Wednesday 18 December 2013

Silos in Sector 8

I received the below layout proposal from Fexno (from Sandycove) to take a look at covering the area towards the left of Sector 8.
Brown numbers are farm locations, yellow are silos, and the black 0 is the proposed field location.
Total time Farms = 340 seconds (48.6 sec on avg)
Total time Silo = 336 seconds (48.0 sec on avg)

This is a pretty good layout. No production building that uses wheat cares for a travel time of lower than 48 seconds, so basically nails the benchmark to go for.

For a small comparison though, I've made up a diagram of the same layout in the same location with the storehouse in the same location, but, I've moved the field over diagonally to the left.
Now, same general layout, but the total walk time for either half (blue or black) is 316 seconds, or 45.1 seconds average per building. This 3 second average will not account for a whole lot of wheat in the grand scheme, but why the difference?

The key comes down to how travel time is calculated.
Settlers need to walk from the storehouse to the workyard (farm in this case), then from the workyard to the deposit (the field), then the actual production occurs, and then they get to perform the return trip (deposit -> workyard, and workyard -> storehouse). It's a lot of walking for the little guys, and it winds up being in your best interest to try to shorten one part of these trips where possible. That is, you want the farm to be close-ish to at least one of the two buildings it needs, the storehouse or the field.
What the initial scenario presents based on this is that for a number of the slots on the right you have your little guy walking from the storehouse waaay over to the farm on the right, which frankly is a bit of a hike for some of the squares, and then once he gets there, he realises he now needs to head over to the field, which is even further away than where he started from.
Depressing.

Pushing the field out slightly like in the second drawing does two things.
First, it helps make a few more of the squares closer to one of what it needs.
Secondly, since since all regular buildings like the silos, farms and storehouses have the exit point being at the bottom/front of themselves, pushing the field slightly lower means more of the buildings can head straight to the field without needing to walk outside, then around themselves to get to the field.

This doesn't mean you want to go separating the field and storehouse by great distances, or you may wind up with scenarios where some other production group nearby has the closer storehouse for one of your farms and messes up your count, or other horrible things.

Good luck settling everyone.

Monday 9 December 2013

Master Architect Box

Just a quick note about the upcoming Master Architect Box coming in the Christmas Event.

Nietzsch over on the TSO subreddit has made a thread for results of the architect box. There's a googledocs sheet where users have entered results so you can get a vague idea of the percentage chance of getting the various items.
http://www.reddit.com/r/settlersonline/comments/1rl327/testserver_christmas_event_master_architect_box/

Mostly looks pretty good. 50% chance of getting a decoration, and 50% chance of getting a reasonable building of some sort.
For just 95 gems there may be good reason to get a few for the overall chance of getting some decent gear.

Sunday 8 December 2013

Ratios for Simple Science buildings

Unlike most buildings, the science system buildings clearly weren't created with synching production times up with the buildings that feed them. Some numbers can still be worked out for them though as guides.


From left to right: Storehouse, Finesmith, Simple Papermill
From left: Storehouse, Finesmith, Simple Papermill
Finesmith needs 4 copper ore to make a nib, and has a production time of 15 minutes. Copper mines have a production time of 3 minutes, but you need to take into account that they need to do 4 trip (thus 4x walk distance) in the time the finesmith only needs to do 1 walk. If your copper mine needed a 24 second walk, they would pluck 4 ore out of the ground in 13m:36secs.
So if you have 1 level of copper mine for each level of finesmith, your copper will come in a quicker than the finesmith uses it, but will only be quick enough to drop to 4 levels of copper mine for 5 levels of finesmith if your mine's are very close to storehouses.

The Simple Papermill uses 2 pine logs and 2 water to produce a piece of simple paper every 10m:30secs. At that pace, it only winds up needing around 260 logs over the course of a day.
A level 1 pine cutter brings in around 700 - 800 logs a day. It uses up somewhere between the amount of logs a sawmill uses and a coking plant. 
If you wanted to have that many mills, the  ideal ratio is 2 cutters : 3 foresters : 3 papermills.
Otherwise, 2 cutters : 3 foresters : 1 papermill : (2 sawmills/1 coking plant) would work out alright with a small log surplus.
For water, a level 1 well brings in 350 - 400 water a day, your papermill is going to use around 260, so 1 well easily feeds it.


So at the end of it, the ratio for finesmiths are 1 level copper mine : 1 level finesmith, although with copper mines sufficiently close to storehouses, you can have 4 levels copper mine : 5 finesmith.
Simple papermills are: 
1 papermill : 1 well : 2 cutter : 3 forester : (1x coking plant/2x sawmills to use up the rest of the logs).
for a lot of paper
3 papermill : 2 well : 2 cutter : 3 forester.

Thursday 21 November 2013

Christmas Event, the Shop


Looking at items that will be available in the Christmas Event tab in the shop.

First, the production buildings

1. Deerstalker Hut: Costs 595 presents, and you can get up to 2 from the event. They produce meat without expending any resources, and can be levelled up to 5. They do have a production time of 8 minutes, slower than the 6 minutes your hunters take, something that needs to be taken into account for swap outs.

2. Rarity Provision House: Costs 995  presents, and you can have 1. At this stage they are not upgradeable.
It has:
Gamekeeper Snacks: Turns 40 bread into a 500 meat refill (can create stacks of 25).
Fish Eggs: Turns 120 fish and 80 water into a 500 fish refill (can create stacks of 25).

  •   Slightly oddly, compared to your regular provision house these are the wrong way around current. The regular provision house turns bread into fish, and can turn fish + water into meat. Part of me thinks this is an error. Regardless, it's a discount if you would usually be getting both, frees up your regular provision house for other duties, and since 1 item is 500 versus it being 100 from the provision house, this means a stack will be 12500 instead of 2500, which will save on some RSI.

Employee of the Month: Turns 300 hardwood planks, 300 marble and 50 gold ore into a 3x workyard buff for 6 hours.
Magical Ink: Turns 200 simple paper, 150 intermediate paper and 100 advanced paper into 50 map fragments.


