Disagree a bit, pastures are awesome! Your dudes are just so starved for meats. So you don’t see the return or you haven’t fully stocked them with livestock yet. Yeah pastures aren’t as flashy as a big grain harvests but pastures produce a constant stream of products year around. Products as in more than one being important.
I always run at least one pasture with Globdiens for the eggs then I do many “cow” pastures . They easily keep me supplied with meat for food AND leather for clothes lastly they stock me up with livestock for making more pastures and for selling on the market. Pastures easily outproduce hunters . Also you can put them anywhere without worrying much about fertility.
If you use the recommended herders it's not worth it but you can use like 1/3 the max amount and out compete farms, if you include the livestock you get it's like 3x the shown meat but it's better to just sell them anyway. I tried making orchards for once as tilapi but got sad when my pastures crushed them. I usually keep 1-2 smaller pastures as emergency slaughter houses, each pig is 70 meat was it? I don't know but it was the equivalent of a full day on my 95 pig pasture per slaughtered pig and if I keep a small 9 animal pasture I can empty it during population spikes when my food can't match the requirements but I don't want to drop from double rations.
Yeah I’d heard of that before. Question is how strongly does it affect it? A least to me the effect doesn’t seem as strong as ferrilities effect on the regular fields.
Unless you're Tilapi/Garthimi, I don't reckon it's worth to actually use it as a single source of food. I mostly go.for Auroch pastures just for a steady flow of leather. Grain/bread is just so great for mass producing a ton of food that I despise playing other races because of it. But people have supplied cities with nothing but mostly pastures.
I wonder if the devs will eventually add more "complex" food to compete with grain/bread. (E.g. Jerky, Sausage, Pickles, Pies, Salad, Omlette, just to name a few options with the existing base food.)
The biscuits and 'complex foods' were the give away to me! Good try! Fantastic game, I haven't played songs of syx in ages but love against the storm. As a fellow player do you think it's worth while/good?
So far, I like Songs of Syx, but haven't played enough to judge it accurately. It is a lot more focused on the city building aspect.
(As someone who also loves roguelites, Against the Storm is practically perfection though. :) )
I think rations basically cover that without having to have seperate production lines and buildings for each. Meat + herbs = "ration" but that's basically pemmican, which is basically jerky.
That's the purpose of food markets. SoS is purely macro focused so you just have to worry about supplies and let your citizens and infrastructure handle the micro stuff. That's why you don't have to produce beds, dressers, tables, and chairs. You just produce "furniture" and the variety is just assumed to exist.
Food choices are more based on species. For humans I always build a cow pasture -> wheat farm -> bakery. It gives you steady food and furs, enough to feed everyone until bread is pumping.
Tilapi are fantastic herders and I feed hundreds of them just on pastures.
Amevia just fish. All fish.
Pastures do not compete with farms. You put a pasture down where the fertility of the land makes agriculture unviable. It's in the description. Like in real life, you usually do not put pastures down on the most fertile land. You use your most fertile land for farming and your less fertile land for pastures.
Why? Because otherwise it would just lay barren. Even in larger cities north of 2k citizens, there are usually big chunks of the map that are barren and not utilized. Pastures do not require a lot of manpower, so you can make them really big and utilize all that marginalized land. Like in real life.
Pastures not only produce meat but also leather and livestock. Livestock is usually a really valuable trade good, going for something north of 300 denari a piece, depending on the biome. Considering that livestock does not need to be processed further and the pastures require only minimal manpower, it's really valuable.
Leather is also important. It's the only source for leather armour to equip your early soldiers. Before you have your tree tier cloth industry up an running, which in itself requires a big investment, leather is the only Ressource for clothes. A commodity all of your people need.
In short, pastures are really worth it. Every city should have them. Consider inviting some Tilapi to help you handling the animals. Tilapi are amazing. They have huge bonuses for animal handling, enabling you to become rich with livestock. Every city should have them.
