Hard economy cost/income evaluation of fieldwork.

[dan1109]

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.

Anything can last forever in RL, but with increased maintenance costs. FS is indeed doing that. Maintenance decay increases with engine hour increase, maxing at 50 hours from what I read. A highly used machine needs to be repaired more often, and I believe those repairs are also more expensive for the same maintenance %, than a brand new machine. It should be replaced when maintenance costs surpass the loan cost of buying a new one. I don't yet know that mark, but I sold my first light tractor with 120 hours on it as maintenance was getting stupidly high. I replaced it with a similar model I found on used sales with only 20 hours, the swap cost $30k...and my maintenance costs dropped it seemed by 90%. At 40 hours, they are getting much higher, but I do believe I made the right decision. The longer I kept it, the lower its trade in value due to age, which I believe is capped at 100 months IIRC.

As I have 8 tractors now, I don't put as much use on a single one, but the concept still applies. I think eventually they will all need to be replaced maybe at 100 hours.

If you retire the machine for light infrequent work on the farmyard and give it little use, with its highest asset being that's its always there if/when you need it, then its not really necessary to replace IMO.

I haven't tested any of this, its just observations in conjunction with a youtube post which described some detailed tests (including that harvesters lose yield from 0-40%, based on 70% maintenance or lower - an old harvester can certainly drop 30% on a large field that takes all day to complete). It should be easy to test yourself though, as there are console commands to set the age and hours of any piece of equipment.

[bossmanslim]

Some info on leased vs bought

If a player leases a piece of equipment, doesn't return it and actually repairs it; assuming 10 hour per year with 2 day months, it takes 2.20 years to break even between leasing the buying a new piece of equipment. This gives 22 hours of work time.

If a player leases only when needed, keeps for an average of 2 days and renews the lease every 3 hours, this number jumps to 128 hours to break even on a new piece of equipment.

Why is leasing so cost efficient?

Initial lease fee is 2.0% of retail
Per day lease fee is 1.0% of retail
Per hour lease fee is 2.1% of retail, while repair cost per hour is 2.0% of retail, meaning the lease cost is only a 0.1% increase

Also, upon purchase of a new piece of equipment, the price drops 20% if sold remotely, 12% if sold at the shop if immediately resold.

[dan1109]

Some info on leased vs bought

If a player leases a piece of equipment, doesn't return it and actually repairs it; assuming 10 hour per year with 2 day months, it takes 2.20 years to break even between leasing the buying a new piece of equipment. This gives 22 hours of work time.

If a player leases only when needed, keeps for an average of 2 days and renews the lease every 3 hours, this number jumps to 128 hours to break even on a new piece of equipment.

Why is leasing so cost efficient?

Initial lease fee is 2.0% of retail
Per day lease fee is 1.0% of retail
Per hour lease fee is 2.1% of retail, while repair cost per hour is 2.0% of retail, meaning the lease cost is only a 0.1% increase

Also, upon purchase of a new piece of equipment, the price drops 20% if sold remotely, 12% if sold at the shop if immediately resold.

Good info. Leasing implements used with high intensity but only annually sounds like a good option. Tractors, not so much, although you could lease the properly sized tractor every time. However, in reality, leasing costs are discounted for contractual longer termed leases...maybe we will get that one day, but everything does seem to be going in the right direction in regards to the economy. Hard mode may in fact be closer to reality more than we care to think, taking years to save up enough funds to purchase another piece of land. Land rental would be an excellent future feature to help hard mode growth, to keep your land better dimensioned with your current equipment and time available - and of course you can only start the rental after harvest. I personally only purchase land after harvest, to reflect its proper pricing.

[paul_c]

Leasing is a simple decision for me: if I can't afford to buy it, I'll lease it until I can.