3. Recycling Manufactory: Costs 295 presents, and you can have 2 from the event. Produces coal without expending resources, and can be levelled up to 5. Has a 3 minute production timer like a coking plant.


There's also the Arctic Mine. Costs 295 presents, and acts as a level 5 iron mine, just without needing a license. If it depletes, or you tear it down, it's gone forever.


Next the Decorations.
Decorations don't do anything special, they just look pretty.
1. Snowman:  Costs 40 presents, no special animations
2. Christmas Tree (small): 40 presents, no special animations
3. Christmas Tree: 60 presents, has sparkling lights all over it.

The Buffs.
Hot Lemon Tea: Costs 40 presents and triples village school production for 24 hours
Christmas Feast: Costs 60 presents and increases population growth from your mayors house 6x for 2 hours.
Cookies: Costs 80 presents and triples output from a workyard for 32 hours.
Fermentation Accelerator: Costs 60 presents and quadruples output from a friary/brewery for 24 hours.
A Thousand Snowflakes: Costs 40 presents, and covers your island in blinding snow
Solar Flare: Costs 1 fish, and clears away snow

The Adventures. The present costing adventures are new this year, and I can't tell you much about them. Save the stolen feast if it comes up for a quest will be given to you, and gave fairly decent XP per troop loss in the past. Stolen Sleigh is probably similar. Not sure they're worth spending gems on, previously Save the Christmas Feast gave XP only for a reward, likely unchanged.
More Secluded Experiments: Costs 95 presents
Return to the Bandit Nest: Costs 95 presents
Save the Christmas Feast: Costs 95 gems
The Stolen Sleigh: Costs 95 gems

Gem -> Present packages
Small Present Package: Costs 90 gems, gets you 30 presents
Large Present Package: Costs 300 gems, gets you 100 presents

Exotic Flotsam: random resources (95 gems each box)
Mastert Architect: random buildings (95 gems each box).
The buildings appear to include items such as :

  • Raving Rabbid
  • Pirate Residence
  • Pavillion
  • Dark Castle
  • Xmas Tree 
  • Arctic Mine
  • Frozen Manor 
  • Storehouse 
  • White Castle
  • Witch Tower
  • Angel Monument
Some stats for opening them from the test server can be found down in the comments.

Monday 18 November 2013

Christmas Event, the Advent Calendar


The Christmas event is coming, and has gone onto the Test Server. There's a fair bit too the event, so I'll cover it in parts. As with anything from Test, any of this is subject to change before going live, but historically little ends up being changed, so I wouldn't expect anything dramatic.

First up, the Advent Calendar.
I'd anticipate quite a lot of countries would be aware of them, but just in case, an advent calendar is a calendar used to count down the days to Christmas. They tend to be in the form of little cardboard houses, or trees, with a door on them representing each day up until Christmas. You open one per day, often to find a pretty mediocre piece of chocolate.

Anyway.
Here's a picture of what it looks like, and I'll go through the elements of it.

1. First off, how to open it. During the event you'll find next to your avatar a little shooting star icon. Click it to open the calendar (there's also a quest pointing you to open it).

2. The 'doors'. Each day you can go in, and click on the days square and you'll be get a reward. There seems to be a small amount of variation, as you can see, on Day 1 I received 100 stone, someone I checked with got 100 pine. Day 4 we both got the advanced paper, and day 7 we both got 40 presents. Some days being the same and others different make me think there might be 2 - 3 possible variations of similar-ish valued goods on each regular day.

3. Note that Day 6, 12, 18 and 21 are Red, and Day 24 is Yellow. These days differ to the regular doors in that there's a set number of options present, and you must choose one from the boxes on the right (Arrow 4), and lock in the one you want.

  • Day 6: Choose between 5x Manuscripts, 3x Tomes and 1x Codex.
  • Day 12: Choose between 500 magic bean and 350 star coin
  • Day 18: Choose between 2x Rabbit Lucky Charm (3x workyard production for 48 hours), 4x Red Flying Settler (3x workyard production for 24 hours), 3x Gold Fever (3x Gold Mine production for 16 hours), or 2x Fermentation Accelerator (4x Brewery/Friary production for 24 hours)
  • Day 21: 2x Bookbinding glue (halve bookbinder production for 24 hours), 2x chocolate rabbit (halve provision house production time for 12 hours), 2x Mr. Myers (4x barracks recruiting time for 1 hour), 2x Training overtime (3x barracks speed for 12 hours).
  • Day 24: 1x Silo, 1x Watermill or 1x Premium day.


5. The calendar also mentions a special features item, a Gold tower. It doesn't specifically say, but I imagine this might be the Christmas day present. Plausibly they may also try to make it so that you get the tower only if you have unlocked all of the doors to keep it more special.

Also generally, if you skip a day you are able to spend some gems to unlock the day. I'm not sure if it will get more expensive as you go, or if the general rewards get better, but I found that the regular days up until 7 at least required 20 gems to unlock, and the red door for day 6 cost 50 gems.

Thursday 14 November 2013

Halloween ends

The Halloween event has ended, and I hope everyone managed to get what they wanted.

I managed to get my 3 improved storehouses, and placed one down in between the 2 copper mines on the left in sector 2, giving a nice 12 second walk distance for either mine.

The other 2 storehouses I've placed in Sector 5, like so.
I like this layout. The upper storehouse is in a 2x3 spacing that nothing else would fit in, you can place a stone mason above it to grab the nearby stone, and above that you've got a nice 3x3 square possible for sitting a Gold Tower. As it looks like we'll all have the ability to get one with the upcoming Christmas event (will discuss in another post), this layout should work nicely.
The lower storehouse also includes two 3x2 spaces immediately to the right of it for placing friaries or watermills.

I also snagged the grim reaper general, and three new schools to go alongside the one I picked up last year.

All in all, a good haul.

Now, if you have some funds you can bear to part with and want to look ahead to next year, now's a good time to pick up cheap pumpkins from people who have leftovers. I picked up these relatively quickly at a ratio of 2 coins per pumpkins, and I'm sure you could get them cheaper.


Next up we have the Christmas event, already being shown on the Test Server and it's looking initially quite good, but I'll look at that another night.

