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[Kagus]

Songs of Syx

Songs of Syx

Songs of Syx

As it seemed necessary...



Songs of Syx is a grand strategy city builder in development by Sweden-based Jakob de Laval A.K.A. Jake the Dev A.K.A. Gamatron, wherein you take your rightful place as ruler over a rag-tag bunch of bumpkins and try to keep them in enough food, beds and latrines that they grow to become soldiers and die gloriously in battle (or of starvation).

As of April 29th, the project was successfully Kickstarted and is now being sold on itch.io, it will also eventually be available on Steam whenever that happens. Note that the free open alpha downloads seem to have been removed, and the demo button on Steam doesn't appear to actually do anything.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

While your subjects will survive with just being able to eat now and again, the maximum size of your colony is based off of your reputation, which is increased by providing the necessary infrastructure to allow your plebeians to sleep comfortably, clothe themselves, bathe, bury their dead, and more.


Due to the early development status and the lackluster ingame documentation, there are a lot of important notes that can easily be missed by new players; such as the fact that room objects can be not only rotated, but also resized to allow for more efficient (and aesthetic) space utilization. Or that the outer tiles of a room cannot have objects placed on them unless there's a solid wall beyond it. Or that the Tavern is where the normal dregs eat their food, while the Feast Hall is for... Other things, presumably. Special things that I haven't gotten to quite yet.

This thread will serve as a useful place to learn and share such useful tidbits of knowledge, as well as discussing the game and its progress as a whole.


At the moment, unless something significant has changed from the last open alpha, $25 seems a teensy bit steep... Especially with how little sense some of the interface seems to make.

It's still an excellent time-slaughterer, and there's plenty of content even at this stage! Getting the little mud-dwellers into something that almost resembles a society is terribly fulfilling business, and there's talk of nobles and slaves being gamechangers as well (which may or may not already be implemented, difficult for me to say).

[Robsoie]

It's odd he removed the free prototype, it was actually very good to showcase the potential his game could have, even if it was limited in scope it was a good demo, maybe he'll change his mind once his game development will have progressed more and will re-offer that old prototype as a demo.

about new development, there's this one that is rather major in comparison to demo as it will enable a lot of planned features (cities rivalries, trading, etc..) :
https://old.reddit.com/r/songsofsyx/comments/ga55ui/world_map_is_coming_to_life_heres_a_populated/

[Frumple]

Or that the Tavern is where the normal dregs eat their food, while the Feast Hall is for... Other things, presumably. Special things that I haven't gotten to quite yet.

You can set feast hall usage in the reputation menu! I haven't bothered much with the tavern in the non-money alpha build thing, but I got a few (fairly big) feast halls up and running once someone mentioned that menu and I checked it out. Didn't even realize the tavern was for bog-standard fooding, huh. Rep menu's also where you tell people to wear clothes! And bath. Also try to build you (big!) bathhouse near coal deposits. You might not notice it needs that to be a happy building on top of being hygienic. Build everything big, really, reasonably sized shit just does not work when you're dealing with a four digit population.

The tutorial lies its little ass off about how many people to allocate to food production, by the by. 1/4th will maintain-ish a stable population, but your population is basically never stable and consequently a 1/4th ratio will lead to a lot of people starving to death when newcomers strain a barely stable food situation to the breaking point, which is stupidly easy early on. You want more like... half. Maybe a bit less, but more than a quarter and probably more than a third.

Also don't forget your monuments and torches. They can be upsized, and it seems helpful to put them places that are high traffic, or areas where you notice people are congregating or idling. Also also it's super helpful to start somewhere with mountains (stone, places to carve out rooms) and water (fish are super easy food sources!).

[Robsoie]

I was losing a big amount of people to starvation after following the tutorial.
Additionally i was a bit too used to DF farming system in which with a very small plump helmet field you can feed massive amount of people, so it was not helping

Only when i started to build more and bigger farms (and so get more farm workers assigned) i could finally have my population increase instead of stagnate (new people -> new starvation -> new death) .

[Kagus]

That's funny, I never had much issue with starvation... There was one instance where supplies got a little low, but other than that I just added a few more fields whenever it seemed like a good idea.

On that note, what kind of field size do you go for now? I've just been building off of the tutorial so far, so for the sake of consistency I've been doing 8x8s. Speaking of which, an 8x8 plot apparently only needs two tiles of irrigation canal before it's considered fully irrigated.

[King Zultan]

PTW

This game looks cool but I can't play it as my computer hates it.

[JimboM12]

ptw as well

its fun, its somehow harder and easier than df at the same time.

