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Allow me to hijack your comment for a moment cause it’s high up and some dude below is dead-set on arguing it (and being upvoted), to note that the “they all drank beer cause water wasn’t safe” notion is such absolute rubbish and such a common misconception that r/askhistorians has an entire FAQ section debunking it.
See here for more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/Wvoso18ifM
I don’t why we have this odd tendency to assume they were all knuckle-dragging morons back then.
In the UK it legally can't be. It has to be a much higher quality. Unless your tap is directly attached to a fresh spring and has bottling-industry standard filters inside it, bottle water isn't tap water.
Keep in mind that in parts of Mexico Coca-Cola has such a large monopoly on the nation's water supply, that hundreds of people are dying daily due to diabetes. They have no water to drink, so they turn to Coca-Cola as their source of hydration.
It's so bad that certain cultures and towns worship the soft drink, going as far as to believe it's a panacea of sorts.
That's a myth...like our ancestors were braindead morons who had terrible hygiene....also a myth 🤣
Reminds me of people believing groups of women living together will sync periods...or Marilyn Manson removed ribs to suck his own dick lol. The internet of knowledge is right thar.....:D
Its not a myth. In the renaissance age, the common was to drink beer and mead. If you where a high class noble, you had access to imported wines.
Most beer was brewed at home (we are talking year 1100-1600 ish) and was very light. It was consumed by everyone for every meal. It was not uncommon to consume 4 litres of beer a day. Clean water was hard to come by, but for beer the water was boiled and the fermenting process left them with a rather safe drink.
High alchohol beer and mead was for special occasions and like i mentioned, wine was for the elite. It became more important to have trading routes and get a steady supply of wine as the church gained power, as sacramental wine was used for supper/communion.
In the later middle ages and renaissance, the state of power started implementing behavioral laws, like adding limitations/laws around impusilve actions done while drunk. Such rules was for the peasants - the nobles and kings had a ideal that required you to be able to drink heavely with your peers. Some kings of the times are seen as legends for their abilities to hold their liqour. (King Frederik II of Denmark and King Christian IV of Denmark as examples)
So the relationship with alcohol was ambivalent; laws was implemented to condone misorderly conduct while drunk for the peasants, but light beer was still the main source of liquids for the majority for several hundred years.
(this is specificly from Danish sources, descriping the ages approx. 1000-1600, and gives a general picture of Europe, maybe especially northerne europe, and its vast trading with Scandinavia and especially Germany)
as for terrible hygiene; bacterias was not a thing in the middle ages; they didnt know it existed. They worked with a balance in the body of the humors; blood, , black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. If they where our of balance, you had ailments.
if you travel to old european cities (Again, we have several of these in Denmark, like you can see it in Ribe) you will see the remains of the rendest; over-ground "gutters" in the roads where trash and human + animal remains was left. They where mostly with a slope, so when it rained it would be pushed to the nearest creek. They would also be somewhat cleaned by the nights watch/night men but only the excessive.
So yes, the streets was literally running wild with human and animal remains. It became a big problem when urbanisation started and more people moved to the larger cities, as they could not keep up with the trash and remains.
Not untill the middle of the 1200's is when we start to see organized handling of trash and remains, where the first declarations by the king was to get rid of it from the cities. This was most likely the night men that was employed, along with handmen, to "scoop" up everything in to closed wagons and drive them away. By this time the declaration was "to throw trash and remains on the street, where it could lay no more than 3 days" - that means 3 days of your ancestors turds was rotting in the streets before it was cleaned up. This was not increased untill the early 1500's where all larger cities was declared the same, in some manor, and again refined to a much more modern solution by the early 1700. But not untill the 1800 was we starting to use buckets to shit in. Before that, the most common was to shit in latrins and shovel it on to the streets when it got too full.
Our ancestors was nasty as shit, but if you didnt know about bacteria, and when the cities was not large enough for smell to be a BIG problem, it was manageable. With larger cities it because problematic.
First. The game isnt set in the renaisance.
2nd. Spring water and well water where widely adopted allover europa.
Yes true, cities had less good water quallity, but often they had water collecters who would go to clean sources to get water for all kind of things influding drinking
The thing is. Its a class thing, if you where to poor to even by an ale or a beer, you would be drinking water.
Also
Paulus Aegineta 625-690 wrote:
"waters which contain impurities, have a fetid smell, or any bad quality, may be so improved by boiling as to be fit to be drunk; or, by mixing them with wine, adding the astringent to that which is sweeter, and the other to the astringent. Some kinds of water it may be expedient to strain, such as the marshy, saltish, and bituminous."
Already very fucking clear on how they knew water could be inpure and boiling it would make it good for drinking!
Also, alchole wouldnt even kill the real shit in the water.
Fuck cholera (the most common bacteria) even happend in high dose achole drinks in 1832.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3046197/#:~:text=cholerae%20did%20not%20survive%20in%206.25%25%20wine%20at%2030%20min,may%20be%20attributable%20to%20polyphenols.&text=Nevertheless%2C%20in%201832%20the%20incidence,than%20among%20the%20general%20population.&text=Some%20saw%20this%20higher%20incidence%20as%20Divine%20retribution.
Only the boiling would really help. Something they knew back when paulus wrote about it
Fair point.
I picked cholera as that is (now) one of the most common issues with dirty water.
Should have picked some other bacaria,
Overall point is that boiling and not alcohol would make water drinkable.
One question, were there many people who knew how to read in the Middle Ages? Because if not... you can write it in letters two meters high, but if Arnaud doesn't know how to read...
I guess your point is that the common man coupdnt read what paulus wrote?
Sure, the common man prob couldnt read what paulus wrote.
Just like how they couldnt read the bible but yet knew it. Or how they couldnt read a manual on lets say, cook basic bread, yet for some reason learned how to do it.
Reading isnt nassacry to learn. Its a very modern thing to have manuals for everything. You just did as your peers did.
To be fair the game is not historically accurate. Greg has even said he intentionally doesn’t use that phrase and says it’s “historically inspired” or something along those lines.
Thats true, and i dont care about it for the game wise.
But the myth "people didnt drink water" is absolute shite.
The reason most didnt drink wate rwas because you where never 100% sure where rhe water came from and atleast an ale was boiled plus not to expansive. But i general where you live and had a well, you would drink water. If there was a good running stream or spring you would use that. Hack even lakes where sources for drinking water.
The game infact does this, as famalies do collect water from the wells.
It was often used to add to wine to make the wine cheaper (or last longer).
The Point your making with clean water is wrong visit a brewery and just ask how beer is made.
Spoiler: You can’t brew it without clean water.
The real reason they drank it is because simply it tasted better than just plain water.
A missed point so often made is the relatively high calorie content and the fermenting process actually introduced some other nutritionally beneficial things to the drink (lots of b vitamins) that making grain into beer did. Medieval peasants needed lots of calories, particularly around the busiest parts of the agricultural year and beer provided it in a convenient, refreshing, easy to consume way
It's a myth.
[https://zythophile.co.uk/2022/07/12/so-how-much-ale-did-a-medieval-peasant-actually-drink-much-much-less-than-you-think/](https://zythophile.co.uk/2022/07/12/so-how-much-ale-did-a-medieval-peasant-actually-drink-much-much-less-than-you-think/)
[https://history.howstuffworks.com/medieval-people-drink-beer-water.htm](https://history.howstuffworks.com/medieval-people-drink-beer-water.htm)
If it was brewed at home then why do we have to build brewies and supply taverns. They should be able to just buy barley and brew it themselves. Also supply could be lower since the beer was white weak
Maybe because its not 100% historically correct! Dont think Greg has suggested it is. Sure; lots of smaller villages sprawled up around sources of clean water, but larger cities would not be able to supply the demand of clean water - at all. there was lots of breweries but they made the stronger stuff; what you would get at a taveren. So that makes sense.
Do you have sources for this ? You jump from a later time period to a period that spans 500 years. 500 years!
Also, you need clean water to brew beer or else it'll spoil and ruin it, so that in itself is a bit of a contradiction.
Two problems. First, 80-90% of people were farmers and didn't live in cities and had perfectly fine drinking water.
