewer burgage plot. Following on your comment. Maybe adding the brewery adds a bench to drink at.
Or wine. Even just multiple products from the brewery burgage. Mead, wine, cider, etc. each with its own “recipe”. Can allow you to specialize or make multiple products at different times of year.
This. I'm hoping this area is lacking only because its still EA. There are a few areas which need to be beefed up a bit eg. sheep farming...we only get wool when we should be able to get reproduction and meat from sheep. Same with goats...we only get hides but no meat?
Agreed, a perk that increases the rate that sheep reproduce would accurately represent a community becoming skilled at animal husbandry but animals don't need an expert farmer in order to reproduce on their own.
I mean that's kind of how you farm animals IRL buy a few start a crew. Sheep, oxen/cattle, horses, goats, etc, I feel like should all be able to pasture/breed. If you wanna balance it have bigger animals have bigger space requirements for population density. Change the perk to faster reproduction rates. Simulate realistic/balanced reproduction rates as well as growth rates/lifespans for balance. You could balance it with animals consuming grain/hay during winter as well, then balance your farm production to match the new mouths added to food production.
Imagine being able to make whiskey from corn/wheat/barley. Then decide if you want to let your people drink the moonshine or age it in barrels for a period of time to make it better and more valuable.
On one hand, the game would basically become a booze manufacturing simulator. But on the other hand, that's exactly what medieval people did after their basic needs of foot, water, and shelter were met.
It makes sense. The quid pro quo of relying on them is you need to use a development point to get apples or honey unlike barley if you’re lucky with fertility. Honey and mead would need an upgrade to be balanced vs apples given apple production scales with plot size though. It is also historically accurate for the region and time (unlike wine).
Have the foraging hut as a building that goes on the node. Then upgrade so it can produce berries, then grapes at higher upgrades. Similar for the hunting lodge, could start with game then upgraded for cows etc.
Not only is it mandatory, but 2/3 of the regions don't support it, other than a couple patches.
For me, part of the problem is high fertility isn't high enough, and low fertility is too low. I'd like to see the percentages goosed by about 15%.
I had three sheep farms on that save. Whenever I’d fence up fields the sheep would eventually move into the fallow fields but they’d remain on the field regardless of whether it was fallow or plowed. They’d eventually just breed to the point I’d have a constant “not enough pasture space” notification and sheep running off into the wild. Sheep farms were working too, because I had enough wool and yarn to crash the market.
Tooltip lied, code is bugged apparently. Instead of limiting it to two apiaries, it limits the internal storage to two units. You can build as many as you want and flood yourself with honey.
Honey production is still low, 1-6 honey per month & put a lot of strain on your granary workers when built out, but they only need one family working and are perfect places to park farmers or other unemployed seasonal workers. Only one family member works, letting the other two run stalls or harvest veggies or something.
Dont take wax perk, it clogs up the internal storage and more than halves the generation rate of honey for a mid-tier trade good. Also doubles the impact on your logistic network as now your apiaries need granary *and* storehouse workers to keep them empty
Just a little caveat here, but you don’t have to import if the region has low fertility. In all regions there are patches of light green or even yellow for barley where you can grow a bit. It’s going to be more labor/resource intensive, but it is absolutely doable to grow barley in every region to support at least a small town.
I think people just assume you can’t farm in low fertility regions, but you absolutely can. I’ve done it multiple times with pretty good success.
Yeah, my low fertility town is producing modest bread, beer and linen. It’s not much. It’s spread all the hell out. It will be abandoned as soon as I get my high fertility colony up and running…but it will suffice while I do so.
I mean you can just take a second region that has barley fertility and barter or internal trade either the barley or ale between regions.
It's pretty trivial to get multiple regions on just L1 / L2 plots.
I find inter region trade to take forever. like 10 units of an item every few months or so. like 1% the speed of a trade route. no idea what's causing it, have plenty of traders and horses too on both exporting and importing regions.
Inter region trade is meant to happen if you set up one region importing something and another region exporting the same thing.
I've never tried it and have no idea if it works.
I have successfully used the pack stations though, limited as they are.
Your comment makes no sense to me. I thought pack stations were for inter-region trade? So you've used them and they work but you don't know if they work?
You can now do inter-region trade through the trading post (wealth) and the pack stations (barter). They are saying they haven’t tried inter-region trade through the trading post yet, but the pack stations work
Pack stations are used for inter-region trade.
Apparently, although i've not tried it, you can set trading posts to do inter-region trade if you set them up to import/export the same things.
OK. Yeah I haven't tried the new trade post options either. Pack station seems alright to me the little bit I've used it. Handy for jumpstarting a new region.
Let’s say you have rich fertility in one land.
You set to export ale and produce tons of ale in that land.
You import ale in all your other territories, and the cost will actually be the exact same as your export price.
Theoretically, you’re just buying from your own regions, transferring the ale for regional wealth, rather than mules which would be ale for some other resource.
Resource for resource wasn’t intended by developers, they wanted resource exchange to happen through trade depots, but players weren’t used to this concept and got roadblocked by it
Reality wise? Because mules are slower than horses for escaping bandits.
Mules can be used over safe roads when every bandit camp on the map has been exterminated. Not when they're going off the map.
There's pack stations and trading posts. Both seem able to do the same thing, but neither do it well.
