ALPHA 49 Crop Post: Farm to Fork

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Alavaria, Jan 4, 2016.

  1. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    [​IMG]

    Topic Name lovingly borrowed from Crop Talk.

    This will have links to posts below because I've written too many words to fit into one post. Links are in a recommended reading order, the order of the posts in the thread is not really the recommended way to read them.

     
    Last edited: May 3, 2016
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  2. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Outdated information on plant growing process was here.
     
    Last edited: Mar 26, 2016
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  3. Alephred

    Alephred Royal Archivist for Queen And Empire

    This is amazing. May I have your permission to use some of this in my oft-delayed Crop Talk video? (Still coming, I promise)
     
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  4. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Outdated information on plants was here.

    As long as I get to watch it. :):dmg_righteous:
     
    Last edited: Mar 26, 2016
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  5. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Cleared a post with outdated info.
     
    Last edited: Feb 26, 2016
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  6. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    version 48-A

    Foraging & Farming

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    You're running low on food, so you quickly send out some forage orders. A day or two later, you're running low on food again, and the forageable stuff left is even further away now... well this shouldn't happen!


    Food Security: My Strategy
    • When do I forage?
      Day 1 definitely, probably day 2. Day 3-4 potentially... This is with the Dauntless Dare loadout, so no starting food either. I usually only have one foraging order, if I feel it would be useful.
      .
    • When do I start farming?
      Day 1, with 2 people. When getting immigration early on, definitely make sure to check and add to your farmer group if you are near your "limit" (ie: 1 farmer per 8 colonists). Don't forget kitchen crew either (1 cook per 16 colonists). In both cases am extra couple farmers or one more cook is not a bad idea.

    ==========================================
    ==========================================

    Advantages of Farming
    Although it's fast to just place a forage order, there are several things to remember:
    • A lot of hauling and walking
      Your colonists will walk to the forage point and frequently leave the food lying there. Someone has to haul it back.
      If there's other things lying about, general haulers might not move it to your stockpile, so instead your kitchen crew ends up spending time walking, which means less time cooking.
      If I set up only one oven, this works perfectly if the food is outside the door, if they have to run out to the forest and back, even three may not be enough. And I'm in a hurry to build other things...
    • The above increases as time goes on
      Forage sources were buffed in 46A, they last a bit longer now. However, in New Antipodea especially you will soon exhaust nearby forage... and if you aren't careful it will become a problem that creeps up on you.
    • Your foragers may be at risk
      As you forage, your colonists will spend more time further away from the colony center, which means if some fishpeople raiders are about, they might be the first ones to meet them...

    Conversely, farming is actually very flexible:
    • Farms near stockpile mean that the raw food is very close to the stockpile.
      The only thing is if you massively overproduce raw food, your haulers will endlessly be hauling it, though not too far.
    • Hauling, unlike foraging etc, is not a work order.
      If you have 3 people in a crew on a workshop, if the workshop is doing a Produce Planks order, any extras cannot do things like forage. But they can haul, which is useful.
    • Farms are steady production, forever
      Actually, production gets better over time as overseers gain skill

    Overseer skill actually does contribute a lot. From an Inept one only using 1/3 to 1/2 of a 14x14 field to the Expert who pretty much uses it all, you can really benefit. That's great as it is pretty passive scaling.

    Farming lets you just constantly have a surplus coming in and if you stop immigration, this surplus grows with overseer skill, and before long you're sitting on hundreds of extra stuff (My 60-ish colony sits on 500+ raw wheat and 350+ bread, for example).

    ==========================================
    ==========================================


    Stable Long-Run Situation: Endless Stockpiling
    Eventually, as you can constantly maintain a surplus day after day, it's likely you'll end up with a ton of raw food sitting about (farmed even more than your kitchen can cook) and a ton of cooked food (kitchens are cooking more than people eat).

    An example:
    I have 50 colonists, produce 80 raw food a day (on average) and cook 60 of it.
    That means every day (on average) I will be adding 20 raw food to my stockpile, 10 cooked food, and be eating 50 cooked food.

