Topic: What effect growing area?

I know that buildings with growing areas don't need to use all of it to reach 100% but does that really mean they don't produce more if they are given a perfect growing area (min. road and no other buildings/overlap to steal even one hex from potential growing land) or does it really not matter at all how sloppy one is?

I mean can you play widelands like a dirty slob and just slam buildings/roads down anywhere with only a minimum of care to make sure they have some growing area? Or is there a benefit to carefully and neatly laying roads to go around the growing areas? To making sure there are as few unneccesary buildings in that area as possible?

I remember when I first learned that some people played the classic Civilization by "smallpoxing". They just built cities as closely packed as possible, ignoring the losses from overlap. And it worked apparently. Until a patch came out forcing more space between cities.

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To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before

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Well, there is no short answer to this.
It depends on the radius the work area has, and the number of fields needed to have full productivity. E.g. a reed yard or a vineyard needs 3 fields I believe to run at 100% wit a radius of 1 they have max 5 available to use (6 fields around the house minus the flag) so it is pretty easy to block this building from 100 % productivity.
Normal farms however need a bit more space but when carefully placed in 4 x 4 field grids they run at 100% productivity. (you might use the forum search to find the explanation of this from King_of_nowhere)
Frisian farms have more radius, but they don't need that much more fields then the other tribes (only 1 field more at max) however they use a lot of fields in the beginning until the first field is ripe. Therefore in their case it is a good stratgy to overlap the workareas to be able to harvest early with the second farm. As their fields can be used very good for gathering honey it is recommendable to squeeze some beekeepers in as well.
The number of needed fields is calculated by the time a specific plant needs to grow form tiny to ripe divided by the length of a cycle of planting and harvesting. The length of this cycle is dependent on the distance of a field from the buildings flag (the worker needs time to walk to the field and back using 1.8 sec per field) by this it could even make sense to actively block the fields behind the building and use only fields in front of it. This might give an extra punch while staying at 100%. Reaosn is that walking time is calculated as productive time so the 100% just tells you that the farmer is productive 100% of the time and not how much of the theoretical maximum of plants he produces.

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mxb2001 wrote:

In build 21 the overlap graphics are beautiful compared to those of b19 and I thought this meant that overlap was critical. But I guess all those fantastic overlap graphics in b21 might as well be turned off for all the good they do?

well overlapping is important for at least some buildings. Especially in the Frisian tribe

So slob building it is! Saves a lot of time. Just slap anything anywhere and if the building drops below 100% dismantle it again.

I guess this is why I'm not good at the game. I think and plan and make it all neat. Waste of time...

I believe that is not true. Planning is crucial I think. All our "pro" players plan their best setup and continously try to improve it on a per map basis. But only in a way different from what you might have done so far.
- It is improtant to plan and maintain a good road network to avoid traffic jams
- It is important to use the space you have as good as possible. This means e.g. place your farms as dense and not wasting space as it is possible without having them drop below 100%
- Plan your economy and placing of building in a manner that you get short ways for your wares in the production chain to improve efficiency.
- use your wares for something useful. Stockpiling just gives you some security but at the cost of efficiency.
- It is not about having a single building run at 100% it is having the right amount of buildings all running at 100% and to have more of each buildings in the correct proportions then your opponent to outproduce him by the economy.

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I guess you were playing against the AI. Try playing against one of our top players and they will win against you.

Busy indexing nil values

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mxb2001 wrote:

The game is very tree centric! That's OK, I am a tree hugger. Just takes some getting used to.

In this case you should try out the new amazonian tribe. They are the tree tribe whilst our other tribes are just wood lovers not tree lovers.
Especially Empire needs lot of Farms in case there is little fish and game.

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