I have run 3 colonies in the current major revision. Observations: Overall food supply almost impossible to keep out of long term deterioration without fairly extreme measures 3 people per crew is not enough to plant and harvest even half the plot and the plots are not max size I am getting spoilage notices even though the plots are manned almost all the time in the day After quite a bit of experimenting, maize seems to be the only crop that provides even semi stable crops. Everything else seems too quick to spoil (cabbage, which fyi, is worthless now and can spoil within moments of being attended) or provide too little return on investment (wheat, barely covers the meals the farmers eat over the grow cycle, and highly exposed to failure by hostile action because of the very long grow cycle) I estimate that a stable food supply with a little excess would require 50% of all colonists (poss more) dedicated to farming Overall it seems that I am putting 80% of my focus into simple survival, extra labourers and managers seem more like a burden to feed rather an opportunity to expand and it's unbalancing the whole game for me. I did try to unpick exactly why, but basically spending so much time on farms just isn't fun, particularly when compared to r41 where I could leave farms to run themselves to a large extent (but still needing to keep an eye on them) and focus on whatever seemed like a fun thing. So yeah, I'm not liking it. In fact I'm really struggling to see any positives and it seems like a huge regression when farming seemed like a largely finished system already. Thoughts?
The farming itself seems more workable to me, actually. The thing that is impacting people the most is the change to cooking that effectively halves its output from previous versions. Before, your one maize grown became 2 maize chowders. Now, it's only one. This makes the overall dedication to food that much more intense.
I'm certainly glad they're re-balancing the food/farming system in general, because it used to be far too easy to maintain a massive supply, which means you'd never run the risk of exciting starvation spirals or delicious cannibalism sprees. But yes, I see your points, especially about having to use most of your entire workforce to maintain a decent farming flow. I think the key will be finding that sweet spot between never having to think about food and focusing all attention on it. I'm sure it will come in time.
Like Unforked said, farming and food production never really felt 'finished' before. They felt easy. A borderline non-factor to playing the game, for all intents and purposes the game might as well just give you a daily exact food amount for free and that would actually have been more challenging. Farms as they stand now work pretty well with what is present in the builds, there's actually some kind of thought and planning behind the process now rather than the previous 'impossible to fail' feeling it had. As more disruptive factors are introduced this may change but really the biggest change factor I found wasn't farms at all but the changes made to kitchens. When the farming changes were introduced, at the same time there was a much more subtle change they removed the previous behaviour that allowed a single colonist to cook multiple orders at the same time so you could have 3 colonists manning a half dozen or more ovens simultaneously, in doing so a colonies potential to produce food was slashed by a factor of about 3. But once it became clear that change had been made (I seem to recall it was missing from the patch notes at first?), planning around it became reasonably straight forward and now the current balance lingers somewhere between 'It's now at least possible to fail' and 'Once you know the system there's no challenge unless random events occur'. Which is certainly a step forward in terms of having the player actually be engaged and not just snooze through food production, but it probably could do with more outside influences that can make growing crops and food production have a bit more variation to it beyond just intermittent random beetles showing up. Such as: * Crop disease and treatments. * Functional fertilizer. * Multiple user ovens. * Food preparation that uses something other than just ovens. (Currently ovens feel a bit like a magical wardrobe from which anything can be conjured) * Seasons and seasonal crop (Though this would be problematic to explain due to the in-game time progression) * Food perishing. * Non-kitchen stoves in dwellings for colonists to prepare their own very basic stews/soups/gruel, so kitchens are more for the preservation of raw food to stop it perishing rather than the sole source of nourishment. In fact, I really like those last two. Might make a thread suggesting it.
I did run into this problem in my last play through, so much so that everything seemed to spoil quickly as well as the fact that I'm probably going to start off just making a work crew only farm. I'm sure it just needs to be rebalanced, or perhaps some of the upcoming features. I'm not sure what a decent ratio is. Or in other words, to feed X number of citizens I need Y number of farmers.
I've been looking further at why the farming seems wrong to me, and I am coming to the conclusion the actual problem I have is with the kitchen, now that cabbage spoilage is fixed. With 3 maize farms in my current colony and 3 farming only crews I can feed 45 easily on raw food. (As far as I'm concerned food needs to be something that can fade into the background somewhat, otherwise it becomes a restriction on how you develop colonies, so that is positive - events are where farming disruption should happen imo) I've got a kitchen with 4 basic ovens and a brewery with 2 wooden vats. My brewery produces far more beer than my kitchen produces food, at a rate roughly in line with other buildings. The kitchen barely seems to produce 1 meal a day per oven, even with one worker per oven. I can't decide if this is meant to be intentional or a bug, but at the moment you would virtually need one manned oven per colonist to provide cooked food for all and that just can't be right.
Told ya it was the Kitchens! But yeah, it has been clarified a few times that the kitchen balancing hasn't happened yet.
Ive been jamming max kitchen work crews ASAP and seem to have it balanced now. Current colony of ~50 people overfed with 1 kitchen with 6 ovens (I overstock the ovens due to breakage) located next to the farms on one side and the stockpiles on the other. One work crew per farm plot (7x7) with 2-3 laborers each on 1 x pepper and 2x corn fields. That gives me 15-16 people actively engaged in food production excluding the random foraging I do (the good for nothing tailors when they have nothing better to do) and hunting (the good for nothing soldiers when they do have better things to do). In addition, I do have a flax/bamboo farm with its own work crew of 2 which may have an impact on the food production as I cannot assign specific crews to specific fields, but the flax/bamboo rarely ever has spoilage. I should also add that my farmers and cooks do NOTHING else: all other activities disabled.