[Frumple]

On that note, what kind of field size do you go for now? I've just been building off of the tutorial so far, so for the sake of consistency I've been doing 8x8s. Speaking of which, an 8x8 plot apparently only needs two tiles of irrigation canal before it's considered fully irrigated.

I started with the 10x10s the tutorial recommended, 1 set (3 fields, fruit/grain/veg), then two, then three -- and lost dozens to starvation when the population bloomed from 10 to 50 to >100, despite having ~1/4th of the population working them. Haven't bothered with irrigation at all. Somewhere around 200-ish pop I went from doing that to "whatever my free worker population can deal with" (so whatever size needed, like, 10-20 workers or whatev') and around half the population doing the work, and finally got over 1 day supply. Somewhere over 7-800 hundred I started doing, like, 50x50s, or stuff like ~max size animal pasture~ _{still utterly incapable of stockpiling meat lol}. It's gotten to the point I'm managing around 2.5 to 3 seasons of surplus with 1.5 rations? But that's with ~450 out of ~1.1k pop doing food stuff and it still dips noticeably when new people trundle in

Also all of that included fishing on the side -- first just one or two spots with 2 workers each, then like a dozen with 3. It helped a lot, heh... though people seem to like fish and meat more than other stuff, so I don't tend to have much of either left in the stockpiles.

[Kagus]

Irrigation is piss easy, you designate a couple tiles for channeling and they automatically fill with water (I think there's some sort of consideration with water tables or whatever, but I dunno). Presto-chango, adjacent fields now have +100% fertility rating.

I just made sure to make the same number of fields for grain, veg, fruit, and mushrooms, and went from there. Kitchens help massively in building up a stockpile, since they can make multiple meals out of a single food unit that would otherwise turn into a single meal if eaten unprepared.


But yeah, meat is tricky... Hunting is hilariously unreliable as a passive thing, and the egg farming takes ages to produce any noteworthy amount.

[Frumple]

Yeah, that surplus is with like fifty people working kitchens

I'll have to check the irrigation at some point, I guess. Reading the description I thought I had to dig a channel from an existing water source, not just like... plop it down for magic water.

Didn't have any mushroom farms, though. Couldn't seem to find any seed mushroom to plant them with, so...

Though the egg farming isn't that bad? It does take time, but the more you do the faster the eggs roll in, so pasture expansion picks up as you jam more animals into the grinder. Hunting is indeed a joke, tho', yeah. It'll clear out a small herd easy and then... nothing. Fishing is waaaay more reliable, assuming you have water.

[Robsoie]

i saw hunting more as a way to prevent some animals to stay on specific areas, as otherwise they kill your citizens walking near them (a problem when you have a mining operation at some distance of the city and most of your miners are regularly dying to a pack of animals roaming around it).

[Kagus]

i saw hunting more as a way to prevent some animals to stay on specific areas, as otherwise they kill your citizens walking near them (a problem when you have a mining operation at some distance of the city and most of your miners are regularly dying to a pack of animals roaming around it).

That's pretty much it, yeah. The fences also seem to infer that grazing animals will munch on your fields if you don't keep them out, but I haven't seen that happening so I can't comment.

Didn't have any mushroom farms, though. Couldn't seem to find any seed mushroom to plant them with, so...

Yeah, the wild growths disappear for half the year and I've only seen small clusters even when they are harvestable. Also very tricky to find on the map as they don't stand out, but the minimap does actually have colored pixels denoting their location. Also just tagging large swathes of land with the "harvest these plants" tool will light stuff up, if push comes to shove.

Once you collect them, it's basically just a race against time and task priority to get them into a farm plot before someone just eats them. Unless particular objects can be forbidden from being eaten somehow... But if you can, then that's another secret the game has yet to divulge to me

[Frumple]

i saw hunting more as a way to prevent some animals to stay on specific areas, as otherwise they kill your citizens walking near them (a problem when you have a mining operation at some distance of the city and most of your miners are regularly dying to a pack of animals roaming around it).

Uh. Huh.

Y'know, it may not have been starvation that was causing those dozens of deaths. Like, pretty sure it contributed cause I usually had "fools be starvin' yo" notifications, but I never even noticed the wildlife attacked people. Would explain some deaths out in the distance, I just assumed they were starving to death out in the fields

[n9103]

Hmm. Didn't realize he planned on taking down the last released demo.
I also can't find any sort of license terms to figure out if distribution is in or outside the rights granted.
I've got the download backed up. Totally can't help anyone access the last demo that was made free.

[Zangi]

It has a good base for a city builder.  I’d say the population errs more on the side of Tropico-like.

Granted I did not play it long before deciding to go to dwarves instead.