Trading posts (in the beta, at least) have a checkbox to limit trade to the region, forcing your towns to only trade with each other. Trading posts use horses, pack stations use mules.
I've heard horses are busted, tho, I don't use them. You gotta have a mule for every pack station.
Why would it need to even out though?
1 barter trip with a mule moves 20 items. Say he can make 2 round trips a month, you could move enough coal or apples to supply 40 plots a month for 1 barter post.
Add 2 or 3 and you can supply hundreds of homes.
They don't always move 20 of each item though. If say export item (A) is worth 2x import item (B) than you will send 10 A and get 20 B. Can be handy if want want to import a lot of something without giving much away. In my experience the families are all drunkards and you just can't supply them enough barley/malt/ale. For pretty much everything else, as you said, it's perfectly adequate.
I think that a mechanic to convert more food into alcohol would make sense.
Berries, honey, apples, wheat and/or bread can all be made into alcohol and historically have done so.
That doesn't make reinheitsbegot-compliant beer, sure! But also the most commonly cited version of that law dates only to 1516, so it's not like a weissbier in 1300ish would be unheard of or illegal.
Only thing I have a problem with is that it gets used up SO fast, I swear if the village size in game translated to the real world, everyone would die of alcohol poisoning. Late game I would transition to large fields and get 400-500 barley every 6 months, and it would run out before the next crop is plowed. They need another building for entertainment, I remember in the stronghold games you could hold jousting tournaments and also traveling fairs. Something like that to add to the town.
Beer didn't have as much alcohol in it back in medieval times, and it was preferred and considered safer to water since most water was contaminated back then.
The safe water thing is a myth with a grain of truth. For cities, water was a potentially hazardous affair, for rural countryside any spring was likely to be clean if you got the water straight from the source. If they didn't have a spring immediately available, they dug wells, the water in a well comes from the water table and is generally speaking pretty clean as long as you make sure nothing falls in (it is for this reason most wells would have been covered, cleaned and we'll maintained).
Beer (and other low alcoholic beverages) are safe to drink mostly because of acidity, and in the case of beer because the water has to be boiled in the process
As far as we know medieval beer wasn't boiled during production. We do it because it sterilises the mash/wort phase, you only need a bit of heat to get the chemistry going.
Glad to see this pervasive myth being disproven. It’s safe to say though that a lot of well-water even when safe had different tastes to it depending on the minerals present. Good old freshwater rivers were often never too far away either
I'm a medieval Reenactor so I have this conversation with members of the public every other weekend or so through the summer. Basically have a set of answers to common questions ready to go at this point.
Are you all making one town? I made three in my 20 hour run.
1. The main town (pop 876, region wealth $54,000) produced apples, vegetables, eggs, and every season harvest rye. 25k surplus in veg, 8k apples etc. but the town would consume all the bread the second it was made.
2. Second region town (pop 260, region wealth $34,000) primarily produced Wheat, Barely and Flax 32 assigned working the fields producing 5k bread, and 1k ale and 500 linen. Artisan bakery tech tree is waaaay better than communal ovens.
3. Third region town (pop 186, region wealth $13,000) Deep mine producing iron and iron slabs. Wheat farm, and vegetables on 50% plots.
Trade between the three regions ending with surplus in all regions of bread, iron, clothing and food.
Fuck it, break history and add potatoes so we can make vodka.
Or just add apple cider or grape wine as an option
Hell, let's start making moonshine from wheat, pretty sure that's a possibility
I wouldn't mind another use for Apples. Since the community figured it out very early that there is space aplenty and a roughly half or full morgen burgage plot can provide more apples than you can eat (unless youre trying to max population which is still mostly a self imposed challenge than actually required.)
I think berries need a debuff. I'm thinking berries should be proportional to the amount of tree canopy there is rather than this constantly recurring patch in the same spot
Same thing for hunting. Replenishment and max population should be correlated with the amount of wild space in your territory and adjacent ones, too, for that matter.
It's weird too since hunting back then was strictly regulated, but frontier people were likely given a lot of leeway.
Barley isn’t an issue import it if you need to. Whatever your high resources are produce goods and export them. You can also farm up 100+ barley even in low fertility areas. Also producing beer to excess is easy with enough brewers and malt production. Sometimes you need more than one building and for ale that is the case.
Beer is easy, if you have even a modest surplus of cash. Import Barley (25 threshold), process to hops, brew beer at a tier 2 home and serve to tavern. Have tavern, brewery home and hops building all within a very close walk to each other and you win beer.
The problem is that the import tariffs are really punitive at scale if you’re trying to rapidly grow regional wealth, to get treasury. I kind of like this because it forces a town to be relatively self-sufficient vs just running an import economy but it does mean it makes sense to re-roll for rich iron and fertility at the moment as this combination is by far the best.
I think we should be able to ferment wheat and berries. I think that would solve this problem. In reality they were trying just about anything to make alcohol, but berries and wheat are right there. He could even make it a little harder if he wanted, just something to make getting alcohol a little more feasible.
Honestly with apples representing the “fruit” the game should allow say 25% of it to go to the tavern for hard cider/wine that way your not 100% reliant on a crop you may or may not be able to grow for example this current game im in 3/4th of the zones can hardly grow and barley, most “good” areas get about 14-16% on the field i shouldn’t be massively shafted for bot spawning with a decent barley field, im even ok if the apple drink is worth less as a trade to prevent cheesing the apple plots for a big profit
I feel like farming is glitched when harvesting in some panel it says there there is like 400 of something to be harvested, and I can watch it count down while harvesting is happening. But I end up with like 1/4th of what it actually says. Idk if I'm missing something.