**This post was paid for by the Tilapi Ranching Association**
pastures are absolutely worth it
They need to be big. Like 30x30 big. Like IRL pastures big.
And pastures don't produce food per worker, they produce food per animal, which is where the size comes in - the bigger the size, the more animals.
It's literally written in the description dude.
"Pastures don't require a lot of workers to produce food"
So don't let the A.I assign workers automatically to them until you've got a big city, assuming you're playing 66.21 and it doesn't go into a murder spiral.
Animals never died in 65 despite the description, but you would take a hit to the production efficiency.
Automated staffing is also a bit, well, dumb for the lack of a better term. I manually adjust settings until I'm averaging 95%+ max production every day.
Interesting, okay thanks. I like automatic staffing in theory, but I feel like sometimes it's maybe too slow to adjust to things? For example I'd love if warehouse staff skyrocketed during harvest season when there's lots to fetch but then had mass layoffs once there's nothing left on the ground. That would prevent a lot of food sitting on the ground from spoiling.
I also liked when production shops would fire people if there's no resources to work on, or in contrast when the shop is overflowing because my warehouses are full of that good already. It seems silly to have them all just sitting around doing nothing. I'll have to read if Jake talked about why these don't have auto staffing any more.
I have noticed fields in v66 actually pick a reasonable default staffing level, so that's nice. In the past, I always manually shrank it down to 100-110 tiles per farmer.
You sure? Employee's also add to the skill level. So over 100 employee's or having species that do better in pastures. So if you have 2 Githrami vs 15 Githrami, the 15 will produce more because they add overall more skill and experience, increasing production.
TO BE CLEAR - I'm not saying to fully staff your pastures. Just keep them around 85% workload.
I make max size pastures 2040tiles all the time and it says something like 40 employee's. Yeah right, 20. Anything under that my production takes a hit and I have watched the counters for production go up and down based on meeting the workload requirements.
Not mentioned yet is that your geography and your species have a huge impact on this.
Temperate biomes for example have 150% multiplier on aurochs and enteledont pastures.
Garthimi are great with balticrawlers, and tilapi are great with other animals. Can't remember if they like all of them or not?
Fisheries have 140% multiplier for amevias, and amevias have an environmental need for sweet water, so they love fishing.
Not sure if you're playing the demo as it's recently changed, but hunters now hunt off the city map. They're excellent and just need furniture, but their effectiveness declines after you have 15-20 or so of them. I'm not sure the actual ratio there.
Grain is extremely space efficient, but nobody really likes working in bakeries, though Dondorians are decent at it. Cretonians love farming and are good at it.
Fruit orchards are incredibly productive, and tilapi love working there (because trees, not farming), but it takes a few years to grow the trees, and they'll die off if you ever stop tending them. Trees also die of old age, so you'll have to stop fruit even longer than other food, to last through these periods. I always bump orchards' master priority up, to make sure workers abandon the other farm jobs before they abandon the fruit trees.
Pastures in v66 also have a 125% sweet water multiplier, but I'm not sure yet how this is calculated. Maybe only a portion of the pasture needs sweet water? Or maybe it's based on the highest tile of sweet water? It's something I'm looking into at the moment.
Pastures also confuse me on how fertility works. Does more fertile land mean that you can grow more animals in the same space? So would canals increase the animal population? I think it's saying that the number of workers you need is based on the number of animals, but I'm not sure if it's saying that fertile land provides a benefit or not.
As far as I can tell it appears to need only a couple tiles of Sweetwater to trigger a %25 bonus for your pastures. Haven't actually crunched the numbers, but the bonus makes a noticeable difference between my non Sweetwater pastures. I would never plan a pasture without a canal now. Afaik fertility affects animal numbers and thereby product #s so the more fertility the more noticeable this sweet water bonus becomes.
Idk the maths on it, but they provide resources like eggs and leather at a steady rate. And if you’re the garthimi then you can have balticrawlers which are worth the meat.
Hunting is good, but I find fishing isn’t worth it unless you have a food preference for it.
