What is the Best Farm Setup with Fertilizer? | Tests | Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic Guides

Love these tests! One idea to manifest the findings for the viewers: some kinda summary/last slide overview which puts things like tractor/harvester ratio with X trucks.
1:2:4 is my takeaway ❤

Gruß aus Germany:)

What about NATO-side transport? Are fields able to be "supervised" by more than one farm?

Good video. I guess my conclusion is that most of the setup works just fine. So if you have limited space or a big space you can easily adapt to that.
Only remember to have more harvester and open hull then you are used to compared to the old setup.

Hi, Bballjo. Thanks for conduting and preparing such massive test. I really like the idea and thorough preparation. Nice to see that 1-1,5-3 is viable and effective.

As a "black sheep" of your community, I feel obliged to point out one critical error in your design:
Huge farms with tons of machinery and helping DOs do not underperform because they are ineffective, but because you have set them to be that way. You have even correctly pointed out that traffic flow and driving distance matters. I second that. Why on earth did you then connected those two huge silos with only one external cargo station and on top of that gave it only single access point to the road network? The result is a very predictable traffic jam and with the way ingame traffic works (and I suppose you haven´t put a priority signals on any junctions as well), it was clear from first week of harvest that the setup will fail.

But it was a design fail, not machinery qualities.

If I may humbly ask for a rerun with some changes, I would be really curious of how better/worse will huge farms with DOs perform. Because those driving distances WILL get larger for tractors, trucks and harvesters alike. And what I would change? Small, but important things:

a) have DOs symmetricaly on both sides of field areas. There is no need of having them near each other and the farm exit; with large setups it is quite opposite. Just place them into nearest point of geometrical middle of their respective 18-19fields area.

b) Robs074, author of these silos, made them one-way road connections and with through traffic. That alone helps a lot with traffic flow inside them. Use them. And even better, let DOs go to unload to them. On my map, huge silo can easily handle a traffic from 2 15-trucks harvesting DOs. If you have 4 DOs for humongous harvesting area, you can send 2 and 2 to each silo or for extra option add 4vehicle unloading station to each silo, so each get their own onloading spot (might be even interesting followup test if that´s worth it). But in general - if you set up the silo with incoming 2-lane 1-way road with waiting space for 4-5 vehicles outside, even 2 DOs connected directly to one silo work well. Tested myself through ca 12 seasons on my current map ;)

_______
These would not require many changes on already saves setups, but I guarantee you that the performance of biggest farms will skyrocket compared to this test. If you would od a followup, that is up to you. I would definitely watch it, just for the curiosity if 1-1,5-3 will change with growing distance to 1-2-4 or 1-2,5-4 or whatever.

Obviously smaller farming setups would benefit from this as well -> one DO comes through loading station, second from the other side unloads directly in the silo. Shorter trips = more of them. And time matters.

Cheers for now and thanks for this test video again!

Jan

Excellent test! Thank you!

Good as Always 👍🏻

This is definitely one measure of efficiency, and it's good to know that ultimately, DOs do still help with throughput for a single farm.

However, the main takeaway for me is that distribution offices only make an impact if you are operating past a certain limit. Yes, a farm with more tractors and combines (because the trucks are in a DO) will be capable of servicing more fields, but consider also the idea that the farms are actually fairly cheap. Let us say that a farm with no DOs is 2/3 as effective as a farm with DOs, which is (broadly) in line with the data you have shown. Then if a farm with DOs can service 90 ha of field, a farm without can service 60 ha. If two farms with DOs are effectively equivalent to three farms without DOs, is the cost of the additional supporting infrastructure of the DOs and such, both in actual cost and in space cost, actually still less than just having a 3rd farm?

You mentioned that traffic was a big problem with the DO-supported farms. Having a 3rd farm decentralises the traffic into more areas. So even if the cost per ha is slightly higher for the 3-farm setup, I think there are soft benefits to it that are difficult to quantify, but clearly exist. I believe this situation is especially prevalent for the small farms, where the farm is actually VERY cheap, cheaper than a DO, and the footprint is smaller too. Of course in this case getting the crop to a central location for transport out is a little harder, but far from impossible -- and the individual farms can have smaller storages, which cuts costs down a bit too.

