Well... after five days I ran into the max. 75 equipment items limit after I just bought my 6th large loader wagon and also wanted to buy a second Challenger tractor to drive it away from the shop parking lot.
I then sold the small cultivator, small sower, small fertiliser spreader, small loading wagon and the small windrower to make some space again. I could also sell the small tedder and medium (21'000) tipper. My farm then looked like this.
To be fair... I played the game quite a bit. But there are still several pieces of equipment I haven't bought yet. No stump grinder or Buffalo. No low loader although it's probably not useful any more with amongst others the GoTo function. There are four models of tractor I don't have yet, but have several of some types of course. The Fastrac being my most used versatile work horse with 6 pieces.
No potato or beet harvesters or potato seeder. I did buy the huge Stilla fertiliser spreader before I had the equipment to have adequate slurry/manure production because the small one is utterly inadequate and frustrating with all its erratic behaviour (it veers off halfway through the 250k field after reloading VERY frequently - high probability of being reproducible). I also wanted to see it work and the 1,2M field is way too big for the miniscule small one anyway. But it is almost impractically large for the size fields in the game. Even for the largest 1,2 M field it feels like overkill. If you'd have fields six times that size it could make more sense as with current slurry and manure production capacity you could choose the simpler but more expensive fertiliser way to free up your time for other goals.
How about an extra 'extra large' map Giants?
To keep the biogas plant fed for slurry to fertilise with you need to be able to keep a stock of straw and grass so I now have 6 large loader wagons that can be filled in between silo cycles to fill them up again and have some grass and straw for the animals.
With all four meadows bought and those cows and sheep breeding like rabbits you need to keep grass production up and store some as bales on Arcusins which can also store some straw bales so I now have 8. Unfortunately bales storage in the sheds is rather limited. I liked the 32/32 bales shed in FS14 which held two full Arcusins each and where it was also much easier and clearer to see the current stock with a glance at the open shed front. Now you have to go to the statistics page(s) and read all the numbers. With the possibility of lager animal herds the feed storage capacity of the sheds seem a bit limited. I regularly had to sell off significant numbers of cattle and sheep to limit the grass consumption.
What are the maximum sizes of the animal herds, if any? I went as high as in the high twenties (27/28) I think. Or was it high thirties even?
Those loader wagons and Arcusins alone take up 14 items. I started smaller with two Ursus bale collectors for round bales and kind of like to keep those although they are not as efficient to store bales as the Arcusins. Also have two bale trailers which I used for storing round straw bales as they were cheaper as I was building up manure stock. I haven't gotten around to check whether you can pick up the rectangular bales and store them on those trailers too. I believe storage capacity in the cow shed is smaller than a full trailer load of bales so you always 'lose' some bales (illogical/'bug') even when the shed is empty (which you want to avoid of course). So for 'external storage' I currently use up 18 items. You also need the bale fork and since I also bought a Fendt 724 Vario I bought a second bale fork for convenience. That brings it to 20 items. Once you start buying loader wagons and bale storage when your meadows owned and income starts to allow your item count starts to rise very fast.
To minimise equipment need I focused on the three largest fields along the highway which can be worked using one 'train' (cultivator, sower, fertiliser spreader, harvester and tipper with four tractors. But after I bought the largest Massey Ferguson harvester I kept the Rostselmash which made it easier to farm two different crops and made me use a second 'train'. Also with the MF you 'lose' some straw on the 250k field as on the last stroke it drives outside the field and it doesn't leave a straw trail that can be picked up. The last stroke of any equipment should always stay inside the field's edge ('bug'). With two headers for each harvester such a train takes up 11 items. One train used a large slurry spreader for the 500k and 1,2M fields and the other the large manure spreader for the 250k field. Another 22 items.
Two balers (round and rectangular), a tedder and windrower for the meadows. Extra Krampe tipper with fast tractor and a truck and trailers for delivering products during big demands, one worker and myself in parallel. With a good 'run' you can earn a lot of money that way. A truck with log trailer and log fork for the ScorpionKing. Hardly excessive but it all adds up.
I limited myself to two mowers with tractors for four meadows thanks to the GoTo function.
There are 12 more fields I still don't own but they are of no use without the equipment needed to farm them. The very limited capacity of the potato and beet harvesters and the still very buggy AI with workers getting stuck VERY frequently, even the 'Honk to collect' workers get stuck on the harvesters, make these 'hobby farming' projects at best anyway.
