Outstanding Setups! Fisherman! (s3)

Hey peeps,

Welcome to a new series of posts about great production setups. The aim here is to examine places where you maximize the efficiency of your buildings.

We are following some very broad rules here - that you may disagree with.

The first rule is that we are trying to save the large areas for farms, silos and wheatfields since this production takes up a lot of space.

The second rule is that we are playing with the so called ortogonal building placement as it is the most efficient in most cases.

The third rule is that we will try and use awkward areas whenever possible to build solid production lines. (the fisherman setup in S3 is a good example of this, you will see it below).

A fourth rule is that we will try and use Improved Storehouses when possible as a means of saving licenses.

This first example follows all of the above rules. It doesn't use a large open area, it uses the ortogonal placement and it is located in an awkward area. But we provide here with two alternatives for you. One with the Improved Storehouse, another with a regular Storehouse.

The times, and therefore the production, is slightly better with the regular Storehouse. Essentially, in the 6 buildings shown around the storehouse, you have 8 seconds more overall production time for the Improved Storehouse setup than for the regular storehouse one. Even if you had all buildings at level 5, buffed twice a day with Baskets you'd only be producing about 120 fish more per day with the regular Storehouse setup.

This first screenshot is for the Improved Storehouse setup - courtesy of Nedrakus! You can thank him, because he was the one who found it! (even though he was tweaking my own setup... that I had conjured up from looking at other peoples islands... no real originality here, I know... :p) We don't have the Improved Storehouse in place just yet - but you can see that the space is there for it ;)

Approximately 5,967 fish per 12h (unbuffed, with six level 5 fishers)

This second screenshot is for the regular Storehouse setup. I did it on the Test Server. I wanted to check if times were better with a regular Storehouse - and they are, just not by much. So this is me tweaking Ned's setup that was the tweak of mine.. etc...

Approximately 6,002 fish per 12h (unbuffed, with six level 5 fishers)

If you are running out of fish or have your fishers a bit scattered and want to have only one deposit being used... this is a good place to try.

If you have a better setup than this - let us know! If it really is better - or simply a good alternative - we will post it here also ;)

Happy fishing!

Incoming! Christmas Event! Treasure Searches!

Hey peeps,

Next week after maintenance the Christmas Event should start. There have been a couple of new Dev's Diary about this:

Christmas Event 2013

Special Shop Items

Do check them out if you can.


In any case, what I would like to tell you now is a bit about the research we did at the test server in relation to treasure searches.

We built a spreadsheet and we asked people to fill in their results in hopes of getting an idea of which Treasure Search yielded the most presents.

As expected the VERY LONG searches give the most presents in one go (up to 50 presents each time). But if you actually calculate the number of presents you get by search hour then it's the SHORT SEARCH that beats the odds.

Here is some data (for normal scout search times - no upgrades)

Search type	Presents per hour
Short	0.5723
Medium	0.4000
Long	0.4231
Very Long	0.3030

This means, on average, we get 0.57 presents per hour of short searches, versus the 0.3 presents per hour with very long searches.

These numbers may or may not change when things start here on the live servers. This is what we found back at the Test Server.

Still, it seems a good way to get Presents!

For the more curious ones here are the number of searches we did:

Search type	Number of Searches
Short	83
Medium	75
Long	65
Very Long	66

Also, if your scouts are fast and you have treasure hunting special abilities unlocked you may get some better numbers than this.

Here's a few screenshots:

Medium Search



 Medium Search

Long Search

We hope this helps!

Read Christmas Event Post 1 - Collectibles!

Read Christmas Event Post 2 - Merchant Shop Items!

Read Christmas Event Post 3 - Advent Calendar!

Read Christmas Event Post 4 - Rarity Provision House!

Read Christmas Event Post 5 - Christmas Quests!

Copper Smelters, Toolmakers and Bronze Weaponsmiths

Hey peeps,

Here is my current setup for my 5 Copper Smelters, 3 Toolmakers and 3 Bronze Weaponsmiths.

As you can see this setup isn't perfectly balanced as there is one Copper Smelter missing. In it's place there is a Stone Mason that will be in the near future destroyed to give room to said Copper Smelter. Still it is a setup that works quite well in this transition shape since i keep some of the Copper Smelters buffed once a day or so - I find it is enough to keep it running smoothly.

