has anyone studied aquafarms vs ranches?

[snuggleform]

I've always been curious - let's say the unit of measurement will be food produced per day per worker (on average). Is it better to aim for aquafarms or ranches? For simplicity let's only consider the case of using pigs in ranches (because it purely produces meat and no other by product).

I was trying to speculate maybe ranches in the long run because they have a long ramp up time and require you to trade with other societies to get started, but my speculation is quite worthless. Aquafarms are extremely powerful in flooding you with fish so I really can't tell.

[Nordil(Hun)]

Aquafarms. You dont need to burn wood, nor give them water. You also do not need to look out for infected animals.(Pollution)
You get for pigs only 45 meat, whereas for cattle you get 60. (So it matters regarding comparision, the growth rate of animals is not on wiki.)

[snuggleform]

Can you demonstrate the math. I know ranches need heating and water, but that alone does not have any bearing on how much meat they produce over time.

How much average meat per day does a ranch full of pigs produce? How much average meat per day does an aquafarm produce? I do not care that an indivdual pig is slaughtered for 45 meat, I'm looking for a rate which means meat per day.

[Nordil(Hun)]

Originally posted by snuggleform:

Can you demonstrate the math. I know ranches need heating and water, but that alone does not have any bearing on how much meat they produce over time.

How much average meat per day does a ranch full of pigs produce? How much average meat per day does an aquafarm produce? I do not care that an indivdual pig is slaughtered for 45 meat, I'm looking for a rate which means meat per day.

A ranch only produces meat if they have excess animals. So say if there is place for 9 pigs in the pen(aka the ranch) you will only get meat from the ranch if there are 9 pigs present and a tenth would appear.
I said in my previous post that there is no information about the growth/birth time/rate of animals. So i would not know. My guess is that you have a chance of a new pig being born every cycle. If you are lucky this can mean that all pig couples give birth, so you get 4 pigs. That would be awesome. However i doubt that.
An aquafarm if my observation is accute gives you about 36 or 48 fish per cycle. It depends also on how far they live from the place, how close the toilet is, and how easy the worker is able to access food. Same goes of course for ranchers, regarding their "travel times".

Also i must correct myself, because aquafarms do need heating during the winter. Still that they require no water is a huge boost.

Currently i set up in Eternal winter an aquafarm and with good positioning(i planned ahead quite far), i placed 2 greenhouses beside it, next to those a food pile, and then a mess hall. After the mess hall comes the row of houses. This saves a lot of time regarding travels.

(House->2 empty tiles->Road->Mess Hall->Road->Food pile(Above it a stockpile to place the firewood)->road->Greenhouse->Greenhouse->Road->Aquafarm. I might post a picture about it, to see.)

[snuggleform]

Well to add my own observations in after doing 2 runs using ranches, I'm pretty sure pigs reproduce once per 24 hours. I watched their population count over the period of a week and it seemed pretty on the dot. So once you cap them (6 is the cap, the 7th will be auto butchered), you on average should be expecting 45 prime meat per day. If what you say about aquafarms (36-48 fish per day per worker) is accurate, then it turns out ranching is roughly equal in terms of meat produced per day per worker. I'm actually unclear and I want you to answer if your estimate is for a full aquafarm (2 workers) or just 1 worker. If you're estimating 36-48 for 2 workers then ranches are actually way ahead, just about double the efficiency. If your estimate was for 1 worker then they're about the same.

In my broad observation (doing a 200% run with all dlc), when I used 2 basic ranches loaded with pigs, and I was cooking the meat, and had no other sources of meat, I had more meat than I knew what to do with for a population of 100 people. So practically speaking, I guess this more or less feels about on par with aqua farms. With aqua farms I roughly recall 2 fishers on one aquafarm being plenty of fish for a population, and I usually run 2 aqua farms to spam out extra fish to trade.

So then I guess the issue goes back to one of water consumption which makes ranches look bad, but my 2 rejoinders are: water isn't that big of a deal in the long run, you just dump a drilled well here and there and you're good (look I know water is tight early in the game but if you're at the point where you've done enough research to get concrete and ranching/aquafarming you've probably figured out how to solve water by that time as well), and more importantly, prime meat is in some sense "better" than fish because it has higher trade value and also it has higher nutritional value (according to the wiki). So you can make more profit off of selling it, and it also possibly means you don't have to cook food, which saves you manpower and firewood.

