[Feedback][Major Flaw] Economy/Production, Farms Everywhere.

LOL, nice reference to "All you need is love" if that was what you meant. Yeah, I have a bit of a problem with people=production/research/wealth. You only need to look at the modern economy to see population <> these things. Otherwise Bangledesh would be a world power, India would be much stronger and that doesn't even bother to talk about automation reducing the number of jobs for the lower classes that have little hope of economic improvement. 

I am mixed on this. You are correct in it does promote specialization. However, the benefits are not as large as one might expect. Again, it goes back into population means almost everything.

I don't really get what you are saying here. It is probably me though.

Your assessment is forgetting something. Most population planet improvements are flat increases to population (the exception are supposed to be limited, from what I've seen). Factories, labs, and markets are percent increases. Percent increases are more powerful when you have a large base number to work with. If I recall correctly, the base farm is an increase of 2. If you had a population 10 world devoted to manufacturing, and you could build a factory with a 25% bonus to manufacturing, then building that factory would yield greater output than building another farm. In fact, building that factory would strengthen the manufacturing potential of each new farm (25% of 2 would be 0.5).

Of course you don't need factories if you are able to build starbases for their manufacturing modules... but hey, that is what betas are for. To figure out balance.

Don't forget that population growth isn't instantaneous. You will need many turns to fill up those worlds (in some cases, many many turns).

Blatantly wrong. The best approach is to balance population with manufacturing/wealth/research buildings. It's a cost-efficiency problem (with the price being the space on your planet). As you build more farms factories/labs/markets become more effective, and vice-versa. Also, farms' benefits are delayed, while factories/labs/markets give an immediate benefit.

I have played a game where I only built population, and it does work pretty well. The biggest advantage, in my mind, is that neglecting the research, wealth, and production research lines allowed me to pursue military techs more aggressively. It also involved a lot less macro. It made for a fast aggressive game which was very fun. It is not, however, the best way to get the most out of your resources.

 

Here's the thing though, while another farm in your scenario would only increase manufacturing by 20%, it would also increase wealth and research by 20% as well, meaning that you'd only want the factory if you were focusing the planet VERY heavily on production.  In a more extreme example, a 20 population planet gets +10% each to wealth, manufacturing, and research, so a balanced planet would STILL be getting more bang from another farm than from other improvements.

So in essence, the problem is that farms are simply OP compared to factories and other specialized improvements: either the farms need to produce less food, or the other improvements need to give bigger bonuses.

Seems to me we are arguing early vs late results. Obviously when you have 100% approval and more pop to go, sure those % increases are better. However, in the long run it is worth it to replace them when your pop gets higher. +1 at 10% is 1.1. a second full one is 2.

I almost always have my planets focusing on only 1 area: wealth, manufacturing, or research.

ditto

Looking at early game i believe the initial colony gets 8 food and one of the early farms has 4 well also say the early speciliazation buildings are at 20% 

ignoring everything else ( pop. Growth and adjacency etc)

placing one farm grants 50% to base production.  8-12

a second farm grants 33%   12-16

a third farm grants 25 % 16-20

and a fourth farm grants 20% 20-24

so at this point the farm grants the same bonus as a spec building but i give the advantage to the farm since it modifies base production. 

A fifth farm would increase our pop by only 16% its not worth it instead put up a spec building

So lets say We now have 4 farms pop 24 and a spec building 20% for an output of 28.8

another farm gives us an output of 33.6 and another spec gives us 36 advantage spec.  So 4 farms 2 spec

farm 39.2 , spec 38.4. Advantage farm.     5 farms (28 pop) 2 spec 40%

farm 44.8 spec 44.8  advantage farm ( see above)   6 farms (32 pop) 2 spec 40%

Farm 50.4 spec 51.2 advantage spec

 

so its fairly obvious that while the farms are powerfull they are not an i win button and i would say that for any planet < class 5 farms are the answer anything better then that should be specialized

Not true. Another farm would only increase production by 2 points (or by 20% relative to pop 10 planet). That production then would have to be split between manufacturing, research, or economy. It does not increase all 3 by 2 production points at the same time.

