Added Realism

[Thedebe48]

Something I've often thought about while playing this game is some minor adjustments that could be made that would go a long way to making the game a true simulator, rather than a farming arcade at times. In particular - with seasons. Obviously many of us would like to see it added to the base game,. Whether or not that ever happens in a future release remains to be seen.

Every season I go through in the game, I know exactly what I'm going to end with and approximately how much money I'm going to make, and how much I can spend. There is little variable to the yields of our crops if we do everything right, and little variable to the price I'm going to get if I sell at the right time. Realismus did a great job with adding moisture and drought factors for the new version of seasons. I'd like to see them go even further in the future.

I feel that two key factors missing from the game are income taxes and crop insurance. Both are very significant components of an operation's annual cash flow. In the United States, most operations are able to get their bottom lines as close to zero as possible so as not to pay income taxes - This is done through capital expenditures and depreciation. Not to get too deep into the weeds, but it would be intriguing to get a notification in the game that your tax bill at year-end will be X amount of dollars as your current cash flow sits, and it can go down if you make large 'write-off' purchases at the end of the year. And operating losses could be carried forward to bring down next year's tax bill. I feel that this is a very large part of what goes into most operations' farm plans every year that is completely missing from the game.

Crop insurance would only be necessary if more variable weather and yield conditions became factors in the game, but it is something I'd like to see.

I also think that forward contracting should be a component of this game instead of only cash sales. Forward contracting X amount of liters of a commodity so many days in the future for an already agreed upon price is another key factor of actual farming that is missing. You'd have to force yourself to make accurate estimates, and not get too greedy and contract more than you can grow. This is what helps mitigate price risk for actual farm operations, and I feel that it would go a long way in adding realism to the farming simulator experience.

Curious to hear about what the community thinks of these ideas, and what other components are still missing??

[theSeb]

Initially your ideas may seem like minor adjustments, but they are not, since we have thought about, discussed or tried to add all of them already, apart from tax.

Crop insurance - it is something we discussed and considered adding when creating Seasons 19, but in the end we could not figure out a way to implement such a system without it being super exploitable and hence have shelved the idea for the moment

Real contracts is another thing that we have been discussing since the days of FS 17 and the first Seasons. There are multiple issues with implementation though. The first one is that the current contracting system in FS would need a lot of rework. We are talking about having the framework here to be able to continuously dump a commodity into a particular sell point to satisfy an on-going and long running contract. The other one is how to actually implement such a thing to make it work properly. You mention some of the things, which are actually massive challenges... how can we give the player enough information to make accurate estimates, especially when people want even more variable yields and weather and so forth. But also how can we get the information to create achievable contracts for the player to pick from? Let's say we would dynamically create easy, medium and hard contracts when you start a map. To do this we would need to calculate/predict what can be possible for the player to do over some period of time which is pretty tricky, but adding "variability" makes this a very difficult, if not an impossible task.

Something else that just popped into my mind about contracts is that you really need to play a few years on a farm to actually make them work as part of gameplay and I don't know if many people actually play like that and have the attention span to do it.

Tax is not something that we would aim to bring in the game. On the priority list rating of 1 - 10 I would put that somewhere 0 and 1. There are just far more "important" things to add to the game. Technically speaking tax would be the easiest to add, but also the most boring. I get bored of having to do my VAT returns every 3 months already.

I don't believe that you will ever see any of the things above in the base game though.

[Illinois Farmer]

I think those things listed are huge in farming. Most people wouldn't even know that stuff existed, let alone try and use that stuff in game. Seasons is already too hard for a lot of younger users. The farm sim network had almost, if not all, these ideas on their server, which is pretty cool. Waiting to join is another whole story ha. I for one wouldn't mind it is game because I deal with it every year. On the contract part, seb, you wouldn't set the contract before joining a game, the player could set their own, like i want to sell 2000 liters (or bushels) of corn at the restaurant. You would pick that contract at a certain price that is available and make sure you deliver the grain by a certain time like mid fall.

[theSeb]

Sure I guess we could do that and the more you select to sell the better the price will be. It's still not trivial to implement because of point 1 about contracts above. If it was, it would already be in Seasons 19 because I, personally, really want this feature. This is actually my 2nd most wanted feature that I would love to add into the game.

[Illinois Farmer]

I was just trying to explain the contract situation better. All that coding stuff seems impossible to me ha. I try learning some on my free time, but free time is far and between lately. My one graph theory class had us code in python, which is totally different ha. Yeah, it would be cool to add, but I'm just happy to have seasons. You guys are amazing to bring that to the game.

[Thedebe48]

Seb, really appreciate your response and insight. And of course, very very appreciative of the work you guys do, and have done in the past. A lot of us on the gameplay end don't think like a developer because it's something that just goes completely over our heads. What your wrote makes sense though about how difficult it would be to implement. It might just be one of those things where there will always be that separation between the game and how it actually works. We can only ask so much of you guys and you can only get so close without pulling your hair out.

As far as contracts go, they way I view it is completely different from how the FS19 base game contracts work right now, where you select from a menu of contracts that the game generates. What I envisioned is a player being able to say, "I will deliver X liters of wheat to CHS Grain within the next X amount of days". Player can choose how many days they need to deliver it and how many liters they can deliver. What the variable would be is the ability to lock the price when you view it as favorable, and a penalty if the contract is not fulfilled on time. Kind of like how Illinois Farmer was touching on in his post above. The user would still have to haul every truck load to the sell point. I do understand though that this would be a complete mess for how the economy in the game and in seasons is set up now. Just a thought I wanted to bring up.