Anyways tldr: once you get them set up and running, you aren't really going to notice that big of a difference either way. Probably aquafarms are just simpler to setup because they don't have a ramp up period and don't require you to buy stuff from other societies but ranches hold their own if you can stomach the up front cost.

[Nordil(Hun)]

Originally posted by snuggleform:

Well to add my own observations in after doing 2 runs using ranches, I'm pretty sure pigs reproduce once per 24 hours. I watched their population count over the period of a week and it seemed pretty on the dot. So once you cap them (6 is the cap, the 7th will be auto butchered), you on average should be expecting 45 prime meat per day. If what you say about aquafarms (36-48 fish per day per worker) is accurate, then it turns out ranching is roughly equal in terms of meat produced per day per worker. I'm actually unclear and I want you to answer if your estimate is for a full aquafarm (2 workers) or just 1 worker. If you're estimating 36-48 for 2 workers then ranches are actually way ahead, just about double the efficiency. If your estimate was for 1 worker then they're about the same.

In my broad observation (doing a 200% run with all dlc), when I used 2 basic ranches loaded with pigs, and I was cooking the meat, and had no other sources of meat, I had more meat than I knew what to do with for a population of 100 people. So practically speaking, I guess this more or less feels about on par with aqua farms. With aqua farms I roughly recall 2 fishers on one aquafarm being plenty of fish for a population, and I usually run 2 aqua farms to spam out extra fish to trade.

So then I guess the issue goes back to one of water consumption which makes ranches look bad, but my 2 rejoinders are: water isn't that big of a deal in the long run, you just dump a drilled well here and there and you're good (look I know water is tight early in the game but if you're at the point where you've done enough research to get concrete and ranching/aquafarming you've probably figured out how to solve water by that time as well), and more importantly, prime meat is in some sense "better" than fish because it has higher trade value and also it has higher nutritional value (according to the wiki). So you can make more profit off of selling it, and it also possibly means you don't have to cook food, which saves you manpower and firewood.

Anyways tldr: once you get them set up and running, you aren't really going to notice that big of a difference either way. Probably aquafarms are just simpler to setup because they don't have a ramp up period and don't require you to buy stuff from other societies but ranches hold their own if you can stomach the up front cost.

Thanks for that. Well i also took the time and checked the aquafarm production.
Whereas my placing of it is not the ideal - as the closest house is about 36 walking tiles away, currently the closest toilets even further - it produced 36 fish per cycle. So 72-74 fish per day. So it produced more than the ranch. 74 was from the graph, however since it started the first cycle at ~30% production and it ended around it i rounded it up to 72.

Also! I am just a friggin idiot:) You can check the dayly production of each good with the graphs. With 3 fully manned trappers i am producing 89 a day. (This is probably quite far from ideal production as i had to place them quite far from residential and other areas, due to not being able to build a forester in Eternal Winter settings.) Going through the pages might be a bit tedious though. (I allways get the feels for such games instead of watching the numbers:P Especially when pathing is considered.)

edit: no clue why ranches and bakeries are not allowed to build on Eternal winter settings. Seems an oversight, since you can grow wheat in greenhouses, not to mention you also just need a radiator for the ranches. Guess this is supposed to make it harder?Since no magnetic storm:D

[snuggleform]

Well be careful when you say that an aquafarm produces more than a ranch, sure 72-74 is bigger than 45, but you are forgetting a key factor which is it takes 2 workers to fully man an aquafarm, whereas it only takes 1 worker to fully man a ranch.

Are your numbers based on a fully manned aquafarm? If so, the ranch is actually more efficient because 1 worker makes 45 meat a day, whereas if we adjust your numbers for workers then it's only 36-37 fish per day per worker.

[Nordil(Hun)]

Originally posted by snuggleform:

Well be careful when you say that an aquafarm produces more than a ranch, sure 72-74 is bigger than 45, but you are forgetting a key factor which is it takes 2 workers to fully man an aquafarm, whereas it only takes 1 worker to fully man a ranch.

