Butter churn & loom

[robinmotion]

I recently drafted butter churn, loom, and milking stool (clay supports too). I was feeling good ... and then the first tile flips, and it's sheep! I was sure I was going to crush it.

I took 3 sheep on round 3 (had a special stable occ that fit all 3 in one stable), butter churn by round 4, and loom by round 5.

But I felt like I was struggling to have enough food. In both of the first two harvests, I only had just enough to feed, and not enough leftover for playing occs or improvements.

What was I doing wrong? Should I have had an earlier food strategy, and just used churn and loom to start supplementing later in the game?

[RicardoRix]

Feeding is not trivial, and is vital to get right to let you do the other stuff more effectively. You can easily get into trouble.
If you do some very crude maths, then 3-4 people with 6 harvests and occs could be 40-50 food, which is a lot.
You've done nothing wrong, in contrary, setting up feeding is good. Growing your family and feeding is usually a priority in the early stages.
If needed, then taking the bottom feeding actions is fine but not normally very efficient. As a personal preference, I favour drafting late-game occs for this very reason, it's very hard to do everything you want in the early stages of the game, and there is a rush for occs too.

[Ranior]

It's hard to say for sure what you did wrong, Agricola is a ridiculously deep and complicated game to play well, and so much of it the answers are usually "it depends" on what else you should have done.

With that said, I suspect the answer here is mostly that you should not have tried to rush out all of the butter churn, Loom, and sheep breeding stuff. Yes it's cool, but it's just trickles of food, and much more importantly those early first two stages are all about building and growing for the most part. One of the issues and traps of trying to play all those cards and set that up is that the reward of an extra action every round is simply better than the payoff those cards provide. Agricola is constantly like this--trying to evaluate what between your cards and the actions available on the board will accelerate you the best, and there often are not easy answers.

One of the other issues with playing Butter Churn and Loom so early is that you're playing very quality cards that you probably should be playing when starting to grow and actually grow, but I suspect that was not the case this game. This means you hopefully had other good cards to be playing during that time, but my guess is your game goes a lot smoother if you maybe still play Stable Master and take the sheep, but instead focus your other energy on building a room and then playing Butter Churn and Loom while fighting for growth. Or you could just delay them until a bit later in the game. You can play both of them in Round 9 of the game and still use them for 2/3 of the game's six harvests!

So broadly my advice is that you should not worry about setting up feeding combos early. Generally try to build and grow and then figure out your food. Or you can work on food stuff in the early game too as long as you're still ready to build and grow on time. Don't get too distracted by early card combos if they are going to prevent you from being ready to build and grow.

[robinmotion]

Thanks, that’s helpful. I had a wood discount occ, which made getting those cards out with first player and family growth easy, but of course it took the action to play that occ in the first place … and I’m sure I lost tempo snagging the sheep before anyone else could. Instead of going all in on everything sheep during stage 1, I prob should’ve just focused on building a room, getting a fireplace, getting a kid, and THEN setting up then setting up the synergies. I’d just heard how ppl value those sheep improvements so highly, I assumed they could be my whole food engine all by themselves. Lesson learned.

[QBert]

There's really only one minor improvement (in CD - not the new set, which I haven't explored much yet) that provides an entire feeding engine, and that is potter ceramics. But you still need a clay oven (and baking support). Yes, loom and butter churn provide food and are very good minors, but a big reason they are good is they also provide points. Butter churn is a wood to a point, which is totally fine on a minor even if it was blank. The food is kind of a nice bonus if you happen to set up early breeding animals. Loom can provide decent food if you can get to 4 sheep (which you can with stable master), but 2f per harvest is still not going to solve feeding on its own. I'd say the main benefit of loom is it's a 2w minor that is not hard to make worth 3VPs. That's just amazing efficiency and provides VPs only available to you.

I like early stable master and find it to be quite strong if you can get the sheep before someone shoves them into a fireplace. If you yourself could lock up the first fireplace, you could feed off a sheep or two early and then breed them, providing you 2f per harvest, and while fighting for growth, as Ranior suggested, slam down your minors and bump it up to 4 or 5 food per harvest (continuing to eat one and breed back up to 4 sheep). This is still bare bones feeding, but it is like 80% of solving feeding. Now, this line might be too action inefficient to put into practice, but if you get lucky with what you are offered, it could be totally reasonable too.