CAM 2 Farming

[InvisiChem]

As development is winding down toward release, there is a few things about the farming system that need to be addressed. This thread is for ideas about the development and update of the current Agriculture system in place from CAM 1.0.

Here is what is currently changed

• Farm stages in CAM 1.0 were expanded to 7 stages. 6-7 were types of heritage lots. CAM 2 is expanding the stages to 10 so it is treated more like normal industry.
• Farms are not as sensitive to traffic or air pollution.
• Farms are counted in industry numbers. CAP relief is provided by connections. CAP is not consumed by other buildings

Most of the questions raised are these:

• Heritage lots are a strange lot. How popular are they really?
• Stage 8-10 farms leave a lot of ideas available. Mine started with Integriculture lots. What ideas do you have?

My personal ideas are in the CAM 2 manual. The farming section is attached to this post. The only thing I would probably change is to remove the heritage lots and continue the farming chain. All ideas are welcome. Agree or disagree with my ideas, please. Just be respectful and lets make this a productive discussion.

[M4346]

This is awesome! Thanks!

I have finally downloaded the relevant files and will fire them up in the game asap!

On the subject of agriculture / primary industry, I have always been irked by how easily farms are affected by traffic and air pollution. It makes no sense and I detest seeing massive swathes of black fields because they can't handle a little nearby traffic! That, alone, is a massive improvement!

Most of the questions raised are these:

• Heritage lots are a strange lot. How popular are they really?
• Stage 8-10 farms leave a lot of ideas available. Mine started with Integriculture lots. What ideas do you have?

Heritage lots are a strange lot indeed. I generally dislike them and rarely keep any that pop up. I suppose the alternative is to not download them, but they often came bundled with other packages and I just dumped them unthinkingly in my plugins folder. I suppose they could be kept in their own reserved growth stage, that way you can control how / whether they grow (simply by not downloading them).

I also like the idea, as in the extract of the manual, of massive farming industry at stage 8 and futuristic farming concepts at the last growth stages. Again, it allows for easier control.

Anyway, let me try this in-game.

[FrankU]

This is certainly awesome! So much work done by one person. 
Your development ideas open up a new horizon for rural development.

It would be good to have 10 staged of I-R like I-HT. Especially with the futuristic stages 9 and 10 we will see that I-R and I-HT will look a bit the same.
This is also an answer to the irritating presumption that farmers are not educated. Nowadays here in The Netherlands farming has become quite a I-HT business already.

So I have been thinking about I-R Stages.
Stages 1 up to 3 are quite common farms with a house, some barns and sheds, with crops growing around them.
Like this:
Stage 1


Stage 2


Stage 3


In my opinion stage 4 already shows quite large barns.
Like these:


Stage 5 is almost industrial: large complexes of pig barns, chicken barns or cattle barns.
Like these:


The above are my concept farm lots. I am waiting for Fred/mrbisonm to finish his farm props set, so I can make them final and upload them to the community.

So then we have stages 6 and 7. A fun idea by the BSC team, but not really logical if you think about it. In fact these heritage lots are a very different kind of lots and would not really fit into any R, I or C category. So, well... putting them on the end of the farming chain was an OK idea.
But if you extend the chain with extra stages above 7, until more or less high tech farms (your stages 8, 9 and 10) I think it is getting a bit weird.

If you keep these heritage lots on stage 6 and 7 we will have a weird chain of farms growing: we begin with traditional small ones, then they get bigger, then we have some heritage here and there and then suddenly we get industrial high tech stuff..... I don't know. It could work, but is it logical?
Would it be possible to do this differently? Maybe we just throw the whole heritage lots stuff out and make these lots Landmarks with or without jobs? What do you all think?

But of course; what to do with the existing Stage 6 and 7 farms.... A problem indeed. Although modding them into Landmarks or something different would not be too hard. I could do that.

For the higher stages we could think of lots with these Integriculture buildings. Or with these: The Pegasus utopia sky farms.

Invisichem, you are going to make new properties and implement them for SC4-Pim? So that I can make CAM 2 balanced stats with SC4-Pim? Without this utility I will get lost!

Not a simple job...! Good luck.

[M4346]

Would it be possible to do this differently? Maybe we just throw the whole heritage lots stuff out and make these lots Landmarks with or without jobs? What do you all think?

I was thinking along the same lines, especially considering that a number of these 'heritage farms' have been made into / are 'functional' LMs already (CSX comes to mind).

