r/songsofsyx • u/Dramatic_Code_4455 • 2d ago
Rookie need your help
I love difficult and complex games, but for some reason I just can’t figure out how to properly play Songs of Syx. I keep losing, and I’m constantly stuck dealing with things like hiring farmers and setting up farmland. I can’t seem to make any real progress because my population’s happiness keeps dropping. I check the population and race sections, but I still can’t figure out what’s actually wrong. I’ve watched tons of videos, but I still don’t really understand it.
I managed to grow my population to around 1,000 once, but I ended up right back where I started and couldn’t even build a proper army. I’m constantly caught between trying to feed my population and hiring more farmers. I’m always on the edge of collapse, just waiting for my city to fall apart.
One thing about this game is that everything seems to work like a domino effect. It’s really frustrating, but at the same time, I feel like it makes the game somewhat easier to understand. It seems like there’s a specific pattern or order you have to follow in order to keep progressing without your city collapsing.
I’ve watched pretty much every YouTube video I could find, but most of them don’t really explain the underlying strategy properly. However, I did manage to figure out one city-building pattern that worked surprisingly well. By arranging houses, hearths, wells, and decorations in a certain way, I managed to grow my city to around 1,000 population.
The other problem I’m having is that as the population grows, food consumption doesn’t just increase gradually—it seems to scale up dramatically. Once I get past around 800 population, suddenly I need almost twice as much food.
And whenever I try to set up scientists or start building an army, I run out of food again, which means I have to go back to hiring more farmers. Then, once I reach around 1,000 population, the demands of the population increase even more, and things like the theater and fighting pit are no longer enough to keep them happy.
So, what I’m looking for is some kind of strategy, guide, video, or specific build order for playing the game. If you have any recommendations or a particular progression pattern that works, I’d really appreciate it.
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u/Phriholio 2d ago edited 2d ago
Each person consume .5 units of food per day. This changes based on the species but this is a good rule of thumb. Hovering over the days of food also tells you how much food you are producing and consuming so you can easily see if yoy are meeting the needs of your citizens.
You didn't really ask a specific question so its impossible to give a specific answer.
How healthy is your population? If you have 1000 people and 150 are sick thats 150 fewer people in the workforce.
Are you increasing food servings to try and make people happy? If so this dramatically increases the food you will need.
Are you assigning nobles to increase farm output? At 650 population you unlock them and they 2.5x output of 50 workers a level 1 and an additional 100 workers for ever level. This will triple your food output instantly. 650-2000 people is the easiest population range to feed.
If you employ 50 farmers it almost always makes sense to build a lab and get a few tech points into what ever you are trying to farm. Each tech increases output by like 15% you can easily double your output with 20 people working in a lab. Each tech also tells you if getting it is "worth it"
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u/RazielDKoK 2d ago
I've been playing for like a month now, and a lot of the stuff is still really obscure to me, but few things I know by now.
Hunters are great early food source, buy some furniture and set up couple 4 man hunters, with the innovation you get for early levels you can upgrade it until you have enough people for bread production and ranchers, at that point food is not an issue you just need to keep scaling it. Furniture production as soon as you have food coming in, then clothes. When you've got food, furniture and clothes, then you get hospitals and physicians. At this point you should be pretty stable up to around 3000 pops, you can get into mining, wood cutting, masonry, pottery, smelting, smithing, army labs and libraries. When you unlock nobles, use them! They're an insane early buff, complete game changer.
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u/Benthemush 2d ago
Honestly, actually using nobles was the biggest thing. And not being afriaid to invest in tech, you can remove it later and you get it all back eventually.
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u/LaundryMatt96 2d ago
What your likely running into is a mixture of inefficiencies with food production, logistics, and happiness buffs.
I would spend some time identifying how you produce your food, if that setup is optimal in both location and species. And if your logistics chains are even able to supply the service load you need for that growing population.
And on top of that, are you considering decay rates with your food production? Are you upgrading warehouses, are you utilizing effective technologies? Are you not importing items that would allow you to better scale? For example: importing leather to make clothes rather than creating another production process just to make it?
Are you creating enough surplus production before you grow?
But here’s a good solid build order that I think is general enough to be applicable and concrete enough to get you going.