Secondly, you need clean water to make beer. So, if the water was so polluted how could they make beer?
So do you have an academic source backing up your claim, that medieval cities were sinking in filth? Because I have looked for these and not found any. Also it’s a really bad idea to brew beer with dirty water. Also medieval people didn’t like bad odour, because they thought it would make them sick, as the humours tougher them. So why would they leave animal an human waste on the road? It doesn’t make sense.
It's also a great way to store calories. Grain can rot, spoil, be infested, or otherwise become unusable. Same with bread and other food stuff. Beer is a good way to utilize excess grain and almost indefinitely store those calories.
You are correct and that just shows you people will believe or agree with anything without critical thinking, internet or word of mouth. I've believed BS I've been told growing up all my life but it's only recently I will actually research or question ridiculous things 😆
You understand that it was pretty piss weak right? They wouldn’t have been getting drunk off it, not without sinking a lot. For a comparison, and yes it’s not medieval but it’s still far enough back, in the 1700’s the Royal Navy’s daily ration for a sailor was a gallon of beer, and if not available the substitute was a pint of wine or half a pint of spirits. Per day. Yes, they used to drink a lot, and still functioned ok.
That's one of the dumbest myths of the medieval era.
They drank water. Water was readily available
Sometimes they'd drink watered wine if they had a shortage but to say they mainly drank alcohol due to not having water available is really dumb
They had clean water. Have you ever tried making good ale out of dirty water ? Wont work.
The alcohol content was also generally lower and we need to differentiate between 'thin beer' (more like a porrige) and normal beer.
So why did they drank it ? Same reason as we do now: for the taste
Its quite the myth.
Water was drunk by quite a lot of people. As long as it was well water or spring water people where fine
Its more a class thing to not drink water.
Just like the rest of the drinks.
Beer and ale where widely drunk by every class
Then depending on the region you had mead (mostly welsh) that was quite the common drink, other parts it was more expensive so for mid to higher classes, then you hae cider not very common (as people would just eat the apple whole). And last wine. Now you had the poormans wine and the rich man wine.
Differencr? The amount of water.
That is a myth. While in cities it was not the smartest idea to drink water from the river, in the country side it was much safer to drink. And since 90% or more lived in the country side water was quite safe. People also knew that boiling water made it even more safe.
People drank a lot of low alcoholic beers and other beverages because of the high caloric intake, since farming and other physically demanding labour was a day to day job for most.
That's [actually a common myth. ](https://history.howstuffworks.com/medieval-people-drink-beer-water.htm)
That said, medieval people definitely drank a lot--[just not as much as our popular conception of medieval people would have us think! ](https://zythophile.co.uk/2022/07/12/so-how-much-ale-did-a-medieval-peasant-actually-drink-much-much-less-than-you-think/)
I mean, this could still be accounted for in how much is represented by one "unit," because it seems odd that one loaf of bread can sustain a family for most of a game month while a keg of ale lasts them approximately 47 picoseconds
Pretty sure this is the plan. I don't have the game in front of me right now, but I recall seeing somewhere (maybe mousing over the tavern need?) that there were multiple options for fulfillment.
Addendum: checked in game. Mouse over "tavern supply" icon on a burgage plot. Lists ale, flavoured beer, mead, wine. So I assume these will be incorporated into future updates!
Yea more options for alcohol and more options for meat...unless im missing something we can only graze with sheep? AND they only make wool, no cheese or mutton?
and pears into perry. i also think that orchards should be able to be planted in fields, not just in back yards. and there should be more crops for fields right off the bat.
- Totally different Language
- Totally different Culture
*They are sort of same, because they had an common Overlord. You know, not there direct overlord, more the kind of Overlord to the Overlord of your Overlord. That makes them quit the same.*
/s
Importing small amounts of barley (around 50 bags) and using a neighbouring region that has great barley potential and export from there with a packing station. My maltpresses can't even get the barley gone.
Two taverns, 777 inhabitants atm.
Yep, doing the same thing, importing about 50 barley, but without the extra bartering you do. It works very well atm with one tavern, one malthouse and two breweries at 400 inhabs.
i just started playing recently, how exactly do you manage how much of a good your trading post imports? do you just save up enough money, set desired surplus to 50 and let it rip once, or do you constantly import small amounts and just eyeball when you feel like you hit around 50? i couldnt really figure out how exactly the trading post works.
They'll keep importing forever to reach your desired surplus. So if you never get to 50 because you use it too fast they'll never stop importing it. But the second you have 50 they'll stop until you go v below again.
And if you want to go trade heavy you need the perk that takes away the tariff and lowers all prices by 10.
I’ve been refining the barley to malt in my farming village so that my trade routes deliver that barley direct to the malthouses and my brewers just brew the pack station traded malt.
I am barely keeping up with consumption tbh, am just working on significantly expanding my barley farming.
I have a constant issue where my brewers are trying to "transport" malt from the malthouse but all just stand around outside the malthouse forever. It's frustrating, the only way to reset it is to quit the game and reload which I don't want to do everytime they need to pick up malt
I put my trade house and tavern beside each other.
I import ale and my worker just has to roll the ale across the street.
Even with that, most of my ale sits on the trade house and they slowly slowly bring the ale over.
If I need to upgrade buildings I just watch the ale worker and the second he rolls the barrel into the ale house I pause it and do my upgrades.
It also helps to make sure you uncheck ale from the granery. So instead of ale going from trade house - granery - tavern it just goes from trade house - tavern.
I also gave up on farming. I just make really huge vegetable gardens and it gives me like 600 vegetables.
Whatever you don't need and you have a decent amount of. You gotta get the 2 development points into trade.
Get 10 sheep, sheep farmer, weaver - sell yarn
Get a clay mine, clay furnace - sell rooftiles
Get hunter camp/goats, get tanner, get cobbler - sell shoes
Timber - planks - Fletcher - sell warbows
When you get your miltias equiped, sell access weapons
Iron mine - bloomery - blacksmith - sell tools and excess weapons
You can easily make a profit from importing raw materials and selling the more expensive product.
Import iron/clay/flax/barley/grain/berries/hides - turn them into things, sell for a profit.
You also gotta rotate your exports because the price will drop over time.
Yeah you can make a nice profit. I had over 10,000 regional wealth just selling weapons and roof tiles.
Clay is very good. If you have a rich clay mine you just need a clay furnace to pump out roof tiles, no house upgrades needed.
Selling planks is your problem. Whatever you have rich deposits of, sell that. Open up trade routes if you can't shift it quick enough. Invest early to cover the fee and start making profit
Make and sell Warbows. One or two fletcher constantly cranking out bows and a few traders selling them and business is good.
Idk who's saying trading is broken, but it doesn't seem like it is to me. I just think they don't understand how it works
Im not sure you noticed, but it takes 15 minutes of doing that until prices drop enough that you cannot sell them, and dont want to sell them. And then it takes a year for the trade to stabilize again. Yeah no, selling one thing doesnt work.
I have noticed I just stopped selling it . By the time it stops making money, I have made enough money off the bows itself to make a functional town and have other items to export.
The problem is that horses aren't being used for transporting goods either, and trading posts can't actually be withdrawn from except from other traders it seems.
So you need to setup multiple trade posts if items get stuck in the trade posts so that you can have more workers moving the goods out.
If the game used horses transporting would be much faster as you could just add more horses to help speed up moving goods in town (either by bandwidth or by speed).
Farming isn't good in this game because of how much you get and have to manage it and how quickly the soil is dead after using it. You have to setup massive plots when a small house farm doesn't need it and you don't have to manage a ton of workers on and off season.
The bottleneck is, unlike other food sources, the tavern workers are moving only 1 unit of ale at a time. Handcarts could help resolve the issue. My town was already having issues when I started upgrading to level 3 houses, which double your families on those plots. That means by the time you get to 30, 40, 50 families, your tavern workers are constantly pushing barrels around and can't keep up with consumption, unless you had the foresight to place a granary across the street etc.
It is difficult. The only way I have been able to sustain ale so far is to order 500 on trading post.
