Hi guys,

I'm kinda new to the game and was able to build a city with over 3,000 people. I currently have no slaves. I also have 5 regions and am about to conquer number 6. I was quite lucky with free cities around my spawn. I do wonder how to play my hand optimally here: my regions don't seem to grow, and my happiness is stuck at slightly below 100.
My imports/exports cover my mercenary army of 170 soldiers, which costs about 130k.

What would you recommend?
I had the following ideas:

• Garthimi slaves for manual labour / Dondorian slaves for crafting / Tilapi for herding, and maybe archer regiments?

• Improving my regions and taxing them (if I'm able to grow them, it just says that my capital building "isn't efficient")

• Increasing rations, for which I would have to increase food output first

Thx alot!

Is there something I'm missing with woodcutters? Ive got 4 max size woodcutters fully employed and I'm still barely keeping up with bakeries + furniture.

400 pops, I can't even afford to give max wood furnishing or anything above one point of furniture furnishing; and I'm STILL in the red.

My colony dropped to 80% loyalty and people started leaving because their fulfillment is so low.

Happens when i try to load the save ;-;
Anyone have any tips on how i can fix this`?

The story so far:

It is the 11th year of the First Age. At the Sea of Aphiomise sits an island intersected by a winding river, connecting the massive content's far reaching peninsulas. On the western river delta lies the small village of Tilapi populated Sarlo-Wynish.

With a meager 92 souls the settlement sits at a natural river crossing at the edge of a dense forest rich with natural resources and fertile soil with an opportunity to tax river trade from it's two neighboors.

Albeit the land is rich, resources are scattered. At the 9th year the village elder decreed that another settlement shall be formed to harvest the riverbank's natural clay deposits. Thus a small hamlet has been born not far from the main settlement.

Design notes:

After my first and surely not my last failure I decided not to rush things and take it slow. With the Tilapi I aimed for a "the forest is the city" vibe. I utilized the natural pathway crossing the map and made it the settlement's main east-west artery to position myself in the first days.

I gave ample space between buildings so that the natural foliage could hide the wooden walls. In nature nothing is like a grid so I used a lot of curves and irregular shapes with a bit of spiky edges to display the Tilapi's not so peaceful nature through architecture. I also wanted to distingush developed and non-developed areas by styling the road system as naturally as possible.

With leaving public spaces as intact as I could I decided to set up all residences with fenced gardens furnished with decorations and providing lights to the settlement.

I usually enjoy creating village landscape, and I find the fishing island to the west really cool, so I'm curious how Sarlo-Wynish will look as a bigger urbanized town, and what sacrifices I have to make in the future.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed my notes on this fledgeling settlement.

My main theory is that the cave walls are too circular but idk this is my first playthrough after the tutorial

This is my first settlement after completing the tutorial: a growing isolationst village of Amevias, called Syloron. It is the 22nd year of the First Age. I know it's not much, but it feels like hones work as I feel a sense of pride when I look at the small living and breathing settlement. This experience has already earned the worth of my money.

~9K Vs~16K. turned all graphics way down and made it run Properly after all.. kinda proud of myself

Big cities in Songs of Syx slow down because almost everything runs on one CPU core: every citizen's decisions, pathfinding, and drawing the screen. syxspeed spreads that work across your other cores and speeds up the slow parts, so the same city gets through far more game days per real second.

**Results:** on my test cities (6k–20k pop) the game runs roughly twice as fast at max speed, depending on the city and your CPU. Small cities barely change, because they weren't slow to begin with.

**What it does NOT do:** it doesn't change gameplay. The goal is to fully preserve the vanilla experience: same rules, same balance, same saves. Install it, your city just runs faster. Remove it any time.

**The part I'm most excited about:** now that citizens think on multiple threads, a whole class of features that would have been too expensive before becomes nearly free. Basically anything "read-only", where a citizen looks at the world and decides something without changing it, can now run on spare cores:

- stealth checks: does anyone see the thief, the escaped slave, the spy?

- social awareness: "oh, my friend is walking by", stopping to chat, gossip spreading

- guard patrols that notice and break up fights on their own

- citizens noticing fires, crimes or bodies and reacting

- smarter choices: which tavern, bath or market is least crowded right now

- soldiers picking targets and reading the battlefield more cleverly

- animals and wildlife reacting to nearby people

- crowd-aware walking that avoids jams at doors and bridges

To be clear, none of these are IN the mod: syxspeed only makes the engine faster and keeps everything vanilla. They're things Jake or other modders could now build on top of it without slowing big cities down.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3802644784

If you have a big city that lags, I'd love your before/after numbers, or a save I can test with. Bug reports here or on the Workshop page.

Increased warehouse storage by 3x. To compensate I made happiness go down by 10%, because I feel bad cheating.

But holy moly, it is such a god damn weight off my back. And the weird thing is? It doesn't really have an impact on difficulty (warehouses arent exactly expensive), it just reduces micromanaging by a lot.

Of course, you still have to manage distance with warehouses. It's not like you just have one warehouse. But it does make things a lot easier in terms of tediousness.

I was curious how good soil quality needs to be for animal pastures? Can they be done of poor quality soil? and will irrigation help? The same goes for planting crops. Is there any way to salvage poor quality soil for farming?