Read this to see how the economy works:
GalCiv III Economy 101

You're correct on everything except the part of only building farms. Without modifiers everything wouldn't be enough to support a late game empire with expensive stuff.

I like farms and build them frequently, but from my games it isn't the the one and only like its being made to seem.

 

DARCA

This is the other flaw in the all farms strategy. My specialty buildings are frequently getting adjacency bonuses worth more then their base value. Farms' adjacency bonus is pretty mild (+.5 food per level), I have not noticed a food adjacency bonus of more then 2. Higher level farms have an influence bonus instead of a population bonus. I'm not sure if that's a mistake, but if it isn't changed it will be hard to rack up meaningful population bonuses through adjacency.

@Blaze of Glory

Yes it was.



It takes a lot of % bonus before they get significant, because Population is more important in the formula.



Basically invest credits in Manufacturing/Research/Wealth to boost them, per example "buy additionnal production points", with a hit to Approval for the Wealth sector, or "buy additionnal % bonus", or something else, all of this depending of the new formula.

For percentage, 1% to 1 = 1.01 rounded down to 1, 5% to 1 = 1.05 rounded down to 1 or rounded up to 1.1, 1% to 1000 = 1010 no need for rounding, 5% of 1000 = 1050 no need for rounding.
It's always better to avoid problems rather than solve them.

@DivineWrath



Before you can get the Manufacturing Center (+25% Manufacturing), you need to research 5 Techs and have enough Techs to be able to enter the Second Research Age.

The Basic Factory (start game) has +10% Manufacturing.
To get the first Farm, you need to research 1 Tech (Xeno Farm / Food +2), the equivalent Manufacturing improvement (1 Tech to research) is the Xeno Factory (+15% Manufacturing).

So, say we have an average planet with 10 free tiles and 10B Pop, spending set to 100% Manufacturing.

(Population * AllocationPercentage) * (1 + ImprovementMod + PlanetMod + StarbaseMod + RacialMod) = Output

No bonus, 1 Xeno Factory (+15% Manufacturing).
((10 + 0) * 1) * (1 + 0.15) = 11.5

No bonus, 1 Xeno Farm (+2 Food).
((10 +2) * 1) * (1 + 0) = 12

No Bonus, 10 Xeno Factories (+15% Manufacturing).
((10 + 0) * 1) * (1 + 1.5) = 25

No Bonus, 10 Xeno Farms (+2 Food).
((10 +20) * 1) * (1 + 0) = 30

Now with bonuses, and I will be very generous with bonuses.

Civ Trait Bonus: 50% Manufacturing
Planet Event Bonus: 50% Manufacturing
Planet Trait Bonus: 100% Manufacturing
Starbase Bonus: 200% Manufacturing
Tech Bonus: 200% Manufacturing
Something I forgot: 200% Manufacturing
Just for Fun: 200% Manufacturing

Total Bonuses 1000% Manufacturing

Bonuses 1000%, 1 Xeno Factory (+15% Manufacturing).
((10 + 0) * 1) * (1 + 0.15 + 10) = 111.5

Bonuses 1000%, 1 Xeno Farm (+2 Food).
((10 +2) * 1) * (1 + 0 +10) = 132

Bonuses 1000%, 10 Xeno Factories (+15% Manufacturing).
((10 + 0) * 1) * (1 + 1.5 + 10) = 125

Bonuses 1000%, 10 Xeno Farms (+2 Food).
((10 +20) * 1) * (1 + 0 + 10) = 330

So with 1000% bonuses, 1 Xeno Farm is better than 10 Xeno Factories (132 / 125).
It's because Improvements do not produce Production Points, they are just % Bonus.



