Hard economy cost/income evaluation of fieldwork.

[humbe]

I've written a little program to analyze savegame data, that takes a backup each time I save, so I can keep a history of savegames of the same game, and compare changes from each time I save. From this I've gathered some data I thought I'd share..

A hard economy start starting from scratch seemed almost hopeless when I started testing the game, so thought I'd try and collect hard values to see. I'm also using no mods at all that makes any alternative gear available or changes any prices.

Between each save I evaluate the price of all my assets. Vehicles and equipment I count as original value all the time, but I deduct the money needed to repair/refuel them. I don't care about the paint condition though. I'm assuming it has no effect on the game, though they could have added something that makes stuff wear faster in bad paint condition to for instance due to less rust protection, but I'm guessing they haven't for now. I also count value for land I own, and all products I have, like diesel in tanks, leftover lime/seeds/fertilizer, and of course the money and the loan.

It looked like maintenance prices was insane, so I've tried to keep a setup where I try to get as little as possible. Maintenance prices rise a lot as you wear it down. If you repair very often you can end up with close to just 10% of the repair cost, compared to just repairing when you're close to broken. I've repaired after every piece of work, and sometimes in the middle of long works like plowing with low working width here, to try and see how low I could get them.

To see if I could manage with just the $300.000 starting money, I've bought almost the cheapest gear I could find.

• Fendt Favorite tractor - One of the cheapest tractors at 150 hp, and you need some hp to be able to do all operations needed. The cheapest tractor with all utilities available. Also upgradable, so I could buy it with 115 hp first and upgrade engine afterwards. This is a maintenance trick, as maintenance scales linearly with the initial cost of the vehicle, but ignores added cost from later upgrades.
• Rostselmash Nova 330 with Power Stream 500 header. Cheapest harvester option.
• Claas Carat 140 TD trailer, upgraded to contain up to 22500 liters. Payed a few bucks extra to avoid the small Welger DK115 being the cheapest option. The Carat is a bargain for the size, and a ton easier to reverse with.
• AgroMasz Pov 5 XL plow. Requires 160 hp it says, but works with less, though possibly with slight loss of speed. It has 2.5m working width. There's a $2000 cheaper option with 1.2m working width, but I'd then have to pay more fuel and tractor maintenance and it'd be painful. And I'll need the tractor HP for other tools anyhow.
• Knoche Speedmax 560 Mulcher - This is $11.500 more expensive than the 3m option, but the 5.6m working width and 6 kph added speed was tempting. Not a whole lot of money extra at least.
• As I'll be using oilseed radish to cut fertilize cost down, I need to cultivate twice per crop, so I got the Horsch Joker 4 CT disc harrow. Disc harrows don't pick up stones, and plowing only picks up small stones, meaning I don't need a stone picker. I'll plow every 3rd year, and otherwise just use disc harrow.
• Einbock Pneumaticstar 900 weeder. This amazing weeder has 9m working width and can also seed oilseed radish and canola, and only cost $18.000. I'll only be growing Canola to avoid having to pay for a seeder and save a ton of money.
• Dalbo PowerRoll 1230 HD - Sadly cheapest option for rolling at $41.000. Will evaluate if rolling is worth it.
• Bredal K015 fertilize spreader - Cheapest option that can apply Lime. Solid fertilizer cheapest option for 2nd fertilize stage.
• Tenwinkel PAC-750 - A 750 kg weight should hopefully be a decent sized weight to get decent traction for the various jobs.

I bought field 41 on Elm Creek. That's one of the most cost effective fields on the map. 1.945 hectares for 150336 is only $77.306 per hectares. Luckily it started of with Canola, so I had a starting crop of Canola to harvest. Sold the crop during peak price in winter for $806 per 1000 liters, and made $14.164 of that, which slightly reduced my loan. Ended up with $240.000 max loan before I got to sell that first crop.

First of all.. Checked out leasing option. Comparing leasing to buying purely funded by loan in bank. It turns out that bank loan has 4% yearly interest, but leasing something for the minimum time of an hour, you will pay 5.1% of equipment value. Maintenance/fuel for that hour is typically far less than 1.1% so leasing is always more expensive if you need to use the gear at least once per year.

