The Stock (and farms)

This is the first in a series of articles on the main windows. You find these by clicking on the second icon from the left on the bottom of the screen.

First of, I'll start with the Stock since a lot of stuff in the other windows is self explaining. The stock, however, gives a good overall view on the performance of your economy. I've read a lot of rules of thumb on the internet on the amount of farms you need, between 1.5 to 3 per consuming building on different websites.

What I do is merely check the stock every so often. I want to see the amount of raw corn slowly rise with intermediate stuff like flour, beer and pigs being as close to zero as possible. Regardless of the amount of farms or their productivity, this shows a healthy economy.

The keyword is productivity. It is not always possible to have farms run on 100% . In some maps you'll have to make choices. A farm running at 50% is better than no farm at all. One could make a whole lot of calculations but the simplest solution is to check the stock.

Some other values to check are coal, iron and gold. Ideally, you'll want all of these to be as close to zero as possible. If one starts to rise over 100, just stop production by cutting food distribution or don't build mines. Gold and iron tend to climb fast on some maps. 100 gold ore is usually plenty to support the rest of the game, 100 iron translates into 50 soldiers. That's usually more than any map needs.

If you manage to keep all values low, this usually makes your road system far less cluttered, meaning your economy overall will run better. Your gold and stones will reach the front lines faster, ore and food can travel easily to their respective destinations and corn is transported to processing building. Cluttered roads is a sign of overproducing. The stock will help you determine the exact problem.

One exception is food and wheat early in the game. You'll want a bit of a surplus. This way you can support a young mining economy when room for extra farms is scarce. I usually start the game with a farm and a few fisheries should I have the room for it. After expanding a bit I can immediately support multiple mills and bakeries without building extra farms. I only have to start building farms when wheat drops under 100. I can forget about fisheries altogether after the beginning.