Base Population Growth is 0.1 B per turn, so a Xeno Farm (+2 Food) will be filled in 20 turns.
If you have 100% Approval, you get 50% bonus to Population Growth (0.15B per turn), so a Xeno Farm (+2 Food) will be filled in 14 turns.
Even more rapidly if you have other Population Growth bonuses.

@peregrine23



With the actual system, for this approach you need to always perfectly balance the Planet Production output 33%/33%/33% (the Planet Production output, not the setting for Planet Production) to be fully efficient. With Population you have total flexibility, 100% Research, or 100% Manufacturing, or 100% Wealth, or 33%/33%/33%, or 70%/20%/10%, etc., the planet is always fully efficient.

@Tohron



I don't think the Farms are OP, they are great the way they are.
I like the idea to be able to have 100+B Population planets, 200+B Population planets, it's fun.
The problem (for me) comes from the formula where Population is the major factor of change. A system where Improvements and Population have an approximatively equal factor of change, and where different bonuses have more influence, would be better balanced. Actually, you can have 20 Factories, if you have 0 Population, you have nothing, you can have 10 000% bonuses, if you have 0 Population, you have nothing.

@androshalforc



That's not the Farms (the Improvement) that are powerful, it's the Population dominating the formula.

@DARCA1213



The modifiers have not so great impact, it's the Population that make their power.
No Population, no bonuses.

@peregrine23



I think it's a mistake, they should have Population adjacency bonuses.

What are you selling here?

Farming equipment, obviously. 

 

only because you gave such a massive bonus to manufacturing so as to make any bonus's from manufacturing improvements insignificant

lets turn that around 

Total Bonuses 1000% colony capital population

Bonuses 1000%, 1 Xeno Factory (+15% Manufacturing).
((110 + 0) * 1) * (1 + 0.15 ) = 126.5

Bonuses 1000%, 1 Xeno Farm (+2 Food).
((110+2) * 1) * (1 + 0 ) = 112

Bonuses 1000%, 10 Xeno Factories (+15% Manufacturing).
((110 + 0) * 1) * (1 + 1.5) = 275

Bonuses 1000%, 10 Xeno Farms (+2 Food).
((110 +20) * 1) * (1 + 0) = 130

here we see that 1 xeno factory is only slightly less efficient then 10 xeno farms . 

Ultimately, the OP is correct.  In the limit as you hit max pop, it is (almost) always better to replace a tile with a farm.  (But this will hit an equilibrium point before you convert them all; see below.)

However, the growth rate of 0.1 bp/t (which you can fairly easily pump to +120%: Xeno Medical, approval +50%, two food techs), for 0.22 bp/t, does impose a time delay.  It is much faster to build up to other tiles first.  You will generally finish building out a planet's tiles (and upgrading it through tier 3 or so) long before it fills up with pop.  Anyways, you'll always want your 1st tile to be +growth%, and it'll be the last one you convert to a farm.

Also, the math is not as simple as comparing a tier 3 producer (e.g. Mega Factory +20%) to a +4 food.  In both cases, the benefit is additive (not multiplicative) with what you had before.  Hence, converting food to % gain is not directly comparable to a producer's "+%" bonus.

Consider a planet with food F = 20, mp +M = +180%, and 1 empty tile (which is a prarie island, so no tile or adjacency bonuses apply).  Adding in the base 100% you always get for unbonused pop, your mf is really =280%.  (This matters: it changes your denominator.)

• Adaptive Farm +4 food gives you 24 food, for a gain of (F+4)/F, or +(4/F) increase.  With F = 20, that's +(4/20) = +25%.  (Yes, it's huge.)
• Mega Factory +20% adds to the =280% you already have. That's an increase of only (20/280) = 1/14 ~= 7%.

So in this case, food wins.  (Generally, an island will always be better off as a farm.)  As an exercise, let's calculate the inverse problem: how many bonus levels do we need to beat a farm?  That's simple: +25% of =280% is +70%.  Since the Mega Factory is worth only +20% by itself, it means you need +50% = +10 levels from somewhere just to match the farm.  (OTOH, it's much faster to build & upgrade to a Mega Factory than to wait for your pop to build up by +4.0 bp.)  If you can get 11+ bonus levels, then the factory beats the farm outright (and is faster).