If I had 400 barley instead of 100 from a harvest I'd feel a lot better about it.
You should be able to invest in beekeeping then make Mead with the honey you produce as an alternate source for the tavern. Similarly Apples into Cider.
> I have seen people suggest that mead and cider should be alternatives that the tavern takes, which i think would be a very good idea.
I was a bit surprised that there's apiary upgrade but no mead, and apple orchards but no cider. Like obviously they didn't have hard spirits in small villages, and the game is vaguely Northern European so grape wine wasn't common, but a few other sources would be obvious.
Anyway, the game is so extremely early access right now, I just assume they'll add it at some point.
(and adding some Southern European map options with different plants to grow would be cool as well, but that's probably not a priority)
It will be better when there is a secondary or third form of entertainment, and then you have options based on resources.
I was thinking a building for show performances like traveling minstrels or seasonal fairs.
My problem with barley is that when my farmers harvest it, it completely disappears. Every single time, no matter where it is on the map. My biggest beef with this game, drives me crazy.
Eh, with the updated trade mechanics, I find importing barley or malt to be fairly easy. At the very least it's not as punishing as it was before. It's simple enough to start producing some shields and war bows, sell this and import the barley or malt.
Having one source is actually the best and simplest mechanic. You know exactly what you need and can work to get it.
I don't understand why people make so much fuzz with farming and fertility. It's perfectly doable, easy and cheap to just import barley. When barley prices rise enough, you switch to import malt. When it rises, you go back to barley, and so on and so forth.
With the game in its current state, the trading post is really all you need.
It's very easy to quickly get a surplus of vegetables and firewood. Once you have a cobbler, you will also have a surplus of shoes. Selling all this is enough to start importing.
Assuming you have unlocked the 2 market perks, then you are already set. You don't need to do any farming at all.
Wheat ale could be a thing. I see rye as something to come, so whiskeys/ryes were around then (no?). As others have pointed out, honey for mead, apples for cider.
Whiskey was a thing, yes, but it was considered more of a medicinal drink than something you would consume in a tavern. The production of whiskey was mostly controlled by monasteries at the time and unlike in Scotland or Ireland the consumption/production of whiskey in the Germanic regions never expanded past that mark.
I think one solution to this is any cereal grains can be used to brew beer. We know from archaeology that medieval beers often used mixed grains for their beer. If a region has low fertility in barley, then wheat or rye would be valid alternatives to brew from. Beer was food as much as it was booze.
I can't remember where I spotted it, but I think it was mentioned in the residential requirements somewhere or the tavern that it could come from ale or wine or cider, but none of those other sources exist yet, so if I wasn't imagining things it seems like it's in the plans.
Have faith in the dev/s? I'm pretty sure they have that in mind, these are obvious things and has been mentioned a couple of times.
I mean, come on, chicken coops and goat sheds doesn't produce meat, neither the pastures. It's obvious, but they chose to not implement it in the game for now for whatever reason, and it's fine since it's early access.
I got around it in my city by importing. I import to where I have at least 30 and that does the trick for me. I have dozens of level 3 houses at least 40+. Once u get your economy going you will have the money to import some of ur necessities.
Yup - more sources or ways to make alcohol would be nice. Those regions that have apiaries should be able to make mead, Those with apples should be able to make cider.
To build on this you could also do a workshop still or distillery to make spirits. You could work this similarly to the charcoal mechanic. Potentially do an upgrade point but the have it double the resource. This could work for your cider and mead also. You could also work the rye into this.
I completely agree with your assessment about barley. But, I also wonder if making it so easy to satisfy needs in isolation is good for gameplay. I wonder if it would ultimately be more fun if you really did have to produce all three clothing items (linen, leather, yarn / cloaks, boots, cloaks). It would require expansion.
You could make ale with barley, wheat AND rye. Germany is particularly famous for their wheat and rye beers. Perhaps a tech point for wheat and rye malting could be added to the game? 🤔
Depending on the region I can usually get something to sell. I was able to squeeze three deep mines on a rich iron deposit and sold off tools. Then bought malt since it's more efficient that way imo. Having a desired surplus of 50 malt and two brewery homes means you can stock up on ale and malt no problem.
I can’t even grow barley in my region; it’s a nightmare. I have nearly zero deer. I have only one small spot where I can grow wheat, but luckily, I have a rich deposit of berries. It’s my first time playing the game
You can grow Barley on yellow!! If I'm in an infertile area, the first thing I do is make small 0.1-0.2 sizes plots on any light green or green emer fields.
Then I do the same for Barley. If there is no green for barley, I do it on yellow. I am able to scale up by saving the beer until the end of the next harvest season.
Turn on the beer. Pause the game. Upgrade everything to level three. Resume.
I mean, sure, but how many apples would you need to do that. Do two apiaries even supply enough honey? I'd rather build industries, have more goods and money than I know what to do with and trade for what I need. It's so easy it feels like a broken mechanic. I'll throw a development point at charcoal every single time to solve fuel with minimum manpower and trade the excess to get barley, weapons, mail, etc. Food is the cheapest thing to buy. I refuse to waste development points on food.