Ok.. So costs of farming field 41:

First of all the income. Only forgetting to stop the harvester in time once, we destroyed close to no crops, and managed to get 22552.8 liters of Canola of the field at 100% yield bonus. That is 11597.2 liters per hectares, and I thus guess the actual max yield of Canola is 11600, 5800 liters/hectares before you apply the yield bonus.

At $806 per 1000 liter, which is the best price I got the first year that is $18.177 total yearly income. So the profit will be less than that. Even without any costs, that would not be much to live on for a year.

So the costs:

Mulching - $44.3 in repair and fuel cost for tractor and mulcher. 4% of mulcher value in loan interest payments, which is $840. 2.5% yield increase is 282 liters of Canola extra, worth $227. If I had 8 hectares of fields to work, I'd not gain or lose any money mulching, but as it is now, I lost $657.3 mulching.

Plowing - $188.6 in repair and fuel cost for tractor and plow. 4% of plow value in loan interest cost me $640. Thus total costs of $828.6. Without plowing I'd lose a 15% yield bonus (was it?). If so that is 1691 liters of canola worth $1.363. Plowing is well worth it every 3rd year at least.

Liming field - $1290 in lime cost, fuel and repair. 4% interest on the $45.000 cart is $1800 too, but that has to be split between this and fertilizing. Fertilizing and liming adds together 15+23 = 38% yield, which is $3453 of Canola, so together they more than pay back for the loan interest. Alternatively you could buy a bit cheaper fertilizer to only fert and not lime, but 15% is quite a bit of yield gain, so you would lose out.

First fert stage - Seeding oilseed - $228.3 in seed costs, fuel and maintenance. Seeding required to get anywhere, but loan interest adds $720 to the cost, to split between this stage and seeding the canola. Fairly cheap as I'm seeding with a cheap weeder.

Cultivating after oilseed has come and seed canola - $494 in seed, fuel and maintenance. Sadly didn't save in between cultivation and seeding to see diff.

Rolling after seeding - $69 in fuel and maintenance. 4% interest of roller is a massive $1640 in yearly interest, which is a lot more than the 2.5% yield gain from rolling worth $227 for me here. Not sure if not being able to roll away the small stones for plowing has a maintenance impact or something, but rolling for yield seems far from worth it as those $41000 could be invested in something far more useful like more fields.

Second fertilizer step - Solid fertilizer - $1129 in solid fertilizer, fuel and maintenance. But fertilization is big yield gain, so still worth it.

Harvesting - $242 in fuel and maintenance cost.

We had some money to start of with, so 100% of the gear wasn't payed by loans, so loan interest wasn't 4% of all the worth.. In total we have for one years cycle, taken from after we harvested the starting free crop, to after we harvested the next:

Income: $18.177
Loan Interest: - $9.100
Other Costs: -$5.250
Profit: $3.827

$3.827 profit after one full year of farming. Not much to create downpayments of the loan..

If only using income from field work, it seems you'll use a lot of years to pay down the loan so you at least can remove the biggest cost

[mackintosh]

People always complained hard was too easy, so with FS17 they started to make changes. I think the game is now balanced around "easy" economy, and the other two settings are there depending on how much you want to grind. Interesting write-up nevertheless, thanks!

[lawm]

Interesting. Thanks for the knowledge. Think I'll stick with my usual normal when I start. Normal always seemed slightly easy but hopefully more suited this go

[humbe]

Some bits to add..

During the measure year, the tractor got an additional 17004 seconds operating time and harvester 4185 seconds. That's altogether 5.88 hours. Some time used driving between shop/repair point, gas station and field, but if I had used helper for 5 hours that would be 5 * $1800 hourly wage which is another $9.000 cost. So using helpers on hard difficulty you'll have a hard time getting any profits at all. At least with small equipment like I've been using here. With noticeable bigger equipment that covers the field faster, helper rates gets a bit better, but still expensive.

And 4% of cost of my field is $6.013. If I had credit limit to buy a similarly cost effective field, like field 42, the added loan interest would be less than the loan interest for field 41 only. As I'm already paying loan interest for the gear/vehicles, I would get a higher return for that second field. Thus, even with the harsh economy, I could still make money of working land only bought through loans.

Playing normal sounds like a good approach. Haven't decide what constrictions I'd want to use for my real games yet. Playing hard economy, it'll take ages before I get to try production lines and such I think, so maybe start of easier while stuff is untested.