Here's another simple math quiz: For what (class-1) of planet is an island tile better as a farm?  N.B. every class-k planet loses 1 hex for the Colony Capital, which you can't replace.)

• Consider that at N-1 full tiles, you could put Fusion Reactor on that last island hex to get (N-1) * 150% mp, where the unit of N is "however many food you get from your best farm".  When is N * 100% base >= (N-1) * 150% with Fusion?  Answer: at N <= 3.
• Generalizing, the equilibrium point is at N = (1+e)(N-1), where e = the +% bonus.  Solving, we have 1+e = eN, or N = (1+e)/e.

Plugging in various values for common +% tiers, we get the break-even point at:

• +50% tile (e.g. Fusion Power Plant): N = 3.  (So for N > 3, the FPP is better than a farm.)
• +25% tile (e.g. Solar Power Plant): N = 5.
• +10% tile (e.g. tier-1 Basic Factory): N = 11.

Conclusion: For class-16 monsters (I've seen a class-26 with 2 full hexagons side-by-side ), it's better to have mostly-food and some non-food.  The math is not hard, but neither is it a simple flat comparison.

Hence, both non-farm and all-farm strategies are correct ... but for different ends of the timeline.  Build tiles early, gradually convert to food later.

• I think if you click "Turn" often, so that you easily reach turn 200(?)+ within a couple of hours of play, then you might not even notice your partially-full phase.  In that case, your empire's total output probably rises linearly with your pop.
• At the other end of the spectrum, a micrmanager like me never gets to the turn-200 phase :)  I check the math every ~10 turns, and I've never had a planet reach the equilibrium point where it would pay to destroy a producer and build a farm.
• Even in the "non-farm" strategy, a class-8+ planet will still devote 3 tiles to a Hospital + 2 farms.  That's necessary just to keep your early-game Approval high, until you reach the starbase module techs.  Age of Expansion's 100-120 turns is sufficient to mostly-fill up a planet with Colony Capital (8), 2 Adaptive Farm (+8), and Soil Enhancement (+1) = 17.0 bp max.

For timescales way past turn ~120, you guys have more experience than me.  For now.

In the current version of the game, with this formula, the Population will always be the biggest modification factor.

This is entirely false. The farms provide a fixed bonus to the maximum population, which means that the increase to output that they provide declines as you add more and more farms. Once the percentage increase in maximum population due to adding a farm drops below the bonus of a factory, market, or lab, modified by spending allocation, the farm ceases to be the more powerful. Is 2 billion more people better than a 20% boost to the production multiplier? Not if there's already at least 10 billion people on the planet.

Moreover, that extra 2 billion people (or whatever it is depending on your farming technology) doesn't take effect immediately. That +20% production multiplier, though? That takes effect as soon as you complete the structure.

Have you considered that the optimal long-term build for a 100% manufacturing world with 10 nonadjacent slots using the improvements you listed and the 0% civilization-wide and inherent planetary bonuses is to build 6 farms and 4 factories, which gives a total of 35.2 units of production, as opposed to your pure-farm build's 30 units of production?

Oh, and your 'generous' scenario where you gave the 1000% base bonus favors the farms heavily. Adding 0.15 to a multiplier of 10 to 11.35 is negligible compared to adding 2 to something that's no greater than 28. The question isn't so much one of how big the multipliers are as to where you get the greatest increase in one side or the other of the equation. If the farm represents a 20% boost to the population number, it's a bigger bonus than a factory which increases the multiplier by 15%. If the farm represents a 10% boost to the maximum population, it's worse than a factory that boosts the multiplier by 15%, and so the question becomes "is (farm population)/(current population) a larger number than (factory multiplier increment)/(current production multiplier)." The answer depends on what the current population is and what the current production multiplier is, and how large the increments from the factory and farm are.

