Another take on farms

[karolans]

Farms seem to be a hard nut to crack, there are already some interesting threads ie. by Rabiosa suggesting a special brush tool for zoning farms and others.
But at least a little improvement could be achieved by removing some of the fences - there is absolutely no reason for fences around the actual fields, so only leave them around the animal pens and make them darker so that the division isn't so obvious? Could look something like this (yes feel free to laugh at my photoshop skills ), you get the gist. If you want bigger farms, just zone more of them around small roads.
new version on the left

 

[nitram78]

Sorry Karolans, but I want to add something, as it dawned on me, maybe, we should all be looking at this from another angle.

Rather than calling them "farms", should we actually all be calling these 4x4 blocks "fields". As fields, they would make a bit more sense. I guess the question is, has the naming been slightly lost in translation from Finnish into English early on....and thus stuck?

 

[karolans]

Ah yea, guess we here just refer to them as "farms" including the buildings AND the fields. But technically you are correct, they should probably say "field" in game if you click on them .

 

[cd concept]

Hello!! CO!! This is the second posting about this subject. Nobody wants the farms to be on a 4×4 grid. Just do it the way SimCity 4 did. By spreading the agriculture grid zone what ever size you want from to 1 acre to 100 acres a lot for a farm. Taxes will be collected and produce sold or traded to another town for money to build the infrastructure.
You could later sell the land to build residential , commercial and industry in the future like in the real world. I'm sure this is possible to make the people happy. Especially the people from North America and Russia. We're used to huge farms because of are large land mass. And the American company maxis created it that way. And were counting on you to do so too!! Thanks !!

 

[fefenc]

They'll probably fix the 4x4 issue, farms issues and add a day/night cycle on C:S2, I'm sure C:S is a guinea pig for C:S2, just like what happened with CiM 1/2...
They aren't hearing the community screaming for much bigger farms and improvements, instead of it, they're rushing the game.

I'm afraid of how limited will be the modding support aswell.

 

[Eurofighter1200]

Don't so negative they have to finished the game after that im sure there will be lots of DLCs if the game is sucessfully and iam sure we will get these bigger farms everyone want or maybee we can mod it however small Farms are not a gamebreaker this is not farmsim or so

 

[fefenc]

Simcity 4 (2003) wasn't a farmsim too and it has done quite better. Let's wait and see what they got to surprise us then

 

[TheeLord]

I like the way the agriculture mod works in SimCity 4. You can stretch the grid anyway you want. Into all kinds of shapes and sizes big and small in between forest, creeks,and hills. And it looks more natural than square boxes.
That's why I think most people like the way SimCity 4 farmland looks. It establishes a rural and farm area in the beginning of the game. Later to be sold for residential commercial or industrial land in the future. That's the way to go!!

Agreed!

 

[dj97]

The reason why the fields are only 4x4 is because farming is a policy that affects the industrial zones. In other words, you're just turning 4x4 generic industrial zones to 4x4 farming zones.
What would solve this problem is if farms had their own independent zone with their own parameters, instead of being dependent on the industrial zones.
So, along with residential, commercial, industrial and office zones, you would also have farm zones. While the others stick with 4x4 zones, farm zones would be 8x8, 16x16, etc.

It would be similar to SimCity 4's way of zoning (agriculture had a different size requirement, while the others were smaller).

 

[karolans]

All these possibilities have been discussed heavily, let's see what CO comes up with .

 

[nitram78]

All these possibilities have been discussed heavily, let's see what CO comes up with .

Indeed. While not at launch, the open discussion from the CO team, you can see they will consider lots of things. They appear to be fans of gaming and clearly love building city type games. What we have here is the foundation of a new product platform.

 

[karolans]

Yup, definitely read this if you haven't already http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2e3uku/we_are_colossal_order_paradox_interactive_the/