This game needs a REALISM category

[Eische]

That is exactly what I meant. Some players would like this kind of challenge. Many others don't. It depends on how much your progress will be affected by this.
But talking about random weather effects or scaling probabilities to the days per month:
Simple answer...not possible in a reliable way with the fully randomized weather system we have right now.

There are already probabilities defined per weather situation. It's all there already. But nature of probabilities is that well...they are only probabilities/chances.
If you define your summer time weather to have 90% chance for clear blue sky, 5% cloudy but dry, and 5% pouring rains, it will not be exacly this way in the game.
You can have 5 summers (5 years) in one row where you are completely rained out of the fields. Not very likely but still probable.
Think of other weather situations where your crop gets damaged, yield reduced, ...

Do you want to experience this every year? If that happens, more and more players will deactivate weather impacts, because essentially their work was useless...frustration.

I'm not saying that weather should have no effect on crops/ground. It's just not so easy to implement in a way it would make sense or be still fun to play.

Instead of direct influence of the shown weather, I had the idea of random events. Popup messages at every season change saying something like:
- Spring weather was very good, enough rain and early warm temperatures improved germination, yield is expected to be at 115%.
- early summer was very dry, hail storms during mid summer reduced yield by 30%

Would this be an acceptable alternative?
It can be designed that way that:
- only limited crop types are affected
- only certain soil types are affected (if soil types will be added to base game in next version)
- harvest time is delayed
- ...

[snekko]

some ideas:

- only first growstages are affected by drought or whetness --> germination fails, but max 10% of your field.

- max 10% plus or min yield per seasons. --> crops grows on average 3 seasons, (Spring, summer autum) so max 30% bonus or reduces yields. Only when you get a real bad year, you will lose 30% of your yields (3x bad season is 3x10%). real bad year vs real good year is 60% difference . chance of a real bad year is likely 10%, chance of real good year is also 10%, chance of normal year is 80%. You can also have a bad spring (-10%), a normal summer (100%) and a real good autum (+10%) is also a normal growing seasons. (100%)

- stop calander farming. Is the soil to wet or to cold to sow, you have to wait a month. --> harvest will also be later, but when its to cold in the last month, your crop fails to the last grow stage. --> you can make wholecrop silage of it.

-1 day/season will not say its not raining when you not see it. --> monthly wheaterforecast

[Gugernoot215]

For the game to have realistic options base game I'd recon their would have to be a decent amount of old equipment available or you'd have to take a loan or lease. And not just the second hand market where the equipment you'll get falls apart quicker than a hashbrown with no batter.
I kinda also want "region locking" on equipment either making it unavailable or more expensive since you'd have to import it, I'd like the game to be an archive of old farming equipment as much as it is an advertisement for new equipment.

If you want to use a mix of European and American equipment play an Australian map, we got a mix of tractors from both continents plus our own.