Good morning fellow farm threaders, (We need a smiley pushing a plow or something, eh?)

Firstly . . . fear not, I'm not offended by anything anyone has written concerning our topic in rebuttal to my opinions. I will admit I have generalized a bit on farm benefits. And I am equally guilty of contending, in so many words, that I do believe you should build farms everywhere. Even I don't build them at every opportunity. I prioritize my building projects as you do based on military and economic necessity.

And . . . I do agree (with Quirinius) that you can mitigate your city's public order problems to some extent by slowing growth way down via 'not building farms.'

I won't try, at this point, to deal with every question that was brought up since my last post. I 'shorthanded' some of the information that I posted from the Julii game simply to focus on the farm income numbers. What I was trying to show was simply the amount of denarii involved in income.

I don't want to belabor our discussion much more as I think our thread is yielding diminishing returns the longer we talk on the issue.

Both RLucid and Quirinus are correct in pointing out that your actual farm upgrade, say, going from No Land Clearance to Land Clearance, or from Land Clearance to Communal Farming, is not a very large improvement. That's if you're talking about the difference of one city's harvest at the same level of performance, say 'poor harvest,' etc. Depending on the level of difficulty you play the game and fertility of the city, your increase is probably going to be vary between 70-90 denarii. For really infertile regions like Nepte, it might even be less. I'll try to monitor that the next time I play Carthage.

I started a game with the Brutii yesterday and decided I would simply monitor farm output of my cities early in the game on the 'easy difficulty' setting so I could see what the most liberal game productivity setting puts out. I'll take one city as an example: Thermon. When I captured it from the Greeks, it had no farms. In my first full turn of occupation it produced 821 denarii, a poor harvest under 'No Land Clearance.' My first harvest after I completed Land Clearance produced 1037 denarii, an excellent harvest. Thereafter, I produced nothing but poor and average harvests alternating between 912 and 960 denarii until I built 'Communal Farming.' My first harvest under Communal Farming was 'poor' yielding 1,003 denarii. My first excellent harvest yielded 1,137 denarii under CF.

Thermon's 'poor' harvest yield of 912 denarii with Land Clearance, only improved to the 'poor' harvest yield of 1,003 under Communal Farming. Again, that reinforces a point made by both RLucid and Quirinius. That's under 100 denarii. It's likely to be less if you play the game at a more difficult setting. Even the poor harvest yield of 821 d. under 'No Land Clearance' is only improved at the 'poor' harvest level of Communal Farming by 182 d.

Now here's my economies of scale point, I fear I'm just repeating myself, and I apologize . . . (then I'll drop the issue): If I played the game with a policy (basically advocated by early game guides) that after land clearance I simply don't build any farms anywhere, and I occupy 25 cities, I am depriving my treasury of roughly 1,750 to 2,275 denarii per turn per improvement. (70 denarii x 25 cities, or 91 denarii x 25 cities, generalizing on possible differences in game difficulty levels). That projection assumes that all cities are equal performers, harvest performance is always the same every turn for every city, and no governors are penalized with poor farmer traits. Yes, I'm generalizing a bit.

2,275 per turn for one improvement for 25 cities may not seem like much. It's 4,500 (+or -) denarii for foregoing two improvements. In truth the actual amount of treasury loss is probably a great deal more. Think about this: the carrying cost of 10 Principes for a Roman faction is 1,700 denarii.

. . . when I practised the old style of play with 'low' farm development I saw a slow tightening of my income as the game progressed. It started to hurt my ability to recruit and finance city improvements. I had to finance my faction by more rapid play - sacking more cities. I never got the the higher levels of city development because the game was over (50 regions + Rome)before I got there.

When I changed my habits and started to make building farms an integral part of my economic development, I gained a great deal more freedom for my planning. I could even recruit and support more armies giving me more freedom in campaign choices. I found that I had less to fear from squalor than I thought I would. And, I was able to occasionally forego sacking cities for income which allowed me some captured mid-sized cities to grow faster getting me higher in the tech tree sooner. Ah . . . to each his own, eh?

Now I'll shuddup.