Farms
Note
When you build 1 of something, you only build a part of a building; each part takes 1 land. Having 1 part of a 10-part building is less than half as effective as 2 parts of a 10-part building. The closer to the completion of a building, the more efficient it becomes. For example, 10 of 10 Training Fields is 100% effective while 9 of 10 Training Fields is only 81% effective.
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General Effects
Farms are the normal way to produce food and provide a small amount of housing (exactly 25 per complete farm) for your people. A complete farm requires 5 parts and produces an amount of food based on your race. You need 1 Population for every 3 food your farms will potentially produce, so be sure to have enough population to work in the fields.
The Numbers
As of July 2008, the result of the following formula is displayed on the build screen.
- Many thanks to Stein for his continued commitment to improving game play and user interface.
- As a second note, other people use a formula for calculating the number of villages to man a given number of farms, which may be added here, though keeping this one for reference probably wouldn't hurt.
I've found the following formula to be useful for every race but Vampires and Werewolves, and if you're looking at the farms page looking for help playing a vamp or WW, you're beyond my help. For the rest of us, we usually want to figure out how to get the most food out of our Population. So, as Population mainly comes from Villages, this is a formula to calculate the number of farm parts to build to maximize food generated as a function of village parts. Note that you can produce more food than this simply by building more farms, but if you don't have the Villages to 'work' them, you'll only get an increase of their base 75 food per farm -- VERY land-inefficient = newbie mistake.
I'm breaking it into 3 parts more for comprehension than anything else, as it becomes muscle-memory for your race once you run it on your 10-key enough:
Farm Parts = 5 * ( Max food obtained from Villages / Racial Farm Production Modifier)
Max food from Villages = (Village Parts/15 * 2500) * 3
the 2500 is population per full village, and the 3 comes from every Population being *able* to produce 3 food, this is why the formula gives you the 'maximum' amount of food you can get out of your villagers.
Racial Farm Production Modifier = (Food Produced * 100) - 75
the *100 simply comes from the fact that the racial mods are listed in the tables as floats (you can find these for all Races under "the numbers" section of each race) the -75 is important, as it represents the 25 Population housed in those farms 'automatically' producing 3 food apiece, hence 75 food per farm does *not* need villagers to work for it.
Putting this all together, where FP = farm parts, VP = village parts, and RFPM = racial food produced modifier, we get:
FP = 5 * ( VP/15 * 2500 * 3 / (RFPM * 100 - 75))
As this number will usually have a lot of decimals, it's best to err on the side of having a tad more population than you absolutely need to max out farms, so rounding down to the nearest multiple of 5 is generally good practice.
A Quick Example - Why Do I Care?
Before the days when the 'maximum' number of farms was displayed, most people would resort to using simple ratios rather than going through this calculation themselves, leading to a decrease in efficiency. Note, however, that building the exact number given to you might not be perfectly efficient, because of the partial buildings, but it's not as if rounding down to the nearest multiple of 5 is all that hard. The following is why those simple ratios rarely worked so well:
So, for a High Elf, these numbers are commonly known to work out to a ratio of approximately 1:3, let's see why:
First, we need an arbitrary number of villages, as this will be determined by many strategic factors during play-time; let's just go with, oh, 420 -- it's nice and divisible by 15... and we'll have to assume that this is a very rebellious high elf, who won't use magic to feed his people, even with this much land.
So, 420 / 15 = 28 Villages at 2500 Population each is 70k pop (from vils) which is enough workers to produce 210k food. Checking the help wiki, we see that High Elves have a RFPM of .9, or 900 food produced per farm -- but 75 of that comes 'free' from the 25 pop living on each farm. So to see how many farm parts we need to get close to our goal of 210k food, simply divide 210k by 825, (from 900-75) to get a need of 254.54... farms. Multiply by 5 to get 1272.72... farm parts for maximum efficiency, but round down to just build 1270 farm parts, so you're not wasting land on partial Buildings or unmanned farms.
To check our 'rule of thumb', 1270 is indeed quite close to 1260 = 420 * 3, but as you can see, the rule of thumb would neglect to build those extra 10 farms that would be fully operational, and is therefore slightly more inefficient. That's why you read "the numbers" -- good luck, and happy feeding!
For Nostalgia
Of historical note were the green-thumbed Gnomes of Shadowmere's long-ago past, who could produce a whopping 5 food per population, instead of the now-standard 3. This is the reason for me not to combine the "... * 2500 * 3 " into simply (*7500) as seen in the formula, as not only does it help one understand the 'why' of the formula, but long long ago, gnomes would instead use ... * 2500 * 5 -- and that made a big enough irreconcilable difference to make them 'broken', and now 3 food produced per pop is standard.