"I'm going to be a lion tamer!"

....No. No you're not. You're going to pick vegetables and you're going to love it.

Alas Crewer. It had some great years. It had some not so great years. At the end mass starvation reduced its population to the point where I felt it wasn't worth saluaging. Sad thing is I saw it coming, but was unable to enact corrective measures fast enough to avoid disaster. It didn't help that as I combated extinction all three orchards and my two large sheep pastures succumbed to infestation. Those provided a goodly amount of food. Not enough to provide salvation, but their loss added more nails to the coffin lid.

After debating the merits of dead-is-dead, I elected to restore Crewer as it was in the early-mid 80s, before embarking on the course that I believe led to its downfall. I devoted almost the whole of my efforts into beefing up the food supply. At year 97-redux I'm to the point where I can safely add other things without fear of famine.

My original mines are about the exhaust themselves. I've footprints for FIVE more laid out, but will build only two. The others are simply long-range planning. Likewise I've footprints for two new quarries, though there's no rush for those.

Opened a second school. Caused a stoppage of expansion for some years while spare folk for labor and building were all but non existent. Both schools are finally cranking out graduates. Manpower is at an acceptable level.

Here's http://i.imgur.com/AzgBD9c.jpg showing my new crop fields (three), pastures (two) and orchards (two). The second school is seen. The footprint for a second hospital is in place. My thought is that it is staffed by only one worker, who can rejoin the labor force as/if needed. The building will be there if I suffer a series outbreak of disease and don't want folk traveling great distances while sick. BTW, There is another crop field and orchard off screen to the left. They are constructed but not functional.

Note that this time my orchards are separated by distance and grow different trees. My pastures are both separated and house different animals (sheep/cattle). Crop fields, when they connect, grow different crops. I hope in this way to minimize food loss from infestation. (At least one of my old orchards needs to be redone to insure safety.) BTW, There is another crop field and orchard off screen to the left. They are constructed but not functional.

I plan to construct a chapel when resources allow. Peripheral, but it does boost happiness, which isn't a bad thing. Low priority.

I'll probably add a second brewer out in the sticks as resources allow, again for the happiness boost. Low priority.

Yeah, I desperately want a town-hall for its statistics. It's on hold until I get more stone and iron. With most new food production units in place I hope to replenish my reserve of those. I'd normally trade for it, but burned through my once vast stockpile of wool (my chief trade item) buying seeds and livestock.

I have surprisingly few deaths from travel-distance, especially considering how spread out my town is. One every several years is about the limit, during the good times at any rate.

BTW, do you contribute to the official Banished forums under a slightly different name?

-Decrepit-

Yes, that would be me.

The distance starvation thing isn't too troublesome if one is building "smartly" - typically people new to the game start seeing dozens per year go and start complaining. My first 500+ town I made the mistake of ordering some land cleared and lost like 20 at once, lol. These days I usually only lose a few a year. But if you actually fill up a whole Large map, you run into it more and more.

800+ populations it starts to get worse and worse depending on how one is building. From your screenshot mini-map, you're not actually all that spread out in terms of floor-tile distance yet, I think.

Oh and I realized you're using stone houses ... I always forget about those and how much stone they take up. I've yet to use them (I find them ugly), so my stone needs are pretty minimal after a while. I don't build too many stone roads, either, just a few main ones here and there.

Graveyards are the only thing I use for happiness - to prevent them from getting unhappy. I personally don't see any happiness benefit from the other things. Only citizens I have with less than 5 happiness stars are the ones who lost spouses when no graveyard or graveyard is full, and that almost never increases again, even with ale and churches and wells all over the place.

I'm worried. For some years my population stagnated. Never had more than ten laborers / builders, and occasionally needed to reduce specialties to get by. That's not what has me worried. Rather, I now have seventy-plus laborers / builders. This seems a repeat of what happened before the town was ruined beyond salvage by mass starvations. (I reverted to an earlier save.) There are differences. This time I have vastly more food production capacity. If it's cyclic, I can hold out some years longer and hope things sort themselves out. Plus, I decided to construct replacement mines very near the original mines rather than out in the boonies, so created no new homes for that purpose. On the other hand, Adding lots of new fields, orchards and pastures itself led to many new home constructions.

Is there some trick to combating this? Or does one ride it out and hope for the best????

On a more mundane topic, here is http://i.imgur.com/0SHZtEK.jpg. Look closely and you'll notice the chicken pen is, at 19x16, slightly smaller than the companions. That didn't bother me until I learned how to combat infestation with minimal loss of livestock. Problem is, if those chickens become infected, I can't swap with any other pen without that pen losing animals due to size reduction. I could not enlarge the pen at that location. It had to go. Luckily, I had a spare regulation 20x20 pen already set up. I transferred chickens to it, then demolished the 19x16 pen. Here's http://i.imgur.com/9tyQUOo.jpg. Two orchards (pear / peach), two crop fields (pumpkins / squash), a much needed barn. All are one-person fields/orchards, utilizing efficient dimensions taken from a website. Doesn't look half bad in my opinion, and will net me yet more food.