In my "hard" No Man's Land gamesave, I've deliberately staged all my sowing so the harvest is on the same month (early Barley), so while it makes for a busy day in June, I can plan my other tasks (there aren't many on NML) around it - for example I'll not do silaging that month. The busy month is in fact 2 months, looks like this:

MONTH 1
Harvest
(Lime spreading)
Plough
Sow oilseed radish

MONTH 2
(Cultivate)
Sow next crop

MONTH 3
Fert application

By sowing one month after the other, I can lease the drill for 2 consecutive months, save on the one-off fee and not pay an idle month. And by selecting the Terrasim C6F, its min-till (so no cultivator to hire or do an extra pass on) and also it can apply fert too, saving on that. I evaluated a number of different drills but once the other jobs, and more importantly the tractor rent time, it taken into account, that one comes out best. It defines the power requirement but its the same analysis with ploughing - its cheaper to get a bigger one, and take less time doing it.

Of course, ownership always makes sense, leasing is "dead money". Although there will be depreciation and replacement at some point in the future. Its just that with hard settings, and a self-imposed "never take a loan" policy, my start £300k soon disappeared with other stuff, land, a caravan etc.

[humbe]

Initial lease fee is 2.0% of retail
Per day lease fee is 1.0% of retail
Per hour lease fee is 2.1% of retail, while repair cost per hour is 2.0% of retail, meaning the lease cost is only a 0.1% increase

Repair cost is 2% per hour? Where do you have this value from? Repair cost can vary a lot depending on how often you repair. Is this a value you've been seeing when testing? And at what percentage damage level are you typically repairing?

[humbe]

Looking up my repair cost data here.. I've found repair cost to be:

<initial price> * 0.09 * <current state> ^ 1.5.

Initial price: Initial price you bought something for. (Thus ignoring any cost of later uprades. For used vehicles sales, it's the rebated cost). This is price attribute of the <vehicle> tag in your savegame.
Current state: from vehicle/wearable/damage property in savegame. A value from 0 to 1, where 0 is 100% find and ok equipment and 1 is fully damaged where the maintenance bar has dropped as far as it goes.

This holds true regardless of age of gear. I just retested to be sure nothing had changed with a tractor with age set to 1000 months and operating time of 9063.8 hours, and there was no change at all to the repair cost.. This part is easy to test checking savegame and repair cost when you load..

The more trickier part, is at what speed does gear get damaged. How fast does that wearable damage number increase. I've done some testing on it, but haven't got a clear answer. Trying to run the same test multiple times gives me a bit varying scores.. I suspect there is some random element to how this damage is accumulated. In FS19, damage accumulated was just operating time since last repair, which made it obvious how it accumulated, but the reason to split this up in own value is that they can vary the speed of wear.

But from all my testing here, it seems stuff goes from 0 to 100% damage in around 22 hours of use.. And there seems to be little difference if a plow is connected to a tractor idling with engine on, or whether it is actually plowing up a field. I have not done tests here with old gear though.. I'll try to do a check with some gear with high age and lotsa operating hours and see if it accumulates damage faster..

But repairing when fully damaged cost 9% of the initial price, and from the tests I've run on new equipment, they use about 22 hours to reach fully damaged state, which means maintenance cost should be far less than 2% per hour. Also, you can cut it down by repairing more often. If you always repair in 90% state (10% damage), you'll be paying 3.16 times less maintenance overall, so after those 22 hours where you paid 9% if repairing just once at that time, you will instead have repaired 10 times, but payed in total 2.8% of initial price after ~22 hours of use.

Made this graph earlier to show how maintenance price vary with state.

[paul_c]

As a rule of thumb, is it fair to say this: There are two effective strategies for dealing with repair cost:
1) Keep on top of repairs VERY frequently - like after every job, have it in for repair for £6 or £8 or whatever
2) Buy a slightly bigger tractor, accept the slower in-field work speed penalty too, and completely ignore them.

Given that trailers don't actually do field work, trailers can be completely ignored for repair too. I suppose the same applies to loaders (but not front weights)?

