So does anyone have any suggestions for the most efficient farm? Meaning how many of what type of each crop per building? I have no desire to manage my workforce, turning various buildings on or off per season, but i would like them to maximize space.

For example: To be constantly working at max production a farm should have 15 cabbage, 10 millet, 20 wheat. That kind of thing.

This may be a per adventure kind of thing as the crops change. I would love to know if anyone worked the numbers for this. In my happy place there is a little app that I can throw in the crop types available and it gives me the answer. Hey, I am optimistic!

For me, I just build 3 farmhouses dedicated to one food type and I can usually provide that whole crop year round. Although this is not the method that many people recommend, it has always worked for me. It depends on the kind of city you want: if you need a large city (ie 4000 or more people), you'll probably want a lot of farmhouses that are dedicated to just singular crops.

If I have farmhouses farming more than one type of crop I usually just make sure the various seasons of the crops in question don't overlap. I have not noticed any difference in the production per square for different crops so I just plant equal amounts of everything across all my farms.

The efficiency of farmhouses is more about land fertility, space-management and distance to warehouse than crop types. One mistake I keep making is not planning ahead with the layout of my different farms and I end up with not being able to build a road past my existing farms or having two separate half-sized farmable areas left.

Thats what I am asking, within a specific farm there is an ideal efficiency crop "rotation" of sorts. Based on time of the season for planting and harvest. I am speculating that as space becomes more of a premium you will have too become more efficient to have super sized cities or you simply wont be able to generate the food .So as I have no intention of actually changing crops there should be a min/max for each crop type, assuming equal fertility and max space, to keep a farm working all year long and get 100% harvest from every square.

Admittedly, this is purely a min/max deal but I like to maximize my citizens. Even though its nit-picky, you can easily see it. Plant a full sized crop of whatever and you can see that all the plants wont hit 100% done by harvest time even with a full workforce. If I plant one wheat farm and one millet I will get less overall productivity out of a two farms that split their workable fields between the two.

I will keep searching and post what I find.

What I'm wondering is: if you put several types of crops on one farm who are not gathered at the same time of the year, can you keep up maximum efficiency while not having full employ for those farms? Like if each farms uses a third of its space for each type of crops, can the maximum amount be farmed for each? Is it more efficient to put two crops per farm rather than have one dedicated to each crop if you don't have full employ?

So if we assume for a moment that there is full employment, fertility, and use of available squares, a farm split between millet and wheat will produce more total food units annually than one farm of any single type. So, if we then take that example and say that there are half workers, in theory you will continue to produce more than a single farm with half workers but the ratio will remain constant or have a minuscule movement up.

Assuming all thats true, It stands to reason fewer workers will work fewer numbers of "active" tiles more efficiently. So with a restricted work force it may make sense to destroy some fields (or never build them) to gain efficiency. I dont understand any of the totals per tile. grain type, gain over time, etc to work that out though. So best I have is anecdotal at the moment. And it should be noted this is an efficiency model, nothing to do with actual gameplay. While each worker may prove more efficient, it wont matter worth a d@mn in-game if you are talking less than a unit difference annually save on super large scales. Also doesnt account for expense, etc...

Anyway, a long winded way of saying, I cant imagine the gain in game will measure out to enough to warrant limiting fields based on available workforce but i have nothing concrete as yet to guarantee it.

On a side note, there really isnt a ton of info out there on the game. Caesar/Pharaoh/Zeus have been dissected down to code levels but not so much for this title. I was shocked when I saw this game and had never heard of it, now it seems to have generally flown under the radar. No wonder it was the last in the line. Thats too bad, I do love the game model for this series!

Does fertility ever go above 65%? And is that a difficulty level thing?

I'm pretty sure that's a glitch with the game (if I'm remembering a post correctly from Emperor Heaven), but even if it went above 65%, I doubt it would have much effect on food growing tbh.