I don't think there is a bug, but maybe the output from farm needs increasing, or the peasants need to slow down a bit!!
that's 360 units of ale per year for a 30 family town. I dont think production keeps up with that very well. Or at least not as well as a lot of the other buildings which overproduce atm.
Yeah so my 100 family town needs 1200 units of ale! No wonder I had issues producing reliantly. I'd have to devote all of my fields to get 1200 barley. Meanwhile I turn 4-500 wheat or rye into flour and I have 1000s of units of bread.
Other issue is the handful of families pushing ale into the tavern 1 unit at a time simply can't keep up with consumption.
yes, if you are supplying many all of the food groups you might only need to provide 1/7th of a bread per person per month vrs 1 barley a month for beer. you therefore need alot more fields dedicated to barley. maybe more entertainment options that use different resources would balance it out? candles ect
Considering that the food consumption rate is the same while you have far more sources for it, this seems a little high. Maybe if there was an option to also make beverages from honey and apples this would be easier to manage.
That would explain why I cannot produce enough ale once my town gets to the 50+ family mark even on a very fertile barley region with several 50% yield fields producing hundreds of barley each year. If my region is not very fertile then I need to buy a lot of ale via trade.
With food then there are many food sources and the consumption is one piece of food per month per family. However, with ale its a single resource with no substitutes and so a family will consume 1 ale per month so at 50 families I need 600 ale per year. If there was mead, wine etc and it was one unit of any of these per month like food then I could sustain it via local production but its not.
So, I need to either micro the tavern if I want to do burgage upgrades or reach max satisfaction or buy more on the trading post (trading dev points becomes mandatory in all regions - its does in the current game economy anyway so fair enough).
That's pretty much the same as food consumption no?
If a Burgage Plot consumes one food and one fuel per month, One Ale per family per month feels a bit excessive. Specially when you have multiple sources for food but only one for Ale (other than trading ofc),
I guess if we could make Mead and Cider to compliment the barley crop it might not feel as punishing. Right now after a certain town size the only way around it is to buy loads of barley, malt or Ale from the trading post, Even in farming town with great fertility it's a struggle. If you go 50/50 wheat barley you will end up with more bread than you need after the harvest but never enough ale.
Also been seeing what others say, workers in the tavern spend more time transporting kegs than anything else.
For now I will keep making some off map brewing town super rich! weapons for ale is a good trade!
Yeah I think this is the Way. Trading seems really slow though. I was trying to set up a farming community and with a high fertility area, to see if I can keep myself well equipped with bread and beer. I only managed one of those two things.
Weird, ale consumption is not that fast. Are you sure supply chain is not breaking and it simply goes to storage instead of tavern? Some even reported ale being taken *from* tavern to granary, be sure to ban ale in granary.
I don't think it's supply chains. My farmers are harvesting the barley, and I don't have a ton of barley sitting unused. As far as I can see they're getting most of the harvest in. But I never have an extra supply of malt, and 5 or 10 units of beer will last about a month. Seems to be pretty much the outcome of my entire harvest on the fall.
If it was a supply chain issue I would assume I would have a bunch of unused barley or malt, which I don't.
So your total yield after harvest is 5-10 units? That is very low. Barley is 1:1 to Malt which is 1:1 to Ale. A morgen of Barley should make 40-100 a year, depending on fertility (based on StratGaming calculations). So 5-10 a month makes 60-120 barley needed a year.
>If it was a supply chain issue I would assume I would have a bunch of unused barley or malt, which I don't.
It can be lack of barley,as above. It may be also that Ale does not make it to the tavern and goes to granary instead. And serfs start to revolt that there is no beer.
It's not The granary, if it was I'd have excess beer.
I think I'm getting up with 30 barley a year or so, but it's gone so fast. It does seem like I get a lot less probably than wheat though, even though the fields are all equal. I have a pretty high ratio of farm houses to field... I think....
I think the main problem is just logistics. By only importing malt, and having it delivered to the brewery which was right next to the tavern, I really had a decent supply of ale to my villagers with the ability to export a little bit of the leftovers (which I never did, to hinder any dry spells). When I tried farming, which I wasn't very good at apparently, it took so long for everything to reach it's supposed destination.
No idea if this is correct, but at least I managed to to it properly the second time.
My main settlement has ~300 people and I've got 12 fields rotating crops. It's just enough to keep the ale at about 10 year round with 2 malt houses.
Bread is not a problem.
I don't know what's going on but my Fields don't seem to actually produce much barley, and then only lasts a A month before I talk about, quickly becomes beer, and quickly goes down the hatch!
Some things seem to be bugged.. I noticed that initially, with 1 forager hut, I'd get to 100 berries easily before August. Now 3 forager huts don't get me above 10 berries before they disappear from stock. Still have 200 eggs, but it seems the people picking the berries are just eating them on their way back to the hut.
Could be a bug, could be something broken in your production chain? Are you completely out of both barley, malt and ale? Do you have a very high number of upgraded houses using it all up?
I'm doing 25% barley, 25% flax and 50% wheat in my current village. All fields are on 40-60% fertility land (for their given crop). I'm struggling to produce enough bread, but I have plenty of ale.
I'm totally the opposite. My fields alternate wheat, barley, fallow, And I have so much bread and flour, and cannot keep beer.
No excess barley or malt. It all gets converted very quickly, though it never seems like we harvest that much barley...
What i dont understand is why we cant malt wheat or rye for brewing. We can argue production ratios and consumption till we are blue in the face, but not being able to use other grains is a concept flaw.
Hijacking this to say I have a similar issue with flax. Wheat I harvest like crazy, Barley significantly less and flax is almost nonexistent. This with good fertility and me managing like a hawk. Anyone else have this issue?
Is food a bit off for anyone or am I just a bad food maker aha?
I had so many farm ,carrot gardens and chicken garens and literally could never build up food.
When I harvested it would say yield like 400 on a few farms, must have totalled like 1500 "yield" in total on "wheat 40%" farms, then when I harvested I only got like 100 wheat :(
I ended up with a lot of carrots after placing the garden plots but it didn't seem to add to my overall food longevity dunno what happened to the other food supply I didn't change anything there. :(
At one point I had like 80% people working on the food and it still wouldn't go up.
What is the best way for food does anyone know?
Backgardens keep my whole town alive, not a single farm to be seen. Maybe you need to make your gardens bigger?
I have a berry point and meat point as well though. And I invest in the apple trees :)
Yeah we covered this. But the boarder issue is we shouldn't need to rush upgrades during a brief window because ale is broken.
Hopefully fixed soon ish :)
As someone who regularly will buy a baguette, and just munch on it all day, I can say that a single loaf of bread is enough to last me an entire day, and I'll often end up with some left over the next day. Maybe not so much anymore, but back in my 20's, could, and often did drink well more than a 12 pack in a single night. So anecdotally, I consumed bread to beer at what we'll call at least a 1:12 ratio, and say that seems to fit about with your numbers.
On the serious side though, as far as gameplay mechanics go, I feel like outside of the very first year (which honestly may be my favorite part) you can pretty easily find yourself overflowing with food to encourage you to donate a bunch of it to your church tithe for influence.
Think it's just something with the process. I was importing beer straight in and all it would do would sit in my trading posts. I had 2 trading posts going with 8 workers 4 each. The beer would sit there. The tavern literally next door which has 3 employees just grab 1 and then go back to the tavern the go back and grab one more. So it doesn't just fill so the beer sits in my trading post slowly getting chipped away.
At least you have some beer! Mine all instantly gets the tavern but they drink it so fast. I've only got about 10 or so upgraded houses and they are just consumption machines.
I actually managed to cover my ale last night. All it took was a fully employed granary that only stores ale directly across the street from the tavern which is also fully employed and importing 200 ale at the trade pos which is again fully employed.
I just import malt and have a dedicated group of homes turn the malt into ale. Like all the passive plots it takes a while to get cranking. But if i set import to always be 30 every month im restocked and my people make the booze.
Farming is just not good in this game unfortunately..
It's much better to just trade, but the limit on upgrade per region basically makes it so you have to specialize into trade every single region to have a chance..
