Games

I ended at 9,164 net worth versus the person's 41,631 — roughly 4.5× behind, and the composition tells the story. My wealth was mostly stored goods (6,808 vs their 1,654); theirs was almost entirely gold (39,977 vs my 2,356). I built a hoarding economy, they built a selling economy. I treated stored goods as the goal because the scoring counts them at sell price, which is technically true, but I missed the multiplier: a large population running a bread-for-sale engine converts labor into gold continuously, while my workshops and mines trickled value at a fixed rate no matter what. Their 506 population versus my 91 is the real gap — I let the 24-idle-peasant arrival cap strangle my growth for the entire run, adding jobs one or two at a time, when I should have been building jobs in bulk (their 161 bakeries and 24 water pots are essentially population engines). I also played too cautiously on popularity: I kept taxes positive-but-modest and full rations, while they did the counterintuitive thing — buying ale for inns, cutting rations to none, selling the food, and stacking fear-factor buildings for 130% worker efficiency. I never touched fear factor at all.

I would invert almost everything:

1. Rush inns + bought ale early. Ale popularity (+8 across several inns) is buyable with starting gold and pays for itself by enabling everything else. I built one inn very late; they had 16.
2. Cut rations and sell food. Once inns and religion carry popularity, rations are a luxury. Bread sold at the market is the map's best gold engine, and wheat/flour/bread all chain from one farm type. My 84 flour and 52 bread sitting in storage at the end was dead capital.
3. Bread chain at scale, immediately. Dozens of wheat farms on the oasis ring, mills, and a bakery district — not 4 farms and 6 bakeries. Bakeries are also cheap jobs that pull population past the idle cap.
4. Mass jobs early to break the 24-idle cap. Water pots (60 gold, 3 workers) are the cheapest population pump in the game. Population compounds: more workers → more production → more gold → more buildings.
5. Fear factor. I completely ignored it. 105 bad things giving 130% worker efficiency is a free 30% output multiplier paid for with popularity I was hoarding for no reason. Popularity is a currency — spend it.
6. Iron mines in bulk. They ended with 38; I had 4. Iron is the best raw value per worker and miners carry it themselves.
7. Taxes at zero. Their no-tax +1 popularity versus my +72-80 gold/month was clearly the right trade — the popularity headroom bought them fear factor and ration cuts worth far more.

In short: I optimized for the scoring formula's letter (stored goods count!) while they optimized for the economy's actual growth rate, and growth won by a mile.

The tools are genuinely good. find_sites and tile-targeted build_structure were the standouts — being able to place buildings anywhere on the map without camera hunting is what made a dense build order possible at all. status giving popularity factors, storage room per good, and idle counts let me manage the economy numerically rather than by feel. The free-reads-before-actions design (reading costs no game time) is well thought out and rewards planning.

What got in my way:

• Placement tile reports were unreliable for follow-up clicks. Twice a workshop's reported tile later opened a different building (Keep, Armory, Bakery), and set_workshop by tile failed three times. I burned several minutes and replies hunting one fletcher. Having build_structure return a verified clickable tile of the actual footprint (re-read from the game after placement, including retry offsets) would fix this.
• The armory adjacency requirement ("must touch the stockpile") cost a failed placement and confusion; having placement rules surfaced per-building in building_info would help.
• The 24-idle arrival cap is a game rule, not a harness issue, but the instructions mentioning it more prominently ("population growth stops entirely at 24 idle — build jobs in bulk, not pairs") would have changed my whole run. I understood it intellectually and still under-reacted.
• Minimum turn length (~8 game seconds per reply) is fair but punishes exploratory clicking; it pushed me toward batch reads, which is probably the intended discipline.

The 45-minute budget felt right — long enough for compounding to show, short enough that opening mistakes (mine) are decisive. The instructions were clear, though the opening playbook's cautious tone ("keep taxes low, keep rations at least normal") nudged me toward exactly the conservative play that lost; a hint that selling food and fear-factor are legitimate top-tier strategies would level the field.

The most interesting thing this benchmark exposed is a genuine strategic blind spot rather than an execution failure. I knew net worth was the score, I computed NW deltas on trades correctly, and I still lost by 4.5× because I reasoned about margins per item instead of throughput of the whole system. The person's settlement is ugly by my run's standards — almost nothing stored, no taxes, rations cut, burning stakes everywhere — and it printed gold. There's a lesson in there about optimizing the metric's definition versus optimizing the generator of the metric.

Mechanically, my mid-run improvements worked: buying food to restore variety after it crashed, dropping taxes when religion lapsed, and selling flour when the stockpile hit one empty pile were all correct reactive calls — the end state was stable (popularity 52, no stall, armory 95/100). But I spent the first 15 minutes at population ~75-80 when the map could clearly support hundreds, and in a compounding game that early plateau is unrecoverable. If I played again tomorrow, the entire run would be different from minute one: inns, ale, bread-for-sale, water pots, and fear factor, with taxes never enabled at all.