Granted, in the late stages of a republic, small farms aren't as useful, but early, especially in realistic mode, small farms are a great way to enter crop production without breaking the bank. Therefore, I think testing for these setups is also valuable, as peak efficiency matters most early on, and by the time you are building big infrastructure, your republic should have a strong enough economy that you can absorb small inefficiencies anyway.

How about one-way roads for all those trucks?
Also, for thight quartiers I found if interesting to use smaller (but still big) trucks like Kmz 5320. Was I only imagining it?

As for DOs, I had good results with four of them at the corners, instead of two in the middle, each with their own grain storage. Then, one additional DO to grab grain from those storages and take it to the station. That worked nicely

amazing job.

Comrade Professor, i'm having a hard time understanding the new update. tutorials of how they work would be very nice.

I have a pattern that uses 2 large farms and 32 Stalin sized fields (from a mod) with 4 size 16 distribution offices for the trucks. I dealt with the traffic jams from the trucks with road cargo stations. Early years, I will end up with some crops left in the fields but by mid to late game with improved machinery I can sow and harvest all in a single season.

As a bonus with the do's you could potentially set them to leave 20 % crops in field and skip transporting the solid fertilizer?

Great Job ​​⁠bballjo, thanks a lot.

One thougth about Traffic Management: maybe a parallel dirtroad to the heavy used asphaltroads ​​⁠would split Combine and Tractor from the covered Hauls.

Cheers

Great experiment, comrade B!what about small fields?

Gestern hab ich wieder angefangen zu spielen und hab verzweifelt überall eine Guide dazu gesucht! Sehr gutes Timing Genosse

The fields ins W&R should be like seting a area, or infinity, like you click in points and the shape should be this shape. it will be more real and logic not this rectangle way.

I don’t know if this helps anyone’s testing, but only 30% of crops becomes fertilizer. To get started, when DOs are locked behind research, it may be necessary to kick things off. However, from an economic perspective, it is best to retrieve all the crops and lay both kinds of fertilizer.

I have been using medium farms with vehicles 2-3-7, so I'm thrilled that your test showed my feelcraft was pretty close to perfect.

I love these abstract tests but something I just want to note is that there's nothing special about maximizing how many crops you can get from a single farm. What matters is how many crops you can get into a single silo. Or not even that necessarily; if a train or a food factory can pull from 2 different silos, that's just as good too.

A practical example of what I mean, is you can build multiple farms around one rail-connected silo. This helps with traffic, and it also prevents farm vehicles from crossing the railway tracks, because you assign fields so that each farm only handles fields on one or the other side of the rail tracks. Another option is if you have a rail cargo station for some other reason somewhere already, you can just connect a silo and a farm and it's automatically part of the rail network so it doesn't have to be huge to pay-off.

This seemed more of a test of traffic control than that of actual set up. Seems to me that the traffic jams determined at least half the results... My takeaway: the most important thing is the design of your roads and traffic flow system to avoid inefficient traffic jams. I wonder if you'd spread out your harvesters, vehicles and delivery points so that they didn't all start and finish in the same area, which would also spread your traffic flow, whether your trucks would have been a hell of a lot more efficient. If you get traffic jams, than NONE of your trucks are really working because they're all stuck waiting, then they also hold up every other vehicle that moves between the fields...

with the addition of fertilizer it'd be really cool if we saw crop dusters added soon. it'd be really cool to have a central liquid fertilizer distribution farm connected to a small airport or helipad

something big I haven't seen discussed much is the new ability to construct foreign power hookups. I'd really like to see an examination of if this makes power export more viable; it seems like it could cut the cost of lines pretty dramatically by allowing a plant to be constructed near the border with lines directly aligned with the plant's outputs instead of snaking around the whole map searching for the naturally generated power lines

My favourite setup with recent update is:
one 8000t silo per large farm, one additional cargo station as drop point, two distribution offices, one fertiliser tank, one large dropoff for solid waste.
One DO serves one row of fields. there is nothing left to pickup in the middle of October. Total amount of harvested crops is typically between 6000 and 8000t, so with my industries and RDO sending train every two IGW no overflow happens.