[humbe]

As a rule of thumb, is it fair to say this: There are two effective strategies for dealing with repair cost:
1) Keep on top of repairs VERY frequently - like after every job, have it in for repair for £6 or £8 or whatever
2) Buy a slightly bigger tractor, accept the slower in-field work speed penalty too, and completely ignore them.

Given that trailers don't actually do field work, trailers can be completely ignored for repair too. I suppose the same applies to loaders (but not front weights)?

Yes.. I've seen a lot of stuff work still when broken. Only thing I've noticed didn't work is a harvester.. The one I tried at least didn't manage to start the header. I guess one could try to test effect of using stuff broken, and most stuff will still work, but to me it sounds like an exploit, so I've just defined for myself, that if something gets broke I need to fix it..

[humbe]

Ok.. Got some spare time here.. Let me test out if old age makes stuff wear faster in detail to show you what I typically do to test

For many of my other tests I've used a Fendt Vario 1050 with a Pottinger servo 25 plow. Not exactly pushing what the tractor can handle there Let me stuff in a bigger plow. The Kverneland PW 100-12.. What I do is that I make tractor ready on field for this test. I save the game. For some very high values, 1200 months age is 100 years in total. Operating time of 2000 hours a year sounds high. A tractor shouldn't be able to live for 100 years with that use, but lets test 200.000 operating hours, which is operating time in game of 720.000.000 in game as it's in seconds. I edit those values into game and load. I check that in game they indeed show up as 200.000 operating hours and 1200 months. I get up to working speed with plow, pause the game and saves it..

I then get starting values from the save game.. Funnily enough, even though operating time in savegame has 6 digit fraction so they track milliseconds, it is still at 720000000.000000 when I save, even though I used a few seconds to get up to speed. I guess the game only adds to it periodically, so it's far less accurate than it looks. To start with, tractor has 0.019485 wearable damage (Condition is thus ~98% ok) (and 0.015458 paint damage but I care less of that one). Plow has 0.001208 wear and 0.001110 paint damage.

Then I unpause the game, makes sure I'm always driving at full speed with plow for the duration of the test.. I could use time played statistics in the game to measure time, but in this case, I have time measure from operating hours of however long I use. As I suspect there's a random element to it, and that the game doesn't persist the state out each second as seen by the operating time above, I should work some time to reduce noise in measurement.. So I work ~5 minutes hoping that is enough. Pause the game and then saves it again.. I managed to plow continuously for this time. Almost always at max working speed of plow 12 kph, but dropping to 11 a few places when turning on the field.

Operating time of tractor is now 720000320.000000, damage is 0.040104 and paint 0.027240. The plow is at same operating time, 0.021827 damage and 0.039745 paint.. That sounded high..

Calculating values, that means the tractor will go from 0% damage to 100% damage in just 0.233 hours, which is 14 minutes of using it. Compared to ~22 hours when new. Ok.. So clearly old gear gets damage faster ;D.. Don't have time to do enough measurements to plot a graph just now but will do later.. And test if it's the age or the operating time value or both that adds to it.

[humbe]

Hmm.. Testing some more here, it looks like both age and operating time is a factor. But artifically just raising one at a time, it looks like age is a smaller factor and operation time a higher factor. That's two variables I know is in there. For all I know, paint condition could matter, horsepower requirements of equipment could matter and whether you drive over stones or not too.

I sure need more time testing and incorporate depreciation into my model..

Grmpf.. With depreciation, sellprice matters, and as both age and operation time matters, one need to consider how much usage you have per year too, so what is ideal will also depend on size of farm.. This got a lot more complex fast

[dan1109]

looks like both age and operating time is a factor.

I post I read from someone that claimed to do some very detailed tests state that the engine hours affect the maintenance decay rate...capping at 50 hours. How much it affected it, I cannot recall. Nor can I be sure if he stated that age affects it as well (you have reached that conclusion however), but of course age does affect resale, IIRC capped at 100 months in time.

The post also stated that maintenance affects:
HP
Fuel Consumption
Max speed

From 0-30%, based on your maintenance from 100 to 0%.