ETA: Do I still need / can I still use this mod? Link

[FrankU]

I am developing some heritage lots myself. Some of them could be landmarks, some of them could be museums, an educational facility, a conference center, a park... I could spread them all over the game menus, except maybe water traffic or utility 

[InvisiChem]

I like what I read here so far. Of course, it's the same things I agree with, so liking it is easy.   

The old heritage lots, we could develop a list of them currently and add them to a cleanitol file. Not too difficult. A thread about deprecated lots will end up having to be made for future plugin releases, so it would suffice to add one for this release of CAM, after I release it of course.

They were a great idea, and once I learn about the developer types interact with the zoning classes in the EXE file, perhaps I can find a way to develop new zone types, one specifically for Heritage Lots. This is of course currently fantasy and brainstorming, but one never knows. With persistence comes results.

[TheTeaCat]

I'm really liking what you are doing here

I had a few thoughts for stage 6/7/8 - how about some abattoirs/processing facilities, aquaculture farms (algae/fish farming in tanks), biofuel farms, wind/solar farms or maybe large scale forestry lots.

As for the heritage lots I'm not too fussed by what happens to them.
If one ever grows for me it usually disappears almost as quick as it grows. (The Great Pyramid growing on a hillside    )

[M4346]

So I started a new region with CAM 2.0.

I don't know if I'm entirely happy with the new demand drivers for agriculture, they seem to be 'bad' for "pioneer" regions, starting with mainly large swathes of farmland. I could only grow one massive farm with a population of 1 500 and then they were all complaining about a lack of jobs!

[InvisiChem]

ETA: Do I still need / can I still use this mod? Link

Unfortunately no, this mod would be inCAMpatible. I used this mod to implement certain changes, though not as extreme. Traffic will still have an effect for instance, just not as severe. It takes quite a bit more traffic to be an issue.

I can definitely up the demand a bit for farms. I was able to grow much larger population, around 10,000 before I started this problem, but I was also zoning a balancing amount of light density commercial with it. I do grow farms a little differently as well. I stick to the about 12x14 swaths. Irregular in shape, but smaller. This makes a lot more farm houses in ratio of farm fields. Doing this, you will notice an increase in R$$ and R$$$ drive as well. Not a lot more, but farms do need some middle wealth to work and the owners become very wealthy with good farms.

Let me increase the drive some more. For this version, I increased the initial drive to 1500. I thought this would help the initial growth, but I can increase the major demand as well. Hesitant to go too high, since all wealth and education except R$$$EQ4 adds to IR drive.

Let me up that and I'll get you the new set.

[InvisiChem]

So, here is a quick test city, updated. Had to use the snapshot tool from in game, so some things are not available. Here is a basic stat. City population was just over 11,000. The grids on the farms are 8x8 with the Ave, where the Ave gives way to road, they are 8x9. Almost no unemployment, very little commercial and fields were not really dilapidating. All good stuff. Thank you Vortext and M4346. Not much of a farmer myself. Vortext's observations originally had me raise the initial drive to 1500. Between Vortext and M4346, I increased the overall drive for IR. This seems to working well.

Farming Area


Residential Area


Residential East Side


Residential West Side



Let me get the changes implemented to all PlayStyle files and I'll get them out for testing.

[M4346]

Awesome! Thanks! I look forward to trying the revised version!

To give you an idea of the kind of rural areas I work on / with:

With little towns / villages like this one in between:

[compdude787]

@M4346, you build farming tiles in much the same way I do. I always have fairly small towns surrounded by farms. The only place where I have farms in a more populated tile is when they're right at the edge of the suburbs, where you have a transition from suburban to rural.

[InvisiChem]

To adjust for a more rural playing style, I think I'll adjust Rural CAM drives to account for large amounts of farms, little population. My current settings still don't do a good job of supporting that, although even at low populations, the amount of jobs is almost the amount of population. Remember, these are just test cities, no fancy stuff. Editable variables.

Simple farms.


Residential Section (Still, no major unemployment)


CRF Report


Demand (Finally killed demand with the population)


This would cause some great growth, but I don't like the balance for that. Drives are too high for my liking, but I think moving these values to Rural CAM but similar to CAM 1.0 would work very well. Be two different sets, but easy to manage through the installer. As it is, all I would have to do is zone another tract of residential, boom IR demand will rise quickly. All R$EQ<4 ask for more than 1 farm job by themselves, 1.66, 1.15, 1.05. I'll admit, CAM 1.0 asked for 16, 1.6, .16.

[M4346]

I'm pleased to report that, as far as I can see at least, CAM 2.0 Rural does what it says! 

