Large Farm Harvesting

[jorleejack]

I'm a fan of running larger farms in my villages, but as it is with the AI it seems to be very inefficient. Since I can only have a max of five farmers on each farm, it seems like they can only get to about 20-25 plots before they're swamped between planting new crops and needing to harvest old ones.

And even with harvesting turned on in the farm, dedicated harvesters do not automatically harvest like the farmers do, so it's a toss between needing an unreasonable amount of dedicated harvesters and manually harvesting the crops or having a bunch of smaller farms, which is space inefficient. And even then you still need a bunch of dedicated carriers or general workers to move stock.

It would be nice if we could either assign more farmers or dedicated harvesters in the workers post would automatically harvest crops that are ready like farmers do. Farms are able to span large areas, but the game is just not able to keep up with it as it is.

[Kotli]

I think the idea with farms plot size is to give you enough space to grow all crop types around each farm with some spare space so you can fit in roads and support buildings close enough.
Its possible more crop types will be added for the new biomes.
Also more techs and other stuff that effect farming may also be added.

[ShadowTani]

Yeah, it would be nice if there was a checkbox that automatically assigned harvesting to general workers / dedicated harvesters regardless of the harvest button being turned on or off (which would only enable / disable harvesting for the farmers). It would remove the required micro for larger farms.

Currently the most efficient farms seems to be 10x10 (4x4 for the building, the rest farm plots) where you disable the harvest and instead manually designate any matured crops for harvesting which will have general workers (or dedicated harvesters) exclusively harvest the crops. Personally I prefer general workers over dedicated harvesters because they can handle logistics in addition.

Not doing the micro means you need more farmers and farm buildings. Which means you'll quickly end up with a bottleneck in logistics while still barely maintaining a food surplus; building space may also become an issue then.

[ShadowTani]

Originally posted by Kotli:

I think the idea with farms plot size is to give you enough space to grow all crop types around each farm with some spare space so you can fit in roads and support buildings close enough.

That was the devs intend yes, which is another reason why larger farms are beneficial. However, if you want to maintain a decent food surplus while avoiding the micro you will need several farms, and to do that within the limited space you have to build then larger farms are not ideal. Thus microing larger farms for massive food gains becomes the current pro-gamer choice.

[Techhead7890]

Originally posted by ShadowTani:

it would be nice if there was ... automatically assigned harvesting to general workers / dedicated harvesters regardless [of the farm's workers and harvest setting].

Yeah, I think I agree. The way I understand it is, the farmers' harvest tasks are created automatically, and assigned to farmers only, rather than how it is for the tasks created by the player (eg tasks to harvest natural resources).

And the player not having control over those automatically created tasks is a bit of a bother (eg setting priorities and stuff). I think there were other players that were keen on having more control over those tasks, too. So it seems like maybe letting some farming tasks go through the "player harvesting" task system that the player can prioritise would be helpful.

[Cleaner]

The sice of the farm does matter. corn grows very slow and if you are not using any dung and if it is maybe kittle to cold or to hot it becomes more efficient to use larger farms and the farmers will use every pile