Wednesday 6 November 2013

Spacing out your building chains




This will be an explanation on how walk times can affect your building layouts with regards to chains. For the benefit of the example, we will assume all buildings are level 1, and you have some supply of the components already in stock that we're trying to keep balanced. The basis stays true for higher level buildings so long as they are all the same level.

To demonstrate, we will be taking a look at the Bread chain. Bread production requires wheat (farms), water (wells) and flour (mills) in the ratio of 4 farms : 2 wells : 2 mills : 1 bakery.

Let's look at this in parts.
First, we'll start at the end of the chain, the bakery and 2 mills.
Mills have a production time of 6 minutes to produce 1 flour, and the bakery has a 3 minute production time to produce a single bread, and requires 1 flour as input. Pretending walk time was instant for a moment, this means that after 6 minutes the baker has done 2 trips from the storehouse to the bakery, and the mills have done a single trip.
Of course, walk time isn't instant, and we now need to account for the fact that the baker has done 2 trips. If the bakers round trip was 24 seconds (shortest possible trip), he now needs 6 minutes, 48 seconds to perform both laps and use up 2x flour. Our mills only need to do a single trip still, and if they were positioned immediately next to a storehouse for a 24 second trip they would need 6 minutes 24 seconds to complete and drop of their 2x flour.
The double trips required by the baker really mean that the mills can be located twice as far away from the baker, and still keep production equal. If your baker is 24 seconds away, the 2x mills feeding him can be 48 seconds away.



Secondly, the 4 farms to feed the 2 mills.
These guys have the same relationship that the bakery has to the mills. Mills have a 6 minute production timer, and the farms have a 12 minute timer. Your mills can similarly do 2 trips in the time it takes the 2 farms feeding it do 1 trip, so again, the farms can be twice the walk distance away.
Of course, if you've made your mills 48 seconds away based on your bakery from before, this would mean the farms could be as much as 96 seconds away, which is probably far far further away then you're likely to make them, but worth keeping in mind that you have that kind of leeway with them.

Finally, the 2 wells to feed the bakery.
Wells produce at the same rate as the bakery, but the bakery needs 2 water per bread, so you need 2 wells per level of bakery. Well's aren't worth upgrading, so if you have a level 5 bakery, you will need 10 level 1 wells. Alternatively, if you go watermills, you will need 2 level 5's per level 5 bakery.
I typically wouldn't worry too much about spacing for wells, or even keeping track of quantity all that much. Since they don't use licences, there's no downside to having extras.

Hopefully this makes sense. Let me know if something isn't clear or any other queries below.

Sunday 3 November 2013

Gem plan in action

Last month I posted about a long term plan to accrue quite a lot of gems through pits, and how buying a gem pit can turn into multiple pits quicker than you might think.

I started this myself, I gave BB enough money to get a pit with a little left over.
As of now, I'm up to three pits up and running, and recently hit 20k again to buy another item.

This time rather than the fourth pit I've gone with the endless copper mine.
They're an excellent investment, and at level 5 at 12 seconds walk distance away it's going to bring in ~4235 ore if unbuffed (and of course it's going to be regularly buffed).

Assuming you only send out your geologists to find copper once a day, this isn't a whole lot less than all 6 mines bring in total before emptying out. If buffed, well more than the regular mines can produce.

The next time I hit 20k gems I'll get another pit, then maybe a second mine after that alternating.

Friday 1 November 2013

Silos in S6 and S9

============================
Edit 18/05/2014: A few of the items in this post aren't correct. I pondered correcting and just resubmitting, but might just start again. At the bottom of this post, I'll place ideas for you to correct your layout if you followed this already. Apologies for any inconvenience
============================

There's a very spacious looking piece of real estate around the border of Sector 6 and Sector 9 that I've been asked to look at for Silo placements.
Despite it's appearance, it took a while to find something I was happy with, but finally I offer the below.

This is how I've laid out my grid for the area. The lines indicated by the arrows are important as they link up some trees to ensure you're buildings go snugly around them without wasting space.


Now, for this layout I've tried to maximise how may silos/farms I can make fit to a single storehouse and field, so positioned them like this. Offsetting the field to the storehouse helps to keep as many squares as possible close to one of the desired locations.
The numbers below represent the total talking time for the mapped out squares.

You will be able to disregard the bottom row entirely as being a little too far to walk if you'd like, I'll be setting one of the 68's and 76's as Silos, and the other pair as Farms, so dropping them won't alter the final result.

For a fairly stylish layout, if you present the buildings like this (where of course S's are for Silos, and F's are for Farms):
The total walk time for the farms is 640 seconds, and the same for the silos, giving an average walk time per building of 53.33 seconds. If you elected to drop the bottom row the average reduces to 49.6 seconds.

===============================================
Now for the corrections.
If, you had already swapped the outlying farm and silo like mentioned from the comments (which does improve the timing a little) like so:
I want you to now swap the farm and silo from the top row highlighted here to fix the rest of the imbalance (image also shows your final layout):

The imbalance on this map occurred from a few of the inner buildings getting in the way of pathing for some of the outlying buildings, and since I hadn't placed the inner buildings during the testing for this one, they went unnoticed. More of an issue for large layouts like this one with more places for things to get in the way.
I believe it should now be sorted though, I placed wells all through the inner squares to mimic accurate pathing for the placement of the outer buildings.

Sunday 20 October 2013

Long term Gem plan


If you feel like you're in the game for the long haul, not in a massive rush, but also no opposed to throwing some money at Blue Byte, a Gem Pit investment can end up being quite profitable for you.

A Gem Pit costs 20,000 gems, and contains 40,000 gems that will be extracted over the course of a year (around 108 per day). This may sound like it will take forever to recover your costs, but it's probably not as bad as you might think.
If purchased during one of the not all that uncommon double gem sales, you can get yourself 22,000 gems for 50 euro.

Note: For the purpose of this post, I'm going to assume you do this, intend on not spending gems on anything else, and log on every day getting your weekly bonus.

You buy your first pit, it has 40,000 gems, and you have 2,000 gems left over from your 22,000 purchase.
Day 1, you have 1 pit pulling out 108 gems per day, and will be getting +100 gems per week for your weekly bonus, so you will be getting ~856 per week.