But you can confirm it doesnt adjust whit difficulty level? Would confirm myself but at work...

I'm pretty sure fertility doesn't change with difficulty, but I can't find a source referring to it.

I have found an interesting information about farm layouts here:
http://emperor.pecunia.nerdcamp.net/farms.shtml

In fact, there is a mission in the tutorial where you can produce silk for the first time. The picture within the tutorial text window shows two mulberry farms, but with only half of the normally available space used for growing plants...

Right, this info is pretty set in my mind. You have to do multiple crops to max out efficiency. My question is at what ratio and type of grain? It would be great to see what an individual tile produces, how many workers needed to reach 100% yield, etc. That info with what we know about seasonal staggering and you could come up with the "ideal" fire and forget farm for whatever situation you have.

PS - There is seemingly nothing out there on this, which of course leads me to believe the actual game value is low enough or simply not needed within the general difficulty of the game I knew it was a real min/max kind of thing when I began looking at it but was surprised none the less there is nothing on it. Having now played through, it is apparent that you simply dont need to be particularly efficient with your farms to win. Splitting crops down the middle keeps people working well enough through the year.

I really can not get these figures right.
I have 1 farm with millet; in tab 'Agriculture' / 'Food Supply' it says: supplies 2.9 loads/month. When the harvest is in the warehouse, I only get 15 loads.
I take a farm, half millet, half cabbage (so overlapping most of the time), the 'Food Supply' tab says I would get 1.5 loads of millet and 1.4 loads of cabbage. When both harvests are in, I did get 15 loads.
I take a farm, half wheat, half cabbage, the 'Food Supply' tab says the same as above, but when 12 months are gone (starting from planting the cabbage), I have 12 loads of cabbage and 10 loads of wheat (because no overlapping here).
However, if you take the figures from the 'Food Supply' tab and calculate how much food you need and how much you supply (provided you have only 1 type of housing), it matches.

So one might think that the output of a farm is not important, as long as it has water under it and the needed amount of workers. But a game that simulates an economy should not work that way; or if it does, it is not worth playing.

What am I missing here?

Assuming that all five food crops are available in a specific map, I use a farm layout with 9 tiles dedicated to rice, and 15 tiles to each of the other four crops, thus occupying the entire 9x9 area around the farmhouse (69 tiles of crops, 9 for the building, and 3 for the path from building to road). As my population grows, I just add more farms of the same exact configuration. These farms can work almost the entire year round, providing the people with a variety of foods.

A city with 84 Luxurious Apartments (three neighborhoods of 28, each with their own mill and marketplace), 4 Heavenly Compounds (yeah, that's an awful lot of people), and eight of these farms will have an abundance of food. Especially if you add some fishing quays (I have one for each farm)!
Getting all the stuff to the citizens efficiently, though, is a challenge.
In fact, that specific city has way too much food and more than enough of everything else as well. Problem is, I fear that if I disable a few farms, I'll get unrest issues because of unemployment. Already, 25 to 30 percent of the population is sitting on their hands with their thumbs up their buttholes. :)

What *I* think you're missing, is that the workers on a farm actually work only 4 months per year on each crop (5 if you add the harvest month). If each farm has only one crop, all 15 loads are of that same type, which has been worked on for only 5 months. The other 7 months of the year, those workers could have been reallocated to other jobs. So those months should not be included in the calculation.
15 loads of crop divided by 5 active months, equals three loads per month.

The calculation *seems* to go wrong when you have multiple crops per farm: because the crops don't all grow in the same season, your farm is occupied longer, but still outputs the same total number of loads. So it's more effective to have a dedicated farm for each crop. However, at some point you'll find that reallocating those workers twice a year for each farm gets tedious. And on top of that, you'll have so many workers that you don't know what to do with, that leaving them on the farm continuously is much easier (as it prevents unemployment issues). Then it no longer matters if a farm serves only one, or all five crops. The total output won't change, after all.