Farm Towns

[Couvs 0]

I'm trying to do this without any mods as  Cougar said was possible.  I know I wont get 1200 farming jobs on a small tile, I'm jus ttrying for 600.

I'm still curious to see a screenshot of the zoning layout that ended up working.

[Cougar2004 127]

I want to post the images inline with text explanations, but I don't know how to do that on SimTropolis it seems. I can attach pictures, but then it isnt inline. Anyone know?

[Couvs 0]

there's an insert image button right beside the smiley button if that helps

[Cougar2004 127]

Originally posted by: Couvs there's an insert image button right beside the smiley button if that helpsquote>

 

Yeah I saw that tool, but it doesnt work unless you have a website with the pictures posted on it already.  That tool requires a link.  And one thing I dont like about those, even if I had a website, is that eventually the site goes down and the post is missing pictures from that day on. 

Simtropolis doesn't seem to have a way to attach posted that post inline with text.

I guess I'll just attach them with minimal explanations instead of post them inline.  You'll probably get the idea.

[Couvs 0]

well even a link to photobucket or something similar should be ok.  that site isnt likely to go down any time soon

[Cougar2004 127]

Originally posted by: Couvs well even a link to photobucket or something similar should be ok.  that site isnt likely to go down any time soonquote>

 

I've heard of that photobucket.  I dont use it though.  I'll check it out, and maybe it will work.

[Couvs 0]

that's where I've been posting the previous screenshots in this thread.

[Cougar2004 127]

Originally posted by: Couvs that's where I've been posting the previous screenshots in this thread.quote>

 

Okay.  That was surprisingly easy to set up.  No wonder so many 10 year olds can use all the Media options of the Internet so well.  They made it quick and easy.

Of course I still have to figure out how to organize uploaded data, and access it, but I'm sure that won't take too much time.  

For now, I'll attempt to post the first TEST image that I uploaded.  If this works, I'll upload the rest and finish the post.

LanaLand (Test Image)

Hope that worked.

[Couvs 0]

didnt work, but when you upload an image it gives you a number of ways to link it.  the one I typically use is the Direct Link.  just copy & paste it to here and the link should show up

[Cougar2004 127]

Originally posted by: Couvs I'm trying to do this without any mods as  Cougar said was possible.  I know I wont get 1200 farming jobs on a small tile, I'm jus ttrying for 600.

I'm still curious to see a screenshot of the zoning layout that ended up working.quote>

 

Okay, I think we are good to go now! 

As I stated above, none of these are for-sure fool-proof, perhaps because of some random variable, perhaps desirability, and what im begining to think now, region play, but each of these images shows you a successful layout that worked to get 600+ jobs of farming (and always being awarded the Farmer's Market, without UDI Missions). 

The 2 cities I mentioned in one of my first posts of this thread, whereas I wasn't even trying to get the Farmer's Market, but it just happened was in my LanaLand Region (In Memory of a Smallville Character).



But unfortunately, I didn't know you were interested in this topic, so I never took any screen captures of those layouts, and while I could go back now, they cities look much different today than back then.  So lets move on.

As I stated earlier in this thread, Ive decided that there is some random variable (perhaps desirability or something to do with neighbor connections) that causes I-Ag farm jobs to go above 600, or perhaps it only does it when im playing turtle speed, because in all my tests (cheetah speed to get something to show you) I rarely could reproduce what happened naturally to both farm cities in Lanaland last week.  However, there were some successful tries.  

Each time I thought I solved it, and hastily deleted my work, to start over with a cleaner map to take a picture of, only to find that it wouldnt do it.  So I only have a few shots for you.  But it will have to do.

These made it, out of all the tries.




My theory is that both Farms must have been feeding residential from the other neighbor city connection.

As for the zoning layouts that worked during testing (at least once)....

Here is one success:


And here is another in stages this time... luckily I remembered to take photos along the way.



Up Close:


Added Residential:



And a third way that worked out was this configuration with a superlarge farm:



Here is a closer look at the Residential Corner of this one:



(You may notice the direction of the arrows was patterned to be in different directions - this was to help keep traffic minimized, however I haven't finished testing out the best layout for that yet.)

Thats all for now.  But the one thing I learned during testing, is that I now believe there are many many configurations that will work just fine, but that its hard to get 600+ farming jobs when you are trying!  

Now that I know how to take and upload and post pictures in threads, I may do more testing and produce some tutorials or reference guides on this and other topics.  But to do that, I have to have learned something of value that people are in interested in, so maybe next time.  