I'd be much more inclined to complain about farms when you're building a generalist planet rather than a specialist planet, as in the case where you have an even split between wealth, manufacturing production, and research, and a set of production-boosting buildings which give a 15% bonus to their specific type of production, each of the production bonus buildings really does look like a multiplier increment of 0.05 rather than 0.05 and the farms really are the way to go, at least until the planet's population reaches at least 40 billion people (in which case, the optimal next building could be either a farm for +2 billion people or a production structure for +5% total production, and after which point it's essentially add a farm and a production structure in every pair of tiles).

What really ought to happen is that extremely high populations should start to be penalized, in addition to those planets that are near their current population limits. Keeping a huge planetary population happy should be a significant issue, but in the current system it's only an issue if the current population is close to the current population limit.

 

In the end on a class ten planet what is better 9* industrial sectors of +30% (counting whatever super projects in place of the factories if need be)

or 9* lossless farms ( super projects can replace some of the nine)

so with that done and a 100% growth and 100% production from stuff, what is better farms or factories. (or a bit o both)

 

DARCA

DARCA1213, you're allowed to do simple math for yourself. Moreover, there are conditions that you failed to specify - what's the average level of the improvements in question? Are you getting any bonuses from sources other than the two listed improvements? If so, how big are those bonuses? How much food does each farm produce? If you're mixing improvement types, what's the average level of each type of improvement? How much does each structure gain per level? Some people may know what these do off the top of their heads, but I don't, and so I had to go look them up for you. I would additionally say that the statement that I can count superprojects, if I want to, is hardly helpful. I don't know all the superprojects, nor do I know which ones would be helpful, nor are superprojects likely intended to be available on all worlds, which means that your inclusion of permission to count these just makes the question more difficult to answer without adding any helpful information.

At any rate, to answer your question, for a world with 9 available tiles and a base population cap of 8 billion people, no production or food bonuses from any source other than the improvements built upon the planet, 100% of the planetary production is of the manufacturing type, and no improvements other than Lossless Farms (henceforth referred to as 'farms') and Industrial Sectors (henceforth referred to as 'factories'), then the greatest production from that planet is obtained when you have six farms and three factories, totaling 152 units of production. If the average level of the improvements changes, then the optimal point will shift. If the factories have an average level of 1.5 while the farms have an average level of 0, the optimal point becomes either three factories and six farms or four factories and five farms, both of which result in a total production of 170, while if the average level of the factories is increased to 2, the optimal point is four factories and five farms. The optimal point does not appear to be significantly affected by increasing the average level of the farms, but this is to be expected given that the farm bonus from levels is so small relative to its total bonus (0.5 food per level, as compared to 12 food base; this is a fairly negligible bonus compared to the factory bonus of 5% per level on top of a 30% base).

A base manufacturing bonus of 40% is sufficient to change the optimal point to two factories and seven farms or three factories and six farms, while a base manufacturing multiplier of 1.5 is sufficient to make two factories and seven farms the optimum point, given that both the farms and the factories have an average level of 0. If the factories and farms both average level 1 or if the factories average level 1 and the farms average level 0, then the optimum point for a 50% base manufacturing bonus is back at the three factories and six farms setup and you'd require a base manufacturing bonus of about 1.7 (I did not check any other combinations of average improvement levels). Furthermore, this changes as soon as you move the spending distribution slider to some other setting than 100% manufacturing.

(Also, when I say a "base manufacturing bonus" or a "base manufacturing multiplier," I mean production bonuses that exist without regard to what you've built on the planet. These can come from starbases, global modifiers, planetary modifiers, or any other source you care to name.)

In short, the math is very simple, and it's something you can put into a spreadsheet quite easily to do a quick calculation and see where the optimal points are. The answer to your question, though? That's a lot more complicated than the math, particularly when you fail to give sufficient information when you pose the question.