Also, this test was fairly strict to try and have as little cost as possible. I'd like to avoid having to repair so often, and being able to start of with a farmyard, rather than just camping on the fields.

[SimpleFarmer]

Some bits to add..

During the measure year, the tractor got an additional 17004 seconds operating time and harvester 4185 seconds. That's altogether 5.88 hours. Some time used driving between shop/repair point, gas station and field, but if I had used helper for 5 hours that would be 5 * $1800 hourly wage which is another $9.000 cost. So using helpers on hard difficulty you'll have a hard time getting any profits at all. At least with small equipment like I've been using here. With noticeable bigger equipment that covers the field faster, helper rates gets a bit better, but still expensive.

And 4% of cost of my field is $6.013. If I had credit limit to buy a similarly cost effective field, like field 42, the added loan interest would be less than the loan interest for field 41 only. As I'm already paying loan interest for the gear/vehicles, I would get a higher return for that second field. Thus, even with the harsh economy, I could still make money of working land only bought through loans.

Playing normal sounds like a good approach. Haven't decide what constrictions I'd want to use for my real games yet. Playing hard economy, it'll take ages before I get to try production lines and such I think, so maybe start of easier while stuff is untested.

Also, this test was fairly strict to try and have as little cost as possible. I'd like to avoid having to repair so often, and being able to start of with a farmyard, rather than just camping on the fields.

Nice report on your findings. I don't think I've seen anyone else work out the profitability all the way through the process like this. And another thing I think you'll find is ElmCreek has a lot of fields that have extra "unwanted" acreage. Playing a bit easier you can still buy them as they are the better shaped, more fun to farm fields without it being such a nucklebiter.
I've been playing on normal on ElmCreek and it seems pretty tough, kind of like hard was in FS19. Im at 120 hours and am just now starting to feel like I have a sustainable farm. I've increased the production speed of the timber factories by 10x along with the cost as they are an absolute drag as is. It seems pretty balanced now.

[JohnDeere77]

I experienced the same as u when started with loans, this was before the patch as well so the interest rate was higher. So I restarted, bought cheaper equipment, some used as well, and no loans. The equipment I couldnt afford, such as roller, stonepicher and so on, I didnt use at all, but bought later, financed with profits. Instead of harvesting multiple times just to pay interest rates.

[paul_c]

Interesting and thorough analysis, thank you.

It would be interesting your thoughts on what you'd do with a "version 2" of choosing and buying the equipment. For example, if rolling isn't going to add value, then would you omit the roller, then be guided to a different seeder etc?

I'm personally doing something similar with No Man's Land - started on "hard" settings, gave back the £200k loan leaving £300k for land, equipment and everything else.

[lawm]

Thankfully the higher ups listened and made the game slightly harder. I love being able to use workers and squeak out a profit until I get my sea legs when starting fresh. Then when your going for max cash you start taking over more aspects in the field. Funny how some of us are wired that we enjoy a video game that is trying to replicate the real life grind of cash flow and money making lol.

[george.earlslight]

I've also had my share of playing on hard and the most profitable routes I've found are:

- Greenhouses
- A field of Barley and chickens
- A field of Grass and Sheep, turn excess grass to silage for sale

After seeing the pattern, I gave up on difficulty modes.
While it might seem intriguing when trying to stay afloat during the early years, it later becomes just a slower pace compared to easier modes.
In the end it mostly depends on how much time you're planning to invest on a single map.

[humbe]

Interesting and thorough analysis, thank you.

It would be interesting your thoughts on what you'd do with a "version 2" of choosing and buying the equipment. For example, if rolling isn't going to add value, then would you omit the roller, then be guided to a different seeder etc?

I'm personally doing something similar with No Man's Land - started on "hard" settings, gave back the £200k loan leaving £300k for land, equipment and everything else.

Sometime I will test if having small stones on field actually damage gear faster.. If that happens, I guess rolling can be a bit more useful. But I might define that removing stones is a requirement to remove annoyance at looking at stones on field

But from a pure money perspective, if there is no need to remove small stones, I guess the turnover point is where 2.5% of the yield is worth enough, to give decent return on investment on investing in a roller. Assuming I have the gear for farming anyhow, and that I get to the point where I have enough money so I don't pay loan interest anymore, the year above would have $12.927 income from a field worth $150336. That is a return of investment of 8.6%. If I had $41000 to spare and invested in similar fields, I could earn $3526 of a field each year if I invested in field rather than rolling. So you'd want to start rolling once you earn $3526 extra. Given Canola and a price of $806 that I got, that is 4408 liters of Canola, which with a base yield of 5800 liters/hectares. If I had 30.4 hectares to grow Canola, I'd get 30.4 * 5800 = 176320 liters of Canola with base yield and 2.5% on top of that would be 4408 liters of Canola.

