Wow I suck.

[del]

Well i got the game installed finally and been through the scenarios.

Problems though.
I have no clue what the ratio of common/luxury shops/shrines etc should be

I am ending up with 60 lux and common shops each.
2-3 bakeries with good harvests and still get people protesting about gods, no food, no wares etc.

Another thing is placement of buildings. I am clueless on this.
With priests, wares, nobles, overseers

[Grumpus]

I can't imagine a city large enough to need 60 common and 60 luxury shops!

For any city with ten nobles or less, you would need at most 2-3 sets of common and 1-2 sets of luxury shops. Suggest you do the tutorials, if you haven't done so already. Check out game help, and lurk around this forum.

If all else fails try:

Which Way to Waset? (http://irvdon.freeprohost.com/index.html)

[ramuhotep]

The problem is, unlike Pharaoh (there's that name again!), there are no hard ratios of distance. You can't say "place your Linen shop 23 tiles or less from the Flax").

For placement of every building, the same questions must be answered. How far is it from the resources it needs? How far is it from the citizens who need it?
Priests are a special case, as they should be treated more like a resource; that is, for each Hospital/Shrine/School, the question is, how far are they away from a Priest?

In the city I just played (Iunu) I had some 598 citizens (approximately 160 families) all supplied with common wares by 13 common shops (3 sets of 4 - not sure where the odd one came from). Although I had a yellow Wares icon here and there, every house had a Green indicator, and the city satisfaction on the Success screen read "Perfect"

How many families can a single shop supply assuming optimal resource access? Beats me! :p

-- Ray

[EDIT: Fix some typos and add screenshots. Success screen blocks the people screen, so I included a shot from just before.]

[Keith]

Del, this game doesn't rely on ratios as much as the old games. It is not about how many buildings of one type you have, but rather, what and where they are. If you have 8-10 townhouses, I would say that 6 luxury shops (1 of each type) is sufficient. Iit takes a little time for the shops to become active and produce wares that the nobles and elites can trade for.

With 60 shops there is too much competition for business. Shopkeepers rely on trade for food. They trade their goods for the food they need to eat and trade for goods that they need.

Providing a handful of servants for the nobles and the luxury shops owners to utilize will help. I generally start out with 3-6 servants and only add a few more if I need a larger noble population. I normally start out with 4 townhouses.

You won't be able to keep all of your people happy 100% of the time in CotN.

[Boobootifi]

I usually don't add a second set of 6 luxury shops unless I have more than 10 nobles. Put them in a row with 4 common shops for a "strip mall" to make shopping easier. Nobles sometimes forget to buy staples. It's like they go to the mall and buy CDs but forget to buy toothpaste unless the drugstore is right there.

Just make sure you are defining what type of wares they sell -- don't let them choose or you may end up with 6 different jewelry stores and no one selling anything else.

...Boo

[del]

Wow I been way off.
I been having no less then 20 of common and luxury and only like 1-2 nobles lol.

They would be in the red all the time for wares so i kept adding more and more.

[Tontoman]

Hehe, by building more stores, each store got less food from selling stuff which means they were short of wares and you probably made more stores which means each store got less food which means.... vicious circle. :D

Yeah the system takes a little getting used to. Big thing is that there is much more lag in this game than the older city builders. Changes you do can take a season or two to take effect since the food/money has to trickle down.

I find it's better to judge store need based on now much stuff is for sale at the store instead of houses wares needs. If it's always at 'few' and it's been around for a number of seasons (takes some time to get resources and start pumping out products) then it might be a good idea to build some more stores. It's better as house wares needs can be effected by many other things than just store wares availability. Bad harvest will make it low, buying a tomb or enhancement (for nobles) can make it low etc. without there being any store shortage problem.

T.

PS. Another indication can be a store with lots of food (money) having a shortage of commodities. If four common stores are grouped together and they all have money but they are also short of commodities... it means eveytime they try and shop at the neighbouring store it is out.... so you need more stores as all wares are too low.

[Keith]

Another reason a shop is out of goods, is that they may be too far from or don't have access to the raw materials that they need to make goods.

If they have to walk great distances to get the materials it will take them much longer to produce goods to sell.

Providing luxury shops with a few (not many) servants, helps, they will go out and gather the materials for those shops when hired to do so. Common shop owners have to fend for themselves.