Farm / Field diminishing returns

[WhiteTreePaladin]

I saw a recent commit mention diminishing returns for farms. I forgot we had this. There is no convenient way to view the gather speed nor is there any visual indication that some farms are performing better than other farms. There is no way new players would even know this exists. AoK farm management queues were less than ideal, but they were still easily accessible.

It gives AI players an artificial advantage because they have easy access to the stats and adequate time to micromanage such things. We already give the AI players free resources at higher difficulties, so I don't feel this is necessary.

How does it work? Are we supposed to rebuild farms periodically?

Edited September 12, 2017 by WhiteTreePaladin

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

The returns are per gatherer.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

But you are right. I would much rather have a more visual or strategic effect with farms insteadof a diminishing returns thing. See: Farmlands in DE.

 

Also like in AOK it wouldbe nice if the farmers walked around a bit too.

[WhiteTreePaladin]

2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

The returns are per gatherer.

Ah, that makes more sense. I read some old threads about it, and wasn't really sure how it had ended up being implemented. Wish it was more obvious how it worked.

1 hour ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

But you are right. I would much rather have a more visual or strategic effect with farms insteadof a diminishing returns thing. See: Farmlands in DE.

 

Also like in AOK it wouldbe nice if the farmers walked around a bit too.

I agree with all of that.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

2 hours ago, WhiteTreePaladin said:

Ah, that makes more sense. I read some old threads about it, and wasn't really sure how it had ended up being implemented. Wish it was more obvious how it worked.

True, it's not obvious, but neither are a lot of other minor features. I will say that it's even less than not obvious, more like "hidden" is the best word. It's not mentioned anywhere in the game. Though again, a lot of the "information" plainly presented in the game is flat out wrong, so which is worse? haha!

But yeah, I'd remove it and go with a more macro placement of the farms for efficiency rather than a diminishing returns efficiency,which is more micro-ish. Farming is supposed to be more macro than other forms of food gathering, so we could go all the way with it and drop the diminishing returns bit and go full macro with the farmlands.

 

[WhiteTreePaladin]

Yeah, I don't like to micromanage my farms at all. The main goal of infinite farms was to reduce micromanagement. There's always hunting if one wants food micromanagement.

[wraitii]

IIRC we implemented diminishing returns to try and "spread" farms to make them more realistic and more vulnerable to raiding. I think we can safely say it's a failure, though :/ 

[Sundiata]

Making the farm building (dropsite for food) a pre-requisite for fields, and taking away the ability from the CC to function as a dropsite (or penalising the use of the CC by reduced efficiency) would automatically stop people from building fields right around their CC's. I think it would intuitively make people build farms and fields further away from the CC and in turn make them more vulnerable to raiding. More logical/realistic too.

Reducing the amount of workers per field, or increasing the size/footprint of a field (rectangular is much more logical/realistic) would also force people to build more of them, and/or spread them out more, which would create a healthier balance in terms of town/countryside.

That diminishing returns thing is very incognito indeed. I had no idea it was even implemented or how it works? Micromanaging resource gathering in general is pain in my opinion...

[Nescio]

32 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

That diminishing returns thing is very incognito indeed. I had no idea it was even implemented or how it works? Micromanaging resource gathering in general is pain in my opinion...

Yeah, only a few people are probably aware it exists; I only discovered it after stumbling upon it when modifying templates. Anyway, it basically is a multiplier applied exponentially to each additional worker. Currently the field can have up to five workers and has a diminishing returns factor of 0.9, which means:

the first worker farms at 0.9^0=1.0=100% speed
the second worker farms at 0.9^1=0.9=90% speed
the third worker farms at 0.9^2=0.81=81% speed
the fourth worker farms at 0.9^3=0.729=72.9% speed
the fifth worker farms at 0.9^4=0.6561=65.61% speed

Combined five workers on a single farm gather at combined rate of 4.0951 individual farmers.

I actually like this functionality (or think it's at least quite interesting), although the current value (0.9) does seem a bit high.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

8 hours ago, wraitii said:

IIRC we implemented diminishing returns to try and "spread" farms to make them more realistic and more vulnerable to raiding. I think we can safely say it's a failure, though :/ 

There's no shame in trying something out to see if it works. Isn't that one of the things an alpha is good for? If it works, keep it. If it doesn't, modify or remove it and try something else.

[fatherbushido]

1 hour ago, Nescio said:

I actually like this functionality (or think it's at least quite interesting), although the current value (0.9) does seem a bit high.

You can even use it as a gain.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

2 hours ago, Nescio said:

I actually like this functionality (or think it's at least quite interesting), although the current value (0.9) does seem a bit high.

I think the point was, and I'm just guessing, that it would be more profitable for the player to build 5 farms, each with a worker, than to stock 1 farm with 5 workers, given that the need for food is greater than the need for the wood to build the farms.

[Nescio]

37 minutes ago, fatherbushido said:

You can even use it as a gain.

Yeah, I know, by assigning a value greater than 1. Even if the dimishing returns end up being removed from fields, the feature itself certainly is a nice to have thing with great potential for mods etc.