Week 21, You have reached 20,000 gems, and buy a second pit. Your pit has drained to ~24,124.
You are now pulling 216 gems per day, and will be getting your +100 gems per week for the weekly bonus.

During week 35 (14.5 weeks passing). You reach 20,000 gems again, and buy pit number three. Pit 1 has drained to ~14,750 gems, and Pit 2 is down to ~30,626.
You are now pulling 324 gems per day, and getting the +100 gems for the weekly bonus.

Week 44 (8.5 weeks passing). You reach 20,000 gems again, and buy pit number four. Pit 1 has drained to ~8,365 gems, Pit 2 is down to 24,241, and Pit 3 is down to 33,615.
You are now pulling 432 gems per day, and getting the +100 gems for the weekly bonus.

Week 50 (6.5 weeks passing). You reach 20,000 gems again, and buy pit number five. Pit 1 has drained to ~3,526 gems, Pit 2 is down to 19,402, Pit 3 is down to 28,776 and Pit 4 is down to 35,161.

Week 55 (5 weeks passing). You reach 20,000 gems again, and buy pit number six. Pit 1 runs out just towards the end of this run, Pit 2 is down to 15506, Pit 3 is down to 24,880, Pit 4 is down to 31,265 and Pit 5 is down to 36,104.


And you can keep this up until pit 10 if you'd like, or take a break and buy a endless copper mine or something else.

There's also other incidental things I haven't take into account here (and couldn't really to keep the advice general) that will provide extra gems.
> Sometimes BlueByte give out small amounts of gems as general presents or to apologise for issues.
> Some quests end with Gem rewards
> Every level-up from 17 onwards provides some gems
> On the official forums, BlueByte occasionally hold competitions with Gems as prizes for the winners.

Friday 18 October 2013

Pinewood setup in Sector 4

Sector 4 (sector above your Mayor's House) has a lot of Pinewood trees, and presents a good location to set up a group of cutters and foresters.
The ratio for these buildings is 2 cutters to 3 foresters, and you're going to have room here for 2 lots of these (so, 4 cutters and 6 foresters).

Here's a template to get you started in the sector. To start mapping it out, I'd recommend you begin tracing roads from the bush pointed out below, which fits in pretty snug.


Now, you've got space around and above your storehouse to place your 4 cutters and 6 foresters. Spread them out a bit so that your cutters aren't wiping out trees and the foresters have a chance to replant.
An arrangement something like the below will keep cutting/replanting nicely balanced (no need to copy layout precisely).


Now, you've got 4 spaces left in the front. You could fill these with coking plants/bowmakers, which would make the entire section a self-contained facility.

Friday 11 October 2013

Improved Storehouse Update

Initially I thought the Improved Storehouse in sector 2 between the copper mines would be a longer walk for your Settlers than it is for a regular one

It certainly juts out further than the regular storehouse, and if it worked like regular buildings, should have been a 16 second travel time.

But this isn't currently true (but they could well change it before going live). As shown below, the walk path has the worker walking into the the side of the storehouse, and not walking down to the front as expected.
This makes it a 12 second walk exactly like if you placed a regular storehouse, making it an excellent spot to place the wonky shaped storehouse.



Thursday 10 October 2013

Pinewood in Sector 2

Pinewood is an important chain in Settlers Online. Even though it's the first type of wood you work with, it remains important long after you stop needing planks for its use in making Coal from coking plants.

It takes a ratio of 2 cutters to 3 foresters to keep a balance so that you don't run out of trees from the cutters overworking, and on the other hand don't just have foresters sitting around doing nothing.
Your 2 cutters produce enough wood to feed either 2 bowmakers, 2 coking plants or 4 sawmills (or some combination, such as 1 bowmaker and 2 sawmills, or 1 bowmaker and 1 coking plant).

There's a spot in Sector 2 you might not usually consider placing things, as it's not the best shaped piece of land, but, it does present itself with space for a storehouse with 5 spaces immediately around it. These 5 spaces are also surrounded by pinewood trees, so is an excellent place to put down a setup.

The spot is just below the river towards the right hand side of the sector, and for mapping it out with roads, I'd recommend starting from the bush as shown below.


Once you have it mapped out, you can place the buildings as you'd like in the 5 spaces provided, and you're on your way.

Afterwards, there is also some spaces to the left you can place a couple of other buildings, maybe your 2 coking plants if that's what you need to keep it all together.


And that's about it. Let me know if there's anything else you'd like me to look at in the comments.

Wednesday 9 October 2013

A few days of Collectibles

Collectibles have been live for a few days now, and I must say I'm pretty happy with them. They haven't fixed any of the issues from test with regards to them occasionally being hidden behind or in objects, but so far I've had greater than half each time being out in the open and relatively easy to find.

If you're extra bored, you can zoom in on an area, and wave your mouse over the objects in the zone looking for the popup of the name of the item, which is certainly easier once you recognise what the meat deposits name looks like and can phase it out.

Here's an example of an entirely obscured Scarecrow behind some trees.
 
You'll also have instances where the items kind of blend in nicely with the buildings, so while they are perfectly visible, you may overlook it as looking somewhat normal, a bit like this Banner that blends in nicely next to the storehouse.
 
Since there's no reward for finding them, I still wouldn't get too excited about searching unless you really fee like it, but if you do feel like scouring the map, it is somewhat satisfying to have the popup advising you that you've found them all, and certainly will be worthwhile during Halloween when you'll want to find all potential pumpkins (which will be worth quite a bit)
 

 
While the collectibles are a nice distraction, the buffs you can make with them aren't so amazing that you should consider it necessary to scour the map if you don't feel like it.
 
Of the six buffs, you've got
"Country Saying: Adds 200 Wheat units to a Wheatfield", which is just terrible, you can place a wheat field if you want some that badly, +200 is mediocre.
"Harvest Ritual: Boosts the production of a Farm up to 400% for 12 hours", not entirely terrible, but even a level 5 Farm produces about 290 wheat over 12 hours, so the buff will give you an extra ~870 over that amount of time, which is worth maybe 20 gold, hardly impressive.
 
