Any reason to use fertilizer?

[Marauder]

Seems that due to loss of space, them eating crops, as well as "then make lower value crops for them!" these being used at random for bio converter having animals around and using fertilizer is always a net loss.

[Copperwire]

It's borderline. While it can theoretically work out, the work and careful balancing to do it is not worth it, imo.

The best method I have found is to regulate feeders by making the "drop to feeder" slow by placing the feed bot "inefficiently" so it only drops enough to feed the animals just enough to make the amount of fertilizer you want.

Skipping most of the houses and running berries is the "best route" atm.

[Marauder]

Originally posted by Copperwire:

It's borderline. While it can theoretically work out, the work and careful balancing to do it is not worth it, imo.

The best method I have found is to regulate feeders by making the "drop to feeder" slow by placing the feed bot "inefficiently" so it only drops enough to feed the animals just enough to make the amount of fertilizer you want.

Skipping most of the houses and running berries is the "best route" atm.

Might be easy to fix it. Create a specific crop only used for farm animals, increase the benefits of fertilzer. And suddenly it might be good. Right now the loss seems higher than the benefit.

[Copperwire]

Atm, Feed Bot chooses between the 3 least valuable crops you have stored ... so you can't run one cheap crop, you need 3.

At the same time, Bio Bot chooses inputs at random.

Because, in a game about robots and automation ... you don't have control of the robots or the automation.

The feel and the concept, solid. The implementation and the econ? Fragile.

[MaIheX]

Agreed, at the moment anything animals related is just counter productive. Takes up space, requires a lot of time to setup and gives a negative improvement to your production.

There are so many things wrong currently on how the game works, causing animals to be detrimental.

If you want the biofuel bots to use good crops, you have to make only good crops, which in turn are slow to make, so the animals just consume all your crops quicker than you can make and you're not able to keep up with their feeding requirements.
Why are biofuel bots selecting randomly in the first place? They should just always select the best available crop/berry.

So you're then forced to make 3 lowest tier crops (WHY!!!???? The feeder bot should just select the single lowest crop, there's absolutely no logical reason to choose from 3 random ones).
So then you get 2 other problems because of this:
1) Biofuel bots start using those lowest tier crops, negatively impacting your biofuel output.
2) Splunk isn't able to keep up with planting new seeds, because the lowest tier crops need to be constantly re-planted with a very short time internal.
3) Your other bots (watering and harvesting) get overloaded with more work, thus being able to maintain less total plots (of worst crops mind you), when compared to using the best crops.

This could be partially solve by making fertilized improve grow speed by 100% or more, so you could then just keep using the best crops.
But you'd still have a couple other problems:
1) You'd need to make a few more watering/harvesting bots to keep up with faster growing crops. Not a problem I guess, as in the end you'd still have higher production.
2) Splunk - he wouldn't be able to keep up with faster growing crops, as he's too inefficient with how he plants the seeds. So you'd be basically still limited by how much Splunk can keep up with, and this is not solvable in any method.

[Forista]

I've just used Animals and Berries on my first farm for getting the Achievements; both are counterproductive, specially the Animals. The Fertilizer don't compensate at all.

On my second map i've nearly done an "speedrun" in comparison just planting crops. It's the best, going from 2000 Biofuel Produced on last 5 minutes on nearly 5000 on my second farm map.

https://i.imgur.com/QQlltK3.png

[Marauder]

The game itself is great and a nice distraction. But the balancing really needs a big pass.