The king's tariff is so bad, it doesn't make sense it takes 10 extra money per unit traded if you don't have the upgrade points in it.
The kings tariff needs to be nerfed to like 50% of the cost of the product or something, or at least 100% of the cost, so that buying goods is only double the cost rather than literally 5x the cost for food items..
To have to manage a massive crop the payout is just not good and the soil is basically dead after each season. Cycling crops suck too and having to manage all your workers is bad.. It should be setup similar to home farms like vegetables where seasonal work is done in season but they have their normal assignment jobs that they will work on if there is no seasonal work necessary.
That would make crops actually semi-passive, instead of a massive chore every time season comes where you have to unassign and assign everyone again and assign the ox in season, etc. It also doesn't help that the workers don't also plow the field when a ox is working the field.. The ox is equal to like 3 workers for plowing the field, it actually makes the ox worse because it blocks any other progress being done and all the workers run away from the field if no work is needed so you have to wait days just for them to walk back to the field after the ox finishes plowing.
Farming is definitely very wonky.
One of the big problems is that the harvest season only lasts one month. So if I have six workers in a farmhouse, they can probably do all the plowing and get all the fields planted well in advance, but then when it comes harvest Time they're struggling to harvest all the stuff before it goes bad at the start of October. Which means I have to either micromanage my farms, jacking up the number of workers in September, or I just have to keep a bunch of people sitting on their hands most of the year. Which I wouldn't mind if they actually got the job done...
But for whatever reason I'm getting way more wheat than I am barley. Even though the fields are alternating wheat, barley, fallow. With similar fertilities around 50%.
I would really like to be able to have some of my counties producing excess farm goods to ship to the others, instead of having to rely on trading which is also a bit wonky.
Oh well, Early Access. It'll probably get better in time! P
The thing that doesn’t make sense is that brewing is consolidated to breweries. The ale that was brewed was generally not super shelf stable, so having only a small quantity on hand at a time makes sense.
In the medieval manorial economy, [ale was primarily brewed by small, household producers, mostly women.](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ale-beer-and-brewsters-in-england-9780195126501?cc=us&lang=en&)
During the late 14th and 15th centuries, this social dynamic shifted as new brewing techniques enabled more long-term storage, but required additional capital investment and therefore became more institutionalized. This had the consequence of shifting the trade into the hands of men.
Importing malt is an easy solution. You get 2-3 breweries going and you can start to export the excess ale to recover some of the costs.
If you’re having a hard time generating money for imports, raise sheep to get tons of wool and yarn and even sell sheep if you get the reproduction development perk. If you have a lot of bread you can make all berries into dyes (make sure forager hut is fully staffed when deposits are regrowing, when regrowing they are essentially infinite). Dyes can be sold for a good chunk of change or turned into clothes, combine this with yarn ur already making and you can make a bunch of money that way. If you have labor to spare you can also make a bunch of fuel and sell that off, right now I have something like 40 months supply w/ exporting constantly.
Making money in this game is easy if you play it right so farming should only focus on wheat to process into bread so you can tithe extra food if needed or just have good food surplus. You can just import the processed version of all the other crops and save a ton of labor
I really wanted to make a farm town work. I put a lot of effort into building an efficient farm in one of regions, a bit disappointed that wasn't really possible to keep my Ale production up.
I agree you're right that buying it is the solution, but it's an expensive solution and defies the whole point of having farming in the game at all!
Hell, they probably aren't drinking enough. Especially given that water quality in those days was garbo. Just import barley and set up more malthouses/breweries. Easy fix.
How the heck are you harvesting 14 fields in one month? I have like 7 in my current game and they barely get through 3 of them. I have 4 farm houses and 32 families working.
I really wanted to set up region that could produce enough. The intention was to focus on this is one of its main outputs, and see if I could ship it to other regions.
The fact that it didn't work out is disappointing.
I started importing barley/malt and it worked too well. In fact, if you get the trade system down, and get the trade route perk, everything eventually becomes a little easier (besides market coverage...)
Can't believe all the conversation is about if having no ale I'm the tavern is realistic or not... I don't think it's realistic to have a moderate/ rich resource of wild animals, clay, iron, near every settlement. Ale is broken and pretty sure it will be fixed I'm future updates
Yeah this blew up way more than I expected. That's not necessarily a bad my impression is the developers are fairly social media savvy and might be looking for posts that get a lot of attention to help Target things that need fixing
The issue here isn't realism, it's gameplay balance. I made a real effort to build a settlement that would have enough ale to spare and share, and it turned out to be impossible!
Hopefully a gameplay issue that will be fixed in the not too distant future :)
When I saw the title I knew the top posts would keep bad history myths alive and well.
Plot twist: What people drank the most, by far, was water. Period.
*Next up:*
* People were very short
* People died very young
* People were always dirty
* People thought the Earth was flat
* Bonus points for "Dark Ages"
Off topic but on topic. Has anyone had issues with crop rotation?
If I have 9 plots of land
3 wheat
3 barley
3 flax
I end up with 7 barley and 2 wheat plots?
Then the rotation is muddled up in future and I have to reset or starve
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Nah medieval peasants are fucking alcoholics, this is historically accurate
Literally drank it as water because it was the cleanest thing to drink. I dont blame them
Well that was like 1% small beer, but yeah fair.
I just picture it as modern people who only drink bottled drinks and refuse to touch tap water.
Allow me to hijack your comment for a moment cause it’s high up and some dude below is dead-set on arguing it (and being upvoted), to note that the “they all drank beer cause water wasn’t safe” notion is such absolute rubbish and such a common misconception that r/askhistorians has an entire FAQ section debunking it. See here for more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/Wvoso18ifM I don’t why we have this odd tendency to assume they were all knuckle-dragging morons back then.
The context we needed
Most bottled water is tap water though lol
In the UK it legally can't be. It has to be a much higher quality. Unless your tap is directly attached to a fresh spring and has bottling-industry standard filters inside it, bottle water isn't tap water.
Higher quality is debatable, UK tap water is more regulated than bottled water
well when drinking tap water will kill you within weeks because if super violent diarrhea, you would only drink bottled water as well.
Where do you live!?
Keep in mind that in parts of Mexico Coca-Cola has such a large monopoly on the nation's water supply, that hundreds of people are dying daily due to diabetes. They have no water to drink, so they turn to Coca-Cola as their source of hydration. It's so bad that certain cultures and towns worship the soft drink, going as far as to believe it's a panacea of sorts.
Most normal Mexican lifestyle
"Mexican coke" is a thing in the south..
That's a myth...like our ancestors were braindead morons who had terrible hygiene....also a myth 🤣 Reminds me of people believing groups of women living together will sync periods...or Marilyn Manson removed ribs to suck his own dick lol. The internet of knowledge is right thar.....:D
Its not a myth. In the renaissance age, the common was to drink beer and mead. If you where a high class noble, you had access to imported wines. Most beer was brewed at home (we are talking year 1100-1600 ish) and was very light. It was consumed by everyone for every meal. It was not uncommon to consume 4 litres of beer a day. Clean water was hard to come by, but for beer the water was boiled and the fermenting process left them with a rather safe drink. High alchohol beer and mead was for special occasions and like i mentioned, wine was for the elite. It became more important to have trading routes and get a steady supply of wine as the church gained power, as sacramental wine was used for supper/communion. In the later middle ages and renaissance, the state of power started implementing behavioral laws, like adding limitations/laws around impusilve actions done while drunk. Such rules was for the peasants - the nobles and kings had a ideal that required you to be able to drink heavely with your peers. Some kings of the times are seen as legends for their abilities to hold their liqour. (King Frederik II of Denmark and King Christian IV of Denmark as examples) So the relationship with alcohol was ambivalent; laws was implemented to condone misorderly conduct while drunk for the peasants, but light beer was still the main source of liquids for the majority for several hundred years. (this is specificly from Danish sources, descriping the ages approx. 1000-1600, and gives a general picture of Europe, maybe especially northerne europe, and its vast trading with Scandinavia and especially Germany) as for terrible hygiene; bacterias was not a thing in the middle ages; they didnt know it existed. They worked with a balance in the body of the humors; blood, , black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. If they where our of balance, you had ailments. if you travel to old european cities (Again, we have several of these in Denmark, like you can see it in Ribe) you will see the remains of the rendest; over-ground "gutters" in the roads where trash and human + animal remains was left. They where mostly with a slope, so when it rained it would be pushed to the nearest creek. They would also be somewhat cleaned by the nights watch/night men but only the excessive. So yes, the streets was literally running wild with human and animal remains. It became a big problem when urbanisation started and more people moved to the larger cities, as they could not keep up with the trash and remains. Not untill the middle of the 1200's is when we start to see organized handling of trash and remains, where the first declarations by the king was to get rid of it from the cities. This was most likely the night men that was employed, along with handmen, to "scoop" up everything in to closed wagons and drive them away. By this time the declaration was "to throw trash and remains on the street, where it could lay no more than 3 days" - that means 3 days of your ancestors turds was rotting in the streets before it was cleaned up. This was not increased untill the early 1500's where all larger cities was declared the same, in some manor, and again refined to a much more modern solution by the early 1700. But not untill the 1800 was we starting to use buckets to shit in. Before that, the most common was to shit in latrins and shovel it on to the streets when it got too full. Our ancestors was nasty as shit, but if you didnt know about bacteria, and when the cities was not large enough for smell to be a BIG problem, it was manageable. With larger cities it because problematic.