 "Whips and Carrots: Boosts the production of a Stable up to 400% for 6 hours" Pretty bad, no one needs horses that badly.
 
 "Drill Sergeant Skunk: Boosts the recruitment speed of Barracks up to 300% for 12 hours" Pretty good, worthwhile getting, useful for replenishing your forces.
 
"A Sip From the Kettle: Boosts the population growth up to 300% for 8 hours." Not great generally, but during some events there are quests to increase your population by some quantity of settlers, and for these quests adding settlers that you created with Bread in the Provision house doesn't count, so you'll want items like this to increase the 'natural' rate your settlers grow to get the quest done quicker.
 
 "Potion of Endless Energy: Boosts the production of a work yard up to 300% for 12 hours." Quite nice, probably what you'll be going for usually, and the only item that needs Cauldrons (gotten from adventures, or from the Trade Office).
 
So far people seem mostly positive, and beside some of the slight issues with them occasionally getting trapped behind rocks, seems to have been one of the better and smoother implemented components to the game to date.


Wednesday 2 October 2013

Silo Placements at Mayor's House

Here's a placement map for Silos and Farms in Sector 1 down in front of your Mayors house. It's a good big, mostly open piece of real estate, and following this plan you will be able to fit 14 of each building in the area, without any of them having to walk more than a minute to do a cycle.

To get going, you should try to lay out  a grid like below using roads. I'd start from the front of your Mayors house and work your way down from there. Remember that each building is 2 segments of road across, and you should be fine from there.
This picture is partially built already, but you should be able to work out the grid with what's there.
Here's a link to a bigger version.

Once you have the layout down, the 6 farms and 6 silos I've already built will have your little settlers all going to the field on the left. The silos have a slightly shorter walk time overall than the farms, which ensures that the field will never ever run out, and the whole side will be self sufficient. The average overall walk time for the farms is 46 seconds, and 45.33 for the silos.


I haven't completed the right hand side, but have mapped out the walk distances for you to fill it out yourselves should you have that many Silos laying around. Shown below:
Here's a link to a bigger version.

Mostly self explanatory, place Farms where I've written 'F', and place Silos where I've written 'S'.
The 'X's have been placed in squares where the walk distance is over a minute, so isn't a great place for placing Silos or Farms.
All of these buildings will prefer the field on the right, and the silos again have a slightly shorter walk distance to ensure the field never runs out. The average walk time for the farms is 45 seconds, and the average for the silos is 44.5 seconds.

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback below.

Tuesday 1 October 2013

New dates for Halloween & Collectibles

There's been some shuffles with upcoming times for maintenance/updates, so they are now as follows.


3rd October - Collectibles go live
10th October - Regular maintenance, nothing special.
17th October - Halloween goes live

This gives a bit more time to start stocking up on things in readiness for Halloween.
Pumpkins are going to be expensive, and you may want to start filling your Storehouse with things you can trade for them from the 17th.

You don't need to bulk up on coins specifically, players still need regular products like Sausages for their gift baskets and bread, and you may find some good deals to be had in these other commodities (with the players who typically sell these things instead focusing on coin -> pumpkins instead of their regular production, causing gaps in the market).

Good luck all.

Monday 30 September 2013

Offtopic: Redesign

While I'm not unhappy with the current format of the site, I've noticed that it's going to hit a wall in it's current formatting, so I'd best fix it up now before I get too far.

Some of the earlier Pages I made (stuff to the left) may need to be changed into regular Posts like this, so it may seem to you that it's being reposted time-stamp wise while I'm shuffling it around. Not really sure there's a way around it. Also, if you've saved a link directly to the pages linked on the left they may stop working.

Sunday 29 September 2013

Get your Silo

Quick post to remind people that they should try to get their Silo from the Guild Market soon, or work towards it if you haven't already. The date hasn't been given yet, but we can't be too far away from the Guild Market changing stocks, and the Silo will go away.

Some of you may not be interested in having Silos, or the price of 1500 Guild Coins may be more than you think you can muster (or you're not in a guild at all). None of this is all that important. Since the item is limited to 1 per person, the richer players who DO want Silos will want them, and you can make a good profit.

They cost 1500 Guild Coins to get. Guild Coin prices may vary slightly across servers, but I'd anticipate them to all be somewhat similar, and be worth about half a Coin, so 1500 Guild Coins should set you back around 750 Gold Coins.

Sell some of your resources, whatever, and get the 1500 Guild Coins. Open the Store

Open the Guild Market section of the market, and buy the Silo.

Now that you have your Silo, if you don't want it, sell it on the Market. On Sandycove you should get around 3000 - 3200 Gold Coins. Check the Trade Office on your own server to see if there's any variations (it will be well over 750 Gold Coins).

Saturday 28 September 2013

Copper in Sector 2

For the copper deposits in Sector 2 (bottom centre on your map), a good spot to place your storehouse is between the two mines on the left, so that the front entrance of the storehouse is in line with the mines, as shown below.
In this layout, the walk time for a cycle is 12 seconds to the closest 2 mines, as short as it can possibly be for your miner.

If you get an Improved Storehouse from the Halloween event and place it in the same spot, the travel time will also be 12 seconds. The Improved Storehouse looks like the walk distance should be longer, but it turns out that the Settler enters the Improved Storehouse from the side, so ends up with the same walk time from the same position.

The production time for a regular copper mine is 3 minutes, but if you apply science books to the copper skills in your Geologist, maybe like this guy, you hopefully can have "Quality Copper Mineshafts", and have a production of 90 seconds.

If you've got Quality Copper Mineshafts, you will have "Natural Copper Vein", and these deposits will hold 816 Copper per vein.