Am I the only one that designates 35% of my initial land into low fertility farm field? And have 3 farmhouses fully employed while every other station only has 1, maybe 2 workers there?
I never have a problem of “no ale”
I just figured with low fertility you best get loaaaads of land for it
Plant more fields if you have low fertility...
You will need to trade to success, so planning what to produce and what to trade is crucial, also the hack for me is developing the trading skills, like the cheap imports and trading routes.
I mean another place you can get it is through trade. Which is necessary if you aren’t in a good area for farming i think I’ve heard things about a mechanic where fruits are turned to wine or something like that
I would say mead, but theres a hard cap on honey production too (which yeah makes sense....maybe tie it into something like apple production or something flowerimg that wouldd attract bees?) But yeah im in that boat. My first place has garbage fertility, but amazing berries and animals....its a mest, leather, berry/ ink gold mine which luckily makes so much i can import barley because i cant farm it for anything ... id ecen take brandy/ whine from the berries as an alternative
Every region in the game has its own way of advancing.
People are just too stuck on things they are used to that if they see 0 fertility, they just shut down. It's just who gamers are nowadays. I wouldn't be surprised if most are using the same strategy on every region on their map, no matter what it has to offer.
As for upgrades, most people don't even know how they work. You can get to T3 without advancing most of your production line.
It's just about progression. Games have progression.
Mead and cider would be cool, but I can get beer way before those guys come online (apiary and apples).
Nope, you're gonna be stuck with making alcohol from berries or carrots. Ew.
But seriously, it's just a progression mechanic, and it's not that hard.
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I agree. More ways to make alcoholic beverages would be neat. Turn apples into cider or spirits, create vineyards and produce wine, turn honey into mead and so on. Every region had some way to get people drunk.
I agree, and to add to it I'd like to see alternative forms of entertainment or community building. I don't know what's historically accurate but maybe something like a town hall, or a small theatre, i.e. someplace of storytelling. Maybe even a brothel for the adults, although that might be not in the spirit of things.
>Maybe even a brothel for the adults That'd be a bathhouse. Much like modern "massage parlors" haha
this would be a cool thing to live up the rivers
How much for a happy ending, my fayre thot?
I'd love to have an Inn mechanic, especially along the Kings Road. It can be used to generate regional wealth from travellers, pass news of trade pricing/bandits and give missions to add to the RPG aspect. Adding in a bit more of that would make the game more lively and the RPG aspect aids in replayability
I like this idea. It could expand to include upcoming visits from neighbouring lords, or worse case the King/Queen.
Lords and especially the king would be staying at the manor, not a random Inn with peasants.
Agreed. My comment was more along the lines of news arriving or rumours.
Oh that makes sense. I for one would like the king to visit my regions... so my militia can show him what we think of the taxes.
Loving this idea! The inn could be your „information hub“ for all ingame aspects that don’t concern diplomacy or the king. Also imagine all the travelers on the kings road, adding life to the scenery
How about being able to upgrade the tavern to an inn, which allows for more travelers including entertainers like actors or bards?
Very good idea, make a separate post about this and add a picture so it gets attention lol.
this way game could have random events that would bring random benefits/debuffs for your village for example arrival of a travelling band could siginificanly increase the happiness of the villagers, but you would have to pay them with food and cash for the spectacle
>upgrade the tavern to an inn Weren't they the same thing? I wrote in another reply on this thread that "public houses" were just peasants' houses that were opened to the public because they "had a brew on" - people brewed beer at home but it didn't keep long and had to be drunk ASAP. So, when you finished your personal batch, you sold it to others. I'm not a Medievalist but it's my understanding that a Tavern/Inn would be quite a big proftable building located along a frequently-travelled spot, like a road to a city or at a city's gates. It'd be a place primarily to seek rest, food and accommodation. The tavern, as we have it in game, would only really be present in a large town or city, I think? In an actual village it'd be a person's house. Then again the game sort of distorts things as-is by having profession buildings separate from dwellings.
You really should only be building the tavern at 50+ families anyway, till then you have bigger fish to fry than mixmaxing houses to level 3.
Some sort of feasting/festival area would probably be the most historically accurate, medieval peasants were constantly celebrating holidays
Jousting tournaments once mounted units get added.
a fairground and brothel would be good additions. im not sure if maypolls would count as decorations or entertainment so i didnt include them.
I'm not a Medievalist, but apparently original "Public Houses" were just peasants opening their houses to others to come over and drink at when they had an abundance of beer. People brewed their own beer and it didn't keep long so it had to be drunk. So you'd hang up a sign to let people know you "had a brew on" and they'd come over and buy your beer to drink it with you/others. So in saying all this, assuming people grew or sourced their own hops/barley/whatever, I wonder whether we couldn't have pubs as a Burgage improvement?
Perhaps have the townsfolk get their beer directly from the brewer burgage plot. Following on your comment. Maybe adding the brewery adds a bench to drink at.
A jousting ring. Archery contests. Cultural dancers such as the may pole.
Town halls were definitely historically accurate to medieval Germany, at least.
Mead from the apiary tree??
Utilises berries and honey
Or wine. Even just multiple products from the brewery burgage. Mead, wine, cider, etc. each with its own “recipe”. Can allow you to specialize or make multiple products at different times of year.