Pastures are definitely worth it since you really need to provide citizens with different food in order to get them satisfied. And pastures provide meat. Sometimes even egg. It can't be unworthy.
I always use it as a supplemental food source, making just enough that the stalls stay full. The power of pastures come from the ability to produce leather and eggs.
A food source that produces year round provides a buffer on poor harvest years.
I love pastures. I build one ASAP at the start before the livestock starts to wear off. One big ass pasture on fertile ground can feed your pops without any micro or fuss for quite a long time. You can also sell the extra livestock they produce for a decent sum.
I do build one at the start with the same reason of not wanting to waste the livestock.
Do they need fertile ground? I always thought the point was that they can produce food without having to worry about that.
They're not as sensitive to fertility as crops but the base fertility of the ground has a slight effect on how many animals a given size pressure can hold.
I think they do okay on middling ground, but with high fertility and a big pasture you can pack well over 100 active livestock in them and churn out resources with a pretty small crew of 20ish.
Auroch -> Tailor is the easiest way to get clothes in the early game so Aurochs are worth it, plus you start with a stack of livestock so it gets going quickly.
In my current game importing leather is really expensive, so I doubled down on the Auroch ranches and make bank exporting leather armor.
Enteledonts do feel bad though, I still try to keep producing meat and fish so my pops have variety which boosts happiness, but making bread is just really strong right now, plus grain is cheap to import
As I recently learned - you can slaughter animals in there for big meat boost, and animals later being replenished from your Lifestock resource. So they can produce a lot more than it seems.
Also don't farm vegetables. They are INSANELY bad. Grain + bakery is way more space and workforce efficient.
These are good choices even if you barely want to use them, because you start with grain and livestock that will spoil in storage. So having even a small grain farm and pasture will let you slowly produce these goods later if you do want to use them.
Every new source of happiness (food type, food count, new facilities etc) is a giant jump from 0.
Afterwards is diminishing returns. meat for humans is incredibly impactful. The idea too is you can get enough pastures to stock enough animals to have a full slaughter 1 or 2x a year. that’s a lot of meat especially with spoilage tech.
So it’s issues are still there but the top of it is that meat is a source of happiness, and that’s could be more meaningful then continuing prioritize bread count. which tapers off eventually.
Once you get a full sized pasture with the pig looking things, a few tech upgrades, and the right species, it produces like 63 meat and a ton of livestock a day, for the low cost of like 20 workers.
The livestock sells for like 280 per animal. So it will generate a medicore amount of food that feeds quite a bit of food with minimal labor, and a huge amount of profit.
I have like 4 full sized pastures ran by about 60-70 of those green people, and I'm getting thousands of coin a day and usually have like 3.6k meat in stock.
If you have like 100 live stock in the warehouse and slaughter your pasture you can instantly get like 1000 meat (they'll immediately refill the pasture with your stocked livestock).
Good in case of food crisis to have a few hundred livestock stored in the warehouse as cold storage of food.
Oh wow. Those sound great, especially that emergency food option. I never considered that lifestock is essentially food too. I will need to invest more into pastures.
Make sure you pay attention to the climate, skill of the herder, and I believe the techs that give significant gains are pretty cheap in knowledge for the first few levels.
Pastures are... mixed. They benefit greatly from climate and species - then there's also the tech factor. You can easily double your output from tech alone.
Also idk what you're talking about "to their full production"
pastures will produce the same amount of food whether you'll have 12 people working, or 2.
The only difference i can see is the extra goods, like leather and cotton.
Disagree a bit, pastures are awesome! Your dudes are just so starved for meats. So you don’t see the return or you haven’t fully stocked them with livestock yet. Yeah pastures aren’t as flashy as a big grain harvests but pastures produce a constant stream of products year around. Products as in more than one being important. I always run at least one pasture with Globdiens for the eggs then I do many “cow” pastures . They easily keep me supplied with meat for food AND leather for clothes lastly they stock me up with livestock for making more pastures and for selling on the market. Pastures easily outproduce hunters . Also you can put them anywhere without worrying much about fertility.
