B
Blue
Let's assume that the gathering buff to yield gets reworked, since the 100% boost at lvl 7 is not only a pain to compete with for new gatherers, but also it's destroying farming as the game progresses. Supply is increasing way faster than demand. It leads to nuked crop prices and demotivated farmers. Or even a lack of farmers because people don't want to go through the trouble. I would personally very much prefer something like a 20% increase at lvl 7.
What if the default yield would be like 3, with gathering max lvl it would be increased by 20%, which yields 3.6 per field (the game could remember the 0.6 for X time and add it to the next harvest of the same crop, resulting in 36 crop for 10 tiles of a crop harvested). This would push towards bigger fields, which is more pretty and probably more fun for farmers.
What if fertilizers would add to this yield instead of just resetting the old value, allowing better yields later in the game, pushing it to 4 (4.8 with max gathering). Would actually make fertilizers more useful. What i mean is at world generation to put the values not at 100% of what they can be.
The gains of these could be:
  • Fertilizers become more important and useful
  • Crops retain value after the first few days because the max yield (including specialization boost) is lower
  • Bigger farms actually make sense
  • Farmers get less demotivated
  • Crop prices might even end up ok
Just using example values btw.