irrelevant: Frenchman's Bend: trying for a soft landing

[rkelly17]

Oh dear, there I go again, making neat grids; somebody stop me!

No, no, @irrelevant. Embrace your inner grid-maker. 

[irrelevant]

@Nilla @salamander  Ha! There was a reason for that, (let's see now, what was it...?  oh, yeah!) I was testing different field configs for crop yield, and never got around to changing them. Yeah, that's my story

I have started using ever-larger fields. Previous to Frenchman's Bend, I had always used 8x15 farms (120 tile) with two farmers, but in this town I have tried 16x8 (128), 18x8 (144) , 21x8 (168), 24x7(168), and 21x9 (189). Mostly they get the full yield, but not always.

When your farming constraint is how much land you are willing to devote to farming (you can have as many farmers as you need), the 120-tile farms are the way to go, 9 years out of ten you will get full yield. If you instead are limited by how many farmers you can spare from your labor force, it is better to put that number of farmers on larger fields, and accept the occasional yield reduction due to early frost. You'll still get full yield 2 years in 3, or maybe 3 years in 4. But more tiles in tillage means larger harvests (per farmer) on average.

Still not sure what the optimum size field is. Not sure I've got the patience to fiddle around that much. In any case, I'm sure it varies by crop seed. And so we're back to that. Beans and wheat.

[irrelevant]

Oh dear, there I go again, making neat grids; somebody stop me!

No, no, @irrelevant. Embrace your inner grid-maker. 

@rkelly17 Oh, I do!

[salamander]

@Nilla @salamander
When your farming constraint is how much land you are willing to devote to farming (you can have as many farmers as you need), the 120-tile farms are the way to go, 9 years out of ten you will get full yield. If you instead are limited by how many farmers you can spare from your labor force, it is better to put that number of farmers on larger fields, and accept the occasional yield reduction due to early frost.

Still not sure what the optimum size field is. Not sure I've got the patience to fiddle around that much. In any case, I'm sure it varies by crop seed. And so we're back to that. Beans and wheat.

For me, that's the tricky part.  Most recently, I been using the @slink's Mediterranean Climate mod, so early frosts haven't really been something to worry about, but I see what you're saying about deciding how to use your available labor.  I have to believe there is an optimum field size (because I'm anal about these things) but there's so many variables, it's hard to say if there's an optimum for all situations.

I'm looking forward to seeing what you get from your population experiment.  I've been using @slink's rule of thumb (from back on the SRS forum) of 1 new house per year, but with the population levels folks are reaching now, that has to change as pop levels get higher and higher.  I'm hoping you'll have some suggestions about how often you should plan on building houses to keep a population stable and/or growing at a fairly constant rate regardless of the pop size.

[irrelevant]

Using larger fields with 2 farmers each, modded with Better Fields + Irrelevant Tweak Crops

These are 21x8 except for the beans and wheat which are 21x9

[irrelevant]

I can't believe it, I'm dismissing boats full of logs and stone.....

[irrelevant]

Every time autumn comes and I click orchard workers up from 10 to 26, I feel guilty cause I'm not checking I9s

[irrelevant]

Year 33, harvest

The three wheat fields are 16x8, 18x8, and  24x7

[irrelevant]

Year 34, planting

This one's going to be ugly, planting is 1/3d done, with snow on the ground; this is why you need big food surpluses.

Hm. Damaged, but not as bad as I expected. Squash and cabbage are especially resistant to cold.

A bad year. 

The new village of Cross Creek.

[Nilla]

@Nilla @salamander  Ha! There was a reason for that, (let's see now, what was it...?  oh, yeah!) I was testing different field configs for crop yield, and never got around to changing them. Yeah, that's my story

I have started using ever-larger fields. Previous to Frenchman's Bend, I had always used 8x15 farms (120 tile) with two farmers, but in this town I have tried 16x8 (128), 18x8 (144) , 21x8 (168), 24x7(168), and 21x9 (189). Mostly they get the full yield, but not always.

When your farming constraint is how much land you are willing to devote to farming (you can have as many farmers as you need), the 120-tile farms are the way to go, 9 years out of ten you will get full yield. If you instead are limited by how many farmers you can spare from your labor force, it is better to put that number of farmers on larger fields, and accept the occasional yield reduction due to early frost. You'll still get full yield 2 years in 3, or maybe 3 years in 4. But more tiles in tillage means larger harvests (per farmer) on average.

Still not sure what the optimum size field is. Not sure I've got the patience to fiddle around that much. In any case, I'm sure it varies by crop seed. And so we're back to that. Beans and wheat.

Of cause there is a logic explanation. I am relieved, almost started to worry a bit about you.

Fieldsize, oh yes, I have made a lot of experiments, too (also never understood the "magic" of 120-tile, although these 8X15 fields are quite convenient). I really don't mind so much anymore, but I do think a bit like you  @irrelevant. I never count the crop that is spoiled, always what I get into the stores.

I have discovered another "trick" harvesting orchards. If you are too lazy (or have too many orchards) to increase the workforce in the autumn, start the harvest manually in late summer or early autumn. The cherryharvest doesn't start until autumn (or at 100%). And if you do not use the immortaltree-mod, there are mostly some young trees, so you never get 100% . If you start the harvest manually, even if it is only 75% (there might never be more at that time) you will get almost the same harvest as with more workers. I made some observation in Jupitero (a lot of cherries) that the harvest was only about the half, if I forgot to start it manually. By the way, if I have large fields with few workers, I also try to start the harvest manually.

[rkelly17]

Still not sure what the optimum size field is. Not sure I've got the patience to fiddle around that much. In any case, I'm sure it varies by crop seed. And so we're back to that. Beans and wheat.

There are charts on Banished Info (http://banishedinfo.com/) which give optimum sizes for fields, orchards and pastures, but they are for unmodded farming. With mods all bets are off. For example, what I was doing unmodded with 4 high X 15 wide orchards I now do modded with 3 X 15, but I'm not sure whether that is still one of the "optimum" sizes.

[irrelevant]

Year 38

Got too much stuff. Dialed back the number of gatherers, built two more warehouses. Laid down more stone roads than I have built in my last 3 towns combined.

The ratio of children to total pop did a nose-dive, so I built two extra houses. Keeping an eye on it.

Built a fisher on a pond, just cause.

In addition to 85,000 food in storage, there's almost that much again in TPs and warehouses.

@Nilla finally I just went ahead and assigned enough farmers to the orchards; I have plenty of labor.

 

[Nilla]

A Question @irrelevant, to the stores. How do you use them? Is it only extra large barns or do you also use them to allocate the stuff to the "right" place of the map. I haven't used them so much before, but made some experiments in Jupitero. I see that you always build a lot of them and it would be interesting to know, how you use them.

[irrelevant]

The one over by the sheep pastures, that was the first one I made. I used that one to drag over a big bunch of stone, iron, and logs from the original town. The others have just been for storage.

In other towns I have used them often to move construction materials.

They're really good for taking pressure off barns that aren't getting emptied out. Better for this than markets are, since you can collect whatever resource your target barns are stuffed with. Been doing that a lot in this town.

[Nilla]

In that settlement I concentrated the production; tool in one place, clothing in another and so on. (Maybe it is not really the best thing to do). I used the stores to drag iron to the toolproduction, leather to the clothing and sometimes cherries to the aleproduction. It seemed like the vendors in the small markets didn´t like to walk far, to get it.