Putting these here for you to interrogate 

(The IM demand is that low because a massive ACME Cold Storage facility just opened its doors down the road  )

[InvisiChem]

Please tell me you have 2 cities going in this region. The numbers seem to coincide with that. If so, everything is looking great. If not, the setup dat pack did not work. Numbers aren't doubled, especially the industrial, so I don't think this is the case.

[M4346]

I do have two cities. One purely R and C and the one ehere the screenshot is from, which is IR, IM, C and R.

[InvisiChem]

Perfect. Everything is looking great then.   

[InvisiChem]

Frank,

Lets bring this conversation public here. This is a great conversation about the redevlopment of PIM-X IR Stages with the expansion of stages I have included in the new CAM.

I have expanded the number of stages from 7 to 10, as has been discussed earlier. The difficult part is how to make PIM-X play nice with this. I have devised a new properties.xml to handle this, but there is rightly some concerns about the values I have used.

Quickly, some tables about about Stage vs. Density. For all types except IR, this has always been number of workers per tile. IR was total jobs. This new file makes it workers per tile for IR as well.

First, the original table from CAM 1.0

2      16
3      40
4      90
5     180

Now, this table Expanded to 15 stages

2   16            9     4808.7
3   40            10   10779.3
4   90            11   24163.2
5   180          12    54164.9
6   426.9        13   121417.7
7   957          14    272173.5
8   2145.2      15    610112.4

And finally the table I have developed for PIM-X

2     5           9    70.9
3    8.1         10   90
4    12.7       11   152.2
5    19.2       12   218.4
6    28.1       13   313.5
7    39.6       14   450
8    53.9       15   645.8

Remember, this is workers per tile again.

[InvisiChem]

So, to clarify this a little bit. Let's take Pedriana's Plants as an example.

In Vanilla Maxis, this building has an occupancy of 13. The lot sizes are 4x4, 4x6, 6x4. So tiles are 16 and 24. This puts the workers per tile at less than 1. Should be a stage 1 farm. Is a stage 3

In CAM 1.0 this has remained unchanged. CAM 2.1.0 doesn't change any building occupancy values yet. That is planned for 2.1.1

Anyways, this building, once run through PIM-X brings the occupancy to 88. This is 5.5 per tile and 3.7 per tile. Still within the Stage 2 and Stage 1 setting except for CAM 1.0 which puts it into Stage 3.

This is because Maxis placed their stages somewhat randomly and CAM 1.0 IR stages are based on total employment instead of workers per tile. So, in CAM 1.0, if the employment was 90 and the lot was 5x4 (20 tiles) then It would be a Stage 4 farm, even with 4.5 workers per tile. This disruption of stage vs. density really throws IR off balance with the rest of the game and could even be part of the reason IR does not upgrade on its own.

PIM-X using Dirty industry values, which is what I'm trying to get IR values to emulate, with a proper filling degree of 0.18 brings our occupancy to 149. On a 4x4 lot, this is a stage 3 building at 9.3 workers per tile. 6x4 lot is a stage 2 building at 6.2 workers per tile.

The industrial dirty occupancy and stage numbers I do trust. They also fall in line with lower density type industries. Testing for this post did bring up a problem with PIM-X with IR, it seems hard programmed to calculate as total employment instead of per tile.

[FrankU]

I used a different list for my Farm Stages. This one:
Stage 1 = 1-15
Stage 2 = 16-31
Stage 3 = 32-59
Stage 4 = 60-99
Stage 5 = 100 and above
Stage 6 and 7 do not have a capacity recommendation because of the nature of the land use.

I can't seem to find it, but I got it from either RippleJet or Jim Myers. And it should be somewhere in a CAM 1 thread.
These numbers correspond with what SC4-Pim gives me when I create a building and a lot with it.

I did check with my self made, pitifully still not released, Farms.
There is this certain Stage 5 lot. It has 161 workers and the size is 7 x 8 = 56 tiles. This means in CAM 2: 161/56 = 2,8 workers per tile, making it a Stage 1 lot.
In CAM2 it needs at least 56 x 19.2 = 1076 workers to make it a Stage 5 lot!

After a bit of calculating I found out that alle the Farms I had made will be CAM2 Stage 1 lots, if I keep the jobs as I had made them.
So I definitely have to make CAM1 versions and CAM2 versions if I want the whole community to have fun with my Lots.

I must say: this makes the step to using CAM2 a bit harder, because there are no CAM2 Farms yet. Off course I could start with my Maxis Farms Override set.... I could make an edited version for CAM2. I suppose I can use your properties.xml for that? Just put it into the SC4-Pim directory and go ahead?