I've been playing the past few days, and I have most of the basics down fairly well. I'm maintaining 50-100 residents no problem, so that's a good step up from a few days ago. However I'm always barely maintaining my resource count.
What I mean is that my current town of ~45 residents is running off 3 forrester's lodges each staffed full, and only then am I able to maintain a positive supply of logs and firewood. Constructing any new buildings essentially wastes my firewood supply to 0 for a season or two until I have spare logs for firewood (and I'm only talking about 50-100 logs for additional buildings in a given year). Does this seem normal, or am I mis-managing something?
I'm also concerned with maintaining iron and stone. Both my current town and the previous one I've mined up all surface stone/iron that I could within reasonable distance of my town. I don't want to build quarries because that land can never be used from then on. I've gone about 15 years on my previous town and 10 years on this one, and not once have I seen stone or iron offered through trading. Again, what would be the better strategy in this case?
Best Answer
Regarding the forester lodges, how far are the foresters walking? Do they have houses to live in near the lodges? Do they have stockpiles to drop their wood off at near the lodges? How far do they have to go for food, tools, coats, and herbs when they have a need for those things? Walking can take a lot of time. I've seen students with a large walk time to the school graduate in twice the time of closer students.
Are the lodges overlapping each other or covering lots of area where wood can't grow? There needs to be physical trees within the radius and they need to be not contending with each other.
A full staff of 3 lodges would be 12 foresters, right? That should be overkill. Don't forget to check that they've all got both cut and plant activities active.
Regarding trading for iron and stone, here's a couple of tips.
First, remember to go into the last tab of the trade station window and specify iron and stone as requests, and make sure to set the drop-down to "every time". To maximize the chances, remove other requests.
Second, more trade stations = more trade. I don't expand very fast so I don't know how many trade stations you'd need to support fast growth, but I do know that in my flagship town I have three and am considering building more.
Third, clicking dismiss when you've traded for all you want, to get the trader to leave sooner, might get a new trader sooner. I haven't kept track.
Fourth, remember to have multiple commodities to trade. Some traders are only interested in some things.
Fifth, consider one quarry with one worker. Having a slow trickle of stone can help with minor shortages, and the quarry will last a long, long time under that load.