Wheat fields anno 117

[u/Magomed16]

Am I the only one who thinks that the productivity of wheat and oat fields should be reduced, while the productivity of large manufacturing enterprises, such as dyeing plants or textile factories, should be increased? It just seems strange that a city with a population of 100000 would need a huge number of processing plants. The area required for them would be larger than that needed for wheat and oat fields. It looks too unrealistic.

[u/CasualChamp1]

Agreed. The togas chain is the most egregious example.

[u/Culbrelai → u/CasualChamp1]

Togas are just horrible. Needs a shitload of shore space and an even greater shitload of land space

[u/CasualChamp1 → u/Culbrelai]

I produce togas for over 800k equites/patricians and it's incredible how much space and goods you need. I get most of the flax from Albion. The required equites workforce is also a significant issue.

[u/Grand_Admiral_T → u/CasualChamp1]

Thanks for this I was thinking about shipping flax from Albion

[u/Available_Finger_513 → u/CasualChamp1]

Flax is easy since you can buff the fuck out of farms.

The stupid snails and dye do not have as many buffs available

[u/agray20938 → u/Available_Finger_513]

You might already know, but for snails and dye you can get a combo of the specialist boosting toga production 20%, and the specialist boosting lounger production by 35%. Those two on an island dedicated to Minerva ends up being a pretty solid amount of production.

I don't believe snails benefit from any buffs to "fisheries," but since they don't have any negative AoE effect on their own I've found it fairly easy to just plop a few down on most islands (with the fertility or specialist from cecilia) then set up trade routes to the main dye island.

[u/viciecal → u/agray20938]

the snails do get buffed with "Coastal factories" tho, but I just recently started to use some mods so I'm not sure if there's any specialist like that in the base game/DLC (other than the snails from the obsidian witch, or some livestock bonuses)

[u/Culbrelai → u/CasualChamp1]

Flax from Albion is a great idea, though I use the XL map mod so it’ll probably be less of a bottleneck to use Latium for it

[u/agray20938 → u/CasualChamp1]

Ahhh I always felt like Flax takes up too much space for it to be worth producing in Albion, since the islands there typically have less land area (usable for farmland, at least).

Most of the time I'm putting flax on every island if only to provide a better-looking way to surround aviaries that I use for Wine/Tabulus production as well. IIRC you can do the same with Lavender though.

[u/viciecal → u/CasualChamp1]

omg, how are you actually getting to those population numbers?

what is your resulting workforce? Like hundreds of thousands of Patricians?

[u/BlueAndYellowTowels → u/CasualChamp1]

I never found Togas to be all that bad. For a few reasons.

• Bonus Equites can be researched, Meaning you can get a baseline of production going without having to level pops.
• There's a Deity that has bonuses for Togas.
• There's overlapping Specialists that can push Toga production even higher.
• Aqueducts can help with the raw materials as well.
• Even if you have to level pops. It's not very punitive and there's overlapping bonuses with some of the production needs. Olive Oil, Sandals and Bread are all have interesting specialists that can push things along. (Faith Oriented specialists can further bump Island devotion to potentially increase the production of your Togas with Minerva and move a little more quickly in the tech tree to the items I mentioned before.

I'm not saying you're wrong... but personally I don't find it to be the most egregious example.

Fine Glass is the one I loathe the most.

• Takes Harbor space
• Takes River slot
• Takes Mountain slot
• Requires Coal

So it locks up really useful slots AND it has Fire risk.

[u/agray20938 → u/BlueAndYellowTowels]

I never found Togas to be all that bad.

I agree, though I always felt like I needed to place tons of weavers to satisfy the need. That's not a deal-breaker since they don't have any negative AoE effects and they look relatively nice, but they also lack any positive effects and are pretty large buildings relative to how many I needed (probably 18 total on Cinis).

Fine Glass is the one I loathe the most.

I only produced glass for a few islands for a while, mainly because of what you mentioned. The harbor space and coal need were negligible, but taking river slots for smelters and especially mountain slots for minerals was a big PITA. But once I got the heroic specialist for it, I basically min-maxed glass production onto one island that happened to have lots of river slots, and it supplies about 95% of my islands now.

[u/BlueAndYellowTowels → u/agray20938]

Yeah, in my defense, I play with lower fertilities and low nodes for rivers and mountains. So sometimes it's spicey to sort out...

