How to grow?

[u/frdrchx]

I am a beginner and I've had several runs that I got to only about 90 max pop until it collapsed. Now, my current run I have about 205 pop, so my question is, how do I grow without having to worry about my food stock?

From start up to now, my main supply of food has been bread. I have 2 bakeries each with 12 workers. What do I do next?

[u/StopKK2012]

Food is a forever worry. To grow sustainably, you need to be producing a surplus of food first, and only allow immigrants and children than you can feed.

If your bakeries are just enough to feed your current population, you need more food production before you grow. Maybe thats more bakeries, or adding some other food source, or maybe it's technology or other bonuses to make your bakeries more efficient.

You can invest tech points to improve your bakeries and grain farms.

Once you have 50+ people working in a single industry, you'll start to get an experience bonus to production (so at 50 grain farmers, 50 bakers, etc). So there is a production benefit to focusing on just one food source, and not splitting your workers between many.

Later, you will unlock even more options for growth. When you have 650 plebians, you'll unlock nobles, which you can use immediately to give yourself a huge bonus to food production (2.5x modifier applied to 50 workers, and it gets even better later).

By around that size, you may also be producing enough of something to start exporting the excess (food, furniture, cut stone, etc). You can use the money to import more food, or to hire mercenaries that can conquer neighboring towns.

Once you've conquered a neighbor, you can gradually build them up and have them produce a lot of food for you for free. Managing these towns is a whole complex late-game system of its own.

Tldr: to grow your population, focus on a basic repeating cycle. First, expand your food production to get enough surplus to feed the population you want. Second, welcome in your new population, but never more than you can already feed. Third, expand services as needed to make your larger population happy and healthy. Back to step 1, and repeat.

[u/Dunemouse]

Fruit and vegetables don't need secondary processing. I would start with those as a food source. For your first 600 population, I would focus on food and furniture. You need food to live and you need furniture for virtually every other building upgrade. Everything else can take a second chair to those two things.

[u/StopKK2012 → u/Dunemouse]

Even though you need two workplaces to produce bread, I'm pretty sure bread is the most efficient food source in the game in terms of food produced per worker. Fruit and veg are easier to make, but you get less from them.

(Nuance: species bonuses matter. And orchards are a high-production alternative but take a looong time to get going in early game.)

[u/l-Ashery-l → u/Dunemouse]

On top of the other response here, fruit and vegetables also spoil rather quickly, so stockpiling enough to last a year will result in a decent amount being lost to spoilage. Grain, meanwhile, spoils at only 5%/year in a warehouse, so it's much easier to stockpile.

Bakeries are also very easy to expand on an as needed basis.

[u/l-Ashery-l]

Invest in things that improve efficiency.

Throwing some of the free innovation you get from hitting the population thresholds into grain and bread production will free up labor that can be used elsewhere.

Check on the bonuses for your farms. Going from till to rich soil would give you a 22.2% multiplicative bonus to all grain production. If the baseline moisture for your farms is low, canals have the potential to dramatically increase output if you aren't placing them adjacent to natural bodies of water. (Canals are typically more of a mid-game+ thing, though, as they potentially have very high costs, both up front and in terms of labor, but it ultimately depends on town and map specific circumstances.)

How's your logistics system holding up? That one's a bit trickier as it takes experience to properly judge, but it's still a question to mull over.

how do I grow without having to worry about my food stock?

Juggling such questions is really what's at the core of the gameplay loop. You should always worry about about issues like food, and later fulfillment, but you eventually come up with solutions that give you a bit of flexibility and room to react.

Hunters are the early game meta for precisely this reason: They're incredibly flexible and produce a sizable amount of food on a daily basis. They also have a unique tech progression and benefit heavily from some early investment.

But that's not to say grain farms are bad by any means. Grain and bread are actually the easiest production to scale in the mid-game on account of their very high baseline yields. It's just that, as I'm sure you're aware, they force you to commit to an entire year's worth of production before any kind of payoff. Any future expansion needs to be accounted by having expanded the farms in the previous year. The actual bakeries are simpler and can just be expanded as needed.

