How many large farms do I need?
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amax3002
- Posts: 6
- Joined: Wed Jan 30, 2019 8:01 am
How many large farms do I need?
Lets say I am playing a game with 4 cities and I want to start with producing Eggs and Meat products. What is the ideal ratio of large farms to supermarkets per city?
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bdubbs
- Level 3 user
- Posts: 59
- Joined: Sun Feb 28, 2016 9:15 am
Re: How many large farms do I need?
I haven't played much with agriculture in a long time, but either way the answer is going to depend on multiple factors. Once the demand bar reaches its peak and the supply bar starts to go down at the farm you're selling more products than you produce. Super market purchasing and sales SBU's also tend to level up from training more quickly, so you'll notice over an extended period time when your SBU's at the farm level up the total output of the farm will also increase.
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saffgee
- Mod Expert
- Posts: 301
- Joined: Sat Jan 28, 2017 2:28 pm
Re: How many large farms do I need?
This mostly depends on the cities you are running as well; ie the demand appetite for a large city will be quite voracious. As a side comment, my personal preference is never to bother with medium farms as I don't find they upscale well (note to self, this is worth modding).
Assuming you are using multiple floors and also assuming you don't mind maxing out your sales in a single shop (and provided my brain has remembered this correctly), here are some pointers:
As a general rule, one 9th level sales unit can handle 1.5 (ish) level 9 input units. This throws up a simple maths problem - how to get best fit ? Personally I favour the 5 input - 3 sales - 1 marketing approach, which slightly under utilises 1 of your inputs, but other combos are possible (if you do 6 -3, then 1 input unit will be completely redundant I think). If you maximise sales this way, then one large farm can consistently handle only 1 well placed supermarket at best. A better approach would be to use warehouses to manage any supply bottlenecks, although you'd need to place these fairly early for best results. Making the farms internal sale only, but opening the warehouses to external sales/exports is a great way to do a little price gouging once you have the brand and are selling all the eggs/meat in any city. Importing eggs is inefficient and best left to the AI who regularly tries it.
In summary then, for a good size city, build 3 farms -> 1 warehouse -> 1 supermarket per city and dedicate one floor total to sales of each produce. If money is tight, start with 1 farm, 1 warehouse, 1 supermarket and then upscale the additional farms to feed in to the warehouse as you go. The advantage with that is that you can build quality more easily as the warehouse will average the 2 (or 3) produce qualities together. You can further tinker with average quality by assigning 2 input units to the good farm and only 1 to the bad farm for example.
Assuming you are using multiple floors and also assuming you don't mind maxing out your sales in a single shop (and provided my brain has remembered this correctly), here are some pointers:
As a general rule, one 9th level sales unit can handle 1.5 (ish) level 9 input units. This throws up a simple maths problem - how to get best fit ? Personally I favour the 5 input - 3 sales - 1 marketing approach, which slightly under utilises 1 of your inputs, but other combos are possible (if you do 6 -3, then 1 input unit will be completely redundant I think). If you maximise sales this way, then one large farm can consistently handle only 1 well placed supermarket at best. A better approach would be to use warehouses to manage any supply bottlenecks, although you'd need to place these fairly early for best results. Making the farms internal sale only, but opening the warehouses to external sales/exports is a great way to do a little price gouging once you have the brand and are selling all the eggs/meat in any city. Importing eggs is inefficient and best left to the AI who regularly tries it.
In summary then, for a good size city, build 3 farms -> 1 warehouse -> 1 supermarket per city and dedicate one floor total to sales of each produce. If money is tight, start with 1 farm, 1 warehouse, 1 supermarket and then upscale the additional farms to feed in to the warehouse as you go. The advantage with that is that you can build quality more easily as the warehouse will average the 2 (or 3) produce qualities together. You can further tinker with average quality by assigning 2 input units to the good farm and only 1 to the bad farm for example.