And the most important thing - Harvester yield has a penalty of 0-30%, based on maintenance however only starting at 70% or lower maintenance.

When I traded in my 100 hour first tractor and got a similar one with only 20 hours and my maintenance costs plummeted justifying the trade in, I also have tended to repair that tractor much more often, hardly ever going below 90%, where as before I would let it go well below 70% at times - your data concludes that this was certainly part of the reason my maintenance costs dropped - thanks for confirming that.

[Psychohate]

That's two variables I know is in there. For all I know, paint condition could matter, horsepower requirements of equipment could matter and whether you drive over stones or not too.

I don't know if paint condition affects it but that would give a reason for re painting if it does affect it. Right now there's not really a point in worrying about paint condition.

Edit: Guess what I'm saying is I've wondered why they even put being able to re paint equipment in the game but if it affects wear or increases re-sell value then I can understand it.

[humbe]

looks like both age and operating time is a factor.

I post I read from someone that claimed to do some very detailed tests state that the engine hours affect the maintenance decay rate...capping at 50 hours. How much it affected it, I cannot recall. Nor can I be sure if he stated that age affects it as well (you have reached that conclusion however), but of course age does affect resale, IIRC capped at 100 months in time.

The post also stated that maintenance affects:
HP
Fuel Consumption
Max speed

From 0-30%, based on your maintenance from 100 to 0%.

And the most important thing - Harvester yield has a penalty of 0-30%, based on maintenance however only starting at 70% or lower maintenance.

When I traded in my 100 hour first tractor and got a similar one with only 20 hours and my maintenance costs plummeted justifying the trade in, I also have tended to repair that tractor much more often, hardly ever going below 90%, where as before I would let it go well below 70% at times - your data concludes that this was certainly part of the reason my maintenance costs dropped - thanks for confirming that.

Interesting you should mention capping at 50 hours.. 50 * 3600 = 180000 seconds operation time, which I accidentally picked as a point to investigate and it didn't seem to fit into my other data:



I need more points to the graph to find the correct formula used, but it sure looks like it caps around 50 hours.. I was wondering whether I had screwed up measuring that point

Replacing a tractor after its engine has been running for 50 hours sounds overly silly though. If the game had obvious scales, that the fields are x10 smaller than in the real world, and the tractors are driving x10 times as fast in the real world, so 1 tractor hour in game is worth 100 in real life, then it may get a little closer to making more sense, but from my impression they're trying to go for 1:1 scale, though I've got a feeling field work takes up more time in the real world..

Don't know why all the game effects are so secret you have to play test to find them. At what level maintenance state effects what properties should be documented as a minimum. While the mechanics are more complex than in FS19, they are far from real world, so you won't make good decisions if you base them on how it should be..

EDIT: Tested with full paint damage vs no paint damage, and I see no difference in wear speed.

[Psychohate]

I don't know about wear and paint condition but I tested out painting my auger wagon before selling it. I bought the Demco 2200 Dual Auger Grain Cart used in my save game a while back. Before I painted it the value for selling was $34, 600. A little over $600 but I don't remember exact value. It cost me $8,560 to re-paint the Grain Cart. I sold it for $46,870. So the value plus paint came out to around $43,160. Minus that from $46,870 and I made a $3,710 dollars just by re-painting it. So I guess painting is actually good for something in game.

[paul_c]

The maintenance is so expensive/wear so quick because if it was based on real-world numbers, it would never occur in normal gameplay. There are (default settings) 1 day/month and 5x time, so that's 150x the real world speed. For good reason - so that you can actually play it without it taking 1 year to play 1 year of game time (then there would be complaints!)

In the real world one farmer (with some help in the summer) can arable farm about 1000 acres, which is approx the entire default map area. But in the summer they do day after day of harvesting, then ploughing/cultivating, etc. The kids would get bored very quick. In the game world, the amount of land you farm is skewed, the prices of products are bonkers (on easy mode, at least), and the maintenance is bonkers to try balance it.