 Here's a chart showing how long it will take your mine to deplete, for each level your mine is, and how far away from the Storehouse it is, shown in Hours:Minutes:Seconds
Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4 Level 5
12 Seconds  23:07:12 11:33:36 7:42:24 5:46:48 4:38:48
16 Seconds 24:01:36 12:00:48 8:00:32 6:00:24 4:49:44
20 Seconds 24:56:00 12:28:00 8:18:40 6:14:00 5:00:40
24 Seconds 25:50:24 12:55:12 8:36:48 6:27:36 5:11:36
28 Seconds 26:44:48 13:22:24 8:54:56 6:41:12 5:22:32

If you only log on once a day at around the same time, you could get away with leaving the mines at level 1 if the travel time is 12 or 16 seconds, and more than that and you'll want to upgrade to level 2 (only 50 tools). If you're going to be online regularly, perhaps a weekend, going to level 3 can let you run them up in the morning (and maybe put a Irma's Gift Basket buff on), and then later in the afternoon repeat the process.
I usually wouldn't go over level 3, not really worth the tools expenditure considering the mine will collapse anyway.

As an extra future goal making the travel distance more important, some of you may be thinking of getting endless copper mines. 20,000 gems is a lot, but it's certainly a nice item, one I can imagine probably getting myself, and the shortened walking distance becomes more relevant there, as unlike the mines that are going to collapse on you, you'll definitely want it to run at level 5 (and on a double-speed mineshaft).

Over the course of 24 hours, unbuffed, your level 5 Endless copper mine will produce:
Walk Distance
Total per day
12 Seconds
4235
16 Seconds
4075
20 Seconds
3925
24 Seconds
3785
28 Seconds
3660

Over time it will add up, so it's important to try to have your Endless Copper mine quite close.

Editted 10/10/13: The Improved Storehouse can be positioned to only be a 12 second walk the same as the regular one, so editted to reflect this.

Tuesday 24 September 2013

Marble and Copper Geologist

Copper and Marble are quite nice/important resources, and can be improved relatively cheaply through your Geologist's Science tree, so wanted to take a look at it with you and discuss it a little. I'll try to have a few more build ideas in the coming days. The thought with this build is that you may want to improve Copper and Marble if easy, but might not have any intention of investing heavily due to cost/time constraints.

Copper is generally a very important resource, and you can almost never have enough of it (unless you can afford 3x Endless Copper mines, in which case you, well,  might have enough). You want it to produce Tools for your buildings and Mine upgrades, and also to produce Bronze Swords for the endless stream of recruits you need for Adventures.

Marble is needed in a number of building upgrades, and after you need it less for that, tends to always be able to be sold for reasonable profit. There will always be other players still levelling up who will need it, and it's nowhere near as easy to stock up on as Hardwood Planks that you use at the same level.

This is the tree I'd recommend:
 
Looking at the skills from the bottom up, and left to right.
 
2 Manuscripts in "Hidden Stone Stash": 20% chance of finding treasure when looking for stone deposit. The best you can find is 25 Marble, which is a pretty poor prize, but you have no choice. You need 5 Manuscripts in the bottom layer to advance.
3 Manuscripts in "Natural Copper Vein": Discover 15% bigger copper veins. This makes the veins in Sector 2 (bottom centre) hold 816 Copper each instead of 710, and the veins in Sector 4 (middle left) hold 827, up from 720.
 
0 Manuscripts in "Two Marble in One": You might be tempted to take this, but is clashes with "Natural Marble Vein covered later. Skip it.
3 Manuscripts in "Quality Copper Mineshafts": 45% chance of producing veins that can be mined twice as fast. Once you have this skill, you can tell if the vein discovered by your Geologist has the Quality attribute by holding your mouse over the copper icon for a few seconds, and seeing if it appears on the popup. Sometimes I find I need to hold the mouse over the copper icon, and then move the mouse away, and *back* onto the icon for the tooltip to display.
If the popup only mentions the increased size of the deposits from Natural Copper Vein, it's not double-speed. If this happens, I suggest destroying the vein and sending your Geologist out again. This is easiest done by starting to build something else, like a well, and then selecting to build the mine (so that it's the second or third thing in your build menu). Then, cancel it from your build menu, and the vein will disappear, and you won't have lost any resources.
2 Manuscripts in "Natural Stone Vein": +16% bigger stone deposits. You need to put 2 Manuscripts somewhere to advance, and 16% bigger stone deposits is alright, certainly better than the alternatives.
 
3 Tomes in "Natural Marble Vein": 24% bigger Marble veins. Bigger marble veins is good, and will allow you to have more level 5 Marble Masons in production harvesting without worrying about running out before you get back from work.
Previously I mentioned this skill clashing with "Two Marble in One". The issue with these skills interaction is that currently if you take the Two-in-One skill, and it triggers and finds a second mine, the second mine will not get the 24% bigger size, only the original found mine.
Also currently, if there is only 1 deposit left to find, and the Two-in-One skill would trigger and find to, the whole thing fails (since there isn't 2 to be found), and the 1 deposit remains unfound.
Both of these things makes "Two Marble in One" not worthwhile.

Monday 23 September 2013

Collectible Items

An upcoming part to the game is going to be Collectible Items, which will spawn on your island in various locations several times a day.

To help keep track of how many have currently spawned somewhere on your island, you will find a quest in your quest book called "Collect All", and if you hold your mouse over the progress bar it will tell you where you are up to. There are no rewards for completing the quest, other than the fuzzy feeling of knowing that you found everything, which I suspect will only last a few days.



The regular collectibles you can find are Kettle, Scarecrow, Banner, Food Cart, Herbs and Bronze Cauldron shown in order below.

Note that out of these, the Cauldron is only found on adventures, and the others are found on your island. Also important, while the general island ones will refresh every few hours (not currently known exactly how often), the Cauldrons spawn when you first visit an Adventure, and do not respawn/change.
 If Cauldrons have spawned on an adventure, you will have a "Collect All" quest present in the quest log while on the adventure, and can again hold your mouse over the progress bar to let you know how many there are to be had.
 
If the Halloween event goes live at the same time, there will also be pumpkins littered on the island. If this does occur, note that in the Collect All quest the counter will also include Pumpkins to be found.

When you click on one of the collectibles, it can add multiple of the item to your stores. I've seen up to 4 for most items (up to 2 for Pumpkins so far)



You will find in the Mayors House a collections tab where you can use these items you find to produce buffs for your island.
 
The buffs are:
Name: Country Saying (required level: 12)
Requires: 12 Herb, 10 Scarecrow
Effect: Adds 200 Wheat units to a Wheatfield.