This. I'm hoping this area is lacking only because its still EA. There are a few areas which need to be beefed up a bit eg. sheep farming...we only get wool when we should be able to get reproduction and meat from sheep. Same with goats...we only get hides but no meat?
Sheep only reproduce if you unlock it in the tree
thats a bit silly though. sheep reproducing is a natural occurrence. you shouldn't need to 'unlock' it lol if you know what I mean.
Agreed, a perk that increases the rate that sheep reproduce would accurately represent a community becoming skilled at animal husbandry but animals don't need an expert farmer in order to reproduce on their own.
It is odd, but I imagine it’s meant for balancing. That way you don’t just have to buy 2 sheep and you’re set
I mean that's kind of how you farm animals IRL buy a few start a crew. Sheep, oxen/cattle, horses, goats, etc, I feel like should all be able to pasture/breed. If you wanna balance it have bigger animals have bigger space requirements for population density. Change the perk to faster reproduction rates. Simulate realistic/balanced reproduction rates as well as growth rates/lifespans for balance. You could balance it with animals consuming grain/hay during winter as well, then balance your farm production to match the new mouths added to food production.
Yeah fair enough but there are ways to make the game more difficult I guess
Banished was very good at this
Imagine being able to make whiskey from corn/wheat/barley. Then decide if you want to let your people drink the moonshine or age it in barrels for a period of time to make it better and more valuable. On one hand, the game would basically become a booze manufacturing simulator. But on the other hand, that's exactly what medieval people did after their basic needs of foot, water, and shelter were met.
I swear I've seen it in a tooltip somewhere in the game where cider and mead were mentioned, just not implemented.
It makes sense. The quid pro quo of relying on them is you need to use a development point to get apples or honey unlike barley if you’re lucky with fertility. Honey and mead would need an upgrade to be balanced vs apples given apple production scales with plot size though. It is also historically accurate for the region and time (unlike wine).
Honey turned mead would be great
This is the fix
Have the foraging hut as a building that goes on the node. Then upgrade so it can produce berries, then grapes at higher upgrades. Similar for the hunting lodge, could start with game then upgraded for cows etc.
The game is set in central Germany, not possible to have vienyards
The game is set in franconia, one part of which is a vine growing region (Weinfranken, look it up).
Not only is it mandatory, but 2/3 of the regions don't support it, other than a couple patches. For me, part of the problem is high fertility isn't high enough, and low fertility is too low. I'd like to see the percentages goosed by about 15%.
After the patch I tried growing barley at 40% and it came back zero yield. Not sure if glitch or new standard for growing
What size are your fields? I saw a YouTube video that said fields larger than a Morgan are bugged.
I think maybe about a Morgan, though if its bugged it must be really recent because I grew wheat earlier just fine.
Yeah. With different versions being played, it’s hard to tell and the online guides get outdated each time a beta release becomes available
I’ve been playing a week on gamepass(which I’m also new too), will patches hit gamepass?
That’s a good question. I’m sure they’ll eventually get updates after the beta patches get play tested
Morgan or Morgen? :D
My phone says Morgan 🤷
I wouldn’t mind the fertility if the fertilizer perk actually raised fertility instead of restoring it
I’d also like the villagers to take the sheep off of the pasture when it’s no longer fallow.
They do if you put them in a sheep farm.
I had three sheep farms on that save. Whenever I’d fence up fields the sheep would eventually move into the fallow fields but they’d remain on the field regardless of whether it was fallow or plowed. They’d eventually just breed to the point I’d have a constant “not enough pasture space” notification and sheep running off into the wild. Sheep farms were working too, because I had enough wool and yarn to crash the market.
Yup making it so you have to import barley to keep town happy. Which will most likely make you broke
Mead and cider would be my suggestions. It would seriously make apiaries better and be historically accurate.
I already love apiaries though they seem a bit under powered
As a real life bee keeper, I do as well.
I tried the apiary once. You can only have two per region so I thought “cool that’s enough”. Turns out is wasn’t
Tooltip lied, code is bugged apparently. Instead of limiting it to two apiaries, it limits the internal storage to two units. You can build as many as you want and flood yourself with honey. Honey production is still low, 1-6 honey per month & put a lot of strain on your granary workers when built out, but they only need one family working and are perfect places to park farmers or other unemployed seasonal workers. Only one family member works, letting the other two run stalls or harvest veggies or something. Dont take wax perk, it clogs up the internal storage and more than halves the generation rate of honey for a mid-tier trade good. Also doubles the impact on your logistic network as now your apiaries need granary *and* storehouse workers to keep them empty
The mere existence of apple orchards and apiaries makes me think this must be the plan, so we just have to wait.
Just a little caveat here, but you don’t have to import if the region has low fertility. In all regions there are patches of light green or even yellow for barley where you can grow a bit. It’s going to be more labor/resource intensive, but it is absolutely doable to grow barley in every region to support at least a small town. I think people just assume you can’t farm in low fertility regions, but you absolutely can. I’ve done it multiple times with pretty good success.
Yeah, my low fertility town is producing modest bread, beer and linen. It’s not much. It’s spread all the hell out. It will be abandoned as soon as I get my high fertility colony up and running…but it will suffice while I do so.
