Farms - Assigning multiple farms to the same fields

[UsF]

Is there a reason why one cannot assign multiple farms to the same field?

I would really like to split up my workforce and have a farm for tractors, one for harvesters and one for the trucks. The benefit of this is that the truck farm would work like a distribution office with an unlimited amount of fields, basically 30 trucks for any field in a 3km ratio, whereas I could then put smaller farms closer to fields with the slower equipment, mainly harvesters.

You can use distribution offices, but they only accept 20 assignments (about 16-19 fields), so they are only really useful for the largest size fields. A large farm handling a variety of fields looks more natural and could centralize the harvest.

[MG83]

hmm different ideas :>

[Silent_Shadow]

I guess, but why not use more dispersed farm buildings instead of distribution offices? You use less fuel with short range truck gathering, and you can use more fuel efficient means of transportation (trains, cable cars) to consolidate these harvests and get them to your factories. The medium and large farm buildings are also cheaper per parking slot than DOs are (especially if you're considering larger farm buildings in place of smaller ones.)

[3ndarchy]

Well... You could use farms for the "farming" equipment (sowing and harvesting) and outsource the trucking to various distribution offices located near railhead silos. That way your farms are focused on the farming part and your trucks can planned and organized in a way so that they're not just sitting all the time (mixing in other jobs) but mostly available for harvest season.

That's how it works IRL. Farmers rarely run their own fleet of rigs.

[Silent_Shadow]

Farmers in this game don't run a fleet of their own rigs, or their own farms for that matter (socialism after all). There also aren't any farmers... (ideal USSR communism?)

Utilizing the trucks year round is also a cool idea, but has problems:

• Crops make up the biggest use of covered hull trucks by volume, so even if you use said trucks for other uses, most would probably stay parked during most of the year anyway. Just consider the ratios of crops to their many required products and you'll see why.
  
• If you do decide to pull all trucks for harvesting duty, you will need additional storage for whatever industries/stores to keep them functioning whilst the harvest occurs. This kind of eliminates the investment advantage that sharing trucks would have, while making your Republic's logistics more complicated.
  
• We would need more control then the game offers us. Even if the Developers got rid of the limit on DO tasks, there'd still be no way to prioritize crops over other tasks.

I do wish we could get more options for automatic control of vehicle lines during seasons; aside from farming, you also need to worry about snow's impact on roads and summer attractions closing (one can only do so much with the $SEASONAL_CLOSE_IF_TEMP_BELLOW tag).

[UsF]

Using DOs for farms directly isn't that great, because of manually having to assign them and the limit of 20 connections. That's why I would prefer a single farm building with trucks, because it has an unlimited amount (it seems) and would make it so that using smaller fields wouldn't be an inconvenience.

Maybe it should be possible to assign DOs to farms as support buildings, so you don't have to assign them individual tasks for the fields, but come harvest season, any vehicle in a DO assigned to a farm for support, will also send vehicles out for harvest. That would be kinda neat and thematic actually. So you'd select the tool for assigning fields, but click a DO instead and it would attempt to use the vehicles present.

Could also work with vehicle depots, making the farm use the vehicles in that storage instead of what is in the farm, extending its capacity. That way you could use some vehicle depots and put them next to the field with the harvesters in it, while retaining the truck fleet inside the farm directly (and potentially expanding it with assigned DOs). Would also make it easier to use a smaller farm with feeling less restricted.

[MG83]

Originally posted by 3ndarchy:

Well... You could use farms for the "farming" equipment (sowing and harvesting) and outsource the trucking to various distribution offices located near railhead silos. That way your farms are focused on the farming part and your trucks can planned and organized in a way so that they're not just sitting all the time (mixing in other jobs) but mostly available for harvest season.

That's how it works IRL. Farmers rarely run their own fleet of rigs.

what he tries to do is opposite :>