Crops

[Domestic Life]

Livestock, alcohol, and food factories require a huge amounts of crops to keep up with production. Unfortunately, fields take an unreasonable amount of time to produce any yields and the amounts are abysmal. I lose way more on trying to building straight farming areas than the crops they produce forcing me to always have to buy crops.

Has anyone actually built self-sufficient factories operating at max capacity without having to buy crops?

Seems like a MAJOR resource balance issue. I can't believe the devs have not identified and fixed this even in beta.

[Leigh]

It is possible, when I have had factories that don't need imports I have had a large-ish farm going for a year or two before I start anything else.

Get a backlog of crops before you start building stuff.

Or, import for now and build up a supply at your farm for a year or so, then cut the imports and use local stuff.

[thorstein92]

1 food factory is enough to feed about 40.000 peoples
1 livestock farm too.
1 clothes factory is enough for 80.000 peoples
So only your greed force you to import crops and get $ and RUB instead.
Bloody capitalist!

[Total Oh No]

Yes of course you can operate self suficient, max productivity factories, but you should keep in mind that you do NOT actually need to. Unless you have a gigantic population or are looking to export a lot, you don't actually need to produce that much stuff for your people. Low productivity factories might be enough, depending on how high your population is.

[The_Mask]

Thats why i made this map to support the huge chemical , clothes and food crop mods .

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1930438241
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1981525425

[tea_bush]

Fields are 'built' for free and don't need workers to operate. They are an everlasting source of income. It's totally the other way around.

[Domestic Life]

Perhaps I have not gone far enough in the game where I can build without buying materials therefore I am hugely dependent on revenue from profitable exports. So while one food factory can feed 40,000 people, if I want to export cattle, meat, and alcohol for revenue, the number of fields required is very unreasonable. I'm not going to have a full working self sufficient construction economy until much later.

[tea_bush]

You just need a lot of fields, that's all. Like in real life.

Don't export meat BTW, exporting cows is more profitable.

[Total Oh No]

Originally posted by Domestic Life:

Perhaps I have not gone far enough in the game where I can build without buying materials therefore I am hugely dependent on revenue from profitable exports. So while one food factory can feed 40,000 people, if I want to export cattle, meat, and alcohol for revenue, the number of fields required is very unreasonable. I'm not going to have a full working self sufficient construction economy until much later.

Buying buildings is pretty expensive, but you start with 10 million rubles on the normal difficulty, so you should be fine for a while, unless you want to immediately get into train manufacturing.
It's all just about time. Even if you only have one farm, you are profitable (although I dunno about fuel prices for your delivery trucks). Upscaling your productivity just means that you will earn money faster and that you have less waiting time. A food factory's productivity max I believe is 45t of crops per real life minute. That's a pretty huge amount, but you don't need to worry about it. It just means that you're probably not gonna need more than one factory.
I'm pretty sure that it's also profitable to just import the crops and then resell them as aclohol or clothing.
By the way, if you just want to make money, I think the biggest money makers are steel, fuel, and exporting western cars into the east. Some might consider it a bit cheaty, but you could just place down a fuel refinery next to the border, have it import oil and export fuel.

[Prometheus]

Originally posted by Total Oh No:

Originally posted by Domestic Life:

Perhaps I have not gone far enough in the game where I can build without buying materials therefore I am hugely dependent on revenue from profitable exports. So while one food factory can feed 40,000 people, if I want to export cattle, meat, and alcohol for revenue, the number of fields required is very unreasonable. I'm not going to have a full working self sufficient construction economy until much later.

By the way, if you just want to make money, I think the biggest money makers are steel, fuel, and exporting western cars into the east. Some might consider it a bit cheaty, but you could just place down a fuel refinery next to the border, have it import oil and export fuel.

Steel isn't as big as you think. The value in/out for raw materials is good but it uses a huge number of workers. For the same number of workers you can get more value created with wood. Though you'll drive the price down at that rate.