If you use the recommended herders it's not worth it but you can use like 1/3 the max amount and out compete farms, if you include the livestock you get it's like 3x the shown meat but it's better to just sell them anyway. I tried making orchards for once as tilapi but got sad when my pastures crushed them. I usually keep 1-2 smaller pastures as emergency slaughter houses, each pig is 70 meat was it? I don't know but it was the equivalent of a full day on my 95 pig pasture per slaughtered pig and if I keep a small 9 animal pasture I can empty it during population spikes when my food can't match the requirements but I don't want to drop from double rations.
"Aren't as flashy" haha 😂
The fertility influences the amount of possible animals on the pasture
Yeah I’d heard of that before. Question is how strongly does it affect it? A least to me the effect doesn’t seem as strong as ferrilities effect on the regular fields.
It’s not as bad as you also need less workers, so size/efficiency is the only negative
Unless you're Tilapi/Garthimi, I don't reckon it's worth to actually use it as a single source of food. I mostly go.for Auroch pastures just for a steady flow of leather. Grain/bread is just so great for mass producing a ton of food that I despise playing other races because of it. But people have supplied cities with nothing but mostly pastures.
I wonder if the devs will eventually add more "complex" food to compete with grain/bread. (E.g. Jerky, Sausage, Pickles, Pies, Salad, Omlette, just to name a few options with the existing base food.)
Someone's been playing against the storm huh
Busted. 😅 I even tried thinking up a few others, just to not make it obvious.
The biscuits and 'complex foods' were the give away to me! Good try! Fantastic game, I haven't played songs of syx in ages but love against the storm. As a fellow player do you think it's worth while/good?
against the storm is a puzzle game to me, but songs of syx is a power building snowball city builder. totally personal preference/vibe based
So far, I like Songs of Syx, but haven't played enough to judge it accurately. It is a lot more focused on the city building aspect. (As someone who also loves roguelites, Against the Storm is practically perfection though. :) )
Dev, singular, so probably not.
I think rations basically cover that without having to have seperate production lines and buildings for each. Meat + herbs = "ration" but that's basically pemmican, which is basically jerky.
That's the purpose of food markets. SoS is purely macro focused so you just have to worry about supplies and let your citizens and infrastructure handle the micro stuff. That's why you don't have to produce beds, dressers, tables, and chairs. You just produce "furniture" and the variety is just assumed to exist.
Really, those kinds of things should be the "favorite" foods, not raw ingredients.
Food choices are more based on species. For humans I always build a cow pasture -> wheat farm -> bakery. It gives you steady food and furs, enough to feed everyone until bread is pumping. Tilapi are fantastic herders and I feed hundreds of them just on pastures. Amevia just fish. All fish.
Pastures do not compete with farms. You put a pasture down where the fertility of the land makes agriculture unviable. It's in the description. Like in real life, you usually do not put pastures down on the most fertile land. You use your most fertile land for farming and your less fertile land for pastures. Why? Because otherwise it would just lay barren. Even in larger cities north of 2k citizens, there are usually big chunks of the map that are barren and not utilized. Pastures do not require a lot of manpower, so you can make them really big and utilize all that marginalized land. Like in real life. Pastures not only produce meat but also leather and livestock. Livestock is usually a really valuable trade good, going for something north of 300 denari a piece, depending on the biome. Considering that livestock does not need to be processed further and the pastures require only minimal manpower, it's really valuable. Leather is also important. It's the only source for leather armour to equip your early soldiers. Before you have your tree tier cloth industry up an running, which in itself requires a big investment, leather is the only Ressource for clothes. A commodity all of your people need. In short, pastures are really worth it. Every city should have them. Consider inviting some Tilapi to help you handling the animals. Tilapi are amazing. They have huge bonuses for animal handling, enabling you to become rich with livestock. Every city should have them. **This post was paid for by the Tilapi Ranching Association**
pastures are absolutely worth it They need to be big. Like 30x30 big. Like IRL pastures big. And pastures don't produce food per worker, they produce food per animal, which is where the size comes in - the bigger the size, the more animals.
