What is the ideal way of dividing up your villagers to perform certain tasks?

Question

I've realised that on the village tab you can set your villagers to perform certain tasks (e.g. hunt for meat, mine for iron or steel, etc.). How many villagers should go on each task to gain as many materials as you can? I have 80 villagers: how should I divide them?

Answer 1

'Best' is subjective, and depends on what your goals are. But you can certainly change production to meet certain needs, or to generate the most overall resources while staying balanced.

If you suddenly need a lot of one resource - such as bait to harvest traps for fur, or leather to build advanced buildings and supplies, etc. - you can adjust your workers to pump out a lot in a short time. For example, ramping up your hunters will generate lots of fur in the short term. You could then convert them all to tanners to produce leather.

In the long term you may find it useful to have a balanced approach. It's possible to generate a positive number of almost every resource type at once. Even if you're only creating +1 of a resource every 10 seconds, it adds up. You can switch the game to hyper mode to run faster, or leave the tab running for a while and come back.

To do this: pick the resource type that is most expensive, and increase workers until you generate a positive amount (e.g. +1 iron per 10s). Then increase other requirements that you need to create that resource until they are positive as well (e.g. increase charcutiers until you are making enough cured meat to feed all of your miners, plus one extra for stockpiling). Continue all the way up the chain of required resources until at last you have a few villagers set as gatherers for wood.

Keep in mind that if you have a large stockpile of resources - e.g. 10,000 or 100,000s of wood - you can get away with sacrificing some of it to build something else that you need. For example, if your 'balanced' approach is almost balanced but gives you -10 wood per game tick, and you have 5 million wood saved up, you likely don't need to worry about it.

Answer 2

So what I get out of your question is that you probably want to make everything at the same time. The best way that you could achieve that is by putting: 19 gatherers, 4 charcutiers, 2 coal miners, 48 hunters, 2 iron miners, 1 steelworker, 1 tanner, and 3 trappers.

I think that is the only way that you can make every resource at the same time without losing any, the only problem is that occasionally some huts are being burned down and since you are not making enough wood (1 per 10secs) eventually you are going to run out, when that happens you could remove the steelworker until you have enough wood or you could follow the patient approach and collect wood from the cart.