Name: Harvest Ritual (required level: 18)
Requires: 10 Herb, 12 Food Cart
Effect: Boosts the production of a Farm up to 400% for 12 hours.

Name: Whips and Carrots (required level: 23)
Requires: 30 Herb, 12 Scarecrow, 10 Kettle, 5 Banner
Effect: Boosts the production of a Stable up to 400% for 6 hours.

Name: Drill Sergeant Skunk (required level: 23)
Requires: 24 Scarecrow, 5 Food Cart, 5 Kettle, 15 Banner
Effect: Boosts the recruitment speed of Barracks up to 300% for 12 hours.

Name: A Sip From the Kettle (required level: 24)
Requires: 15 Scarecrow, 10 Food Cart, 14 Kettle, 8 Banner
Effect: Boosts the population growth up to 300% for 8 hours.

Name: Potion of Endless Energy (required level: 26)
Requires: 32 Herb, 20 Scarecrow, 12 Food Cart, 6 Cauldron
Effect: Boosts the production of a work yard up to 300% for 12 hours.
 
You select them one at a time from the Collections tab to be made using the buttons on the right, and need to come back to the Collections tab to pick them up when done.
 
 
On the test server currently it seems like sometimes the items can be stuck in terrain, or may even be under a building, and this sort of thing could potentially make it onto live. As a result, while I would recommend doing scans of your island for new items intermittently when your quest renews itself (indicating the items have respawned), you might drive yourself insane if you actually try to find all of them, all of the time.


Sunday 22 September 2013

Silo Layout in Sector 9

Here's my finished Silo layout I've set up in Sector 9 of the map (top right corner of your island).
I worked out the walking distances and spacing as I went, and this layout results in the exact same walk distance for farms and silos going to the right hand field, and the silos having a 4 second shorter overall journey on the left. On the left this 4 second margin will mean effectively one of your silos does nothing (because the fields are full) less then once a day.




It's 9 Farms and 9 Silos that will entirely look after itself, so you can surround the outer, further away spots with Nobles, and ignore the sector entirely if you wish after that.

If you wanted to trace the same layout out yourself using roads, I'd start with the lone bush sitting on its own down next to the left field. Draw a square out around it, and work your way out from there.

Not included yet, but there's also a spot towards the top centre where a Watermill or Friary could fit in front of the Nobles I've placed at there (the area has been mapped out with a road circling the spot).

Saturday 21 September 2013

Adventure Seeker on the cheap

The science system can be very expensive in The Settlers Online. The prices of Manuscripts, Tomes and Codex's rises over time, capping out eventually at 3 Tomes per Codex, and 5 Manuscripts per Tome (plus the other materials).
This equates to eventually 1 Codex requiring you to make 15 Manuscripts, which you convert to 3 Tomes, and then over to that Codex, so an argument can be made for trying to level on the cheap, and use as few Tomes and Codex's as possible while still getting some of the better skills.
Manuscripts rise in cost too, but it's nowhere near as extreme, and I'd never feel bad about investing in them. The materials needed for the books themselves isn't really the big deal, it's more the time required, for many people making a single book of any type per day is all you can hope for, so one day 1 single Codex taking 19 days is extreme.

With that in mind, I suggest filling out an Explorer (one of your Savage Scouts or Experienced Explorers if available) like the below.
Going through the skills from the bottom to the top, and left to right, and the order I'd place them.
3 Manuscripts in "Fearless Hiker": Shortens search time for Adventures by 15%
2 Manuscripts in anything else. None of them are that useful to your adventure seeker, but this is necessary to unlock the second layer.

3 Tomes in "Wild Determination": Find 90% more map parts on Adventure searches. A long Adventure search that doesn't yield an adventure will now yield 17 frags instead of 9.
2 Manuscripts anywhere back on the first layer. Again, this is just so you have the required +5 books placed to unlock the third layer

3 Tomes in "Travel Expenses": Reduce the cost of all adventure searches by 30%. This will make reduce the cost of sending your guy out on long searches to 42 Coins and 244 Sausages, instead of 60 Coins and 350 Sausages. Every little bit counts.
2 Manuscripts anywhere in the first layer again.

3 Codex's in "Trouble-Seeker": Gives a 99% Chance of finding 2 adventures at once. This will allow your Explorer to (almost) always come back with 2 things. It can be 2 adventures, 2 lots of Map Fragments or 1 of each item. Combined with Wild Determination from earlier, if your guy come back with 2 lots of map fragments he will bring back 34 fragments, where an untrained Explorer would have only brought back 9.

2 Manuscripts anywhere in the first layer again. A case could be made for putting 2 Codex's into Pathfinder at this level to shorten the time for all types of searches by 10%, but it's up to you to determine whether the usage of Codex's here will gain anything for you personally. Will you actually get extra searches out of it? 

1 Codex into "Sophisticated Pillager": Gives a 30% chance of finding adventures with bonus rewards. When this triggers, you will get an additional quest in your quest book asking you to do a certain Adventure, and if you do you'll get a quest reward, some of them make the requested adventure well worth doing. The tooltip for the skill suggests +30% rewards, but this isn't really accurate.

And that's about it. 11 Manuscripts, 6 Tomes and 4 Codex's. 8 of the manuscripts aren't doing anything relevant for your adventure searches, but as Manuscripts are relatively quick and easy to produce, this should be fine.

Friday 20 September 2013

Explorer Skills gone live

Explorer Skills are now up on the live server.
At a glance it doesn't look like anything changed from the Test Server, so my list here -> http://thradetso.blogspot.com.au/p/science-explorer.html should be about right.

Even if you have no plans of spending deep into the science trees, I do recommend a few books in the low level skills to decrease the search time  for Adventures and Treasure Hunts by a few percent. For those of you who log on once a day at around the same time this can drop the search time from 24 hours for the longer searches down to 20 - 22 hours. 