But here are the layouts as promised.  Good luck~!

[Couvs 0]

I'm beginning to think i need at least one adjacent town for it to work. even with those configurations I'm capping out at just over 500 jobs.

with the original setup, I did start building an adjacent town, and despite the large amount of industry jobs everyone commuted to the farms for a long time. I loaded up the farm, the jobs hadnt budged past that 480 equilibrium it had settled on, and on top of that the amount of traffic coming in was causing a lot of emissions pollution at that cross-over, and driving the desirability down.

[Cougar2004 127]

Okay you are talking about two different things here. Farm Income and Farm Jobs are not a 1 to 1 ratio. It is a fact that the MORE farms you have (more farm buildings I mean), the more I-Ag tax income you will get. I will likely conduct some experiements and post the data and screen captures in a new Farm tutorial when I have time.

However, its good to note that Farm Jobs greatly vary with desirability and other factors that I am still attempting to study and crack wide open for the ST community. I think there must be some mathematical calculation to determine Farm Jobs, which may very likely have to do with how many freight loads are going out, number of field tiles, etc. There is research to do. But so far I'm sure that tax income doesnt directly relate to jobs, even though both are feeding upon some similar data somewhere.

So now some tips for you that actually may matter..... when possible, keep your farms near the edges of the map.... freight trucks are fighting to get to the border neighbor connections... help them to do it. Have enough streets, or perhaps even roads, to ensure freight trucks trips are short and fast, without congestion that usually leads to traffic pollution which leads to lower desirability which leads to lower farm jobs. Try only windmills, since dirty power sources will hurt farms. Dont waste space for water treatment plants, because farms give off water pollution and dont seem to care about it. Keep the commercial low or absent in the Farming community because that will lower Farm demand. Dont be afraid of adding "good" rewards, such as Mayors House, in fact everytime ive gotten over 600 farm jobs in a small city, I had obtained and placed a Mayor's House (usually within the first year or 2). Dont waste time with Water. Farms dont need Water, however if you want your residents to build over low density, water them - that being said, I haven't yet proven that water hurts farms, but it sure costs and I haven't used it for farms. Farm's dont seem to like crime either. Ordinances? I haven't found any ordinances to make any different on farms, but ones that negatively affect industrial demand may be wise to stay away from (see my ordinances thread to see which do this).

Lastly, I don't know if you want to play your game this way, but last month, I did it once, and definitely got the Farmer's market.... Create a 100% pure Farm small city. As a neighbor, create a 100% only residential small city. Connect them with many connections. Watch them feed each other. Once you get enough farm jobs (or should i say IF), then locate the farm that appears to be producing the least, and redevelop some of it to residential to get your population to 3000 (hopefully without losing the farms), and then you might get your Farmer's Market. After placing it, you can redevelop your city any way you want to, adding commercial, etc. But after I tried a few times, dont even think about getting a State Fair in a small city, without a farm mod. You think 600 farms is hard? Try getting 1,200 and 3,500 residents in a small farm, keeping the mayor rating above 48, and still have enough room to place the 8x12 State Fair. Not going to happen. However, I just created a Medium city Farm city, and within a few years, I have both Farmer's Market and State Fair, plus a Cemetary, Church, Mayor's House, and City Hall (which I didn't place due to the monthly cost (it only helps commercial not residential, and i dont need that much commercial in a Farm town really).

Well I hope a few of these tips has been helpful. It will have to do until I have time to run my farming experiements and post pretty results for interest people on here. Good Luck~!

[Couvs 0]

I'll give it a shot later this week.  right now I'm trying to replicate the Large City Tutorial city to get a feel for building a city up to a 20k population and for planning out the street/road grid.  not sure what part of my last post sounded like it was about farm income, I was talking solely about the number of jobs.

[Livin in Sim 83]

Hi, couvs and Cougar2004.

Have you ever seen this thread?

https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=23&threadid=71708&highlight_key=y&keyword1=experiments

It is a bit hard to tell what the member who started the thread is talking about, because the pics are missing due to the site upgrade after they started the topic.  When it really gets interesting is on the member RiverCocytus' posts farther down.  It sounds like you might enjoy reading what he or she was experimenting with regarding farming.

Enjoy the game.

--Liv

[Cougar2004 127]

Yeah I read all that a couple years ago.

Its full of falicies and assumptions.  When I do it, I'll be more complete, and repeat it mulitple times before presenting presumped results.  A handful of people presented ideas, I believe there were 2 or 3 actual experimenters, and then another 2 theorizers in that thread.