 

All of this also assumes that any approval bonuses or penalties are affecting both setups equally, and since I don't know how - or even if, aside from the 10% bonuses listed for 100% approval - approval factors into the production multipliers, I cannot really claim that approval percentages will impact both setups equally.

Dude you guys love this stuff, I'm half assing it. I was doing the math but i hardly understand the rules of adjacency and all the variables so its was way easier to have someone explain it like people have been doing or like you grudgingly did which is a preferred option. I really don't care to deeply about this since I'm going to modd the hell out of this game later bit i thought i would know the truth.

Although i thought i was quite clear in my question and as many relevant details i knew. As i think the examples given have been quite cheesy and unbalanced vs a real game senario. Because planetary projects and the final tier of improvements will unbalance many of the models given im sure.

Ok now peace out Joe

 

DARCA.

@androshalforc

This was exactly the point to demonstrate that the bonuses profit entirely to the Population, not to the improvements.



Before you can have 110 B Population on a planet, you need to have a lot of Xeno Farms in addition to the Capital to be able to support the Population.
And, in your example, you need to avoid at all cost all the other bonuses (no Civ Trait Bonus, no Event Planet Bonus, no Planet Bonus, no Starbase Bonus, no Tech Bonus, etc.).

What about no Population and no bonuses then.

0 Population, 1 Xeno Factory (+15% Manufacturing).
((0 + 0) * 1) * (1 + 0.15 + 0) = 0

0 Population, 1 Xeno Farm (+2 Food).
((0 + 2) * 1) * (1 + 0 + 0) = 2

0 Population, 10 Xeno Factories (+15% Manufacturing).
((0 + 0) * 1) * (1 + 1.5 + 0) = 0

0 Population, 10 Xeno Farms (+2 Food).
((0 + 20) * 1) * (1 + 0 + 0) = 20

Or no Population and 1000% Manufacturing bonuses.

0 Population, 1 Xeno Factory (+15% Manufacturing).
((0 + 0) * 1) * (1 + 0.15 + 10) = 0

0 Population, 1 Xeno Farm (+2 Food).
((0 + 2) * 1) * (1 + 0 + 10) = 22

0 Population, 10 Xeno Factories (+15% Manufacturing).
((0 + 0) * 1) * (1 + 1.5 + 10) = 0

0 Population, 10 Xeno Farms (+2 Food).
((0 + 20) * 1) * (1 + 0 + 10) = 220

Here, you clearly see how Population is powerful and that the bonuses benefit to the Population and not to the improvements.
The Population dominates in the formula. Normal, the improvements produce nothing, they are just bonuses.

@Gilmoy

I did not test all the game possibilities, it would be... ouch.

As general rule, until bonuses provided by the Manufacturing improvements are larger than the bonuses provided by a Farm, then build a Manufacturing improvement.

And, as soon as all the others bonuses (Civ Trait Bonus, Event Planet Bonus, Planet Bonus, Starbase Bonus, Tech Bonus, etc.) are larger than the bonuses provided by all the Manufacturing improvements on the planet, then build a Farm.

But in the end, it's always the Population that prevails, no Population, no bonuses to apply.

@joeball123



You misunderstand, I wrote "Population" not "Farm".

**

Overall, I think that if the player need to do the math to determine if an improvement is better than a Farm, then there is a problem.

This should be simple.

Need more Manufacturing, build a Manufacturing improvement.
Need more Research, build a Research improvement.
Need more Wealth, build a Wealth improvement.
Need more Approval, build an Approval improvement.

The improvements should have base Production Points, the Population should act as "bonuses" to the improvements, and the Bonuses should have more impact on both of them.