An example of how this is beneficial. Previously, with searches taking 24 hours, at a glance this allows you to do them once a day. But your time in real life may not work that way.
Say you tend to get home after work and and log on at around 6pm. Day 1, you send your guys out.
Day 2, maybe you don't get on until 7pm. You send them at 7.
Day 3, you get home at 6, but they aren't back yet. You get distracted by TV/Dinner whatever. You don't notice you hadn't sent them until 8.30pm, and send them then.
After a few days, you're getting later and later before you send them, until it's too late to send them on a day, and you go to bed just before they get back. They spend the next 20ish hours sitting in your Star menu doing absolutely nothing. Sadly inefficient.

The benefit of dropping a few hours can mean this never happens again. Same scenario.
Day 1, send guys out at 6pm.
Day 2, get home at 7pm, but your timer was 22hours, they got home at 4. Send them out straight away.
Day 3, get home at 6pm. Your guys got back at 5pm. Send them out straight away.
This method may feel a little inefficient since your guys are still sitting around for a while before you get home, but you're still sending them out every day, which is what you wanted all along.

Saturday 14 September 2013

Halloweens Improved Storehouse

The Improved Storehouse in the upcoming Halloween event  is a nice item, offering drastically more storage space than a regular Store, offering 16,000 storage at time of writing as opposed to the regular 6,000 that normal stores have.

As a downside, the Improved Storehouse takes up a space 2 squares across, and 3 down (where most buildings only take up a 2x2 square. This makes the Storehouse tricky to place in any efficient manner.

I've been staring at the map for a while, and have come up with two decent locations for the storehouse.


In Sector 2 with your Copper mines, you can place it between the 2 mines on the left, and end up with 16 second travel times to the Storehouse for the close mines, and 28 seconds for the further one. Generally a good place for a Storehouse anyway, and not much else will fit with a regular storehouse either.
Edit: No longer true -> clicky



In Sector 5 (middle of the map), just below the Marble deposits you can make this setup. It's generally a wonky area of the map to fit things anyway, and the below layout fits the location exactly, and allows for 2 longer buildings (Watermills or Friaries) to fit to the right of the Storehouse.
The other numbers written down are for regular buildings to fit and tell you what walk time there is from that location.

A third good location eludes me for now.

Friday 13 September 2013

Halloween is coming



In preparation for the upcoming Halloween event, introductory information has been released about what will be involved in the event here ->
http://forum.thesettlersonline.com/threads/25508-Dev-Diary-Halloween-is-coming!?p=237919#post237919

Unlike previous events, this time they've decided to make it not matter whether you received the same items last year (previously if you already received the Grim Reaper, you couldn't get him again for example). It all being available regardless is a bit of a shift in feeling of the events, one I think I'm generally happy with.
Previously it seemed that the devs wanted everyone to have access to exactly the same things, regardless of how long you've been playing, so for example only allowing 1 Grim general ever kept things "even".

Resetting things (assuming the trend continues) will allow older players to collect multiples of items, rewarding their long term play, and will continue to give them something to spend resources on. The old becoming new again may also mean the Devs will stop trying as hard to come up with new content, which is less good, but not a problem seen in this event so far.


Now, for the items you can get during the event.
First, you'll need Pumpkins to pay for any item in the Store, you get these from first buying Pumpkin Sematary's (Name borrowed from Stephen King's Pet Sematary novel).
There are :

  • 3x Small Semataries for 50 Stone and 100 Pinewood Planks each. These have 45 Pumpkins and 1 is produced every 8 hours.
  • 3x Common Semataries for 150 Marble and 200 Hardwood Planks each. These have 80 Pumpkins and one is produced every 4 hours.
  • 3x Noble Semataries for 10 Granite and 15 Exotic Planks each. These have 100 Pumpkins and one is produced every 1 hour.
Important Note: Once you place the fields, if you destroy them, they will not go back to your star menu, they will be gone for good, and you cannot buy more from the store.

They can be buffed, but only need to be buffed just when the pumpkin is produced at the end. For the Small Semataries placing a 30 minute Fish platter buff just before it is produced will yield a second Pumpkin. Since they have such a long production time I would tend to not worry too much about buffing the small fields, but certainly try to keep the other two types buffed.
Not counting buffs, you're only going to get 675, and you will also be able to get some from quests. Golems will appear on your home island, and you will be able to use Marble, Wheat and Water in your provision house to produce weapons that you use on the Golem. When he falls, you get some pumpkins.

As far as possible, it may be a good idea to stockpile these resources to help you kill Golems when it's time.


As for the actual items you're spending the Pumpkins on, I generally don't consider Decoration items or limited use buff's/refills worth worrying about, so that leaves a few items.

There's the Grim Reaper general for 1560 pumpkins (cap of 1). If you're starting out acquiring this many pumpkins may be hard, but if manageable is well worth it. He recovers twice as quickly from defeats when on adventures, and travels to and from adventures twice as fast (15 minute trips). This travel speed alone makes him excellent for ferrying troops back and forward.

The Silo for 600 Pumpkins (cap of 3). I'm generally fond of Silos for helping to remove the need to redo fields, but since you can always buy Silos on the Trade Office from players at any time, and for the prices Pumpkins are likely to go for, it's unlikely that buying Silos with Pumpkins will be a good move financially.

Village School for 600 Pumpkins (cap of 3). Produces 1 settler every 2 hours (12 extra per day). This isn't a big boost to your population growth as you already produce 96 per day, but over time it will save you on bread costs when producing an army. If you're able to get the Pumpkins together and have space permitting, a few of these can make a difference.

Improved Storehouse for 600 Pumpkins (cap of 3). These have 3 times the storage space that a regular storehouse provides, so at first seem like excellent investments. However, they are not in the classic 2x2 tile shape like most other buildings, they are 2x3 (2 across, and 3 down), making them the only building in the game to have this shape. Not to be confused with the 3x2 shape (3 across and 2 down) that Friaries and Watermills take up.
3 times the production is generally excellent, but the unusual shape of the building will make placement and arranging buildings around it difficult. I'll be taking more of a look at this later to see what sort of placements I can come up with. It may be a fine idea in the end to just get them and not worry too much about efficient placement, and instead primarily utilizing them for their +16000 storage capacity.

At this stage I consider the Grim general the most useful thing to go for, followed by the Storehouses and then Schools.

This is all subject to change before going live of course.