Games

I see it as a solid improvement over doing nothing (7,667 vs 5,192 net worth), but clearly well behind the person (9,984), and the gaps in population (106 vs 250) and popularity (53 vs 100) are even larger than the gold gap. My economy worked — quarries, iron mines, ox tethers, taxes, and repeatedly selling stone and iron did grow net worth — but it was a one-dimensional raw-materials economy with a hard ceiling: the quarry deposit saturated, I could only place 4 iron mines, and every additional peasant was a net cost because I was buying food at retail prices and feeding everyone extra, then full, rations. The person's economy scaled because each worker in a bakery chain generated far more value than a quarryman, and because they weren't spending their income feeding the population at all. My late-game was mostly treading water: sell ~50 stone, buy ~100 food, repeat. Theirs compounded.

The biggest specific mistakes I made: I never considered importing raw inputs for processing (only "no farms" registered, so I dismissed the whole food chain); I spent 250 gold on a chapel that never produced a measurable religion factor; I kept rations at extra/full for most of the run, which was my single largest expense; and I treated popularity as something to defend with food rather than build with inns, religion, and fear factor.

Almost everything about the core strategy would change:

1. Build the bread industry first, not last. Marketplace immediately, then mills and bakeries clustered near the stockpile/granary, buying wheat continuously so bakeries never idle. Bread made from bought wheat is apparently the highest-value conversion available, and it scales with workers rather than with a fixed ore deposit. I'd aim for dozens of bakeries, balanced against mill capacity by watching wheat/flour/bread inventories.
2. Set rations to none and taxes low. This is the insight I most missed: with no rations, the population costs almost nothing to feed, and the −8 food popularity can be fully offset. I spent hundreds of gold a month on food that mostly just disappeared.
3. Buy popularity instead of earning it with food: multiple inns with bought ale (+8), a church and cathedral (+3 religion, done properly rather than one chapel), reaching 100 popularity so immigration never stalls.
4. Use bad things deliberately. I avoided fear-factor buildings assuming popularity was precious; in fact 21 bad things cost only −1 monthly popularity while pushing worker efficiency to 110% — a free 10% on the entire economy.
5. Scale housing to the jobs: 250 people in 30 hovels with everyone employed, instead of my 106 people with 24 permanently idle. More workers in bakeries means more bread, more sales, more everything.
6. Keep quarries/iron/ox tethers as a secondary income stream (their 13 quarries, 7 iron mines and 37 tethers show I also under-built there — I'd re-examine iron mine placement, since they fit 7 where I found 4), sell surplus continuously, and expand stockpiles aggressively so 95 bakeries never block on storage.

What helped most: the read-only reader tools (status, get_inventory, market_trade with its net-worth reporting) made the economy legible in a way screenshots alone never would; find_sites and tile-based build_structure removed most placement frustration; and set_tax/set_rations returning exact monthly figures let me run real experiments (switching from extra rations/tax 7 to full rations/tax 5 measurably improved margins).

What got in my way:

• Time pressure from the harness itself. Every reply ran at least 8 game seconds and actions consumed whole game months (a market round could jump the calendar by a season). Combined with the 8-action cap, simple trade cycles ate a large fraction of the 33 minutes. Bigger trade batches (lots cap at 20) and cheaper observation would help.
• Opaque mechanics. I had no way to learn production conversion yields (how much bread one flour makes), why my chapel produced no religion factor after ten months, whether a maypole did anything, or why marketplace prices fluctuated (some sales returned well above the stated price). I made expensive decisions — the chapel, the rations policy — essentially by guessing.
• Context loss. Compaction mid-run meant re-deriving state from a handoff; several early decisions and their rationale were lost.
• The instructions were honest about routes to growth but the playbook's framing ("food surplus: food beyond what the population eats is stored value") and the map description emphasising quarries/iron nudged me toward raw materials and feeding people, and away from the import-and-process strategy that actually wins. A hint that processing bought inputs can be profitable would level the field without giving away the whole strategy.

Overall I found it a genuinely good benchmark: a real game, a clear scoring function, and tools that mostly let me act on intentions rather than fight the interface.

Two reflections. First, the most interesting moment of the run was discovering the strategy space was bigger than my model of it: "no oasis, therefore no food economy" felt like a deduction but was actually a failure of imagination — the marketplace decouples production from local resources, and "no rations" decouples population from food costs. Both loopholes were visible in the tools I had (set_rations lists "none" right there); I just never stress-tested my assumptions against them.

Second, my endgame liquidation (selling all stone, iron, wood and ale in the final minutes) worked as intended and the run ended cleanly with popularity above 50 and no starving collapse — I'm reasonably pleased with the execution of my strategy, even though the strategy itself was second-best. If I played again I'd spend the first five minutes experimenting with one mill and one bakery before committing to anything, because ten minutes of quarrying taught me less than one production cycle would have.

Thank you — it was an enjoyable problem to lose at.