@DARCA1213



Total Bonuses 100% Manufacturing

Bonuses 100%, 9 Industrial Sectors (+30% Manufacturing).
((10 + 0) * 1) * (1 + 2.7 + 1) = 47

Bonuses 100%, 9 Lossless Farms (+12 Food).
((10 + 108) * 1) * (1 + 0 + 1) = 236

Bonuses 100%, 5 Industrial Sectors (+30% Manufacturing), 4 Lossless Farms (+12 Food).
((10 + 48) * 1) * (1 + 1.5 + 1) = 203

Bonuses 100%, 4 Industrial Sectors (+30% Manufacturing), 5 Lossless Farms (+12 Food).
((10 + 60) * 1) * (1 + 1.2 + 1) = 224

Using a low-population scenario to support your claim that farms are superior to factories is foolish. You can add as many farms as you want to a planet with less people than the population cap, and they'll do less for the near future than any number of production improvements of any kind you want.

Let's redo your math with a reasonable number for a low-population case. Let's say 0.25 billion people. That's a quarter of a unit of unmodified production. Let's add 200,000 Lossless Farms to that, just because you've used some ridiculous examples and I feel like returning the same. That's a population cap increase of well over a quadrillion. How much does it boost my production? Oh, it didn't boost it at all, because the population wasn't nearly enough to warrant even a single farm yet. So 200,000 Lossless farms gave me a 0% production bonus right now. Let's compare this to 1 Basic Factory. That increases the production multiplier by 0.1. If I don't have a production multiplier yet and the planet's set to 100% manufacturing, I just boosted my production by 10%. 10% > 0%. Even if I do have a pre-existing production multiplier, adding 0.1 to it will increase it by some amount, no matter how small. Increasing the population cap by any amount, no matter how excessive, does nothing whatsoever for me until I can actually make use of that extra population. So in this case, a single Basic Factory is better than 200,000 Lossless Farms.

Let's do a more rational example and assume 0.5 billion population are added per turn, and let's say that the planet can either have 14 billion people or a manufacturing multiplier of 1.3 (3 basic farms or 3 basic factories). What's the total production in the time it takes the planet to grow to its population limit? In the case with the 14 billion person cap, you take 28 turns (0.5 billion people per turn) and produce 203 units of production. In the case with the 8 billion person cap and the 1.3 production multiplier, you take 16 turns and produce 88.4 units of production in that time. In the time between when your 8 billion person, 1.3 production multiplier world stops growing and when your 14 billion person world stops growing, the 8 billion person world produces a total of 124.8 additional production, for a total of 213.2 production units in 28 turns. Compare this to the 203 units of production of the pure farm world. The total output gained from the pure farm world doesn't surpass the total production gained from the world with the 1.3 multiplier until 31 turns have passed. So tell me, oh you who are so wise in the ways of math where "population dominates the equation," which of these is better right now? I agree with you that in the long run the high population world is better (though not to the exclusion of production improvements - that depends on what exactly is going on with the planet in question). However, that's the long run. While you're building up and the population is growing, though? Farms are not the best choice.

Additionally, in the case given, the farm world will not even begin to catch up with the factory world until the planetary population exceeds 10.4 billion, as until that point the total production of the planet with the multiplier is always greater than the total production of the planet without it. Also note that these are times given for a growth rate of 0.5 billion per turn, which is 5 times the base amount that you've claimed for population growth. Think about how much longer the game would have to go on before the farm world caught the factory world if instead of finishing growing in 28 turns it took 140 turns. Being ahead in total production output for ~155 turns isn't a bad deal in my book; even if there's enough of a growth bonus coming from somewhere to halve that growth time, this is still ~77 turns where the factory world is ahead of the farm world in total production, and there's no one saying that if you really want to optimize things you can't go around converting those factories over as you near an appropriate point at which to do so.

I clearly see someone manipulating math to prove a falsehood. From where I stand, it's fairly clear that in the short-term the factory bonus is better than the farm bonus, if you're going for 100% on manufacturing production. In the long run, yes, pure farms work out to be a bit better than pure factories, but even then there's at least one optimal balance of farms and factories, depending on available planet tiles and the production multiplier before factories. Yes, the bonuses don't do anything if there isn't any population there to create a base production unit. You know what doesn't do anything for a much longer time? Population cap boosters, such as those farms you keep pushing. If you continue to claim otherwise, you either do not understand math as well as you think you do or you're intentionally trying to deceive people.

