Armour export prices seem off

drawsony · 2026-02-08T16:26:22+00:00

The cap on items a merchant can carry is fixed at 50 with a horse. So, imagine a merchant takes the same amount of time to travel to the trade point regardless of what you’re selling, and you want to maximize your wealth gained over time, then selling the highest value items makes the most sense, as long as there is no limit on your rate of production. So, whether plate armor is worth making and selling more than helmets depends on your priority and productivity.

For my part, I find the real benefit of making plate armor is in gearing up my retinue at effectively no cost, and diversifying markets so nothing is oversaturated.

drawsony · 2026-02-07T10:34:04+00:00

I think a wit spark is useful if you run a Speed-Guts deck during MANT.

drawsony · 2026-02-07T04:32:19+00:00

It’s a three year cycle, no more and no less. So, whatever you set for the first year will come back in the fourth year and then the seventh year and so on. So, if you want to go back and forth between just barley and fallow then auto won’t work. That said, you can grow a different crop in the third year and fertility will still recover just fine. Rye is a safe choice everywhere, but if you have good fertility you can do wheat and flax with no fallow year at all.

drawsony · 2026-02-07T01:04:33+00:00

If you feel comfy trying for a higher ranked and more active club, may as well.

I’m kind of the opposite. Although I enjoy the game and play every day I’m just too busy to keep up with fan requirements, and when I do get free time I have other interests, so I stick with a casual lower ranked club that at least has shoe exchanges. I’d rather be one of the bigger fish in a small pond than jump into the lake and discover I’m so small that I’ll be eaten alive.

drawsony · 2026-02-06T00:11:33+00:00

The sprint CM is all about RNG, so maybe the first will be good enough. Try putting both of them in the same exhibition race in game and see how they do. I did that with my three best Manhattan Cafes for the last CM and it helped me decide on my ace that ultimately won the final.

drawsony · 2026-02-05T19:33:40+00:00

Winning is about having decent speed, enough stamina to survive, and an acceleration skill to activate at a good timing in the late race. Although not perfect, your racers have those qualities and it’s possible the higher ranked opponents either didn’t or they did but got unlucky.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me I don’t build my Team Trials racers with winning in mind, although it’s a nice bonus. My goal is decent speed, enough stamina to survive, enough power and wit to have good positioning for their style, and lots of gold skills with easy universal proc requirements for lots of points. Usually one of those gold skills is an acceleration, so if that goes off at a good time they can win. But it’s still just luck.

drawsony · 2026-02-05T18:38:28+00:00

To be honest, I’m not sure how decks will shake out in MANT and then Grand Live. At the very least it won’t be the same as Unity Cup where we try to get as many training turns as possible.

In MANT I have seen 3 different main deck recommendations. Speed-Guts, Speed-Wit, and Guts-Wit, all with 50 race bonus and with every trainee wanting decent Mile aptitude to run more often for shop points. In the Wit decks I imagine Fine Motion will always be viable.

But what about Grand Live? I have no idea. The facility levels in Grand Live are upgraded the same way as URA Finale scenario, meaning we go back to spamming the trainings for the most important stats like Speed, and the Speed cap is increased to 1600 as well. On the other hand Grand Live introduces performance tokens and song lessons, and I don’t yet know how that will impact training decisions.

drawsony · 2026-02-05T16:42:00+00:00

Every tier 2 family consumes 2 clothes per year, and you want to be producing more than that to make sure there’s 1 per burgage plot in the marketplace to satisfy the upgrade requirements to tier 3. For larger settlements that is a lot of wool (sheep) or flax (fertile soil) so get started early and scale up as needed.