[TheAmishStig]

Originally posted by Domestic Life:

Perhaps I have not gone far enough in the game where I can build without buying materials therefore I am hugely dependent on revenue from profitable exports. So while one food factory can feed 40,000 people, if I want to export cattle, meat, and alcohol for revenue, the number of fields required is very unreasonable. I'm not going to have a full working self sufficient construction economy until much later.

Full self-sufficiency is the closest thing we have to an endgame currently, so it's perfectly OK to rely on imports to varying degrees through almost the entire playthrough...but it's still wise to set up a construction system early and then work towards getting independent of individual materials later.

Labor is about half the price of any given building, so you can save a significant amount of money even if you're building with imported materials...and every dollar/ruble you don't spend in the first place is a dollar/ruble you don't have to make up for with exports. I implore you, don't wait to start constructing buildings until you're fully independent on conmats!

----

Back to the farming:

Yeah, if you're trying to run dozens of distilleries you're gonna have a bad time, but for the most part crop independence is something your republic can grow into. You've got tons of space in your little republic to be cramming fields.

On a conceptual level a bunch of the resources are best served meeting domestic needs and being left at that...figuring out which is which is one of the key things you'll have to explore and discover in order to have a strong, stable economy. I won't spoil it all, but for Agricultural industry, here's where I tend to stand:

(note: These are my opinions, based on my play style and experience, and are not a 'one true way' to play. There are a couple wrong ways...like importing cows to make meat, which loses money hand over fist...but not a 'one true right way')

• Clothing is a fantastic export. It's extremely low yield at just 1.2 tons/day, but domestic consumption is minimal, the margins are solid, and the sale price is very high. Plus 1 Fabric Factory can supply 2 Clothing Factories so you're getting a lot of bang for the ton-of-crops buck, making it my go-to agricultural export.
  
• Alcohol is decent. Like clothing domestic consumption is minimal and the price is good, the downside is that it's not a great bang for the buck once you stop importing crops. At 30 tons/day, it's a whole lotta farmland for not a lot of production, so don't be afraid to re-evaluate your industrial base from time to time if you're playing as a liquor baron.
  
• Fabric is decent...but if you're making Fabric you have everything you need to make Clothing except more people, so I generally don't export Fabric any longer than it takes to add a couple hundred citizens and spin up a pair of Clothing Factories.
  
• Cattle isn't bad, but it's low-yield...slow output and not a very high sale price combine to make it just OK. Generally I use Cattle for domestic needs only, though if I get a huge backlog I'll send a train manually [Any route that ends at a depot runs exactly once when deployed] to deal with the excess.
  
• Meat is awful. It costs more to import cattle than you'll make selling the meat, so it's a recipe for disaster before you're independent. If you've got the capacity then there's no harm in having your trucks run Slaughterhouse -> Delivery Route -> Export, but at least before price drops you can make more money selling the cows directly, so in general overproducing meat is wasteful.
  
• Crops is terribad as an export. The price and production rate are both so low that if you're making long runs to the border, it can cost you more in fuel to take them to a Customs House than you'll get for selling them!

And since I have it: Information for helping you plan farmland.

A single Agro Farm can handle 18-24+ Big Fields with relative ease. You'll have to adjust the numbers to work with travel times and things for the layout and road you use, but each one will have a sweet spot in that range where you can have 2 Tractors, 5 Combines, 5 Trucks, and no vehicle is ever idle. A farm built in that way will always be producing, sending 22-30 tons of crops per day into your distribution network. The 10-ton capacity trucks are your friend here, they can keep up with the harvesters and won't leave any fractions laying around after their last trip back.