I grabbed a few more images of my farming area. Here we are http://i.imgur.com/fOGvjrK.jpg. These are older fields created prior to the mass starvation that did me, or would have had I not loaded an old save. http://i.imgur.com/PF0QLJC.jpg. My old concept was to build an elaborate market district here. Much of it was in place when mass starvation hit. http://i.imgur.com/wrPVdm3.jpg Seen are my very first fields and orchards. The small fields are okay. The orchards are inefficient. Additionally, there are two plum orchards next to each other, a no no. I'll raze them and start afresh once new orchards began producing.

My town suffered an outbreak of dysentery. Only two citizens became infested. They went straight to hospital and were cured. Ho hum. I am NOT complaining!

Distance starvation: I had a brain fart this morning (after posting my prior message) and sent a bunch of people off to gather iron, forgetting it was borderline late autumn. Not pleasant. I had nowhere close to twenty deaths, but still...

There are a few "forest nodes" out in the semi boonies. I place stockpiles, a barn, and when practical a woodcutter reasonably close so that they are somewhat self sufficient. But yeah, the stuff I've been doing lately is reasonably compact with lots of storage and again woodcutters. (My town already has nine cutters. I don't want folk to travel over far in winter in search of firewood..)

Yeah, I like stone houses for their better heat retention. I wonder if they catch fire less easy than wood homes? When they DO catch fire they burn as thoroughly as wood, sad to say. Doesn't help that firefighting seems broken. Hmm...it dawns on me that all four or five of my fires began with wood structures. Coincidence?

I'm a fan of graveyards too. At first I thought to rely on wells for increased happiness. But they are resource intensive, and don't help fight fires to boot. Their one advantage is size. They can be placed in locations that otherwise can't hold a happiness enhancer. As to chapels, establishing one raised my happiness meter half a heart all by itself. So long as one has resources and space to spare, why not? With a staff of one, it doesn't strain the workforce. Taverns? I have one, and might build another. Just for fun. When specialties need to be axed, it's almost always the first to go.

-Decrepit-

A trick to what? Controlling numbers of excess laborers? No, not really. That's just about controlling general population growth, which appears to be a very tricky balance that no one has truly figured out yet. Some say keeping the number of houses built at an approx. 1:3 (or was it 2:3) ratio of potential "families" works well (you need the Town Hall to see that), others say just build a few houses a year, etc. I tend to build 2-4 houses twice a year, but depends on size of town at the time.

Citizens can breed from age 10 to age 40, and can live to 75-85. Up to three kids each couple, I think. When the move in together, it takes 2-3 season (or something) before the first kid. If you have Schools, it delays breeding age by about 6-10 years, but students can move out/have kids before they're actually advlts, if you keep building new houses and the AI is trying to "staff" them for efficient worker distribution.

So if you don't have some kind of ideal build/birth/death ratio going on, you end up with lots o' laborers, then sometimes a shortage because they're all dying at the same time (within the same one or two seasons).

Citizens (including kids) eat about 100-125 food per, each year ... so food production each year has to match/exceed that or you quickly get in trouble without realizing it (it creeps up on you over a few years).

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The "problem" with this game is we have no concrete information re: majority stat mechanics. Hehe. So yeah, it's just play/design design I suppose (re:happiness). I never notice any difference. I have 5 happy stars (overall rating) all the time, except when a few die without a graveyard then it might drop by half a star and never goes up again until those individual citizens actually die (even with churches, taverns, etc.). I once just had one couple who both had only 1 happy star each, which kept the overall rating to 4.5 forever. They would not get happy.

I also don't care about every individual citizen having 5 full health hearts, so I don't tend to bother with herbalists unless I don't have all the food groups for a long time, since you can get 5 overall heart rating without them...seems to just be a preference thing. I'm sort of a minimalist.

I haven't filled up a whole Large myself yet, but I have had it where citizens were walking just about half the map distance on a regular basis. I can only imagine building edge to edge, think that would take a lot of planning/efficiency and I tend to get sloppy at the half-way point, haha.

I've heard stone houses do likely decrease the percentage chance of them catching fire by a bit, but I don't think anyone knows any true numbers. Once on fire, however, like you said, they burn the same. Best thing is to put 2 or even 3 spaces between all houses, which seems to prevent fire from spreading much.

I generally play with Disasters off, tho. I tried them, and the whimsy of the tornadoes ticked me off too much (if you get a bad one, it can be Game Over or at least a serious rebuild of half your town or more while scrambling to prevent a death spiral that = game over anyway) - not my kind of stress level, so I gave up on it.

I'd like to get a town past 1000 citizens someday, but I have a hard time focusing on a single town for that long at the moment, since most of the fun for me is the start of the game/early trading goals etc (up to about 300-400 people or so), then I get kinda bored, now.

Edit: man, sometimes I talk too much.