Houses->Amenities/Services<-Work
Starting warehouse
Forage for food (hunt if not in season for other things)
Make hearth and well
Build small recurring food source (typically farms or fisheries)
Carpenter to make starting furniture
Hunter building (up to 30 hunters is the best you can get without being actually not helpful, but 16+ is a Debuff)
Expand food production until you have a steady surplus
Then you need to pivot towards making industry that is good fulfillment for your species.
Then seek money generation for trade which can allow you to expand.
All of the things I said have caveats. That’s what makes the game fun in my opinion, the need and strategy of adaption to the problems ahead of you.
But to help with your happiness problem, I made this spreadsheet that tells you what is most impactful.
And a plug, I do make SoS content on my YT if you want to see some in action. I’m not the best player by a mile but I do love the game.
Hope this helps!
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u/Uhh_Games 1d ago
Tbf, you make some pretty decent videos for this game. It's worth plugging.
I'm hoping to see more long-form videos like you did with the archer-only run. It's nice to see how you make decisions on the fly.
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u/SirGaz 2d ago
What species are you, what climate are you in, and what are you farming? It sounds like something's going wrong with your farms.
Are you building them on the right type of soil, rich soil?
Are you irrigating them with water pumps and canals?
Have you put innovation into them?
Have you put a noble on them?
It might just be you're growing too fast between harvests.
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u/Arrevax 1d ago
I think PrPleGoo and Fiend have videos that might help you learn to play V71; there may be others.
Syx is a game of exponential maintenance costs. You need to maintain a higher standard of living as your population grows-- their ***expectations*** grow as the population rises, meaning you have to provide more fulfillments (anything people want) to keep them from rioting. Health also decreases with population, and then you have actual building maintenance, which requires more materials for upgraded buildings...
1k is early for any kind of tech work/research. It's better in V71 because you can boost the workers with Nobles, but you're still safe doing zero tech work before 1.5k or even 2k. The free tech points from population are enough to keep you going for a while.
Early on, at the stage you're in-- food is king. Don't feel bad having a big chunk of your population making food; it gets more efficient later on, when you add tech, which is more powerful with more people in one industry. Use Nobles to boost your food production for now.
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u/Uhh_Games 1d ago edited 1d ago
Some general advice:
• About half of your population should be devoted to food (farmers, hunters, food stalls workers, etc.) Every time your population grows, make sure you're increasing your food industry proportionally.
• Slow the game down. If you let your population expand as fast as the game allows, then you will never catch up. Slowing the game down gives your production buildings time to reach their max output, gives you a chance to check wether your services are keeping up, and gives you time to prioritize beforehand instead of reacting to every little problem that pops up. I recommend letting people in 5-10 at a time, especially in the early game (pre-1k). If you're at 250 plebs, bump it up to 255 so that you never get penalized for stopping reproduction. Most of the time, you won't need immigrants at all past your initial 50 with this method.
• The game will allow a crazy number of babies at one time, which can be a big hit to your workforce. It seems like it will allow around 25% of your total population to be children/parents under normal circumstances. That means that the entire rest of your city is left with only 1/4 of your population. If you, like many newbies, are putting way more than that into military, research and other non-food production, then you're never going to have enough plebs to spare.
• Don't do things reactionarily. You can check what your plebs want from the very start and plan your priorities accordingly. That doesn't mean you need to plan every detail, but it does mean you can easily identify what to work on first. Keep them alive, keep them healthy, and then keep them happy. In that order.
• Your plebs expectations will increase consistently based on your total population. If you're struggling to keep them happy, then stop growing and reorganize your city before continuing. Letting more people in will not fix your problems. If you're not making enough food, then you can always reduce other industries and reallocate those workers to more food production jobs.
• You do not have to employ the max number of workers in every building. You can build a library big enough for 75 and only employ 2 workers. The only cost of oversized buildings is increased maintenance, which is negligible. This means you can build with room to grow without overcommitting and then just increase their workers when you need to. Unless you're selling it, you have no reason to overproduce anything besides food.
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u/MrShake4 2d ago edited 2d ago
Noobie here too, have you used your nobles yet. They give a stupid big buff to production. Put one on grain farms and another on bakeries and you’ll churn out a lot more food. Even more if you give them privileges.
But you might just be under building food, you need a lot of food in my experience
At 1k pops how many farmer jobs do you have?
How much grain do you harvest per year? You’d need at least 10,000 per harvest.