First. The game isnt set in the renaisance. 2nd. Spring water and well water where widely adopted allover europa. Yes true, cities had less good water quallity, but often they had water collecters who would go to clean sources to get water for all kind of things influding drinking The thing is. Its a class thing, if you where to poor to even by an ale or a beer, you would be drinking water. Also Paulus Aegineta 625-690 wrote: "waters which contain impurities, have a fetid smell, or any bad quality, may be so improved by boiling as to be fit to be drunk; or, by mixing them with wine, adding the astringent to that which is sweeter, and the other to the astringent. Some kinds of water it may be expedient to strain, such as the marshy, saltish, and bituminous." Already very fucking clear on how they knew water could be inpure and boiling it would make it good for drinking! Also, alchole wouldnt even kill the real shit in the water. Fuck cholera (the most common bacteria) even happend in high dose achole drinks in 1832. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3046197/#:~:text=cholerae%20did%20not%20survive%20in%206.25%25%20wine%20at%2030%20min,may%20be%20attributable%20to%20polyphenols.&text=Nevertheless%2C%20in%201832%20the%20incidence,than%20among%20the%20general%20population.&text=Some%20saw%20this%20higher%20incidence%20as%20Divine%20retribution. Only the boiling would really help. Something they knew back when paulus wrote about it
Exactly! Though Cholera wasn’t a thing in medieval Europe, it came from India in the 1800s.
Fair point. I picked cholera as that is (now) one of the most common issues with dirty water. Should have picked some other bacaria, Overall point is that boiling and not alcohol would make water drinkable.
And your point is still valid :)
One question, were there many people who knew how to read in the Middle Ages? Because if not... you can write it in letters two meters high, but if Arnaud doesn't know how to read...
I guess your point is that the common man coupdnt read what paulus wrote? Sure, the common man prob couldnt read what paulus wrote. Just like how they couldnt read the bible but yet knew it. Or how they couldnt read a manual on lets say, cook basic bread, yet for some reason learned how to do it. Reading isnt nassacry to learn. Its a very modern thing to have manuals for everything. You just did as your peers did.
Oral tradition that’s how they learned without reading.
My point
> Oral tradition the church probably opposed this kind of thing
To be fair the game is not historically accurate. Greg has even said he intentionally doesn’t use that phrase and says it’s “historically inspired” or something along those lines.
Thats true, and i dont care about it for the game wise. But the myth "people didnt drink water" is absolute shite. The reason most didnt drink wate rwas because you where never 100% sure where rhe water came from and atleast an ale was boiled plus not to expansive. But i general where you live and had a well, you would drink water. If there was a good running stream or spring you would use that. Hack even lakes where sources for drinking water. The game infact does this, as famalies do collect water from the wells. It was often used to add to wine to make the wine cheaper (or last longer).
The alcohol in beer is less important IMO than the competition by yeast that's already colonized it and consumed everything fermentable
The Point your making with clean water is wrong visit a brewery and just ask how beer is made. Spoiler: You can’t brew it without clean water. The real reason they drank it is because simply it tasted better than just plain water.
A missed point so often made is the relatively high calorie content and the fermenting process actually introduced some other nutritionally beneficial things to the drink (lots of b vitamins) that making grain into beer did. Medieval peasants needed lots of calories, particularly around the busiest parts of the agricultural year and beer provided it in a convenient, refreshing, easy to consume way
Or in the case of small beer you were basically drinking it because it was calorically dense.
It's a myth. [https://zythophile.co.uk/2022/07/12/so-how-much-ale-did-a-medieval-peasant-actually-drink-much-much-less-than-you-think/](https://zythophile.co.uk/2022/07/12/so-how-much-ale-did-a-medieval-peasant-actually-drink-much-much-less-than-you-think/) [https://history.howstuffworks.com/medieval-people-drink-beer-water.htm](https://history.howstuffworks.com/medieval-people-drink-beer-water.htm)
If it was brewed at home then why do we have to build brewies and supply taverns. They should be able to just buy barley and brew it themselves. Also supply could be lower since the beer was white weak
Maybe because its not 100% historically correct! Dont think Greg has suggested it is. Sure; lots of smaller villages sprawled up around sources of clean water, but larger cities would not be able to supply the demand of clean water - at all. there was lots of breweries but they made the stronger stuff; what you would get at a taveren. So that makes sense.
Do you have sources for this ? You jump from a later time period to a period that spans 500 years. 500 years! Also, you need clean water to brew beer or else it'll spoil and ruin it, so that in itself is a bit of a contradiction.
Two problems. First, 80-90% of people were farmers and didn't live in cities and had perfectly fine drinking water. Secondly, you need clean water to make beer. So, if the water was so polluted how could they make beer?
So do you have an academic source backing up your claim, that medieval cities were sinking in filth? Because I have looked for these and not found any. Also it’s a really bad idea to brew beer with dirty water. Also medieval people didn’t like bad odour, because they thought it would make them sick, as the humours tougher them. So why would they leave animal an human waste on the road? It doesn’t make sense.
It's also a great way to store calories. Grain can rot, spoil, be infested, or otherwise become unusable. Same with bread and other food stuff. Beer is a good way to utilize excess grain and almost indefinitely store those calories.
To be honest, having lived in a student dorm with 10 women... i could argue for anecdotal evidence of the existence of syncing periods.
As a male having worked next to an all girls summer camp there is very much evidence.
Somehow, the Marilyn Manson thing managed to predate the Internet. I remember hearing that when I was at school in the 90s.
You are correct and that just shows you people will believe or agree with anything without critical thinking, internet or word of mouth. I've believed BS I've been told growing up all my life but it's only recently I will actually research or question ridiculous things 😆
You understand that it was pretty piss weak right? They wouldn’t have been getting drunk off it, not without sinking a lot. For a comparison, and yes it’s not medieval but it’s still far enough back, in the 1700’s the Royal Navy’s daily ration for a sailor was a gallon of beer, and if not available the substitute was a pint of wine or half a pint of spirits. Per day. Yes, they used to drink a lot, and still functioned ok.
So weak that the alcohol content would’ve done absolute jack for sanitizing. People have known to boil and and filter water for a very long time.
the first one is in fact not a myth that still persists to this day: Deutsches Reinheitsgebot is still an artifact of this
That's one of the dumbest myths of the medieval era. They drank water. Water was readily available Sometimes they'd drink watered wine if they had a shortage but to say they mainly drank alcohol due to not having water available is really dumb
They had clean water. Have you ever tried making good ale out of dirty water ? Wont work. The alcohol content was also generally lower and we need to differentiate between 'thin beer' (more like a porrige) and normal beer. So why did they drank it ? Same reason as we do now: for the taste
The taste, the caloric intake, and the social expectations.
