Banquet Analysis

[Bobkyou]

I'm bored and feel like doing an analysis of banqueting (this is not a guide). These numbers are all just theory, I am not a heavy banqueter so I have very little in the way of actual examples.


At max, you can fit 9 silk docks or 9 spice docks on a river. This takes up the vast majority of the water space, leaving you very little room for fishing jetties. Because the 2 river maps are more restrictive than the others, we'll be using 2 sets in an attempt to reach equilibrium.

So lets take a player with 1 lowland (his starting village), 4 rivers, 1 salt, 1 wine, and 1 highland. Lets assume he's built 8 guilds, 1 for each banqueting good, and he's donated the millions of wood, stone, iron, and pitch needed to max out 8 guilds. He's spent 72 research points maxing out everything banquet related. Assuming you have already maxed engineering for other things, you'll want 10 points in hall capacity so you can store 2,700 banquet goods.

If you wish, you can save some research points and a guild by not building a hunters. Each hunter hut is small enough that you can have a lot of them without too much trouble. However you'd have to have ~96 hunters with no research and no guild to equal 18 upgraded hunters.

4 rivers = 9 silk or spice docks each, 2 tailors each, 1 carpenter each, and 2 hunters each
1 salt = 18 salt, 3 tailors, 1 carpenter, and 3 hunters
1 valley side = 18 wine, 3 tailors, 1 carpenter, and 3 hunters
1 lowland = 9 carpenters, 2 tailors, 5 metalworkers, and 2 hunters
1 highland = 3 carpenters, 2 tailors, 13 metalworkers, and 2 hunters

This leaves us with
18 hunters
18 carpenters
18 tailors
18 metalworkers
18 wine
18 salt
18 spice
18 silk

All of these numbers are estimates. If you need 20 wine or only 15 salt to reach equilibrium, go for it. If you want 10 tailors on 1 map and no tailors on another, that's fine to.

Each banquet building has a base of ~50. x2.1 for guilds and x2.5 for research gives us ~262.5 goods per banquet building. Multiplied by 18 gives us around 4,725, however we have to take into account distance from the village hall, so lets round down to 3,900. If anyone who is a heavy banqueter could share some actual numbers, I'd love to add them to this post. So 3,900 of each banquet good per day, x160, gives us 624,000 potential honour per day.

As a comparison, you can earn between 42,000 to 47,000 honour passively per village (336,000 to 376,000 honour with 8 villages) and up to 180,000 honour per giant pig castle (killing more than 2 giant pig castles per day though would be extremely taxing).

The Benefits

1. Honour - 624,000 honour per day speaks for itself.
2. Gold - A product that sells really well as few players produce large quantities of banquet goods.
3. Donations - A product that is needed for donations, such as parish garden, parish church, and town hall.
4. Team Player - Something that could help your faction. You can ship your banquet goods to your factions more military minded players, where they could consume the goods for honour so they can keep attacking, sell the goods for gold so they can recruit more troops, or donate the goods to needed parish buildings.

Keep in mind you can't consume 50 venison for honour and also donate it and also sell it. You can't do all 4 of these things to the fullest at the same time.

The Costs

1. Time - You are producing ~3,900 of each banquet good per day, but you can only store 2,700. You must log on at least twice a day or you'll be wasting resources.
2. Merchants - To properly consume banquet goods, you have to ship them all to a single village. To ship 3,900 wine, at 20 wine per packet, is 195 merchant trips. Even if you had 50 merchants per village (which is ridiculous and something you should not do) it would take 4 trips. With 20 merchants per village (which is far more than I recommend but is much more reasonable) that's 10 trips. With 10 merchants per village (which allows you to keep 400 of your own troops in your castle at all times) that's 20 trips.
3. Merchants (again) - The banquet villages have horrible wood/stone production, and no iron or pitch, which means your merchants will also have to spend a lot of time shipping wood, stone, iron, and pitch around.
4. Production resources – Even with regular shipments of wood and stone, you are going to be hurting resource wise. Building the castle, castle repairs, village buildings, ect all use a lot of something you don't produce a lot of.
5. Lack of military – With almost no iron production and weak wood production, you will not be able to produce much in the way of armies. This isn't a big deal if you don't plan to be a military player, but its something to consider. Each armor or sword takes 50 iron and each bow or pike takes 100 wood. Just producing 100 bows and 20 pikes a day ends up being 12000 wood.
6. Research Points – 82 research points to max out everything banquet related and to have enough storage capacity to hold it all (assuming you've already maxed out engineering). 82 research points alone is a lot, at 27 subranks or hundreds of thousands of gold. But in addition to that is the research time involved. At later levels research time is over a day per point, so you are looking at over 3 months worth of research time. Even if you research all of these point early on, those will be 82 research points you didn't put somewhere else, so it still works out to be over 3 months of research time.
7. Food – With this setup, 7 of your 8 villages will have at most 3 food types each (the river villages won't have enough room for a lot of fishing jetties). 3 food types at 4x is 52 happiness, while 5 food types is 70 happiness (and 6 food types is 80). That bonus to happiness can help a lot when recruiting troops during negative weather, maxing your tax rate, or for passive honour. Of course if you aren't a military player the recruiting shouldn't be an issue for you.