A single Big Field produces between 74 [harvested by workers only] and 124 [harvested by machines only] tons each time it cycles, which takes between about 61 [workers only, max at all times] and 100 [machines only] in-game days, for a peak rate of about 1.25 tons per field per day. Or in more practical terms, for each 5 tons a factory says it wants, you need 4 big fields running at capacity to break more or less even on crops consumed vs crops produced. (The fractional shortages will be made up for by the factory ebbing and flowing as workers come and go)

That means to be totally independent on crops, you need:
Cattle: 8 Big Fields per Ranch
Food: 34 Big Fields per Factory
Alcohol: 24 Big Fields per Distillery
Fabric: 8 Big Fields per Factory

That's a lot of space, but 'unreasonable' is in the eye of the beholder. Game farmland, just like real farmland, is not space efficient in terms of output...but game farmland is way more generous; a Big Field at maximum output produces about 450 tons per year, compared to a real one that produces just 21 tons in the same amount of space and time. I couldn't imagine trying to make the game's economy work on realistic production rates!

Double bonus is that Farms can be completely automated, and aren't expensive to keep running once you've paid the setup costs. A farm capable of producing almost 10,000 tons of Crops per year is roughly 400k to set up (in cash, not self-built), then at most a couple thousand a year in fuel / electricity costs to keep running.

Originally posted by Promethian:

Originally posted by Total Oh No:

By the way, if you just want to make money, I think the biggest money makers are steel, fuel, and exporting western cars into the east. Some might consider it a bit cheaty, but you could just place down a fuel refinery next to the border, have it import oil and export fuel.

Steel isn't as big as you think. The value in/out for raw materials is good but it uses a huge number of workers. For the same number of workers you can get more value created with wood. Though you'll drive the price down at that rate.

If you're importing the resources, last time I ran the numbers Steel was outright terrible...8 cents profit for every dollar spent! Once you're producing domestically it gets pretty respectable, at least. Even so, from a pure min-max perspective it can't match the Kings of Cheese: Fuel, Bitumen, and Cars.

[Domestic Life]

Originally posted by TheAmishStig:

Originally posted by Domestic Life:

Perhaps I have not gone far enough in the game where I can build without buying materials therefore I am hugely dependent on revenue from profitable exports. So while one food factory can feed 40,000 people, if I want to export cattle, meat, and alcohol for revenue, the number of fields required is very unreasonable. I'm not going to have a full working self sufficient construction economy until much later.

Full self-sufficiency is the closest thing we have to an endgame currently, so it's perfectly OK to rely on imports to varying degrees through almost the entire playthrough...but it's still wise to set up a construction system early and then work towards getting independent of individual materials later.

Labor is about half the price of any given building, so you can save a significant amount of money even if you're building with imported materials...and every dollar/ruble you don't spend in the first place is a dollar/ruble you don't have to make up for with exports. I implore you, don't wait to start constructing buildings until you're fully independent on conmats!

----

Back to the farming:

Yeah, if you're trying to run dozens of distilleries you're gonna have a bad time, but for the most part crop independence is something your republic can grow into. You've got tons of space in your little republic to be cramming fields.

On a conceptual level a bunch of the resources are best served meeting domestic needs and being left at that...figuring out which is which is one of the key things you'll have to explore and discover in order to have a strong, stable economy. I won't spoil it all, but for Agricultural industry, here's where I tend to stand:

(note: These are my opinions, based on my play style and experience, and are not a 'one true way' to play. There are a couple wrong ways...like importing cows to make meat, which loses money hand over fist...but not a 'one true right way')

• Clothing is a fantastic export. It's extremely low yield at just 1.2 tons/day, but domestic consumption is minimal, the margins are solid, and the sale price is very high. Plus 1 Fabric Factory can supply 2 Clothing Factories so you're getting a lot of bang for the ton-of-crops buck, making it my go-to agricultural export.
  
• Alcohol is decent. Like clothing domestic consumption is minimal and the price is good, the downside is that it's not a great bang for the buck once you stop importing crops. At 30 tons/day, it's a whole lotta farmland for not a lot of production, so don't be afraid to re-evaluate your industrial base from time to time if you're playing as a liquor baron.
  
• Fabric is decent...but if you're making Fabric you have everything you need to make Clothing except more people, so I generally don't export Fabric any longer than it takes to add a couple hundred citizens and spin up a pair of Clothing Factories.
  