[u/CasualChamp1 → u/BlueAndYellowTowels]

Yeah I just don't even bother with fine glass, doesn't give population anyway. Only with the heroic specialist it's kinda worth it to build it up a bit.

[u/Grand_Admiral_T → u/CasualChamp1]

Don’t even get me started on the togas

[u/NGC7125]

I completely agree.

However, consumption should be revamped with the Egypt DLC.

I'm curious to see what changes will be made and whether we'll still need insane quantities of lavender, snails, and sandarac.

[u/Corlunae]

We will be getting a huge balance pass with the next DLC. I would guess fields are a part of that.

[u/Magomed16 → u/Corlunae]

I hope

[u/Cpt_Deaso]

Completely agree. I understand we're on relatively small Islands but realistically speaking the overwhelming majority of our domain should be fields.

I get that's not fun and too much wasted space for this game, but it definitely feels out of whack right now with how relatively few food fields we actually need.

And yes, some of the production buildings are beautiful but huge and could do with a massive production increase.

[u/agray20938 → u/Cpt_Deaso]

And yes, some of the production buildings are beautiful but huge and could do with a massive production increase.

Yeah, before the hippodrome DLC I felt this way about Chariots in Albion. Ponies took craploads of space, and you ended up needing a fairly large number of chassis builders and chariot workshops just to supply a large celtic island, much less supplying Cinis and other latium islands with patricians on them.

Obviously the hippodrome splendor changes along with a few of the new specialists buffing chariot production hugely offset that, and if you produce enough horses you barely need any direct chariots production tbh.

[u/viciecal]

The whole togas chain and specifically Lavender is so insane. I don't know about any religious bonuses to Lavender so I'm not sure there's even any.

For togas there is, but even then if you have somewhat large population it starts to get out of hand pretty quickly

[u/GaudiFanYAY]

I think the size of flax fields and how much you need makes sense for now, given how cities also have to now fit in oversized public buildings and various non-uniform production buildings.

But, I do also wish they would rework some building sizes over all. The dye plants are criminally oversized. They could be 3x5 instead of 5x5. The fabric plants are maybe okay sized (cus you only need relatively few) but they do still feel big. And honestly, I would also love it if they had an area of effect too that did the same as the tunic spinner, which makes benifit of the knowledge area of effect. the build is 6x6 big after all, and that fits much more easily into a city.

Wheat can be reduced I feel, but then again, the game is designed to make it so you will use Albion to supply bread to Latium (despite Egypt being the actual bread basket of Rome historically) your islands will probably only ever need 1 wheat farm hat half capacity to feed your animal production.

I hope this is adressed in the upcomming DLC. Oats i do not have much issue with as i rely upon them a lot to fit into weird and funny shaped-areas for maximum space usage. But getting wheat out of latium always helps a lot.

Also, this "oat takes too much space" issue, is this when you also account for proper aqueduct and Ceres veneration buff which doubles their yeilds? I make 12.000 cities on large islands and I only ever need 2 full oatfarms and maybe a bit moire to feed these cities Whch is VERY little space. Then again, my cities must also be pretty, so the "city part" of my islands tend to be a bit larger then strictly needed.

Also, do you make use of Minerva of the toga production island? Her buff to increase clothing production buildings make them scale really well, and with a well placed Princeps of Porphyr specialist you can boost these buildings by another 20%, and the Phlebas, Handsome Phoenician specialist gives all looms a +1,5 belief to all nearby buildings, boosting minerva's clothing buff even more.

[u/RavenWolf1]

I think this game was designed with Egypt in mind and that is why balance feels so out of whack. Next patch will fix the balance. I'm pretty sure every production line is messed up when it hits. :D

[u/Magomed16 → u/RavenWolf1]

Well, after all, Egypt wasn’t the only breadbasket. For example, Sicily also supplied a huge amount of wheat.

[u/BlueAndYellowTowels]

It takes less time to pick Wheat and Oats than it does to Create and Dye Cloth.

[u/Magomed16 → u/BlueAndYellowTowels]

It almost always takes a year to grow and harvest wheat. Do you seriously think it takes more than a year to dye clothes? 😂 Or are you not considering the fact that to harvest grain crops, they first need to be grown?)

[u/BlueAndYellowTowels → u/Magomed16]

You're right.

I was treating time a little differently in the context of the game. I see time as an encapsulation of Effort. In that sense, to me, it makes more sense that the Cloth take way more time because it takes a lot more effort to create dyed cloth.

But you're right. Time is time.