In conclusion with that roller, and that cheap tractor, you earn money rolling field once you are rolling more than 30.4 hectares/year. Up until that point, it would be better to invest in more land instead. 30.4 hectares is quite a lot of fields in this game.

...
After seeing the pattern, I gave up on difficulty modes.
While it might seem intriguing when trying to stay afloat during the early years, it later becomes just a slower pace compared to easier modes.
In the end it mostly depends on how much time you're planning to invest on a single map.

Definitively goes into motivation for playing the game, yeah.. I get quickly tired of repeating task if I don't have specific goals to work for.. Getting rich as fast as possible in the least game time possible is what looks like the most obvious goal for me. However, the game has several shortcomings of making such a scenario obvious.

• Contracting is no risk income and very efficient income per game time, and I don't want to be locked into gameplay where I should always be doing all the contracts. Thus, I'd need to define max amount of contracts I can do.
• Various mods are available that make the goal simpler. What to allow. Should I allow cheaper stuff equipment to give you stuff you can buy without needing to take up loans, if they are also worse when it comes to game stats like working width, speed and horsepowers for instance. Should I allow me to reduce maintenance cost with a mod, to not have to repair everything 10x more often than I need to refuel? Do I allow mods of equipment I like to play with, but manually edit prices to make them balanced with in game stuff?
• Forestry is also very efficient on game time. No harvest to wait for if you have a map like No Mans Land, where the cost of a land plot is just a small portion of what the forest already on it is worth. Allowing uncapped forestry in such a scenario will make it optimal to turn game time to 0.5x and cut down and sell all forest on the map immediately. Which does not sound fun. Maybe a constraint could be that while doing forestry I'd have to have at least a given time multiplier so time flies so fast that I'll have a hard time making more money than I can make from field work and production chains.
• Selling land can be exploited. Buying land, harvesting it and selling it back is a clear exploit. So in FS19 I had a policy that I couldn't sell land I had bought.
• And then you might end up with only being able to use a small subset of gear and vehicles because this other stuff is clearly inferior when it comes to being efficient compared to the investment made, but I might want to buy this bigger tractor and that gear with higher working width, even if the x5 maintenance and fuel bill means it wasn't actually financially a good decision.

Some might rather optimize for income/played time, but that sounds stressful to me.. And also it sounds like the optimal way to play would probably to build stuff that requires no work, and then just sleep as fast as you can until you can buy more of them. Doesn't sound interesting

Having issues deciding on what my constraints for an economic challenge should be. It is a bit sad that one has to make it oneself, as you'll not play the same challenge as others are playing, so hard to compare games. Also, there's a lot of undocumented details in the game that you'll need to know to make informed decisions if optimizing, otherwise it's like playing chess without knowing how all the pieces can move, which is no fun, and while some theorycrafting is fun, it can end up tedious.

FS19 was my first in FS series, and after using a few games to test out how stuff worked, I set up a series of economic challenges, but for each one, I found something to exploit, which made me want to add more rules and constraints and start over

[humbe]

I've also had my share of playing on hard and the most profitable routes I've found are:

- Greenhouses
- A field of Barley and chickens
- A field of Grass and Sheep, turn excess grass to silage for sale

After seeing the pattern, I gave up on difficulty modes.
While it might seem intriguing when trying to stay afloat during the early years, it later becomes just a slower pace compared to easier modes.
In the end it mostly depends on how much time you're planning to invest on a single map.

Will definitively checkout production chains at some point. But they can be considered separately. I can get X cash from this crop now.. Or I can invest in this production bits, and then I will get a return of investment of Y by selling the end product instead. But figured I'd start out with trying to figure out what income can be made by field work first, as crops from fields is ingredients for many of the production chain bits regardless.

[paul_c]

I'm in two minds. Approach 1) is to watch and analyse the numbers, and try do it as efficiently as possible. Not only for max profit given any chosen constraints (eg hard settings, no land flipping, etc) but for time efficiency too. Approach 2) is to keep my head above water financially, but also enjoy it and do a variety of stuff.