• Cattle isn't bad, but it's low-yield...slow output and not a very high sale price combine to make it just OK. Generally I use Cattle for domestic needs only, though if I get a huge backlog I'll send a train manually [Any route that ends at a depot runs exactly once when deployed] to deal with the excess.
  
• Meat is awful. It costs more to import cattle than you'll make selling the meat, so it's a recipe for disaster before you're independent. If you've got the capacity then there's no harm in having your trucks run Slaughterhouse -> Delivery Route -> Export, but at least before price drops you can make more money selling the cows directly, so in general overproducing meat is wasteful.
  
• Crops is terribad as an export. The price and production rate are both so low that if you're making long runs to the border, it can cost you more in fuel to take them to a Customs House than you'll get for selling them!

And since I have it: Information for helping you plan farmland.

A single Agro Farm can handle 18-24+ Big Fields with relative ease. You'll have to adjust the numbers to work with travel times and things for the layout and road you use, but each one will have a sweet spot in that range where you can have 2 Tractors, 5 Combines, 5 Trucks, and no vehicle is ever idle. A farm built in that way will always be producing, sending 22-30 tons of crops per day into your distribution network. The 10-ton capacity trucks are your friend here, they can keep up with the harvesters and won't leave any fractions laying around after their last trip back.

A single Big Field produces between 74 [harvested by workers only] and 124 [harvested by machines only] tons each time it cycles, which takes between about 61 [workers only, max at all times] and 100 [machines only] in-game days, for a peak rate of about 1.25 tons per field per day. Or in more practical terms, for each 5 tons a factory says it wants, you need 4 big fields running at capacity to break more or less even on crops consumed vs crops produced. (The fractional shortages will be made up for by the factory ebbing and flowing as workers come and go)

That means to be totally independent on crops, you need:
Cattle: 8 Big Fields per Ranch
Food: 34 Big Fields per Factory
Alcohol: 24 Big Fields per Distillery
Fabric: 8 Big Fields per Factory

That's a lot of space, but 'unreasonable' is in the eye of the beholder. Game farmland, just like real farmland, is not space efficient in terms of output...but game farmland is way more generous; a Big Field at maximum output produces about 450 tons per year, compared to a real one that produces just 21 tons in the same amount of space and time. I couldn't imagine trying to make the game's economy work on realistic production rates!

Double bonus is that Farms can be completely automated, and aren't expensive to keep running once you've paid the setup costs. A farm capable of producing almost 10,000 tons of Crops per year is roughly 400k to set up (in cash, not self-built), then at most a couple thousand a year in fuel / electricity costs to keep running.

Originally posted by Promethian:

Steel isn't as big as you think. The value in/out for raw materials is good but it uses a huge number of workers. For the same number of workers you can get more value created with wood. Though you'll drive the price down at that rate.

If you're importing the resources, last time I ran the numbers Steel was outright terrible...8 cents profit for every dollar spent! Once you're producing domestically it gets pretty respectable, at least. Even so, from a pure min-max perspective it can't match the Kings of Cheese: Fuel, Bitumen, and Cars.

Thank you so much for this feedback. I haven't gone very far into fabrics and clothing so it is definitely something I will check out.

Typically I start with oil and refining but it requires a lot of people but it is intensely profitable. From there, I have been raising cattle (and meat when the price of cattle is driven to well than half the value of cattle).

For alcohol, I usually just auto-buy from the market to feed these factories and attempt to build farms to supposedly increase profitability, BUT it seems as I expand more fields, the delivery to and from my collections centres the further out I go significantly eats into any benefits of having large areas of crops. Eventually, it almost seems like I was more profitable without the fields and buying from the market.

So, while plenty of people have said you can fill your map with farms, collecting all the yields and delivering them to places where they will be used does not seem to be factored into their advice. These supply lines are much more expensive than I think a lot of people realise.

