make placing dairy farms on shrubland

[Monsterfisch]

just an idea to maybe make dairyfarms similary unique as they were in sh1 where they had the benefit of beeing placeable on areas where other farms were not able to be placed (granted this will impact the balance of existent maps but as an option would provide players with new ways to play the game and create interesting szenarios.

mockup of the idea

[GRhin]

There is a way to do it currently, it involves placing grass in a specific pattern. The way it has been dont in the maps I have used is a little bugged, as placeing the farm extends grass a little, and so deleting the farm will allow the other farms to be used there. But there is another pattern. It does not limit to only dairy, but limits to either dairy or apples. CIO has more info on that if you are interested.

[Monsterfisch]

yeah I know there are ways to force it but as you said it comes with certain issues for me the idea of making dairy farms more inline with their sh1 counterparts in terms of being able to be placed in areas other farms cannot be placed and shrubland just like in reality would support livestock as well. i am however open to looking at those patterns for future reference.

[Russianstory]

I support you furiously. I also wrote something similar somewhere for a long time. I agree! It would be great to use different types of grass in the game for different farms, or make all the farms available on different types of grass, BUT so that the "yield" is different depending on the suitability of the soil

[ByBurton]

Only question would be if the AI would know how to do that / use it.

[CIO61]

There is a way to do it currently, it involves placing grass in a specific pattern. The way it has been dont in the maps I have used is a little bugged, as placeing the farm extends grass a little, and so deleting the farm will allow the other farms to be used there. But there is another pattern. It does not limit to only dairy, but limits to either dairy or apples. CIO has more info on that if you are interested.

Using certain patterns that put the richer grass on the edges of the farmland allows for each farm type to have its own farm area that allows that specific farm only(that is, unless you enable apple farm preview shrink feature on UCP, which results in dairy and apple farms not being differentiable with that technique). However not only it looks weird, the grass spreading bug makes it super hard to put natural looking grass lands that allow for 1 size-type of farm(apples vs dairy vs wheat/hops). The workaround is putting rocks that prevent user from building new farms that utilize the bug-created grass tiles.

Another way of differentiating the farms would be changing the amount of rich grass each individual farm requires to be built. But I don't know if each farm has its own rich grass requirement number, or if its shared between all farms. Solely reducing this amount for cheese (say from 50 to 40 for example) would have little to no effect in AI usage of farms, as the rest of the farms still obey the same rule. Using the worst-case(that is, still only building cheese farms only in areas that meet the old requirement) would still result in acceptable AI behavior.