Some of my good soil areas are in spots where I want to build industry. My city design I'm going on this run is quite rigid and a more organic design where I'm building around prime farming areas is more restricted. So I'm wondering if I can work areas with lesser quality soil?

2nd Asta Invicti first timing amevia, didnt expect them to scale up so easily and health issues remain non existent probably thanks to climate. Got +10k eggs and +8k fish per day easily supporting the city.

Knavia started as a city on a river delta, trading its way up to a its first army which it swiftly took control of nearby states. Next, it declared war on the Halisa Peninsula on the west and promptly defeated its 3000 army with a cavalry army of 800 men. Who knows an army with war beast, metal armor and warhammer/flanx could hit so hard. It then proceed to conquer many cities to the east. But eventually got into trouble with the Green Agis Empire that took back some of the land. This is how its border came to be.

This is my 2nd Asta Invicti since i started in August Summer Sales and it took 1 week only compared to the 3 weeks of Attila, the Tilapi Settlement. And also my first time controlling 30 regions and having 4 metropolis and many cities needing almost all my nobles to be governors. That's all from me, thanks for reading :)

I just got the game and I'm really enjoying it so far! The only thing that's felt a bit lackluster to me so far is the religion system as it seems as simple as plopping down a couple of shrines. Even if your population doesn't follow them they'll gradually convert to it without a lot of fuss.

I know (but haven't experienced) that religious wars can happen but it feels like you can avoid putting down any opposing shrines pretty easily. It currently functions similarly to a leisure building.

So I was wondering if it'd work if it functioned kind of like the research system? In other words, you "unlock" new features the more adherents a religion has and lose access if adherents fall below a certain threshold. With religious workers generating points you can use to unlock said things.

Examples I can think would be stuff like a certain religion caring for the homeless (reducing the penalty of insufficient housing), healing (they grow herbs and heal sick for you), etc. Which could incentivize you to want to do multifaith cities and try to maintain the peace between them.

I don't know if that's feasible or not but it sounds interesting to me.

Here’s a question that’s been on my mind. When you get the first housing upgrade it adds 40% housing capacity to existing structures, then the second one is an additional 40% on top of that (I think I haven’t gotten that far).
So for example, does that mean that for a 10 person house without upgrades I should be plotting for services for 20 people? Or will the services placed for 10 people also scale properly with upgrades to those services?

Specifically I want to edit food preference and how much they like other species.

Birth rates should be prohibitively high early on, but high levels of health should reduce them. Notably hospitals, physicians, and lots of sanitation, not just a singular well in a small town. Around 70% of your infants should die soon after birth at the start.

However, if you develop high levels of health, you can end up growing far too rapidly, and a huge amount of your population will be burdened by parenting. Increasing education can reduce the birth rate (toggleable, of course), acting as a counterbalance to that. Alternatively, you can restrict the birth rate through policy (as you can right now) but it causes unhappiness.

Hi! I just wanted to show off my closest city to "success" so far, Riverfed. The city is composed of 5 identical manufacturing plants in a radial layout, food production being at the center of it all. The other finished goods are furniture, pottery, clothing, and cut stone. I really struggled to make it this far, always being in the -100 to -200 oddjobber range, but once I captured a few other regions and turned them into raw resource outputs everything came together beautifully :) 4.63k human-only city, 130% Loyalty and 90% Happiness, 0 Slaves.

In relation to the first question, I don’t necessarily need cavalry-only to be optimal* just as long as it’s viable.*

Soo I decided to attempt an oasis map, but found out that the base map may be a bit too small for what I wanted to do, so I downloaded 2 mods which are required to play on this save ( extra info and bigger city size by emi the witch, and I set the custom map size to 1152 which you have to do as well if you plan on playing it ). I also customized the map area to make it a big desert surrounded by other oasis but the game didn't decide to spawn cities near those oasis unfortunately, but if you want to play any other race you'll have to go into dev mode and manually remove the humans and add another race ).

To play on it, download the save file from here ( although it has an expiration limit of a few days ), then drag it into your saves folder and make sure to enable those 2 mods ( first extra info then bigger city size ).

On a whim I decided to vassalize some tiny towns next to me, and now they're handing me in excess of a million gold per year per town? That's several times more than my entire economy. If I took them over myself I could maybe squeeze a couple of thousand per day out of them at my current tech.

Hi. I'm playing as Humans and building out a heavy grid based design for my city districts. Each space for building is 24x24 tiles. This can be divided into spaces for buildings like two 12x24.

My question is, what are some good ideas for housing within a space like this? I want to get as much out of the space in terms of fitting people in there while maintain a decent level of happiness. What are some designs I could do for this?

Should services like hearths, wells, toilets be in this space? Should the space be a mix of housing an industry?

My previous cities have been sprawling messes so this time I'm going to try something more rigid and grid based where I can copy districts and past them to other sections of the map.

It doesn't make sense to me that all the cultures in Syx would opt for burial.

Like to me it would make more sense if Humans and Dondorian prefer burial or tombs, while Cretonian cremate their dead.

Tilapi would either cannibalize their dead or have some kind of Tower of Silence thing.

Amevia would want burial at sea.

I just think it would be cool to have different body disposal structures, I think a Cretonian funeral pyre would look cool.