Farmers

[biljir]

I have several cities where, if I assign a farmer specialist, the total food production goes down!

I'm beginning to think that CTP 2 was released way too soon. A CIV-like game has to get its formulas right, so that the player is challenged, in a way that he can respond to rationally. CTP 2 drowns you in gold, features an AI that can't be bothered to attack, and an agricultural system that penalizes attention to food production. CTP 1, for all its grievous faults on release, was never quite that messed up...

[MarkG]

it goes down cause you are lowering the percentage of possible food that your tiles can give more than the increase that the additional specialist can bring

[Alisia]

Farmers create food. Farms create food. Sometimes, farms create MORE food.

Should farmer leave farm for city, he creates less food then the farm would.

Example in numbers:

Farmer creates 5 food.
Farm creates 8 food.

Should the worker remain a worker on the farm, or change career to Farmer???

[rah]

No different than CivII where if you take a worker off a high trade tile to make him a scientist the number of science beakers produced goes down.

RAH

[biljir]

I can certainly see how this argument applies to scientists. But I don't get it given my (admittedly dim) understanding of the agricultural production model of CTP 2.

As I understand it, the model is that all your non-specialized citizens are working all your land, some of which may be improved. If you have more tiles than citizens, some of the tiles will be worked at less than capacity. (Further, other factors, such as how much gold the city generates, have no effect on food production...it all depends only on the land and the farming improvements. City improvements like granaries can be discounted because they result in percentage increases of what the land produces.) Because these are unspecialized citizens, you may assume that they don't farm at full potential, as they are also doing some trading, studying, factory labor, etc.

If you now make a specialist farmer, a reasonable expectation is that the farmer would be able to work a single citizen's fraction of your tiles at greater efficiency than a regular, polymath citizen. Which would mean that, regardless of the level of improvement of your terrain, adding a farmer should always grow more food.

I guess this isn't the model that CTP 2 used, or else they botched its implementation. I can't come up with a model that seems reasonable where adding a farmer ever reduces food production...

[Matthew Watson]

When you turn a land worker into a farmer, they no longer work on the land, put produce food effectively from nothing. However, the amount of food that they can produce in this way is less than the amount that they would produce if they were working a land tile with a high food production (such as a farm), so you get a net loss by so doing.

However, if the tiles around the city don't produce much food (eg desert), then you will get a net increase in food production by turning a land worker into a farmer.

It does make sense, honest!

[Dale]

Think of it in a reality-relevant view. You have X number of farmers tilling the land and growing wheat (as well as production and whatnot). You take 1 farmer off the square he works, and the other farmers have to share his plot between them, hence every squares wheat production goes down a little in response (less time for each square). That farmer is placed in a bakery to turn wheat into bread. If the wheat fields are on high-yeilding improved squares, then the percentage of wheat lost to removing the farmer is greater in real wheat bushels lost, than if the squares were all desert. A bakery will make the same amount of bread whether on desert or improved riverland plains. So if the amount of bushels lost by removing the farmer is greater than the amount of bread he can bake, that results in less food.

Makes sense to me.

------------------
Rommell to a sub-commander outside Tobruk: "Those Australians are in there somewhere. But where? Let's advance and wait till they shoot, then shoot back."

[biljir]

That's not farming, that's baking!

Seriously, I can't consider farmers who make food out of thin air, and don't work any land, to be a realistic model. (At least, until the "Genetic Age", and, even then, it's hard to credit.)

As far as farming the desert is concerned, I do expect a farmer to be able to get more food out of the desert than it would otherwise produce, but if the model has a farmer growing the same amount of food in two cities, one surrounded by nothing but desert, and one by nothing but grassland, I can't possibly take that model seriously.