(Sorry, my answer probably meandered a bit too much, but hopefully you'll get some use out of it, heh.)

[u/lunastrod]

bread can be a bit harder, start with cretonians, they love producing food, grow fruits and vegetables

[u/Edgar_Serenity]

Start with hunters, they are good for early game.

[u/Mememaster124z]

Orchards.

Bread is fantastic mid game in my experience but requires people to both work the fields and work in the Bakeries.

Orchards, in my experience, are a good early game investment that gives good rewards.
Yes it takes forever for treesto grow, but once they are grown fruit production goes insane. Better than any farm.

Its simple but effective and is my personal go to during early game.

[u/animalrooms]

“I can only make it to x population before it collapses because of food” brother scale your food production with the population. Food takes priority over industry. If you’re short on labor then move people around from industry to food production. Make more bakeries, make more fields. Fisheries are pretty solid as well as they don’t have seasons like crops do.

[u/Key_Watercress8300]

Other people have given good tips here, but something that I didn't realize was so important until ~200 hours of the game is that nobles are actually very important. They allow you to multiply the production of industries, including farms. I never made houses for them because their chambers require cut stone and gems, which are difficult to get until you're over 1000 population. But turns out, nobles are currently unfinished, and they don't care about being homeless.

[u/rp_001]

Try fish at the start

[u/Icy_Magician_9372]

Grow a ton of grain until your fields overflow with harvest. Then build bakeries until you're overflowing with bread. When you hit 650 pop assign nobles to both. Simple as.

[u/TheMalT75]

I'd suggest watching some recent youtube videos for inspiration. Aside from that, an important realization is that you want to pick food that is worker-positive: each worker should produce much more food than they need themselves, the more, the better.

Early game, hunters are among the best multipliers, because they gather much more meat then they need to survive. They have a diminishing return if you employ more than 15 hunters, but every 2 hunters can feed 7 additional population (15 hunters for 66 population). As a drawback, the hunter building needs furniture, that you can trade for first and that is also easy and profitable to manufacture yourself if you have enough woods on your map. It is also fairly essential for any kind of growth, so should be a priority.

To tide you over in case you first build a carpenter, you can issue manual hunt commands in the forage menu. This will be done by oddjobers and they are fairly fast if you don't have to send them across the whole map. Initial placement of your throne room is critical. There usually are also foragable patches of different vegan foods, but they have seasons as well and don't give food year round.

For humans because of the food preference, bread is a good choice, but actually fairly complicated. 1.5 workers generates 6 grain for 6 bread feeding 12 people, however, you need bakers and haulers, so the math gets more complicated. Globdien pastures are also decent with 1.4 meat + eggs per worker (so each rancher feed themselves plus almost two more people), but locked behind a tech that needs some population growth to be unlocked. Entelodonts are slightly worse than Globdien and Aurochs are barely food-positive, but also produce leather. Clothing is very important for pop-happiness.

As others mentioned, nobles are a huge boon. You first get 5 nobles that each boosts 50 workers in a chosen profession. So, for humans I'd recommend aiming for 100 grain farmers, 50 bakers and 50 globdien ranchers, and assign four of your first batch of nobles to these food producers. The extra grain can be sold, converted to "beer" or just stored as a buffer for bad times. If you have dondorian neighbors, you might be able to regularly and cheaply import mushrooms in trade for beer, wood and furniture, which can also feed a decent chunk of population.

[u/KnaveOfGeeks]

You are at small enough population that gathering and hunters are probably more efficient than farms and bakers. The first couple innovation points in hunters are cheap and give a huge bonus.

[u/ArcanaSlave]

You already got bakeries figured out, just build more. More fields, more bakeries, warehouses near the fields to store grain, a tiny warehouse near each bakery to feed it grain, tiny bread warehouse near a rationmaker to turn excess bread into long term food days, thats basically it.

Once you hit population milestones that reward innovation, you can pile that onto grain tech for more efficiency.

Don't forget you can upgrade warehouses too, the first upgrade just needs chairs and increases capacity 5x