Most efficient farming vs resource foot print?

[maddguyy]

Farms/mines allow for a major patch of land to be taken up to farm/mine a particular resource, however it seems their footprint doesnt seem to mean necessarily a bigger output, ie a 11x11 wheat farm can only push out so much wheat that will bottleneck at a miller and perhaps a 5x5 would be just as effective irrigated and fertilised.

Also logistics almost seems to be way too slow for its splitter convenience. I currently have a mine feeding two forges with a backed up supply but even maxed out workers just seems slow, however an iron mine per forge just doesn’t seem to be resourceful either.

I’ve seen players isolate their productions into pockets around the map but I thought the novelty would’ve been dealing with how the map’s dice roll of located resources had you deal with moving it around, but being able to plant them anywhere seems to just mean you only need to wait to have the right research and manipulate things almost too conveniently..

TL:DR is 2 farms with 16sq of cotton to feed one cloth work shop better than 1 farm with 32sq of cotton

[cswiger]

You can use grabbers to pull out multiple belts of items from something with fast production. That's more useful with the initial cloth belts than the faster belts you get later on.

With regard to farm productivity, you're quite right that it needs some tweaking. Multiple farms with 4x4 or 5x5 fields works better than a single farm with a giant field, even with a ton of workers added. Likewise, it seems like watering or adding fert will usually slow down your production, since those jobs take time away from doing harvesting.

[Mr. Ethereal]

The footprint of your farm only matters for sustainability. As long as your farm never runs fallow, then it does not need to be expanded, but if you hit points where all of the crops surrounding a farm have been consumed, then it's time to add more tiles.

If you're concerned about total item output in a given timeframe, it is better to build more farms over having larger farms.
CSWiger is right about using grabbers to increase transfer rate from buildings, and also the impact of watering and fertilizing hurting production; these features only really prove to be useful very late game when the ratio of time spent performing the tasks of watering and fertilizing compared to the time a tile spends in a "bountiful" state exponentially shifts in your favor due to happiness boosts. The only impact they actually serve is reducing regrowth delay of crops (which points back to my first point). From personal experience, I'm talkin' like 1,200 happiness or better for water (I haven't even bothered trying to fertilize farms) to matter--but, obviously, if you design the system ahead of time, you won't have rebuild it later.

[Lil Puppy]

Production time on secondary items is the major bottleneck, then the tertiary items just stop flow completely with their 10s+ times and waiting for the secondary items to show up, you'd have to have 20 kitchens just to make enough apple pie to saturate a belt and that's nowhere near useful for any map.

2 crops for each grain mill even though 1 would suffice under normal conditions. But then the grain mill is still the slowest part of the chain if you have to send its stuff to somewhere else and then somewhere else needs multiple of whatever just to produce its simple thing too. So now you've exponentially increased your base resource acquisition to accommodate for 1 single little thing. To make an apple pie and regular cakes for purple coins I need like 5 farms and 3 of those only produce one thing, 2 for flour, the other 3 for animal food (2 for milk, 1 for eggs). Then there's the kitchen... ugh. those slow ass kitchens. I literally worked in a kitchen and you don't make 1 thing at a time per worker, that and I'm looking at an apple pie recipe and there's no way you wouldn't be able to produce a dozen of those at a time with the ingredients I'm streaming into the kitchen. 1/2 cup of flour, not an entire bag of it...

I know it's just a balance issue with timings and/or quantities, but right now it can get ridiculous, and it gets even worse when you factor in the bonuses and the fact they aren't reflected in anything ( I hate trying to do math in my head... ). Additionally, when you exponent your resource requirements you also exponent your logistics and that's where you get into trouble since you can't. You have a total limit of entries into a building that can be used, but because of that building's timings, you will saturate it long before you get that many, but building another one may not be possible due to the logistics of trying to get that stuff there, because you also exponent the area required for the logistics. Anyway, a logistics game that is stalled by timings instead of logistics needs balance.

As a suggestion I would like each recipe to have a check mark on the UI so I can prioritize that one over all the other things I can have active at a time so the building will produce that one every time even if it requires multiple items that would have been used on one of the other recipes. Like in the machine shop, I usually have it centralized in a large production camp and just have it produce all the things it can, this requires it to fill up the single iron bar items first unless you can shove enough of them in to get other recipes going, which I don't usually have the people for. This way, for other things, you can just open it up and say "I need red coins a little more right now" and check the box for the red coin item to be prioritized over the other coin types.