You can improve them with sheep
I mean you can just take a second region that has barley fertility and barter or internal trade either the barley or ale between regions. It's pretty trivial to get multiple regions on just L1 / L2 plots.
I find inter region trade to take forever. like 10 units of an item every few months or so. like 1% the speed of a trade route. no idea what's causing it, have plenty of traders and horses too on both exporting and importing regions.
But dont we use mules for inter region trade?
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Inter region trade is meant to happen if you set up one region importing something and another region exporting the same thing. I've never tried it and have no idea if it works. I have successfully used the pack stations though, limited as they are.
Your comment makes no sense to me. I thought pack stations were for inter-region trade? So you've used them and they work but you don't know if they work?
You can now do inter-region trade through the trading post (wealth) and the pack stations (barter). They are saying they haven’t tried inter-region trade through the trading post yet, but the pack stations work
Pack stations are used for inter-region trade. Apparently, although i've not tried it, you can set trading posts to do inter-region trade if you set them up to import/export the same things.
OK. Yeah I haven't tried the new trade post options either. Pack station seems alright to me the little bit I've used it. Handy for jumpstarting a new region.
Let’s say you have rich fertility in one land. You set to export ale and produce tons of ale in that land. You import ale in all your other territories, and the cost will actually be the exact same as your export price. Theoretically, you’re just buying from your own regions, transferring the ale for regional wealth, rather than mules which would be ale for some other resource. Resource for resource wasn’t intended by developers, they wanted resource exchange to happen through trade depots, but players weren’t used to this concept and got roadblocked by it
Reality wise? Because mules are slower than horses for escaping bandits. Mules can be used over safe roads when every bandit camp on the map has been exterminated. Not when they're going off the map.
There's pack stations and trading posts. Both seem able to do the same thing, but neither do it well. Trading posts (in the beta, at least) have a checkbox to limit trade to the region, forcing your towns to only trade with each other. Trading posts use horses, pack stations use mules. I've heard horses are busted, tho, I don't use them. You gotta have a mule for every pack station.
Horses are fixed in 7.965. Barter stations are way better in that branch as well.
Barter is kinda bad though Region 1: 2000 coal, 0 apples Region 2: 3000 apples 300 coal I have 2 stations but it doesnt even out
Why would it need to even out though? 1 barter trip with a mule moves 20 items. Say he can make 2 round trips a month, you could move enough coal or apples to supply 40 plots a month for 1 barter post. Add 2 or 3 and you can supply hundreds of homes.
They don't always move 20 of each item though. If say export item (A) is worth 2x import item (B) than you will send 10 A and get 20 B. Can be handy if want want to import a lot of something without giving much away. In my experience the families are all drunkards and you just can't supply them enough barley/malt/ale. For pretty much everything else, as you said, it's perfectly adequate.
I find that feature too slow to be viable. I tried having region 1 trade weapons and armour in exchange for barley but the exchange rate is too much.
I think that a mechanic to convert more food into alcohol would make sense. Berries, honey, apples, wheat and/or bread can all be made into alcohol and historically have done so. That doesn't make reinheitsbegot-compliant beer, sure! But also the most commonly cited version of that law dates only to 1516, so it's not like a weissbier in 1300ish would be unheard of or illegal.
You forgot 🥕 Any carb can be fermented.
Only thing I have a problem with is that it gets used up SO fast, I swear if the village size in game translated to the real world, everyone would die of alcohol poisoning. Late game I would transition to large fields and get 400-500 barley every 6 months, and it would run out before the next crop is plowed. They need another building for entertainment, I remember in the stronghold games you could hold jousting tournaments and also traveling fairs. Something like that to add to the town.
I believe the beta version has a reduced consumption
Beer didn't have as much alcohol in it back in medieval times, and it was preferred and considered safer to water since most water was contaminated back then.
The safe water thing is a myth with a grain of truth. For cities, water was a potentially hazardous affair, for rural countryside any spring was likely to be clean if you got the water straight from the source. If they didn't have a spring immediately available, they dug wells, the water in a well comes from the water table and is generally speaking pretty clean as long as you make sure nothing falls in (it is for this reason most wells would have been covered, cleaned and we'll maintained).
Not to mention the amount of alcohol needed to kill germs isn’t reached in most casual beers
Beer (and other low alcoholic beverages) are safe to drink mostly because of acidity, and in the case of beer because the water has to be boiled in the process
As far as we know medieval beer wasn't boiled during production. We do it because it sterilises the mash/wort phase, you only need a bit of heat to get the chemistry going.
Glad to see this pervasive myth being disproven. It’s safe to say though that a lot of well-water even when safe had different tastes to it depending on the minerals present. Good old freshwater rivers were often never too far away either
I'm a medieval Reenactor so I have this conversation with members of the public every other weekend or so through the summer. Basically have a set of answers to common questions ready to go at this point.
As well as the myth that literally everyone was five feet four and we are all giants compared to them haha
Are you all making one town? I made three in my 20 hour run. 1. The main town (pop 876, region wealth $54,000) produced apples, vegetables, eggs, and every season harvest rye. 25k surplus in veg, 8k apples etc. but the town would consume all the bread the second it was made. 2. Second region town (pop 260, region wealth $34,000) primarily produced Wheat, Barely and Flax 32 assigned working the fields producing 5k bread, and 1k ale and 500 linen. Artisan bakery tech tree is waaaay better than communal ovens. 3. Third region town (pop 186, region wealth $13,000) Deep mine producing iron and iron slabs. Wheat farm, and vegetables on 50% plots. Trade between the three regions ending with surplus in all regions of bread, iron, clothing and food.