While you have shown that pure farms is better than 5 farms and 4 factories with a 100% manufacturing bonus and assuming 100% manufacturing production, you have failed to find the optimal point in this situation. The optimal point is 2 factories and 7 farms, which results in 244.4 units of production per turn, which is superior to your apparent optimal point of 9 farms which gives 236 units of production per turn. Both 8 farms and 1 factory, and 3 factories and 6 farms are also superior to your apparent optimal point of 9 farms, with the 8 and 1 balance being nearly equal to the 7 and 2 optimal point and the 6 and 3 balance being nearly equal to the 9 and 0 balance.

I think this is turning into something meta but this is just a beta! But I am now old McDARCA with a farm (eei eei oh) and feeling good with my current farm to factory ratio.

I'm wondering if the devs are going to change this so factories be on par again, hope so?

 

McDARCA

That's really the crux of the whole issue.

I also think the bonus tiles throw a major kink in the "just build farms" model... a tile-bonus and adjacency bonuses change the whole equation. In reality, it's not as simple as just x-number of farms vs. x-number of factories.

And Joe, while I agree that Unknown_Hero's statement "it's always better to build a Farm instead a Manufacturing/Research/Wealth Improvement" is wrong, his posts have all been civil. I agree with what you are saying, Joe, but I just want to offer a friendly suggestion to be careful about how you make your point. The above post feels fairly pushy (that may or may not have been your intent; I'm not assuming one way or the other), and I just don't think it is necessary.

Unknown_Hero's strategy of just building farms may not be best--and his math may be wrong. But your claim that he is "manipulating math to prove a falsehood" or that he either doesn't understand math or is intentionally trying to deceive people--those aren't fair assertions. I don't get the sense that Unknown_Hero is intentionally trying to deceive anyone, nor does he seem to be manipulating math to prove his point. From what I can tell, he's just trying to point out a concern about how production and population relate and provide meaningful feedback.

And I, for one, am glad he brought this up (even though I disagree with his main assertion) because it got people discussing something I hadn't given much thought to, which will inform my strategy going forward.

 

I'm not sure where this math is coming from. The formula for getting manufacturing is:

(8+(#farms*size of farms)) * (1+(#factories * factory bonus)) I'm not sure where that extra 1 on your manufacturing side is coming from, or why you think base population for a planet is 10. 

Here is the math with the correct formula:

Bonuses 100%, 9 Industrial Sectors (+30% Manufacturing).
((8 + 0) * 1) * (1 + 2.7 ) = 29.6

Bonuses 100%, 9 Lossless Farms (+12 Food).
((8 + 108) * 1) * (1 + 0) = 116

Bonuses 100%, 5 Industrial Sectors (+30% Manufacturing), 4 Lossless Farms (+12 Food).
((8 + 48) * 1) * (1 + 1.5) = 140

Bonuses 100%, 4 Industrial Sectors (+30% Manufacturing), 5 Lossless Farms (+12 Food).
((8 + 60) * 1) * (1 + 1.2) = 149.6

The best is 3 Industrial Sectors (+30%), 6 Lossless Farms (+12)

((8 + 72) * 1) * (1 + .9) = 152

So as I have said balance is best. It should also be noted that the manufacturing adjacency bonus becomes better then the population bonus once your planet passes 20 pop. If you assume that your buildings will be on average level 2 (13 food from Losless farms and 40% from Industrial sectors) the balance shifts further toward manufacturing. As Joeball has said, the real way to optimize is to build heavy manufacturing, then as your planet's population fills up, build farms. As long as your population is below the cap, additional farms are worthless, especially now that it .41 has fixed approval so you can keep 100% even with population pressure.