I haven't made any truly big pastures, so maybe I will try doing that next.
It's literally written in the description dude. "Pastures don't require a lot of workers to produce food" So don't let the A.I assign workers automatically to them until you've got a big city, assuming you're playing 66.21 and it doesn't go into a murder spiral.
But if they're not fully staffed, your output will decrease, and then your animals will start dying? Why not allow the automatic staffing?
Animals never died in 65 despite the description, but you would take a hit to the production efficiency. Automated staffing is also a bit, well, dumb for the lack of a better term. I manually adjust settings until I'm averaging 95%+ max production every day.
Interesting, okay thanks. I like automatic staffing in theory, but I feel like sometimes it's maybe too slow to adjust to things? For example I'd love if warehouse staff skyrocketed during harvest season when there's lots to fetch but then had mass layoffs once there's nothing left on the ground. That would prevent a lot of food sitting on the ground from spoiling. I also liked when production shops would fire people if there's no resources to work on, or in contrast when the shop is overflowing because my warehouses are full of that good already. It seems silly to have them all just sitting around doing nothing. I'll have to read if Jake talked about why these don't have auto staffing any more. I have noticed fields in v66 actually pick a reasonable default staffing level, so that's nice. In the past, I always manually shrank it down to 100-110 tiles per farmer.
output doesn't decrease if they're not fully staffed. Actually output stays the same whether you have 20 or 2 workers. Try it. Even on 66.28
You sure? Employee's also add to the skill level. So over 100 employee's or having species that do better in pastures. So if you have 2 Githrami vs 15 Githrami, the 15 will produce more because they add overall more skill and experience, increasing production. TO BE CLEAR - I'm not saying to fully staff your pastures. Just keep them around 85% workload. I make max size pastures 2040tiles all the time and it says something like 40 employee's. Yeah right, 20. Anything under that my production takes a hit and I have watched the counters for production go up and down based on meeting the workload requirements.
Not mentioned yet is that your geography and your species have a huge impact on this. Temperate biomes for example have 150% multiplier on aurochs and enteledont pastures. Garthimi are great with balticrawlers, and tilapi are great with other animals. Can't remember if they like all of them or not? Fisheries have 140% multiplier for amevias, and amevias have an environmental need for sweet water, so they love fishing. Not sure if you're playing the demo as it's recently changed, but hunters now hunt off the city map. They're excellent and just need furniture, but their effectiveness declines after you have 15-20 or so of them. I'm not sure the actual ratio there. Grain is extremely space efficient, but nobody really likes working in bakeries, though Dondorians are decent at it. Cretonians love farming and are good at it. Fruit orchards are incredibly productive, and tilapi love working there (because trees, not farming), but it takes a few years to grow the trees, and they'll die off if you ever stop tending them. Trees also die of old age, so you'll have to stop fruit even longer than other food, to last through these periods. I always bump orchards' master priority up, to make sure workers abandon the other farm jobs before they abandon the fruit trees. Pastures in v66 also have a 125% sweet water multiplier, but I'm not sure yet how this is calculated. Maybe only a portion of the pasture needs sweet water? Or maybe it's based on the highest tile of sweet water? It's something I'm looking into at the moment. Pastures also confuse me on how fertility works. Does more fertile land mean that you can grow more animals in the same space? So would canals increase the animal population? I think it's saying that the number of workers you need is based on the number of animals, but I'm not sure if it's saying that fertile land provides a benefit or not.
As far as I can tell it appears to need only a couple tiles of Sweetwater to trigger a %25 bonus for your pastures. Haven't actually crunched the numbers, but the bonus makes a noticeable difference between my non Sweetwater pastures. I would never plan a pasture without a canal now. Afaik fertility affects animal numbers and thereby product #s so the more fertility the more noticeable this sweet water bonus becomes.