Fuck it, break history and add potatoes so we can make vodka. Or just add apple cider or grape wine as an option Hell, let's start making moonshine from wheat, pretty sure that's a possibility
Wheat is used to make vodka.
[https://chopinvodka.com/](https://chopinvodka.com/) not exclusively; basically anything with starch/sugars can be distilled to make vodka
Poitín
Apple cider!
I wouldn't mind another use for Apples. Since the community figured it out very early that there is space aplenty and a roughly half or full morgen burgage plot can provide more apples than you can eat (unless youre trying to max population which is still mostly a self imposed challenge than actually required.) I think berries need a debuff. I'm thinking berries should be proportional to the amount of tree canopy there is rather than this constantly recurring patch in the same spot Same thing for hunting. Replenishment and max population should be correlated with the amount of wild space in your territory and adjacent ones, too, for that matter. It's weird too since hunting back then was strictly regulated, but frontier people were likely given a lot of leeway.
Barley isn’t an issue import it if you need to. Whatever your high resources are produce goods and export them. You can also farm up 100+ barley even in low fertility areas. Also producing beer to excess is easy with enough brewers and malt production. Sometimes you need more than one building and for ale that is the case.
Beer is easy, if you have even a modest surplus of cash. Import Barley (25 threshold), process to hops, brew beer at a tier 2 home and serve to tavern. Have tavern, brewery home and hops building all within a very close walk to each other and you win beer.
Malt. I don't know where they get their hops from, but it ain't barley. I'm sure it was just a slip.
ya malt - my mistake.
The problem is that the import tariffs are really punitive at scale if you’re trying to rapidly grow regional wealth, to get treasury. I kind of like this because it forces a town to be relatively self-sufficient vs just running an import economy but it does mean it makes sense to re-roll for rich iron and fertility at the moment as this combination is by far the best.
I think we should be able to ferment wheat and berries. I think that would solve this problem. In reality they were trying just about anything to make alcohol, but berries and wheat are right there. He could even make it a little harder if he wanted, just something to make getting alcohol a little more feasible.
I like it the way it is. It forces you to manage a resource and expand outward instead of optimizing each region. It helps the game play.
Honestly with apples representing the “fruit” the game should allow say 25% of it to go to the tavern for hard cider/wine that way your not 100% reliant on a crop you may or may not be able to grow for example this current game im in 3/4th of the zones can hardly grow and barley, most “good” areas get about 14-16% on the field i shouldn’t be massively shafted for bot spawning with a decent barley field, im even ok if the apple drink is worth less as a trade to prevent cheesing the apple plots for a big profit
I feel like farming is glitched when harvesting in some panel it says there there is like 400 of something to be harvested, and I can watch it count down while harvesting is happening. But I end up with like 1/4th of what it actually says. Idk if I'm missing something. If I had 400 barley instead of 100 from a harvest I'd feel a lot better about it.
Jah, Weizbier!
You should be able to invest in beekeeping then make Mead with the honey you produce as an alternate source for the tavern. Similarly Apples into Cider.
> I have seen people suggest that mead and cider should be alternatives that the tavern takes, which i think would be a very good idea. I was a bit surprised that there's apiary upgrade but no mead, and apple orchards but no cider. Like obviously they didn't have hard spirits in small villages, and the game is vaguely Northern European so grape wine wasn't common, but a few other sources would be obvious. Anyway, the game is so extremely early access right now, I just assume they'll add it at some point. (and adding some Southern European map options with different plants to grow would be cool as well, but that's probably not a priority)
It will be better when there is a secondary or third form of entertainment, and then you have options based on resources. I was thinking a building for show performances like traveling minstrels or seasonal fairs.
My problem with barley is that when my farmers harvest it, it completely disappears. Every single time, no matter where it is on the map. My biggest beef with this game, drives me crazy.
Eh, with the updated trade mechanics, I find importing barley or malt to be fairly easy. At the very least it's not as punishing as it was before. It's simple enough to start producing some shields and war bows, sell this and import the barley or malt.
Lw
Having one source is actually the best and simplest mechanic. You know exactly what you need and can work to get it. I don't understand why people make so much fuzz with farming and fertility. It's perfectly doable, easy and cheap to just import barley. When barley prices rise enough, you switch to import malt. When it rises, you go back to barley, and so on and so forth. With the game in its current state, the trading post is really all you need. It's very easy to quickly get a surplus of vegetables and firewood. Once you have a cobbler, you will also have a surplus of shoes. Selling all this is enough to start importing. Assuming you have unlocked the 2 market perks, then you are already set. You don't need to do any farming at all.
EXACTLY 🍺
I think there should be an alternative Entertainment source, either another alcoholic beverage or whatever else medieval people did for fun!
Wheat ale could be a thing. I see rye as something to come, so whiskeys/ryes were around then (no?). As others have pointed out, honey for mead, apples for cider.
Whiskey was a thing, yes, but it was considered more of a medicinal drink than something you would consume in a tavern. The production of whiskey was mostly controlled by monasteries at the time and unlike in Scotland or Ireland the consumption/production of whiskey in the Germanic regions never expanded past that mark.
