[BUG]Agriculture Expierement

Farming bonuses do actually have an effect, but it.. doesn't work quite as you'd expect. The whole food/population/farm mechanic in general doesn't really make sense, I suspect it's just a placeholder until a final - more intuitive - system takes its place. I did a little experimenting, and here's how it works now:

City 1: I built a city next to a fertile land but didn't build a farm or do any research, and let it grow until population stagnated and food plummeted to the minimum amount. This left me with 115 population and 11 food. I built a farm, food increased, eventually surpassing population so that population could increase as well, which slowed down food growth and eventually caused food to decrease. The end result was 163 population and 15 food.

City 2: Still without doing any agriculture research, I built a city next to a fertile land and immediately built a farm. It hit about 174 population before stagnating. Note this is higher than city 1, so the timing of building the farm has an effect.

City 3: I researched 50x farming upgrades, then repeated example 1: built a city next to a fertile plot without building a farm -> let it hit maximum population -> built a farm. It hit 170 population in the end (7 higher than city 1 reached without farming upgrades).

City 4: Still with 50x farming upgrades, I repeated example 2: built a city next to a fertile plot and immediately built a farm, it grew to 183 population before stagnating (9 higher than city 2 reached without farming upgrades). Note that at this point, despite the 50x farming upgrades, cities 1 and 2 were still at 163 and 174 population.

City 5: I built a city nowhere near a fertile land, it reached 130-something population (the game crashed before I could write down the number). Note that this is higher than the 115 population that city 1 reached without a farm, so farming upgrades seem to help food generation/maximum population even in cities without farms.

Conclusion:

*Building a farm immediately after building a city will wind you up with a higher maximum population than building a city and adding the farm later on..

*Farming upgrades help cities that are still growing and future cities reach higher populations, but do nothing for cities that have already stagnated.

Recommendation, just in case you folks at Stardock don't already have a better economic system in the works (which I'm sure you do): whether you build a farm sooner or later shouldn't affect your final, maximum population - building the farm sooner should just make the city grow faster and hit that maximum population sooner. Farming upgrades should affect all cities equally, regardless of whether the city has stagnated, is still growing, or has yet to be founded at the time you actually research the farming upgrade. How to accomplish this? The way food and population interact needs to be changed, it doesn't exactly make sense at the moment and the strangeness of farms and agricultural research is just a side effect of that food/population interaction.

I'm really happy you're here for when we actually have real gameplay.  Just don't spend more than 40 hours a week beta-testing, SD doesn't like to pay overtime.

It only took about half an hour Not counting my first attempt, which crashed after city 2 when I made the fatal error of trying to build a road..

I think what happens is that while the city is still pretty small it does not use up all food so it stacks up food supplies. The city growth seems to depend on other factors but require that you have enough food supplies to feed all. So if you build a farm earlier you have a higher stock of food at the point when the city reaches the size that requires all new food to feed. So it starts to use up the supply but still grows. Now at some point that supply is used up and the city stops growing. Actually it should get smaller again at that point but that does not seem to be implemented so you reach different max populations depending on how much food you stack before reaching large city size.

If you could somehow delay city growth, you could propably reach really big sizes.

I just had a game where I conquered a city where I built 2 farms and 1 inn, 1 barracks, 6 kingdom mansions (hooked to the complete road network. total of: 2 cities had 2 farms, 5 cities had 1 farm, 6 cities had no farm). That city ended with max population of 268 possible and filled. still had a food surplus of 3. This was the last city i conquered, it hat ~100 inhabitants at that time.

Housing Tech and Agriculture Tech were both maxed out.

The other city with 2 farms was built before agri was maxed out. It ended with ~240 pop. The cities with 1 farm ended around 205 pop and the ones without farms ended at ~180 pop.

Since my number are higher than the ones from austinvn, either my Agri-Tech was higher or the road network had a significant impact.

Since my 2 cities with 2 farms have such a big difference, I think the agri-tech IS implemented, it just doesn't rise the value of already built farms.

You can pump up food before letting your city grow by training units. I managed to get a city's food above 500 before I ran out of RAM and the game crashed.