Here's a list of things you may want to have a look at:
1 - Each Copper Smelter is positioned in exactly the same slot relative to its Storehouse as are the Toolmakers and Bronze Weaponsmiths to theirs.
2 - I am upgrading one Copper Smelter and one Toolmaker at the same time- as to minimize unbalancing the production too much (one less consuming, one less producing)
3 - I am using only the fast slots in these Storehouses (6secs and 8secs slots) since I want these specific production buildings to produce as much as possible (I use a lot of Tools and Bronze Swords and I do not want to have loads of Toolmakers and Bronze Weaponsmiths - just a few but at level 5, running buffed as much as possible).
4 - I am using this area behind the Mayor's House to do this since it is not a good area to place Farms and Silos. It is also an area not needed for Wood production. Farms and Wood production are the two things that require the biggest sprawls in area in order to have good production values.
5 - The whole setup is marked with roads. In fact my whole island is "gridded". I did this because I wanted to know where best to place things. So, you can use roads to create the places where you intend to place the buildings before you put them there. In this way you can see beforehand if you do actually have the room for everything you had planned or not, without wasting resources moving things there only to find out your setup doesn't have enough room.

I will try to post more stuff like this in the near future.

Happy Settlering!

A Few Tips About Levelling Up

Dear friends,

We start playing a game and, surely, part of the fun is to level up quickly, to reap rewards, to grow stronger to to speak. Right?

It is usually so - but TSO (The Settlers Online) is a game about consequences. Everything is tied in to pretty much everything.

What does this mean?

It means that it is important to be careful when leveling up. My aim here is to examine the two main consequences:

1 - Leveling up your Player Level.
Usually when you level up you don't feel so much difference between the tasks you were given in the previous level and the current one. This is because there are "marker" levels so to speak that herald a new phase (a more costly one) in your gaming.

When you reach level 36 your Guild Quests and Daily Quests and even some Event Quests (the special events that occur a couple of times of year, typically) become a bit harder. You start having to do adventures regularly for GQ and they show up on your DQ as well. In order for you to do this with some ease your economy needs to be somewhat balanced and efficient (even if you are buffing it to keep it going ;) ).

The next step is level 46, and level 46 is really a game changer. Your GQ's and DQ's become quite hard, having to do adventures like Black Knights, Dark Brotherhood, The Nords and so on. You may even have the troops to do them - but they are costly to buy, lootspots are costly to buy and even if you're sending your explorers in medium or long searches, they are not easily found. Your economy needs to be solid at this point for you to be able to tackle them. At this level perhaps the best strategy is if guildies team up to tackle these 2 and 3 player adventures as a combo. Perhaps one guildie has found one through explorer searches and can give the lootspot to someone else. Otherwise you will be stuck with an adventure whose lootspot may cost around 1k or 1.5k coins to purchase. So level 46 is a tough one to get into and, as soon as you do, you're there for keeps...


2 - Leveling up your Production Buildings.
This is something we all do regularly because, after all, we all want those shiny level 5 buildings, right? The problem with this is that our leveling up may be something like: "hey, I need more bread to build settlers and adventures... I know what I will do, I will level up my bakeries." And then you level up your bakeries and suddenly they stop working because they have run out of flour. And then you realize you need to level up the flour mills as well. The problem is you haven't got the resources to do it since you've used them all on the bakeries. So, you find your way around this: you start buffing the mills. The problem with that is that you start running out of buffs as well - that you need to buff other stuff... So you level up a Butcher - only to find out your meat production is now in the red and you need to buff the Hunters too...

You see where this is going. If you level up buildings without looking at your economy overview, without planning it a bit... you may be heading for trouble. After all the aim of leveling up a building is making things more efficient and easy, right? But, as it turns out, it should also make you need to be a bit more careful.

A good thumb rule is to level up production buildings from the bottom of the chain up. The problem with this strategy is that you know it's gonna take a lot of time. But, my friends, this is TSO: time is the name of the game...

Another thing you can do is to level up things in clusters. So you level 4 farms, 2 mills and 1 bakery (and keep things balanced) - rather than leveling ALL the farms, then ALL the mills, then ALL the bakeries.

Have a think about what you have, what you want to have and what is required to make that jump - both in terms of the initial investment (the resources needed to push those level up buttons...) and the long term commitment (the input resources needed to keep those buildings actually operating smoothly at their new level).

So, we can sum all this up into two tips really:

1. At level 36 and level 46 GQ's and DQ's become substantially harder. Perhaps speak with other players  before you collect all that loot and XP to evaluate if your economy is ready for it.

2. Use the Economy Overview to plan ahead your leveling up of production buildings, so that you don't get stuck with missing resources to keep them working!

I hope this helps!