As far as taxes go, maybe we just have different opinions? I can see how it's a 0-1 on the priority scale as it's not really a 'sexy' added feature. But as someone who farms (and this is just me here, not speaking for everyone who farms), I would view an income tax planning feature as a 7-8 priority.

[Thedebe48]

I do also agree with what Illinois Farmer said above that Seasons is already a degree of depth that might be too much for some players. Getting deeper into the weeds might make it more realistic, but also more complicated than fun for a lot of people.

[theSeb]

It’s not that it’s not a sexy feature, but lets face it, it’s really not. The issue is that there are far more fundamental issues to address first. To me it’s like restoring a car and worrying about what colour the new leather seats will be when the engine is still broken

[GrimGandalf]

Does anyone know how the current system comes up with how much crop your going to get from a field for a contract? Is it Just simple
Math? Obviously for each field with a contract the computer can figure out a number for each crop and all of the variables with fertilizer, lime , and plowing. Couldn’t the computer see how much farmable land you own and come up with a base number for a contract?

[theSeb]

Does anyone know how the current system comes up with how much crop your going to get from a field for a contract? Is it Just simple
Math? Obviously for each field with a contract the computer can figure out a number for each crop and all of the variables with fertilizer, lime , and plowing. Couldn’t the computer see how much farmable land you own and come up with a base number for a contract?

We do know exactly how the current system comes up with how much crop you are going to get from a field for a contract. That’s not the problem that we need to solve.

[GrimGandalf]

Sorry - wasn’t saying that was the problem. But couldn’t that info be given to a player to help them determine how much crop they would yield? Or is it not as simple as that? Listening to you Seb fascinates me. You give an inside the mechanics point of view things here. Much of which I know nothing about.

[FarmBoss]

theSeb, given that you know so much of the internal workings and algorithms, does it take any of the fun out the the game for you?

Now back on topic.
Thedebe48, FS15 had a mission similar to the contract you are talking about. The job board offered a mission where you had to deliver x amount of x crop in x amount of time (if I remember correctly). That version was only helpful if you already had the crop, or were about to harvest it. I like your idea, and I hope to see it in future versions of the game.

[Thedebe48]

Sorry - wasn’t saying that was the problem. But couldn’t that info be given to a player to help them determine how much crop they would yield? Or is it not as simple as that? Listening to you Seb fascinates me. You give an inside the mechanics point of view things here. Much of which I know nothing about.

Right, that isn't the challenging part of what is being thrown around. Anyone who's played the game long enough knows roughly how much they're going to have by looking at the size of a field.

Actual farmers though have to be careful how much of their crop they contract early on in a growing season because they don't know if they will keep getting rain, if they'll get hailed out, etc. They have to be able to fill that contract, and it can get messy if they don't have the bushels to do it.

The challenging part, as Seb said above, is the amount of code it would take to make it more unpredictable. The entire point would be to make it more of a challenge to predict what your yield is going to be until you actually start harvesting it, so that you have to give a conservative contract estimate instead of an aggressive one - like in real life. This is probably something that won't ever be accomplished for the game though.

[theSeb]

Sorry - wasn’t saying that was the problem. But couldn’t that info be given to a player to help them determine how much crop they would yield? Or is it not as simple as that? Listening to you Seb fascinates me. You give an inside the mechanics point of view things here. Much of which I know nothing about.

The contract formula works on what the state of the fields is now and "we" know it's ready to harvest and won't change during the contract, since if it wasn't ready to harvest that contract would not be presented to the player. Going backwards in time, the ability to work out what the yield will be with confidence will be less. When you are doing contracts like we are discussing you won't always be working with "now", so you don't know what will happen to the player's fields in the future. We could try to calculate and show the range of worst to best yield based on fertiliser, lime, ploughing required, but is the field even planted when the player is trying to work out whether they should do a contract and how much they should commit to. So now you have to show a range of yields for all fruits, but even then you are not accounting for possible weeds and the effects of patchy crop failure, which is something that I wish to build upon anyway in the future and make yields even more unpredictable. The biggest challenge then is how to present this in a nice and informative way to the player within the constraints of the FS GUI without completely turning off the majority of your player base.

What I hated about the game is how it was groundhog day, so I designed seasons and thanks to the other guys who came onboard and formed Realismus it became far more than I initially thought up. But then I ended up hating the fact that Seasons 17 became groundhog year. So in 19 we tried to add variance and uncertainty without upsetting people too much.

[theSeb]

theSeb, given that you know so much of the internal workings and algorithms, does it take any of the fun out the the game for you?

Now back on topic.
Thedebe48, FS15 had a mission similar to the contract you are talking about. The job board offered a mission where you had to deliver x amount of x crop in x amount of time (if I remember correctly). That version was only helpful if you already had the crop, or were about to harvest it. I like your idea, and I hope to see it in future versions of the game.

Heh, funny question. It's not so much the knowing of the internal workings that takes the fun out of the game. It's the actual modding and especially scripting. I am mostly talking about myself, but I know that many others who create popular script mods for this game don't play the game. It's a painful chore frankly to write scripts and you end up in this loop of write stuff, start game, check stuff, quit game, correct stuff, write more stuff and repeat. It takes a lot of the shine out of playing the game. The first time I've actually really played FS 19 was only a few weeks ago.