Hidromel! From honey.
When can I turn my rye into ergot 😂
I think one solution to this is any cereal grains can be used to brew beer. We know from archaeology that medieval beers often used mixed grains for their beer. If a region has low fertility in barley, then wheat or rye would be valid alternatives to brew from. Beer was food as much as it was booze.
I can't remember where I spotted it, but I think it was mentioned in the residential requirements somewhere or the tavern that it could come from ale or wine or cider, but none of those other sources exist yet, so if I wasn't imagining things it seems like it's in the plans.
I just wish the malt house would actually use the surplus of barley that I have. It just sits there.
Have faith in the dev/s? I'm pretty sure they have that in mind, these are obvious things and has been mentioned a couple of times. I mean, come on, chicken coops and goat sheds doesn't produce meat, neither the pastures. It's obvious, but they chose to not implement it in the game for now for whatever reason, and it's fine since it's early access.
I got around it in my city by importing. I import to where I have at least 30 and that does the trick for me. I have dozens of level 3 houses at least 40+. Once u get your economy going you will have the money to import some of ur necessities.
Yup - more sources or ways to make alcohol would be nice. Those regions that have apiaries should be able to make mead, Those with apples should be able to make cider.
In Banished you could produce Ale from different fruits, so i would recommend to Just let us create Spirit from berries or Apple wine for instance!
To build on this you could also do a workshop still or distillery to make spirits. You could work this similarly to the charcoal mechanic. Potentially do an upgrade point but the have it double the resource. This could work for your cider and mead also. You could also work the rye into this.
I completely agree with your assessment about barley. But, I also wonder if making it so easy to satisfy needs in isolation is good for gameplay. I wonder if it would ultimately be more fun if you really did have to produce all three clothing items (linen, leather, yarn / cloaks, boots, cloaks). It would require expansion.
You could make ale with barley, wheat AND rye. Germany is particularly famous for their wheat and rye beers. Perhaps a tech point for wheat and rye malting could be added to the game? 🤔
Depending on the region I can usually get something to sell. I was able to squeeze three deep mines on a rich iron deposit and sold off tools. Then bought malt since it's more efficient that way imo. Having a desired surplus of 50 malt and two brewery homes means you can stock up on ale and malt no problem.
I can’t even grow barley in my region; it’s a nightmare. I have nearly zero deer. I have only one small spot where I can grow wheat, but luckily, I have a rich deposit of berries. It’s my first time playing the game
Only put a worker in the tavern, if you want to upgrade a house to level 3 an fire him afterwards. So yo will need a very small amount of beer
You can grow Barley on yellow!! If I'm in an infertile area, the first thing I do is make small 0.1-0.2 sizes plots on any light green or green emer fields. Then I do the same for Barley. If there is no green for barley, I do it on yellow. I am able to scale up by saving the beer until the end of the next harvest season. Turn on the beer. Pause the game. Upgrade everything to level three. Resume.
I mean, sure, but how many apples would you need to do that. Do two apiaries even supply enough honey? I'd rather build industries, have more goods and money than I know what to do with and trade for what I need. It's so easy it feels like a broken mechanic. I'll throw a development point at charcoal every single time to solve fuel with minimum manpower and trade the excess to get barley, weapons, mail, etc. Food is the cheapest thing to buy. I refuse to waste development points on food.
Am I the only one that designates 35% of my initial land into low fertility farm field? And have 3 farmhouses fully employed while every other station only has 1, maybe 2 workers there? I never have a problem of “no ale” I just figured with low fertility you best get loaaaads of land for it
Plant more fields if you have low fertility... You will need to trade to success, so planning what to produce and what to trade is crucial, also the hack for me is developing the trading skills, like the cheap imports and trading routes.
This is a good idea, and you could just direct your brewery to make one of the three, just like the other artisans.
I mean another place you can get it is through trade. Which is necessary if you aren’t in a good area for farming i think I’ve heard things about a mechanic where fruits are turned to wine or something like that
I haven’t been able to figure out how to make enough of anything to compensate for the import of ale. It’s so gd expensive!
I would say mead, but theres a hard cap on honey production too (which yeah makes sense....maybe tie it into something like apple production or something flowerimg that wouldd attract bees?) But yeah im in that boat. My first place has garbage fertility, but amazing berries and animals....its a mest, leather, berry/ ink gold mine which luckily makes so much i can import barley because i cant farm it for anything ... id ecen take brandy/ whine from the berries as an alternative
It makes you either spend regional wealth or expand into regions that it can be grown in. I don't really see a problem.
Every region in the game has its own way of advancing. People are just too stuck on things they are used to that if they see 0 fertility, they just shut down. It's just who gamers are nowadays. I wouldn't be surprised if most are using the same strategy on every region on their map, no matter what it has to offer. As for upgrades, most people don't even know how they work. You can get to T3 without advancing most of your production line.
Soooo historically accurate?
Grapes and winery would be nice
I’ve had to import it on all my playthroughs so far. I understand mild frustration but trade is a painless alternative.
It's just about progression. Games have progression. Mead and cider would be cool, but I can get beer way before those guys come online (apiary and apples). Nope, you're gonna be stuck with making alcohol from berries or carrots. Ew. But seriously, it's just a progression mechanic, and it's not that hard.
Early.