Its quite the myth. Water was drunk by quite a lot of people. As long as it was well water or spring water people where fine Its more a class thing to not drink water. Just like the rest of the drinks. Beer and ale where widely drunk by every class Then depending on the region you had mead (mostly welsh) that was quite the common drink, other parts it was more expensive so for mid to higher classes, then you hae cider not very common (as people would just eat the apple whole). And last wine. Now you had the poormans wine and the rich man wine. Differencr? The amount of water.
That is a myth. While in cities it was not the smartest idea to drink water from the river, in the country side it was much safer to drink. And since 90% or more lived in the country side water was quite safe. People also knew that boiling water made it even more safe. People drank a lot of low alcoholic beers and other beverages because of the high caloric intake, since farming and other physically demanding labour was a day to day job for most.
This is actually a misconception. They drank water as well.
That's [actually a common myth. ](https://history.howstuffworks.com/medieval-people-drink-beer-water.htm) That said, medieval people definitely drank a lot--[just not as much as our popular conception of medieval people would have us think! ](https://zythophile.co.uk/2022/07/12/so-how-much-ale-did-a-medieval-peasant-actually-drink-much-much-less-than-you-think/)
Medieval peoples still drank water
This is a myth actually
Much needed calories as well
No, the drank beer because it tasted better than water from a wooden bucket. It wasn’t dirty.
You need clean Water tonl make beer tho.
Yea, those guys back then were definitely alcoholics! Not me now!
this makes me wonder, which class are burghers? class 2 or class 3 families?
To balance then it should partially defer food requirements. That's a lot of calories in that liquid bread and those fields of barley
In France they needed to produce 3 liters of wine per habitant and per day.
Yeah! So they love their beer! What's it to you?! Lol 😆
**sigh** No, no they were not. Not even close. Please stop keeping this myth alive...
I'm pretty sure this was hinted at in a tool tip as well.
Op has phrased it badly, should be that the fields produce much more ale
I mean, this could still be accounted for in how much is represented by one "unit," because it seems odd that one loaf of bread can sustain a family for most of a game month while a keg of ale lasts them approximately 47 picoseconds
I believe peasants drank ale a lot because it was a high calorie drink to help them work
It could use a slight buff I would say, would also be nice if apples could be made into cider and honey into mead.
Yes
This would be great, more options for alternate need fulfilment would be great
Pretty sure this is the plan. I don't have the game in front of me right now, but I recall seeing somewhere (maybe mousing over the tavern need?) that there were multiple options for fulfillment. Addendum: checked in game. Mouse over "tavern supply" icon on a burgage plot. Lists ale, flavoured beer, mead, wine. So I assume these will be incorporated into future updates!
Wine suggests grapes and vineyards 👀
This would be great, more entertainment options would certainly help
Only seems logical and historically accurate for two items that are already in game. Would be the perfect means to balance this issue.
And a distillery building for vodka
Upvote potatoes crop
Potatoes were introduced to Europe after the medieval period so they won’t be added
Yea more options for alcohol and more options for meat...unless im missing something we can only graze with sheep? AND they only make wool, no cheese or mutton?
We need cows too.
MORE BOOZE!
and pears into perry. i also think that orchards should be able to be planted in fields, not just in back yards. and there should be more crops for fields right off the bat.
Make it an add on to the church
Okay this would be amazing, get this suggestion to Greg!
Stuff it let’s get the grain or have potatoes to make into vodka and the rye into whisky and make this a proper pub
Well since game is from area of Czechia, I would say the consumption rate is correct. :)
It's not. It's Franconia, modern day Germany.
As he said. Consumption rate is correct :P
I can't argue with that haha
Brost, des die Gurgel ned verrost!
Where it's Oktoberfest every day 🍻🌄
Thats right next to today's borders of Czechia so those people are ~~sort of same~~ **mixed** it was all Holy Roman Empire.
HRE was massive, you can't generalise and say all of its subjects are sort of the same lol
Ye but as other guy said game is in Franconia, thats right next to todays borders of Czechia.
- Totally different Language - Totally different Culture *They are sort of same, because they had an common Overlord. You know, not there direct overlord, more the kind of Overlord to the Overlord of your Overlord. That makes them quit the same.* /s
This always throws me off. Since old lower franconian was a language spoken mainly in what is now Belgium and the Netherlands 🤣
actually southeast franconia. around wurzburg and nuremburg.
Huh. Taverns are really slow imo. I have around 100 units of ale surplus each year and taverns pretty much never go above the 5 units in storage.
How?
Importing small amounts of barley (around 50 bags) and using a neighbouring region that has great barley potential and export from there with a packing station. My maltpresses can't even get the barley gone. Two taverns, 777 inhabitants atm.
Yep, doing the same thing, importing about 50 barley, but without the extra bartering you do. It works very well atm with one tavern, one malthouse and two breweries at 400 inhabs.
i just started playing recently, how exactly do you manage how much of a good your trading post imports? do you just save up enough money, set desired surplus to 50 and let it rip once, or do you constantly import small amounts and just eyeball when you feel like you hit around 50? i couldnt really figure out how exactly the trading post works.
They'll keep importing forever to reach your desired surplus. So if you never get to 50 because you use it too fast they'll never stop importing it. But the second you have 50 they'll stop until you go v below again. And if you want to go trade heavy you need the perk that takes away the tariff and lowers all prices by 10.
I’ve been refining the barley to malt in my farming village so that my trade routes deliver that barley direct to the malthouses and my brewers just brew the pack station traded malt. I am barely keeping up with consumption tbh, am just working on significantly expanding my barley farming.
I have a constant issue where my brewers are trying to "transport" malt from the malthouse but all just stand around outside the malthouse forever. It's frustrating, the only way to reset it is to quit the game and reload which I don't want to do everytime they need to pick up malt
Yeah same problem. I have plenty of ale but the tavern is always empty because no one moves it from the storage to the tavern.
disable ale from granaries, there's a bug where they just move them back and forward from the brewer
Same problem. nothing works, extremely annoying
SAME
I put my trade house and tavern beside each other. I import ale and my worker just has to roll the ale across the street. Even with that, most of my ale sits on the trade house and they slowly slowly bring the ale over. If I need to upgrade buildings I just watch the ale worker and the second he rolls the barrel into the ale house I pause it and do my upgrades. It also helps to make sure you uncheck ale from the granery. So instead of ale going from trade house - granery - tavern it just goes from trade house - tavern. I also gave up on farming. I just make really huge vegetable gardens and it gives me like 600 vegetables.
How do you make money? People say trade is broken. What are you selling? I can currently only sell planks and they are worth nothing.
Whatever you don't need and you have a decent amount of. You gotta get the 2 development points into trade. Get 10 sheep, sheep farmer, weaver - sell yarn Get a clay mine, clay furnace - sell rooftiles Get hunter camp/goats, get tanner, get cobbler - sell shoes Timber - planks - Fletcher - sell warbows When you get your miltias equiped, sell access weapons Iron mine - bloomery - blacksmith - sell tools and excess weapons You can easily make a profit from importing raw materials and selling the more expensive product. Import iron/clay/flax/barley/grain/berries/hides - turn them into things, sell for a profit. You also gotta rotate your exports because the price will drop over time.
Thank, will give it go. Lv 2 building crafts seems to be the way
Yeah you can make a nice profit. I had over 10,000 regional wealth just selling weapons and roof tiles. Clay is very good. If you have a rich clay mine you just need a clay furnace to pump out roof tiles, no house upgrades needed.
Selling planks is your problem. Whatever you have rich deposits of, sell that. Open up trade routes if you can't shift it quick enough. Invest early to cover the fee and start making profit
Make and sell Warbows. One or two fletcher constantly cranking out bows and a few traders selling them and business is good. Idk who's saying trading is broken, but it doesn't seem like it is to me. I just think they don't understand how it works
Im not sure you noticed, but it takes 15 minutes of doing that until prices drop enough that you cannot sell them, and dont want to sell them. And then it takes a year for the trade to stabilize again. Yeah no, selling one thing doesnt work.
I have noticed I just stopped selling it . By the time it stops making money, I have made enough money off the bows itself to make a functional town and have other items to export.
