Wheat, Flour, and Bread: The Great Balancing Act

[MrPillow]

Has anyone found a way to balance the amount of wheat, flour, and bread, or any product made of flour, that is produced. Usually after a while flour starts stockpiling and I end up with more than 100 flour if I let it go for a while. I manually turn off my mills to slow, or completely stop, production, but I would rather have a balanced amount of farms and mills to keep flour from piling up. Right now I have 80 wheat tiles, 5 mills, and am producing about 25 products for 21 citizens.

[Syvelocin]

I usually switch to meat before that would really matter, and I keep bread and flour stockpiled in large amounts just in case (50 or 100 if I want two lines of barrels to be used, as I have a little obsession with using a standard size of 5x5 stockpile). Then I just harvest wheat as needed. If I'm down six flour, have them harvest the 12 required and that's it.

You really have to play with it though. I don't know of any sure-fire way. When I'm on the bread stage, I change it often depending on demand. During the wheat stage on my current town, I was discovering my magic number was time and time again 3. But I'm sure there are many variables that could change that.

[MrPillow]

I usually switch to meat before that would really matter

I have stages that I go in as well, bread --> meat --> meat pies ---> and now I'm going into snowcherry pies, which is a wheat product, so you can see how I would still need to produce wheat.

At the start I find that 32 wheat plots and 2 mills produces enough bread for 11 people to survive on, any less and people end up starving. Flour still piles up though so I have more experimenting to do.

[Avarice]

Maybe I'm completely wrong here, but I don't think you are meant to build that many farms.

If food production was completely automated then what would you be doing exactly?

I'm super early into the game, but even at the beginning the more I tried to automate the more the townies just sat around and ate/slept and didn't have time to do anything else. Harvest wheat>store wheat>get wheat> bake wheat> store bread> eat bread> start over again.

So I just feed them apples and pears now until they starve and quickly pump out stockpiled meals...fruit regrows and they are back on a fruit diet and working again.

Haven't played that far into it yet, but I hope we honestly don't need to build more than 1-2 of each building. I'd rather control a small town and rely on heroes.

[Colombo]

You cad do it with building, but you would surely need more utilities.

[Reyn]

Easy(sort of) workaround for this is to juggle with the priorities. If you're low on flour, make harvesting top priority(baking second), make the quota of your flour equal to the number of stoves, and double of that number for wheat. Increase the quota of desired food(I usually go double the number of townies)

By doing this, you'll always have enough raw material to use all your producing units to make prepared food to fill desired quota.

[DragonLynn]

I have found it is much easier to control the amount of flour by setting the amount of wheat in the auto-production panel. I have 90 wheat farms and six mills but I control the amount of flour by changing the number of wheat I want harvested. You have to keep in mind that by setting the wheat to two, for instance, that only two townies can be harvesting wheat at one time. The wheat is immediately taken to a mill, leaving a spot for another townie to come harvest wheat. Of course, if they are far away, it can take them awhile to get there.... However, that way you do not need to manually turn your mills off and on. If your wheat starts to build up, turn down the number for wheat production. I have found that in a beginner town of 11 people all being fed on bread and fruit pies, setting wheat production to 2 or 3 is more than enough. Flour starting to take over the map? Set wheat production to 1 for awhile. That being said, I transition over to ham and eggs and cooked beef for my people's main munchies later on and only have bread and pies as backup food so I set wheat production to 0 at that point and just manually harvest wheat when I need it. It did seem to me from times I stayed on pies a long time (no iron ) that about 2 wheat production for every 15 ish people is a good guideline - as long as you have enough wheat farms and enough mills that neither of those are a choke point. There should ALWAYS be enough wheat for harvest and ALWAYS enough mills that they can take the wheat right to a mill after it is harvested, otherwise, using the production panel won't work as well.

Anyway, that is just how I preferred to go about it - just seems a lot easier to turn one number up and down than to have to turn each mill on or off all the time.

[wizardjian]

well i set wheat to 10 at 1st then bread to 100. after that i set pies to 50. when i get a ton of food i turn wheat into 2 that way the villagers wont only
grow crap. if the food goes too low i turn it back up 2 10.

[MrPillow]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I'll try these out.