    This just keeps on piling up day after day. Eventually you'll have enough that you pretty much have 0 risk of people going hungry etc.


    More later on the new food changes... for now though, Bread (a basic food) and a maxed out bunkhouse is good enough.
    However, I'll note that you can't use wheat to make better food. Or maize, you'll have to rely on Cabbage/Pumpkin or Chilli to farm up your Quality_Food (Farmers' Stew)
     
    Last edited: Feb 28, 2016
  7. Mikel

    Mikel Waiting On Paperwork From The Ministry. Forever.

    I really have to bite the bullet and go your route...
     
  8. Squid Empire

    Squid Empire Member

    I've had terrible times with almost all my colonists starving to death despite my best framing efforts so it looks like I might have to try this out too...
    As a game suggestion though I don't think players should be encouraged to be building the sort of prison farm like colony shown in the pictures above, and that farms should be altered to produce more, faster, by default. I think that ideally farms would take a long time to get set up, but once running there should be food rolling in, with minimal labour and fast kitchen cooking.

    Currently I have two plots of maize and one of sugarcane (each about 9x6), as well as two emergency chilli farms of about 3x4 (they usually make flax and poppies), and despite the full crews and two adjacent fully staffed kitchens (with as many iron stoves as needed), my food stockpile has never exceeded one quickly consumed stew, and every 'refresh' I get a stack of starving messages and dead colonists. :(
     
  9. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    It depends on how effective your colonists are. This is my guess, a lot of the time the farmers are not fully effective, same for cooks and even the hauling. (Food involves a lot of hauling...)

    With only 10 farmers on 2 fields of 14x14, it seems they can (Jolly Good overseers) cover 60 people, for some reason they take forever to hit Expert.
    5 cooks (Expert) can cover 60 people of food as well.

    Really, by the time overseer hits Jolly Good, the cooking process is very very fast. At Expert (which I've always reached pretty consistently) it's like one second. But carrying the raw then cooked food.. that's probably what gets people. I will detail my improved (tm?) setup soon.

    I suppose all the military walking around with assault carbines means it's also under martial law? :savvy:

    Anyway you don't actually need the wall, ironically once a ravenous herd came in and my military stood around like morons, the beetles didn't do much though.

    What is really important is being friends or at least neutral with as many groups as possible.
     
    Last edited: Jan 25, 2016
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  10. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Outdated strategy on farming was here.
     
    Last edited: Mar 26, 2016
  11. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Post with outdated info removed.

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Feb 26, 2016
  12. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    version 50-C

    Science Upgrades: Farming

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    Farming labor upgrades
    Probably the most important science upgrades are the three which make your farmers work more efficiently (they take less time to Tend Crop, which means they can take care of more plants, meaning more output).

    I tend to think of this as one of the best things as:
    • Farmers are probably going to be endlessly Tending Crop as long as they are working
    • Your adjustment is going to be +1 or -1 farmer. On the other hand, reassigning your one Carpentry overseer is annoying.
    • With the happiness-workshift changes, note that Workshops get quality, but farmers don't have an equivalent.

    Once you can get up your lab (just check here), basically have an overseer +2 lower-class grind out all the techs at once then you're good to go.

    There are 3 research items for productivity, which boost your production thusly:
    • Say your farmers start off using "100 time" to Tend Crop.
    • After all 3 researches (-5% each) they will now only need "85 time". Which is great :)

    ============================================

    Unlocking crops via research

    These are the big projects needing up to the full 50 research points. These unlock new crops which are generally strictly better than whatever you started with. Grab them next.
     
    Last edited: May 3, 2016
  13. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    version 50

    Rules of Thumb: Labor Allocation

    I've found the following two numbers to be useful as early & conservative estimates of worker productivity.
    • 1 maize farmer produces 2.5 to 3 raw food a day
    • 1 cook can convert 8 raw food into 16 cooked Basic Food a day
    • I treat cooking a Quality Food as cooking 2 Basic Food (it's a bit better but not by much)

    Thus:
    1 cook for every 16 colonists (round up and add 1)
    have 1 farmer for every 5 colonists (round up and add 1)

    Of course this is with a "good" set up, ie: FSK (Farm close to Stockpile close to Kitchen)
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2016
  14. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    version 49-A

    Turning Colonist Labor into Food

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    Version 48-B introduces a new system, the "fixed-size black-box" farm, this removes a bunch of issues we had before with the "variable-size & per-plant-simulation" farms of ver48-A and before.