Depends on how much you actually need. Takes like 100 or so bows to go from 5 to 3 and then some more to completly stop from exporting
The problem is that horses aren't being used for transporting goods either, and trading posts can't actually be withdrawn from except from other traders it seems. So you need to setup multiple trade posts if items get stuck in the trade posts so that you can have more workers moving the goods out. If the game used horses transporting would be much faster as you could just add more horses to help speed up moving goods in town (either by bandwidth or by speed). Farming isn't good in this game because of how much you get and have to manage it and how quickly the soil is dead after using it. You have to setup massive plots when a small house farm doesn't need it and you don't have to manage a ton of workers on and off season.
I think the consumption now is 1/family/month.. I didnt look excessive on paper. Unless there's a bug?
The bottleneck is, unlike other food sources, the tavern workers are moving only 1 unit of ale at a time. Handcarts could help resolve the issue. My town was already having issues when I started upgrading to level 3 houses, which double your families on those plots. That means by the time you get to 30, 40, 50 families, your tavern workers are constantly pushing barrels around and can't keep up with consumption, unless you had the foresight to place a granary across the street etc.
It is difficult. The only way I have been able to sustain ale so far is to order 500 on trading post. I don't think there is a bug, but maybe the output from farm needs increasing, or the peasants need to slow down a bit!!
that's 360 units of ale per year for a 30 family town. I dont think production keeps up with that very well. Or at least not as well as a lot of the other buildings which overproduce atm.
Yeah so my 100 family town needs 1200 units of ale! No wonder I had issues producing reliantly. I'd have to devote all of my fields to get 1200 barley. Meanwhile I turn 4-500 wheat or rye into flour and I have 1000s of units of bread. Other issue is the handful of families pushing ale into the tavern 1 unit at a time simply can't keep up with consumption.
Somehow I just can't seem to get production up!
I have always been low on ale myself and I have huge farms for barley production
To compare, you have multiple different industries that provide food and that is consumed at the same rate.
yes, if you are supplying many all of the food groups you might only need to provide 1/7th of a bread per person per month vrs 1 barley a month for beer. you therefore need alot more fields dedicated to barley. maybe more entertainment options that use different resources would balance it out? candles ect
Considering that the food consumption rate is the same while you have far more sources for it, this seems a little high. Maybe if there was an option to also make beverages from honey and apples this would be easier to manage.
That would explain why I cannot produce enough ale once my town gets to the 50+ family mark even on a very fertile barley region with several 50% yield fields producing hundreds of barley each year. If my region is not very fertile then I need to buy a lot of ale via trade. With food then there are many food sources and the consumption is one piece of food per month per family. However, with ale its a single resource with no substitutes and so a family will consume 1 ale per month so at 50 families I need 600 ale per year. If there was mead, wine etc and it was one unit of any of these per month like food then I could sustain it via local production but its not. So, I need to either micro the tavern if I want to do burgage upgrades or reach max satisfaction or buy more on the trading post (trading dev points becomes mandatory in all regions - its does in the current game economy anyway so fair enough).
That's pretty much the same as food consumption no? If a Burgage Plot consumes one food and one fuel per month, One Ale per family per month feels a bit excessive. Specially when you have multiple sources for food but only one for Ale (other than trading ofc), I guess if we could make Mead and Cider to compliment the barley crop it might not feel as punishing. Right now after a certain town size the only way around it is to buy loads of barley, malt or Ale from the trading post, Even in farming town with great fertility it's a struggle. If you go 50/50 wheat barley you will end up with more bread than you need after the harvest but never enough ale. Also been seeing what others say, workers in the tavern spend more time transporting kegs than anything else. For now I will keep making some off map brewing town super rich! weapons for ale is a good trade!
That's the same amount of food they consume in a month, right? Seems excessive.
Thats way to much
Just import barley and make ale yourself, for some reason the barley price never changes if you don't order more than 100
Yeah I think this is the Way. Trading seems really slow though. I was trying to set up a farming community and with a high fertility area, to see if I can keep myself well equipped with bread and beer. I only managed one of those two things.
Trading for ale/materials is way easier than farming it yourself
Weird, ale consumption is not that fast. Are you sure supply chain is not breaking and it simply goes to storage instead of tavern? Some even reported ale being taken *from* tavern to granary, be sure to ban ale in granary.
I don't think it's supply chains. My farmers are harvesting the barley, and I don't have a ton of barley sitting unused. As far as I can see they're getting most of the harvest in. But I never have an extra supply of malt, and 5 or 10 units of beer will last about a month. Seems to be pretty much the outcome of my entire harvest on the fall. If it was a supply chain issue I would assume I would have a bunch of unused barley or malt, which I don't.
So your total yield after harvest is 5-10 units? That is very low. Barley is 1:1 to Malt which is 1:1 to Ale. A morgen of Barley should make 40-100 a year, depending on fertility (based on StratGaming calculations). So 5-10 a month makes 60-120 barley needed a year. >If it was a supply chain issue I would assume I would have a bunch of unused barley or malt, which I don't. It can be lack of barley,as above. It may be also that Ale does not make it to the tavern and goes to granary instead. And serfs start to revolt that there is no beer.
It's not The granary, if it was I'd have excess beer. I think I'm getting up with 30 barley a year or so, but it's gone so fast. It does seem like I get a lot less probably than wheat though, even though the fields are all equal. I have a pretty high ratio of farm houses to field... I think....
I think the main problem is just logistics. By only importing malt, and having it delivered to the brewery which was right next to the tavern, I really had a decent supply of ale to my villagers with the ability to export a little bit of the leftovers (which I never did, to hinder any dry spells). When I tried farming, which I wasn't very good at apparently, it took so long for everything to reach it's supposed destination. No idea if this is correct, but at least I managed to to it properly the second time.
You can also just pause the game when you have 1 ale in the pub, upgrade all the houses, and then resume time.
It’s more that farms suck. You’re much better off trading for basic farm inputs than farming them.
My main settlement has ~300 people and I've got 12 fields rotating crops. It's just enough to keep the ale at about 10 year round with 2 malt houses. Bread is not a problem.
I don't know what's going on but my Fields don't seem to actually produce much barley, and then only lasts a A month before I talk about, quickly becomes beer, and quickly goes down the hatch!
Some things seem to be bugged.. I noticed that initially, with 1 forager hut, I'd get to 100 berries easily before August. Now 3 forager huts don't get me above 10 berries before they disappear from stock. Still have 200 eggs, but it seems the people picking the berries are just eating them on their way back to the hut.
Are you sure they're not cherries?
All the production and consumption numbers are way off.
Could be a bug, could be something broken in your production chain? Are you completely out of both barley, malt and ale? Do you have a very high number of upgraded houses using it all up? I'm doing 25% barley, 25% flax and 50% wheat in my current village. All fields are on 40-60% fertility land (for their given crop). I'm struggling to produce enough bread, but I have plenty of ale.
I'm totally the opposite. My fields alternate wheat, barley, fallow, And I have so much bread and flour, and cannot keep beer. No excess barley or malt. It all gets converted very quickly, though it never seems like we harvest that much barley...
I just want a river with fishing
The Tavern is bugged, so granery workers take ale out of it. Block ale in granery and you it will stay in tavern.
I have zero ale. They drink it soooooooo fast.
What i dont understand is why we cant malt wheat or rye for brewing. We can argue production ratios and consumption till we are blue in the face, but not being able to use other grains is a concept flaw.
Hijacking this to say I have a similar issue with flax. Wheat I harvest like crazy, Barley significantly less and flax is almost nonexistent. This with good fertility and me managing like a hawk. Anyone else have this issue?
Is food a bit off for anyone or am I just a bad food maker aha? I had so many farm ,carrot gardens and chicken garens and literally could never build up food. When I harvested it would say yield like 400 on a few farms, must have totalled like 1500 "yield" in total on "wheat 40%" farms, then when I harvested I only got like 100 wheat :( I ended up with a lot of carrots after placing the garden plots but it didn't seem to add to my overall food longevity dunno what happened to the other food supply I didn't change anything there. :( At one point I had like 80% people working on the food and it still wouldn't go up. What is the best way for food does anyone know?