[TheAmishStig]

I try! Been hanging around these parts way too long, and occasionally swoop down out of the rafters to drop walls of text on people. ^_^

Refineries are so good it's almost like cheating...between '5 tons in, 4 tons out' and having solid prices, the amount of money you can make from one even on imported oil is staggering.

You're right in that supply lines can get really expensive if you're not careful. Beyond a certain distance, especially if it's a low-value material, it becomes a fool's errand to keep throwing more trucks at the problem...there comes a point where what you're paying in gas is worth more than the value of the cargo.

I've found once you get past that initial hump of getting your economy up and running, it's best to use Trains for inter-city deliveries [as their massive capacity can offset the cost of long-distance runs], Trucks for local deliveries [running between a cargo hub and individual buildings], and in some contexts Forklifts can be useful inside an industrial park [as a way to eliminate 'stuff a warehouse between Fabric Factory and 2x Clothing Factories, to allow one output to be split between 2 buildings' situations], but Forklifts do have a lower throughput than passive (direct, not even a 'crossing' pad) connections so it's a trade-off between burst capacity and forking/merging capabilities.

Granted, especially early-game the cost of trains can be intimidating. Locos are commonly over 100k, diesel trains have the additional logistics of fuel-station placement, and building an electric train line is a real quick way to get sticker shock.

[Zyx Abacab]

For anyone else arriving here from Google:
If you're looking for the approximate consumption rates of food, meat, electronics, clothes, and alcohol by citizens, see this discussion on Reddit.

If you don't want to leave Steam, here's a summary.

In a year, 109478 citizens consume:

• 13618.61 tons of food
  
• 3039.5 tons of meat
  
• 900.53 tons of electronics
  
• 511.07 tons of clothes
  
• 996.37 tons of alcohol

For anyone arriving from the future:
Hello! Has Google fixed itself yet, or did it just keep getting worse and worse?

[MG83]

Not so sure if your numbers are % 100 correct.
here is my tested numbers.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2385999049

they are somewhat similiar thou

[Julien Renard]

I am aware that my opinion on farming is far from popular in this forum, and I am about the only one to have the courage of explaining to newcomers that you SHOULD NOT FARM at all. It is absolutely inefficient. Therefor I won't react on hostile posts or people trying to convince me that I am wrong. In the following post you will find my argumernts (posted begin of september). Don't forget that trade is one of the features of the game.
But as always, this is just my personal opinion and you play just the way you want.

Originally posted by Julien Renard:

It seems obvious to me that your problem is efficiency. You are stuck in the belief that you have to farm yourself. Free your mind of all the limitations and look at the problem from another angle. Unless you want to farm for romantic/emotional/nostalgic reasons, don't farm, it's too inefficient, especially with seasons. You'll never be able to produce AND transport/distribute enough crops to cover the entire demand.
Import crops, that is really efficient.
- You only buy what you need.
- They're available all year round, without limitations.
- No massive investments like described in other posts. The minimalist needs are: one train cargo station, one warehouse, one or two trains, tracks (of course), and power/fuel for trains. You could even push efficiency a step further by autobuying crops directly into the warehouse (autobuy is also a basic mechanic of the game). But then you'll loose some money through delivery costs, and you'ld still need some way to export surplusses. The train will quickly pay off when you avoid delivery costs.
- The same train can import crops and export your surplusses in food, alcohol and clothes on the same trip.
- You have crops available right at the start with the arrival of the first train, you don't have to wait for sowing and growing.
- You gain a lot of space on your territory, space that you can use way more profitable than with fields.
There will be hostile reactions to my post, ie that the prices will rise. Be aware that prices ALWAYS rise, be it for crops or for food. And still, the added value of food will compensate the changing price in two ways. Producing your own food, you don't have to import it, and when crops price rises, food price will do the same, making export of food more profitable.
Another reaction will be that the only way to play this game is by doing everything by yourself. Where is that written? Trade is a basic mechanic in the game, so why not use it?
You asked us how we solve the given problem; this is my solution, purely based on efficiency, but everybody plays the game the way he wants. I don't pretend to possess the only truth or wisdom.