It may be interesting if devs allowed us to opt in (checkbox on farm) to have the tractors help transport the crops, since it seems like we're going to need a lot of them anyway. They would be slow compared to the trucks, especially if you have asphalt roads, and thus would slow down the trucks, but it'd be your choice to opt in for this compromise. Would be a no brainer for small farms wiith fields realy close by.

I guess the farm gameplay is not final. We will probably see some use of equipments such as tractors with trailers instead of using cargo trucks to collect grains which make little sense.

is there a written conclusiopn too somewhere ?

1/2/4 works for 20 large fields & 20 medium fields, large farm in the middle with 2 large silos each with its own cargo station, 10 harvesters and 20 traktors in the middle and farms around it, has a train cargo station in the middle of silos with a switch to get out, first year got about 9k crops at 140-150% fertility, only about 4t was left on some of the fields, 2nd year got me 12k with 190-200% fertility, with around 10-20t left on most fields, but that propably happened cos i got more trucks to see if i can get it all collected but forgot to set up road signs so had some traffic problems, 3rd year, 1st fertilization done by april 6th and 2nd round done by may 4th, almost 15k crops with 190%-200% fertility, with around 15-30t l left on about half the fields, added 8 extra trucks between year 1 and 2 and that seems to leave more on the fields because of the extra traffic, around 34-36 seems for be best for my setup, 4th year after changing some pick up orders and street signs got me 17k with less than 10t left on the fields total, 42 trucks atm but i think i could take it down to 36 but i m too lazy so i m leaving it like this, i also have 4 gas stations set up in the corners for trucks, so thank you for the tests, if i didnt see this i'd propably go for someting like 1-1-3 or 4 and not check, and lose out on a lot of crops.

For the farms with distribution offices, can you re-use the distribution offices to transport the crops to the food factory/distillery/wherever else you're using them? If so, seems like that might give them an additional edge since the trucks will be used year-round instead of only during crop season. Though not sure if they're smart enough to focus on transporting crops solely from the fields to the local grain silo while it's active, or if they'll try to take crops from the fields all the way to the food factory thus wasting time.

I always use the setup 1 tractor 1 harvester 1 truck for every single field

So the ideal ratio of tractors:harvesters:trucks, in integer numbers, would be 3:2:8. That would be 13 vehicles, which is bad news for medium farms, since they can hold exactly 12. With early harvesters being able to harvest just above 3 fields per season, I guess the ideal setup for medium farms (without distribution offices) would then be 3 tractors, 2 harvesters and 7 trucks, farming slightly less than 6 big fields to make up for the missing truck. Maybe 5 big fields and 2 medium fields? That way you also get the medium field advantage of getting started earlier on harvesting.

edit: I should add, I prefer multiple medium farms rather than large farms due to shorter distances to the fields being possible that way. The tests shown in the video have fields all the way around the farms. In an actual game, that's not always possible nor preferable, since you might want to connect the silo building to an industrial area that uses crops.

Fields in this game are way too small then real fields.

Boy do I need help. Please?

TLDR4

Numbers are for fully fertilized fields.

Large farm -> 22 large fields + 1/2 large DO; can do some more with better traffic management
Medium farm -> 10 large fields

Possible to swap out large fields for medium fields; can improve efficiency if placed correctly.


1 combine: 1.5 tracktors : 3 trucks ratio is works
1: 2 : 4 will be best if possible

This game is so freaking complicated and there is no manual. I feel like it will take months to get to grips with everything -_-

Very helpful, on point as always! <3