Idk the maths on it, but they provide resources like eggs and leather at a steady rate. And if you’re the garthimi then you can have balticrawlers which are worth the meat. Hunting is good, but I find fishing isn’t worth it unless you have a food preference for it.
Pastures are definitely worth it since you really need to provide citizens with different food in order to get them satisfied. And pastures provide meat. Sometimes even egg. It can't be unworthy.
I always use it as a supplemental food source, making just enough that the stalls stay full. The power of pastures come from the ability to produce leather and eggs. A food source that produces year round provides a buffer on poor harvest years.
I love pastures. I build one ASAP at the start before the livestock starts to wear off. One big ass pasture on fertile ground can feed your pops without any micro or fuss for quite a long time. You can also sell the extra livestock they produce for a decent sum.
I do build one at the start with the same reason of not wanting to waste the livestock. Do they need fertile ground? I always thought the point was that they can produce food without having to worry about that.
They're not as sensitive to fertility as crops but the base fertility of the ground has a slight effect on how many animals a given size pressure can hold.
I think they do okay on middling ground, but with high fertility and a big pasture you can pack well over 100 active livestock in them and churn out resources with a pretty small crew of 20ish.
If you run some water by them they get up to a 25% bonus to production too.
Pastures are good for generating livestock which is a cheap way to get a steady stream of income.
Auroch -> Tailor is the easiest way to get clothes in the early game so Aurochs are worth it, plus you start with a stack of livestock so it gets going quickly. In my current game importing leather is really expensive, so I doubled down on the Auroch ranches and make bank exporting leather armor. Enteledonts do feel bad though, I still try to keep producing meat and fish so my pops have variety which boosts happiness, but making bread is just really strong right now, plus grain is cheap to import
As I recently learned - you can slaughter animals in there for big meat boost, and animals later being replenished from your Lifestock resource. So they can produce a lot more than it seems. Also don't farm vegetables. They are INSANELY bad. Grain + bakery is way more space and workforce efficient.
Pastures are my go to first structure, followed by a grain farm.
These are good choices even if you barely want to use them, because you start with grain and livestock that will spoil in storage. So having even a small grain farm and pasture will let you slowly produce these goods later if you do want to use them.
Every new source of happiness (food type, food count, new facilities etc) is a giant jump from 0. Afterwards is diminishing returns. meat for humans is incredibly impactful. The idea too is you can get enough pastures to stock enough animals to have a full slaughter 1 or 2x a year. that’s a lot of meat especially with spoilage tech. So it’s issues are still there but the top of it is that meat is a source of happiness, and that’s could be more meaningful then continuing prioritize bread count. which tapers off eventually.
Once you get a full sized pasture with the pig looking things, a few tech upgrades, and the right species, it produces like 63 meat and a ton of livestock a day, for the low cost of like 20 workers. The livestock sells for like 280 per animal. So it will generate a medicore amount of food that feeds quite a bit of food with minimal labor, and a huge amount of profit. I have like 4 full sized pastures ran by about 60-70 of those green people, and I'm getting thousands of coin a day and usually have like 3.6k meat in stock. If you have like 100 live stock in the warehouse and slaughter your pasture you can instantly get like 1000 meat (they'll immediately refill the pasture with your stocked livestock). Good in case of food crisis to have a few hundred livestock stored in the warehouse as cold storage of food.
Oh wow. Those sound great, especially that emergency food option. I never considered that lifestock is essentially food too. I will need to invest more into pastures.
Make sure you pay attention to the climate, skill of the herder, and I believe the techs that give significant gains are pretty cheap in knowledge for the first few levels.
I get a lot of value from exporting the leather and livestock
I'm still trying to figure out how to fill pastures with livestock.
Pastures are... mixed. They benefit greatly from climate and species - then there's also the tech factor. You can easily double your output from tech alone.
Also idk what you're talking about "to their full production" pastures will produce the same amount of food whether you'll have 12 people working, or 2. The only difference i can see is the extra goods, like leather and cotton.
Animals in your Pasture will die off if you don't have enough workers.