Are your numbers based on a fully manned aquafarm? If so, the ranch is actually more efficient because 1 worker makes 45 meat a day, whereas if we adjust your numbers for workers then it's only 36-37 fish per day per worker.

Well I think with further adjustments the numbers can be increased for an aquafarm. As i said my place did not have toilets nearby, and the house was also quite far(around 40+ tiles to walk). So quite a number of down time. It is safe to say that i think around 80-85 can be reached. Or maybe the 45/per worker as well. Dunno. I would have to take time to plan it out correctly and i would need to know about pathin and need algorythms.
However this DOES NOT apply to a ranch. As in you cannot improve the output of the ranch in ANY way. Simply because it is a fix number you get since 1 new pig born per day.
In this regard i would say that probably the cattle ranch or the chicken farm is better.
(You get both the meat and additional products)

Also i checked the numbers on the graph. For the prime meat production they were completely wrong. (Same for the ranch) Basicly it stated for me that i had 15 prime meat produced a day, whereas i could see in my inventory the 45 appearing. It was the same with milk. It said a daily production of 1 milk, yet i got 40 per day. (I had 5 cows.)

There is also an additional issue with ranches though. The initial investment to get it running is quite high. For a pig farm you would need about 600 coin for cattle about 1100.

But since i finished the game i actually think i wont bother testing anymore. (I was not that impressed by it, i just pushed through it via brute force:P Patrician 3 or Frostpunk are still much more enjoyable and replayable imho.)

[snuggleform]

Also i checked the numbers on the graph. For the prime meat production they were completely wrong. (Same for the ranch) Basicly it stated for me that i had 15 prime meat produced a day, whereas i could see in my inventory the 45 appearing. It was the same with milk. It said a daily production of 1 milk, yet i got 40 per day. (I had 5 cows.)

That's exactly why I don't trust the graphs. I've noticed some other weird things like me havnig positive production of some stuff I clearly wasn't producing in any way.

I also forgot to ask you, did you have the aquafarm's upgrade from the industrialist ideology for +3 fish or was that just the regular aquafarm?

The "additional issue" with the startup cost of ranch is something I have already noted many times.

[Nordil(Hun)]

Originally posted by snuggleform:

Also i checked the numbers on the graph. For the prime meat production they were completely wrong. (Same for the ranch) Basicly it stated for me that i had 15 prime meat produced a day, whereas i could see in my inventory the 45 appearing. It was the same with milk. It said a daily production of 1 milk, yet i got 40 per day. (I had 5 cows.)

That's exactly why I don't trust the graphs. I've noticed some other weird things like me havnig positive production of some stuff I clearly wasn't producing in any way.

I also forgot to ask you, did you have the aquafarm's upgrade from the industrialist ideology for +3 fish or was that just the regular aquafarm?

The "additional issue" with the startup cost of ranch is something I have already noted many times.

I don't own any DLC-s and i am guessing that industrialist is from one. So no, it is pure base vanila game. And yes i can tell that a lot of things are lacking, it is just a framework of a game:) However the graph being incorrect and flawed is just really a huge issue.

About the additional issue, sorry i might have forgotten it. (I am usually in other game's forums, and quite a few are in early access, or freshly released.)

But as i mentioned for me the worker number was never really much of an issue.
Certain resources were and how certain resources are completely not worth producing.
(Weapons and electronic components being as top contenders.)

But if you keep on playing, enjoy! I'll go back to Patrician 3 and Frostpunk:)

[snuggleform]

Industralist is not a dlc, it's one of the 3 ideologies you pick in the base game.

[Nordil(Hun)]

Originally posted by snuggleform:

Industralist is not a dlc, it's one of the 3 ideologies you pick in the base game.

Ah. I always went with security:)

[sdykla]

Originally posted by Nordil(Hun):

Aquafarms. You dont need to burn wood, nor give them water. You also do not need to look out for infected animals.(Pollution)
You get for pigs only 45 meat, whereas for cattle you get 60. (So it matters regarding comparision, the growth rate of animals is not on wiki.)

not true aquafarms create pollution and will shut down when their contamination level gets high enough as well as contaminate anything near it