A few more issues/points/questions. Please answer them ALL and not just pick a few and ignore the rest.
It's rather difficult to see the edge of a mown meadow especially during the night period because the colour difference with its surrounding is rather small. This makes it harder to position equipment correctly.
And why is everything so depressingly grey? Can't you give the scenery 'a lick of paint' to brighten things up a bit? Doesn't Farmington have a paint store? It would make the environment a lot more pleasing to the eye. I doubt it's a colour palette/resource/memory saving thing is it? Maybe in real life the landscape this environment is based on truly is so depressingly colourless... but this isn't real life is it? Maybe... how about a map editor?
Do crops grow/ripen at different speeds? If so, how are their relative different speeds?
There are rather few trees. If you cut the ones around fields that are hindering work you obviously won't let them regrow and rather few remain to do some serious forestry work as you can in FS16. There the low loaders were of use to move the slow Ponsse machinery around between the 'forests'. Now there's so few trees this isn't needed any more.
I already mentioned the limited feed (bales) storage capacity for cows and sheep with larger herds. You cannot move bales at will from the bale trailer. Its 36 capacity is too large to be dumped at once in the sheds. Make it work just as the animal trailer so you can move bales to (and from!) the sheds at will to allow for better feed storage management. You already have the code for this so it should be quite easy to implement.
Does fertilising the meadows has any effect on grass production?
A few more bugs.
At some time it seemed straw couldn't be topped up at the cow shed. All counters remained at 100% for quite some time. (until I closed the game?)
Bales stay at 100% when being used and number of bales is counting down. Something seems to be going on here with the calculations of these feed stocks in the (cow) shed.
After a worker fills up a large loader wagon with the Challenger on the SE meadow and I then use the GoTo function it gets regularly stuck on the rocks on the opposite side of the road when turning North. It's 'turning circle' isn't tight enough it seems. Or it's 'virtual size' that the path selection algorithm takes into account isn't big enough.
When buying an Arcusin or other long trailer and putting a tractor in front of it and then using the GoTo function usually causes it to try to make a left turn which causes it to get stuck on the wall surrounding the parking lot. As I have mentioned before the whole collision avoidance and path selection algorithms needs work. Old issues at least going back to FS14 are still in FS18. That's really too long boys and girls. Surely you can do better.
I'd like to see remaining silo times in the map screen when tapping on the icon. Not just the current slurry amount. There's still lots of screen space there. Now I have to leave the map and go to the statistics screen and go to the right page for this. All rather awkward and time consuming.
A total current equipment count would be very useful in the Farm Statistics screen. There is still room for one more line in the current layout. Something like "Equipment Owned". A "Total money earned" would also be nice. Frankly that fourth page is only rarely interesting and you have to page past it to reach the more relevant screens. It's basically 'in the way'. I'd suggest creating an extra menu item ("Journal"?) which would hold a journal of events, including 'getting stuck' events. "Your cows have eaten all the grass", started and finished worker jobs, Silo's being full or empty again, amounts of products harvested from a field and delivered to silo's and customers and the earnings it generated. Things like that and more. It's just text so it wouldn't take up much space. And if you'd let the user set it's storage location it could be stored on an external SD card. That menu section could also contain the fourth current statistics page reducing the number of pages to navigate through.
A different layout for tablets with more information per page or simply on a total of one page could be useful too.
Customisable on-screen controls as are in many games would be very nice too. On a large tablet I can't reach the horn without moving my hand for instance so I can't stop traffic when driving.
And since my posting about a bug a few days ago was removed from the bug-reporting topic and apparently not moved somewhere else I'll repost it here.
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I don't think this bug is specific enough to need the standard reporting format. I expect it to be easily reproduced. It might even be present in older versions of the game too.
If a worker automatically refuels while seeding with the large red/yellow 'universal' seeder it remains in the 'working' position with the arms extended. These bumped into the edges of the bridge it had to cross but it pulled it through in this case. In other situations it might get stuck on obstacles.
When automatically refilling the seed itself it does collapse the arms as far as I know (have not observed it in FS18) but refuelling the tractor pulling it doesn't. Obviously it should do so too.
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I like the game a lot. But because I do I'd like to see it's shortcomings improved upon to make it even better.
Please see what you can do Giants.