Considerations

1. Guilds – getting all 8 guilds built in a parish and fully donated is going to be a chore. You don't produce much so you'll either have to donate very slowly or rely on your parish mates to donate for you, not to mention the flag costs. For example, a Tailor's Guild takes 324,100 wood, 303,150 stone, 70,000 iron, and 7,750 pitch to max out (I think).
2. Level – This was typed up assuming a Duke with 8 villages. A Prince with 10 villages will have an easier time with 2 more villages to focus on wood/stone production. Also the prince could go up to 15 villages, however players with more than 10 villages are prime targets in war and loosing a village is extremely expensive to replace.


So the final question is, is it worth it? It depends on your play style. First and foremost banqueting like this requires a much greater time investment than say, someone with 8 lowland villages just gaining passive honour all day.

Also this sort of playstyle would be very difficult for a military inclined player to use due to the iron and wood requirements. And that's not to say banqueting is the only way to support other players in your faction. Going for high weapon production and shipping them to team mates can be used for recruiting troops, selling for gold, or donations to parish buildings. A player could also focus on monks and use his faith points to interdict his team mates or bless to give them more passive honour. Their are lots of ways to play a support role besides banqueting.

However 624,000 honour a day is nice, in addition to the honour you will be gaining passively and potentially killing the occasional AI castle. 624,000 honour is really nice, either consumed yourself or given to team mates.

It all comes down to your playstyle.

[Fatal]

3.900*8 is just 31.200 production per day, what about top one with 168.6k ? But that's just lowlands and highland, i didnt find any banquet villages
168602/4*16=674408
Which is even more, doesnt make you ship goods that much and also he probably has enough wood/stone/ etc

[Syfon]

It's all quite feasible, but once again it comes down to multiple merchant trips which makes it almost pointless. Even for heavy carders.

[Fatal]

I hate when someone's trying to look pro while cant play without cards

[Bobkyou]

3.900*8 is just 31.200 production per day, what about top one with 168.6k ? But that's just lowlands and highland, i didnt find any banquet villages
168602/4*16=674408
Which is even more, doesnt make you ship goods that much and also he probably has enough wood/stone/ etc

This analysis was for a 'banquet' player, in the sense that they produce all 8 banquet types to get the x160 modifier. The reason I stopped at 18 of each banquet building was because 18 was the maximum number of silk/spice docks that could be fit on 2 river maps. The number of silk/spice docks end up being the limiting factor on reaching 'equilibrium', a point where you are producing an equal number of all 8 banquet goods. Such a player could easily have 50 hunters and 50 tailors if he so chose, and receive extra honour for banquets involving just those 2 resources, but such a thing is hard to quantify because at what point do you stop building hunters and tailors due to space limitations? Technically you could build 30 tailors and 30 hunters in a single village, but you wouldn't have room for much of anything else.

In w1 their is a prince producing 168,602 banquet goods per day with only lowland and highland villages. Assuming he is producing an equal number of the 4 primary banquet goods, he would be making ~10,537 of the 4 banquet goods for ~674,408 honour per day, without having to ship resources around as much. But also keep in mind that this player is a prince and has 15 villages, almost double the number of villages as our 8 village hypothetical player.

I'll write something up for a 15 village 8 banquet type player later. Keep in mind this is not a guide, its just an analysis. I wanted to consider how worthwhile banqueting was after the changes and decided to start a discussion.

[Fatal]

Ough i missed the fact that its really a player with 15 villages against yours with 8

I like topics about banqueting and pillage styles of playing as long as they have some more usefull information and not just 'you need 82 researches, 8 parish guilds and 4 villages of banquet type' and 'you need to max pillage and many military researches'. I'm really curious about how many honour can be raised in first case and how player can be really offensive without industry/farming buildings/researches. Want to know more about that

[DefendYourBase]

Well Currently getting into banquets now. I seriously think the wine silk, salt. all those things at 20 per merchant is DUMB. serioulsy DUMB. Infact.. all the banquet goods should be able to be carried from village to village much more easier... seriously?? A merchant cart can carry 1000 huge freaking blocks of stone.. but only 20 silk?? psssshhh what bs is this?

[Anidem]

Well Currently getting into banquets now. I seriously think the wine silk, salt. all those things at 20 per merchant is DUMB. serioulsy DUMB. Infact.. all the banquet goods should be able to be carried from village to village much more easier... seriously?? A merchant cart can carry 1000 huge freaking blocks of stone.. but only 20 silk?? psssshhh what bs is this?

This reflects rarity of items. Considering that Ff decided to do similar pricing ranges per bundle, they had to modify the size of the bundles.

Personally, I prefer a more open system, if not a auction.

[prince Hector]

Well Currently getting into banquets now. I seriously think the wine silk, salt. all those things at 20 per merchant is DUMB. serioulsy DUMB. Infact.. all the banquet goods should be able to be carried from village to village much more easier... seriously?? A merchant cart can carry 1000 huge freaking blocks of stone.. but only 20 silk?? psssshhh what bs is this?

This reflects rarity of items. Considering that Ff decided to do similar pricing ranges per bundle, they had to modify the size of the bundles.

Personally, I prefer a more open system, if not a auction.

Doesnt anyone think of the horses?

Please think of the horses instead of putting blocks of stone on them.

Joke,i need stone to defend against the armies of Mordor. XD

[Demawend]

I am not able to put more the 8 spice buildings in a village, and trying hard Anyone got picture how to place 9?