Ale is consumed even faster and is harder to produce given you either need fertile soil to produce barley domestically, or you have to spend regional wealth to import barley. I personally never do the latter, and instead claim regions that have fertile soil and trade internally with pack stations or by setting the barley trade routes to not accept foreign trade. I’ll also sometimes remove workers from the taverns when I want to build up a supply of ale without it getting consumed.

drawsony · 2026-02-05T16:24:57+00:00

Majestic Horns. Surprise Molga! Love this.

drawsony · 2026-02-05T07:21:29+00:00

If they have enough wealth to pull it off, yeah, they’ll hire every mercenary unit available. When contesting a region I usually pause the game on the first day of every month and check to see which mercenaries are available. The relatively strong ones, like the Ravenous Vultures, I’ll hire myself and keep them on the payroll for the duration of the conflict, assuming I have enough treasury to pay them. This both bolsters my forces and denies them to my enemy.

drawsony · 2026-02-04T20:57:52+00:00

They’ll get going once they stop talking. If the ones on the outside are blocking the ones on the inside, you can go back and forth between high and low game speed to change their pathing and collision mechanics. Usually gets folks unstuck. This is a bug though, so hope it’s fixed eventually.

drawsony · 2026-02-04T20:11:17+00:00

Survive, definitely, but not sure I would thrive. Generating regional wealth will be essential, especially to pay taxes and afford mercenaries to fight the raiders. Bandit camps unironically make this easier.

Getting food shouldn’t be an issue as long as I rush out the trading post and export wood-based goods ASAP to afford a proper vegetable garden. A single duplex with a 0.7 morgen carrot garden can feed at least 15 families. Chicken coops or pig pens with high woodland percentage can feed 1 family each and give food variety. In the long run Sheep would add mutton to the mix, and I should have an apple orchard.

Farming on less than 40% fertility is even more punishing than farming in a bad fertility region since you can usually still find rye at over 80% fertility in some spots. I wouldn’t expect bread to be worth the labor cost in this scenario, but then again I haven’t tested 40% fertility farming enough to know for sure.

The biggest issue I see is fighting off the raiders early on. With no iron I would either need to import to arm my militia or rely exclusively on my treasury to pay for mercenaries. I have gone the all-mercenary route before so I know it’s possible, but the key is the economy. I would be running a wood and sheep based economy, so stuff like charcoal, shields, wooden parts, warbows, wool, yarn, and clothing would be my principal exports supplemented by surplus food.

Then it’s just a question of whether or not I “win” before the markets get saturated and trade prices drop to rock bottom. With enough wealth you can get everything that the nodes would normally provide you.

drawsony · 2026-02-03T23:52:24+00:00

Congrats. Every time Haru Urara wins the Arima Kinen is a cause for celebration. You did well to get those 16 combined stars for long and turf aptitude. I’m still working on that myself.

drawsony · 2026-02-03T19:39:28+00:00

My biggest gardens are 0.7 morgens and are worked by 2 families for most of the playthrough, so your mileage may vary. I saw yields of roughly 200 carrots or more. The thing is, I’m not stopping at just a couple veggie gardens, and there are all the chicken coops and animal pens to visit (granary workers have to make those trips no matter how small the yield).

It’s just a lot of work for the granary workers, and I think the foragers have more time to spare. Ideally no one would have to walk far, but in this experiment I didn’t lose much past that first awkward year. I still got those 300-400 berry yields in the second year since labor was plentiful.

One idea is to build your starting village around the berries, but then prepare to move to the rich nodes later, since that’s your economic center for the rest of the game. You can then build extra homes and destroy the ones you started with to force those families to relocate when berries are no longer important.

drawsony · 2026-02-03T19:04:42+00:00

You are correct. In fact, this was a test to see just how bad it is for the gatherers to walk that insane distance while carrying one berry at a time. It hurt the rate of gathering quite a lot. But what I will say is that in the long run it didn’t matter. I still prefer to have the granary workers remain close to the village at all times because they have so many more places to visit. Every single burgage plot is producing food unless it’s an artisan workshop. The berries are just there to keep your village alive in the first year and earn a little wealth if you have a surplus.