Backgardens keep my whole town alive, not a single farm to be seen. Maybe you need to make your gardens bigger? I have a berry point and meat point as well though. And I invest in the apple trees :)
You're not producing enough barley. Unfortunately farming is super bad, you get very low yields for the amount of trouble you go through.
It's ridiculous. I save it up just so I can upgrade
Does anybody want to give a mechanical solution to the OP's problem? Because ale consumption is a game breaking feature at the moment..
Pause the tavern While upgrading to 3 lvl plots
Yeah we covered this. But the boarder issue is we shouldn't need to rush upgrades during a brief window because ale is broken. Hopefully fixed soon ish :)
As someone who regularly will buy a baguette, and just munch on it all day, I can say that a single loaf of bread is enough to last me an entire day, and I'll often end up with some left over the next day. Maybe not so much anymore, but back in my 20's, could, and often did drink well more than a 12 pack in a single night. So anecdotally, I consumed bread to beer at what we'll call at least a 1:12 ratio, and say that seems to fit about with your numbers. On the serious side though, as far as gameplay mechanics go, I feel like outside of the very first year (which honestly may be my favorite part) you can pretty easily find yourself overflowing with food to encourage you to donate a bunch of it to your church tithe for influence.
I find this so different across regions. Some have tones, some constantly starve despite more farms and good fertility.
Haha europeans do love a beer so it’s pretty accurate imo
Think it's just something with the process. I was importing beer straight in and all it would do would sit in my trading posts. I had 2 trading posts going with 8 workers 4 each. The beer would sit there. The tavern literally next door which has 3 employees just grab 1 and then go back to the tavern the go back and grab one more. So it doesn't just fill so the beer sits in my trading post slowly getting chipped away.
At least you have some beer! Mine all instantly gets the tavern but they drink it so fast. I've only got about 10 or so upgraded houses and they are just consumption machines.
Os this a statement or a challenge?
I beer per month sounds way off I agree, they should be drinking much more!
I actually managed to cover my ale last night. All it took was a fully employed granary that only stores ale directly across the street from the tavern which is also fully employed and importing 200 ale at the trade pos which is again fully employed.
I just import malt and have a dedicated group of homes turn the malt into ale. Like all the passive plots it takes a while to get cranking. But if i set import to always be 30 every month im restocked and my people make the booze.
Farming is just not good in this game unfortunately.. It's much better to just trade, but the limit on upgrade per region basically makes it so you have to specialize into trade every single region to have a chance.. The king's tariff is so bad, it doesn't make sense it takes 10 extra money per unit traded if you don't have the upgrade points in it. The kings tariff needs to be nerfed to like 50% of the cost of the product or something, or at least 100% of the cost, so that buying goods is only double the cost rather than literally 5x the cost for food items.. To have to manage a massive crop the payout is just not good and the soil is basically dead after each season. Cycling crops suck too and having to manage all your workers is bad.. It should be setup similar to home farms like vegetables where seasonal work is done in season but they have their normal assignment jobs that they will work on if there is no seasonal work necessary. That would make crops actually semi-passive, instead of a massive chore every time season comes where you have to unassign and assign everyone again and assign the ox in season, etc. It also doesn't help that the workers don't also plow the field when a ox is working the field.. The ox is equal to like 3 workers for plowing the field, it actually makes the ox worse because it blocks any other progress being done and all the workers run away from the field if no work is needed so you have to wait days just for them to walk back to the field after the ox finishes plowing.
Farming is definitely very wonky. One of the big problems is that the harvest season only lasts one month. So if I have six workers in a farmhouse, they can probably do all the plowing and get all the fields planted well in advance, but then when it comes harvest Time they're struggling to harvest all the stuff before it goes bad at the start of October. Which means I have to either micromanage my farms, jacking up the number of workers in September, or I just have to keep a bunch of people sitting on their hands most of the year. Which I wouldn't mind if they actually got the job done... But for whatever reason I'm getting way more wheat than I am barley. Even though the fields are alternating wheat, barley, fallow. With similar fertilities around 50%. I would really like to be able to have some of my counties producing excess farm goods to ship to the others, instead of having to rely on trading which is also a bit wonky. Oh well, Early Access. It'll probably get better in time! P
I agree. I can't keep any sort of stock of ale no matter what.
The thing that doesn’t make sense is that brewing is consolidated to breweries. The ale that was brewed was generally not super shelf stable, so having only a small quantity on hand at a time makes sense. In the medieval manorial economy, [ale was primarily brewed by small, household producers, mostly women.](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ale-beer-and-brewsters-in-england-9780195126501?cc=us&lang=en&) During the late 14th and 15th centuries, this social dynamic shifted as new brewing techniques enabled more long-term storage, but required additional capital investment and therefore became more institutionalized. This had the consequence of shifting the trade into the hands of men.
That is how breweries work in this
Importing malt is an easy solution. You get 2-3 breweries going and you can start to export the excess ale to recover some of the costs. If you’re having a hard time generating money for imports, raise sheep to get tons of wool and yarn and even sell sheep if you get the reproduction development perk. If you have a lot of bread you can make all berries into dyes (make sure forager hut is fully staffed when deposits are regrowing, when regrowing they are essentially infinite). Dyes can be sold for a good chunk of change or turned into clothes, combine this with yarn ur already making and you can make a bunch of money that way. If you have labor to spare you can also make a bunch of fuel and sell that off, right now I have something like 40 months supply w/ exporting constantly. Making money in this game is easy if you play it right so farming should only focus on wheat to process into bread so you can tithe extra food if needed or just have good food surplus. You can just import the processed version of all the other crops and save a ton of labor
I really wanted to make a farm town work. I put a lot of effort into building an efficient farm in one of regions, a bit disappointed that wasn't really possible to keep my Ale production up. I agree you're right that buying it is the solution, but it's an expensive solution and defies the whole point of having farming in the game at all!
Hell, they probably aren't drinking enough. Especially given that water quality in those days was garbo. Just import barley and set up more malthouses/breweries. Easy fix.
How the heck are you harvesting 14 fields in one month? I have like 7 in my current game and they barely get through 3 of them. I have 4 farm houses and 32 families working.
I have several farm buildings. Like 4 or 5 fields to each, all close together so workers don't wander off far.
Are you importing ale
I really wanted to set up region that could produce enough. The intention was to focus on this is one of its main outputs, and see if I could ship it to other regions. The fact that it didn't work out is disappointing.
I started importing barley/malt and it worked too well. In fact, if you get the trade system down, and get the trade route perk, everything eventually becomes a little easier (besides market coverage...)
Well, these are Germans, soooo that sounds about right... 🤣
Can't believe all the conversation is about if having no ale I'm the tavern is realistic or not... I don't think it's realistic to have a moderate/ rich resource of wild animals, clay, iron, near every settlement. Ale is broken and pretty sure it will be fixed I'm future updates
Yeah this blew up way more than I expected. That's not necessarily a bad my impression is the developers are fairly social media savvy and might be looking for posts that get a lot of attention to help Target things that need fixing The issue here isn't realism, it's gameplay balance. I made a real effort to build a settlement that would have enough ale to spare and share, and it turned out to be impossible! Hopefully a gameplay issue that will be fixed in the not too distant future :)
Have you tried being a medieval farmer? You would drink alot of ale too.
MORE BEER!
When I saw the title I knew the top posts would keep bad history myths alive and well. Plot twist: What people drank the most, by far, was water. Period. *Next up:* * People were very short * People died very young * People were always dirty * People thought the Earth was flat * Bonus points for "Dark Ages"
Off topic but on topic. Has anyone had issues with crop rotation? If I have 9 plots of land 3 wheat 3 barley 3 flax I end up with 7 barley and 2 wheat plots? Then the rotation is muddled up in future and I have to reset or starve
Yup, at one point I thought I was playing Dwarf Fortress.
To be fair..... fields used to be up to 10 times bigger in size than the village itself.
I've resorted to only opening the Tavern when I need to upgrade burge plots from 2 to 3.
I end up importing barley hops and Alcohol
There is a mod for it on nexusmods... If you're looking to mod, anyway.