It makes for some interesting reading if someone is bored, but its not going to help anyone play their game or accomplish the goals that Couvs wants.  

But on a positive note, I was intending to copy all the same experiements there, and hopefully crack the real equation that is a lot closer than 3 to 8 off.

I think you are cool though, for participating on the forum and finding and sharing related ideas.  In my opinion you rock for that~! 

[Livin in Sim 83]

Yes, there is a lot of speculation about this topic, and many opinions.  Sounds like the ones who experimented put some thought and work into it.  I'd be interested to see the results of your experiments if you choose to do some. 

[jail_guy 0]

I have never been able to get a 1200 farm jobs in a small city--but a medium city is just fine. It will take about two thirds or more of the city to get enough farms. In one corner I start a small city using 4 by 9 spaces surrounded by road. I fill the center with R$. About six of these is a good start. I then build a 15x15 farm (the largest i can make), when it grows another next to it and one below it, using road around it. When finished I have six farms surrounded by road. I repeat this over and over, until the map is about two thirds full. In spaces where this is not possible I fill in with smaller farms. I keep checking the chart to see how many jobs i have going. I usually hit about two thirds when i reach 1200 jobs. I keep adding residents to fill the jobs. Once I get the 1200 jobs, I then concentrate ons building R$ and R$$ to get the population of 3500 required for the state fair. It also takes some parks. Once i have the State fair i place it in an area that later will be commercial. The only thing I give the sims is water--no highways, subways--they will drive to work!At such a low population they do not need schoolls police etc. Once i place the State fair--I move on to the next city I want to be a farming community and repeat the process the same way.

When i have all the farming cities I want for the region, I can then start adding the ammenities they need. But if you put in too much it just makes building the next farm city more difficut. Once you add education the sims no longer want to work on farms. R$ and R$$ will work farm jobs if that is all tht is available. You have to put in all your farming communnities in first in your region. You only need 3500 sims to build a farming communnity--pretty easy to do if they are not touching a major cityIf all you have in your region is farm jobs, they will work them. Do not water the farms. Later i go back and build right over the farms. This is the easiest way i know to do it with no cheats and mods. You just have to build enough farms to get the jobs---later you go back and make a real city if you want.

[ShortStraw 1]

Here's what I did to get the farm rewards with relative ease just an hour or so ago. . .

My farming city is on a medium size tile but I didn't have to use the whole tile.

My farm city is a neighbor to a city with a residential population of about 20,000 that has an even mix of industrial, commercial and residential zones.  I bought my water supply from my neighbor city (with the exception of 2 water towers purchased primarily for appearances sake.

I used only windmills for power (it took 5 of them by the time I was finished).

I built the smallest farms possible (most were about 4X6 tiles in size).  I built my farms from the outside edge of the map and worked my way in toward the center laying out each farms borders with streets and filling them in with "agri." zone.  The secret to my success was keeping each farm as small as the game would allow.

When I had reached 1200 farming jobs I built a small basic residential zone in the center of the map, again using very small lots (most were 1X2 tiles in size) with a few commercial lots thrown in just for the fun of it.  I didn't build any education, medical or government lots until I had reached my population goal of 3500 residents.

I still had lots of real estate and money available by the time I had reached 1200 farming jobs and 3500 residents.  At that point I began working on education, healthcare, transportation and other infrastructure in order to raise my mayor rating to the required levels.  This was easily the most time consuming step of the process but it was still quite easy.  I used mostly streets with a few roads in the commercial areas.  I placed lots of bus stations in my residential and commercial zones and I used quite a few small (1X1) parks to please my sims (and get my mayor rating up).  I used only an elementary school and clinic for government services.  No police or fire.  No ordinances.  I did use basic rail service and train stations but I don't think it made much difference one way or another.

To sum up, I kept my individual farms and lots to the minimum allowable sizes and until I had my population and farm job requirements satisfied I provided practically no services.   I leeched off a healthy and diverse neighbor city of 20,000 for my water supply.  My neighbor city provided the labor during the initial phase of building up the farm jobs.  The power was all windmills.  After meeting the job and residential quotas I provided services to get my mayor rating up.

That's it in a nutshell (Oh, my farm city was only the 2nd in the region, so by the time I had reached a population of 3500 in my farm city I had a total regional population of 23,500 split between two cities.).  This was with the Nam installed on a clean version of SimCity4 Deluxe edition with no cheats, mods or add-ons (other than the Nam with default settings).  I've never completed a "mission" either for whatever that's worth.

Good luck to you.