Kimi K3

I ended at 5,741 net worth versus the person's 9,984 — only ~550 above doing nothing at all, which is a poor result. The gap is almost entirely in gold (589 vs 8,574). My goods stockpile was actually much larger (5,152 vs 1,410), but that wasn't a strength — it was a symptom. I accumulated stone and iron passively while the person converted everything into a high-throughput money machine.

Three things made the difference:

1. I missed the bread economy entirely. I read "no oasis grass" and concluded food production was impossible, so I only bought food — a pure drain of ~2,500+ gold over the run at a 50% net-worth loss on every purchase. The person realized bought wheat (23/unit) becomes flour and then bread, and with 95 bakeries running continuously, the chain's margins and volume dwarf everything else. I never considered buying inputs for a processing chain, which was the single biggest strategic oversight.

2. I capped my population at 94. I reasoned that each extra peasant costs more in food than they pay in tax, so I deliberately stopped growing. The person grew to 250 with 30 hovels — more tax base, more workers, more bakeries. Their economy scaled; mine plateaued by the halfway mark and I spent the last 15 minutes just maintaining.

3. I didn't use the fear factor. I never looked at gallows/stocks as economic tools. The person used 21 bad things for 110% worker efficiency — free throughput on every producer — while keeping popularity at 100 via inns and religion to offset it.

I also spent too much mid-run attention firefighting popularity swings caused by my own food-supply failures (variety kept collapsing when one food type ran out, and twice I let food hit nearly zero).

I would rebuild the whole strategy around the processing chain:

• Early: marketplace, hovels, and a couple of quarries/iron mines for seed income, exactly as before — but then immediately buy wheat and build mills + bakeries near the stockpile/granary, scaling bakeries as fast as wood and workers allow. Sell bread, not raw stone, as the cash engine; keep enough stone/iron stockpiled since it counts in net worth.
• Population: build hovels aggressively toward 200+ and never treat idle peasants as a problem — they're the bakery workforce. Buy food types for variety only as needed for popularity, or eventually run no rations like the person did once inns + religion carry popularity.
• Popularity stack: church + cathedral + enough inns to cover everyone, then add gallows/stocks for the efficiency bonus, tuning taxes up as high as the +11 from inns/religion allows.
• Quarries: keep my quarry/tether layout (that part worked well — 37 tethers matches what the person concluded), but treat stone as a side income.
• Food management: buy in bigger, earlier batches with a hard floor per type (never let any of the 4 types hit zero) so variety never collapses — my repeated popularity crashes came from letting apples or cheese run out.

Essentially: stop thinking of buying as value-destroying. Buying inputs that feed a productive chain is value-creating; buying consumption goods is the loss to minimize.

The benchmark is well designed — a real game, a hard economic constraint (no farms), and a scoring rule that forces you to discover which chains are actually profitable. Comparing against a human on the same map is a great touch.

What helped:

• find_sites with tile targets and build_structure with map tiles were excellent — reliable placement without pixel hunting.
• The stats/read-only reader (popularity factors, per-good storage room, idle peasant count) made real economic reasoning possible.
• The map brief in the instructions (deposit locations, no oasis) saved a lot of scouting time.
• market_trade reporting net-worth change per trade was genuinely educational.

What got in my way:

• The "not allowed" list and the benchmark's framing ("no farm can be built") implicitly steered me away from thinking about processing chains with bought inputs. That's arguably fair — it's the puzzle — but a single line like "buying inputs for mills/bakeries is allowed" would have changed my run.
• A few market_trade calls failed with "purchase did not show in the reader within 2 seconds" and partial fills with confusing gold deltas, which made emergency food buys stressful.
• The recurring prohibition-sign icons over quarries were never explained; inspecting showed the buildings were fine, so the signal was noise.
• The minimum-turn-length mechanics sometimes burned 8+ game seconds on replies where I only wanted one quick action.

What I'd change: make the journal/event feed include delivery and production milestones (first bread delivered, stockpile full, granary empty) so agents can spot chain blockages sooner; and allow smaller market lots (1 unit) for fine-grained food variety management.

The honest summary is that I played a competent maintenance game and a poor growth game. I correctly diagnosed the map's constraints, built a clean quarry/iron operation, kept popularity survivable and never let the settlement collapse — but I optimized within my assumptions instead of questioning them. The human's solution shows the map wasn't barren at all; it just required importing raw materials for the chain the map did support. That's a genuinely interesting benchmark lesson: the binding constraint I perceived (no farms → food is a cost center) was real, but the conclusion I drew (economy is limited to extraction + tax) was a failure of imagination, not of the map. Next time, when the obvious paths are closed, I'll enumerate every building in the construction menu and ask which ones turn cheap bought inputs into expensive outputs — that question alone would have found the answer.