    The aim is still to answer: Which crops are best at turning colonist work time into food output? And how much better is the conversion of one crop vs another?

    ======================================================================================

    Basic assumptions:
    No destruction by animals (I have no idea what crop destruction is in this case, my best guess is it removes labor from the pool)
    That's about it.


    Growth of crops is much simpler than before:
    • Colonist walks to a random plant
    • Colonist does a tend plant action, when finished this adds 1 to the labor pool
    • Repeat until...
    • Pool has filled up to labourPerHarvest, then we get outputPerHarvest units of the raw food. The pool then resets to zero.

    The setupLabour is a number of "totally wasted" actions which are required to prepare the field. This is only done once as far as I can tell, the field is then forever prepared.

    ======================================================================================

    From scripts\entity\crops.edb

    The standard unit of time here when comparing is:
    1 unit of time = 1 AS (Actions depending on Skill) + 1 WF (Walking depending on Field)

    "Long periods" is like 2 harvests, or about 2-3 days with a full crew...

    Labor Cost: 7.5 per output

    Slow-growing only means you get a harvest every day or so with a full crew (so not unlike the earlier maize)

    Labor Cost: 6.25 per output
    It has a massive harvest but unlike before, is probably not the most efficient.

    Labor Cost: 6 per output

    ======================================================================================

    There's two things to keep in mind:
    • To be fair, we should consider not only farmer walking but also the hauling of the output to stockpile
    • Secondly, with improved farmer skill, the action time decreases, but not the walking time

    So, a pumpkin/maize farm takes 6.25 of its units, while a wheat farm takes 6 of its units. I think that after considering the larger field (ie: more farmer walking and more hauling time) that they're probably pretty close to each other.
    Adding overseer skill and farming upgrades will probably mean they're about equal, if not giving the win to pumpkin/maize.

    So, here's what you can do with our selected crops:
    • Pumpkin -> Basic Food & Quality Food
    • Maize -> Basic Food & Basic Drink

    I recommend just going mostly Pumpkin and having maybe 1 Maize field for a little bit of alcohol if you need it, my kitchen orders would look like:
    • Brew Basic Drink: #X (if I need any)
    • Cook Farmers' Stew: Minimum #Y (which ideally is at least 1x or 2x your overseer population)
    • Cook Basic Food: Minimum Infinity

    If you see you have very little pumpkins but tons of maize in your stock, then just move your maize farmers over to a pumpkin farm (my current planning calls for 5 farms, though I should only need 4 to feed 100 people, which includes 25 overseers).

    Oh and:
    Labor Cost: 6.25 per output

    =============================================

    Still no pumpkin. You'll have to use cabbage for Farmers' Stew (or just spam the Foreign Office's mission for food supply from Empire, that drops Sausages, a Quality Food)
     
    Last edited: Mar 26, 2016
  15. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Ahem, this is a note that the above information is inaccurate as farm crop balancing has changed from 48-B to the newest 48-C.

    I'll post something about the new crops later, but be aware it's not as neat as the earlier version (more crops, crops have different uses, etc)


    =====================

    Ok....

    So once you have gotten the Refined Food recipe from the Republique (max out their relationship), you're pretty much good to go forever on food. Have a farm that makes something which is raw food (edible) and can be turned into booze.

    Now spam the Refined Food recipe. This multiplies "1 raw food + 1 booze" -> "8 Farmers' Stew"

    This basically means one maize farming overseer (+ techs + a bit of skill +4 lower class) can probably feed 100 people. And you only need 3 kitchen crew?

    [​IMG]
    (That Maize and Chicha could be turned into 264 more Farmers' Stew after 1 brew and 33 cooking, truly a hilarious amount).
     
    Last edited: Apr 16, 2016