I thought hard settings etc would simply equate to slower progress so more tedious/boring but in a way, its the opposite. The harder the settings, the more planning and more care is required so its an additional element to the game.

[DirectCedar]

Having issues deciding on what my constraints for an economic challenge should be. It is a bit sad that one has to make it oneself, as you'll not play the same challenge as others are playing, so hard to compare games. Also, there's a lot of undocumented details in the game that you'll need to know to make informed decisions if optimizing, otherwise it's like playing chess without knowing how all the pieces can move, which is no fun, and while some theorycrafting is fun, it can end up tedious.

FS19 was my first in FS series, and after using a few games to test out how stuff worked, I set up a series of economic challenges, but for each one, I found something to exploit, which made me want to add more rules and constraints and start over

I am thoroughly enjoying this discussion and reading the results of your economic analysis. Thank you for making these observations and thank you for sharing them.

One other depressing factor that you haven't mentioned in your analysis but which is a very big deal in real life, is depreciation. Equipment decreases in value as you own it and use it and eventually becomes worn out and essentially value-less. It is a serious cost to be evaluated and is higher the newer the equipment is. It kind of sort of doesn't factor the same in Farm Sim because your equipment never actually becomes worn out, so even if its resale value eventually approaches zero, you can continue using it indefinitely in the game and it really never needs to be replaced. In real life that doesn't happen. If you factored real depreciation in to your analysis of the hard economy setting, it looks like you might lose money on everything.

Re: economic goals, John Deere American Farmer (way back in 2003 I think) had a bunch of "scenarios" you could play along this idea. Each one was "grow so much x or y in so much time" or "own so much land in so much time" or "have so many staff in so much time" or "do x without letting your net worth ever get below y" - things like that. They gave you a starting outfit and a time limit and set you free. Some scenarios there were several ways to succeed, some occasionally only seemed possible with specific strategies or exploits. They were an interesting feature of the game that gave you a change from the sandbox and self-imposed rules when you felt like trying them. In some ways that game had some much more advanced features than FS and in some ways it was an absolute mess. Still it had its charm overall. It could have been quite great if a modding community had gotten behind it to work out the many flaws in the original.

[humbe]

...
I am thoroughly enjoying this discussion and reading the results of your economic analysis. Thank you for making these observations and thank you for sharing them.
...

Thank you ;D

Yeah.. Depreciation is definitively something to watch out for. I have heard people thinking vehicles gets worse over time in FS22, but I've yet to measure any difference. Thus I'm ignoring the fact in my calculations. In FS19, I know for sure, old gear was just as useful as new gear, cost the same to repair, performed equally well and so on. Property was something else though. Curiously, property maintenance started at the listed price but kept rising. And as you don't get an overview in game of what properties cost you how much, it is hard to see that the farmhouse you thought you paid $150 for a month, is now costing you $300 per month. It took some time, but placeables in FS19 at some point got so expensive that it would be beneficial to remove it and rebuild it, so I suspect similar mechanics in FS22 for those.

Scenarios would be awesome. Set up various constraints within the game so it's more obvious what paths to choose, but still room for interesting tactics. Would also be a nice way to introduce people to various aspects of the game, and provide some context in which you could compete at some level.

[DirectCedar]

Whenever I get into discussions like this, I start to wonder if the main brains working on Farming Simulator (who I respect - obviously - I love Farming Simulator despite its quirks) ever played John Deere American Farmer, or Maxis' Sim Farm from ten years prior. They were both excellent, heavily-flawed games in their own respect, that in some ways were very clearly archaic compared to Farm Sim, but in some (limited) ways had features way ahead of where Farm Sim is even now after 14 years of development.

Why is there no net worth calculation? American Farmer showed this as a default in 2003. Why is there no annual economic statement? Sim Farm showed this in 1993. Likewise why can't we build our own animal pens and have animals of different ages grow from birth to market age like we did in 1993? Why are there no random weather effects and natural disasters and market anomalies? If these could be done in much, much, much simpler games 10 and 20 years ago, these are my questions for the main brains Plus probably about 20 more questions if I had the patience to sit through a session of Sim Farm again.

Oh yeah, meaningful drainage and irrigation and soil erosion. Wow - 1993 was a big year