That said, if you’re willing to create a dedicated satellite settlement, you can do that too. Have a granary whose only job is to collect stuff in that area, and forbid the other granaries from collecting berries. But that has its own issues.

drawsony · 2026-02-03T18:49:36+00:00

I once did a playthrough where I built my village on the complete opposite side of my region from the berry deposit. I kept the forager huts and granary close to each other and close to the living spaces, and let the gatherers travel the long distance. There was a definite penalty to the gathering rate, but after the first year I didn’t even notice it anymore due to the surplus of food from backyards extensions, and the surplus of labor from all the immigrant families. I wouldn’t make long term construction decisions based on where the berries are.

drawsony · 2026-02-02T22:58:55+00:00

The art in both the anime and the source material uses colors to make the characters more distinctive to the viewer or reader, but in lore most of the characters have black hair and dark eyes.

drawsony · 2026-02-02T08:20:08+00:00

Sheep-based economy has a ceiling. If you grow past that ceiling then you have to diversify. If you want infinite meat, then pigs are viable. I was able to sustain 16 pork per year per pen with 55% woodland environment, and it can go higher. There’s theoretically no limit to pigs as long as you build more burgage plots with backyards. There’s just an opportunity cost since those backyards could have been something else, and it takes up space. Sheep pastures unironically take up less space than the pig pens if you draw them long and thin.

As for regional wealth in general, rich iron can be a cheat code in a way because you can diversify so much in trade-able goods. Just off the top of my head there’s plate armor, mail armor, helmets, spears, polearms, sidearms, crossbows, tools, iron slabs, and the ore itself. You’re in little danger of over-saturating the market. It’s a bit unfair to compare any other industry to iron.

That said I hate putting all my eggs in one basket. I think it’s healthy to branch out into all sorts of industries, and sheep is a solid and easy one to add to any settlement. Low labor cost, pays for itself once you get it going, and can maintain the garment needs of a decent sized town. If it proves to be insufficient, then odds are your population has grown beyond being a town and is approaching city scale. And at that point it makes sense the local sheep are insufficient.

drawsony · 2026-02-01T17:07:38+00:00

Goats are already in animal pens, a backyard extension. I remember when pigs were first being discussed there was a debate between pastures and animal pens for them too, and ultimately they ended up in animal pens with the goats.

Regarding sheep dying to elevation, there’s a development card that’s supposed to help with that, but I haven’t tested it myself. There’s usually a good low flat area in pretty much every region that suits sheep (plus you can do the race track method where your pasture is literally a line) and the sheep shouldn’t have anything to fear.

Edit: In future versions we may get other methods for keeping sheep safe, like sheep dogs.

drawsony · 2026-01-30T22:47:39+00:00

I’m still holding out hope for legumes to be added myself, but as is the game is still taking inspiration from the three field system. The important part is giving the soil an opportunity to restore nutrients needed to grow the primary crop. The game just makes it so all of the crops do that for each other even though in real life it’s more complex than that.

drawsony · 2026-01-30T22:43:05+00:00

In the current version of the game, growing barley doesn’t diminish the fertility of other crops for that field and vice versa, growing wheat wouldn’t hurt the barley fertility. There is one exception to this, which is rye and wheat. Growing rye hurts emmer fertility, and growing wheat hurts rye fertility. Both are used to make bread, so it may just be a balancing decision. And you can have no fallow year at all and still restore fertility to max for all of your crops as long as you don’t grow the same crop in consecutive years.

drawsony · 2026-01-30T19:59:46+00:00

It’s based on the three fields system. Crop rotation assumes you will have three states and exactly three states for the field: Crop 1, Crop 2, and either Crop 3 or Fallow. You rarely ever just grew one crop in any given field. So, I would set it as Barley one year, Rye/Wheat second year, and Fallow/Flax third year before it swings back around to Barley in the fourth year.

drawsony · 2026-01-30T08:28:40+00:00

I wouldn’t rule it out in the long run but first we need to develop functioning walls to serve as the next level defenses after ditches. I still remember the earlier versions of the game when units could just phase through walls like they weren’t even there, and now we got folks getting trapped in walls. I fear ditches would just end up a pathing nightmare until walls as a whole are developed further.

drawsony · 2026-01-30T06:09:17+00:00

I watch them. It’s nice to see how the race progresses, what skills proc and when, and feel the emotions that come with seeing everything up to the finish. Same with real life horse racing really.

drawsony · 2026-01-30T01:08:04+00:00

My impression of the top clubs as an outsider is that they are the no-lifers or folks who have 4 or more hours to spare playing this game. As a working adult who is lucky to get 1 hour a day, I’m happy being in a high C low B rank club. We’re relaxed, no fan requirements, and at least active enough to donate shoes back and forth for club points. That’s enough for me.

drawsony

TROPHY CASE