As we go into the third game year of farming, I have a bunch of changes based on our review of the prior two.

Multiple farms
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You can now purchase deeds to buy more farmland! This comes with a few other changes. Details as follows:

* You can BUY FARMLAND DEED while standing at the entrance of your city's farmland territory to purchase a new deed.
+ Deeds cost credits to buy at a scaling cost based on how many deeds/farms you already have.
+ First deed/farm is free (given to you when you acquire the skillset)
+ Second deed/farm costs 10cr
+ Third deed/farm costs 20cr
+ Fourth deed/farm costs 30cr
+ Fifth deed/farm costs 40cr

* These deeds can only be used on the farmland area you buy them at.

* Maximum of five deeds/farms currently! We may expand this further in the future.

* FARM LIST now exists to see a list of farms you own.

* You can FARM CLOSE while standing at the entrance of your farm plot to permanently close it.

* Farms will now be automatically closed if you go inactive for 30 days, or if you lose the Farming skillset.
+ This is being applied retroactively, so some farms may disappear soon after this post.

* When a farm is closed by any means, the owner will get a deed placed back in their inventory.

* Deeds returned in such a way will always be bound to the same farmland area as the one they were originally purchased for.

* You can ARTIFACT <deed> TRADEIN to get rid of a deed at the usual 2/3rds tradein price.


Caravan adjustments
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There is now only one caravan departure per game season. These caravans will depart randomly 24 to 96 hours after a season ends. i.e. the first possible time it could depart is 24 hours after a season ends, and the last possible time it could depart is 96 hours after a season ends. Essentially, a 72 hour window for caravan departure.

* This change means shipping will now add your goods to the end-of-season caravan instead of prepping a new caravan delivery.

* Once a season ends, there will be a room-message at each farmland that indicates a caravan is being prepared for departure. This message disappears once a caravan has departed.
+ Intended to give enemies/raiders a way to check if they need to bother keeping an eye on that caravan route anymore.

* The idea here is to give a more predictable timeframe for when a caravan will be happening, and hopefully generate some conflict in regards to caravans. The 24-72 hour period per season will also ensure a city doesn't have to spend too much time securing caravan routes or removing enemy aegises from them.

* I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that the Trade ministry has a command that makes a caravan depart immediately, with a global announcement. They can also see the exact departure time for their city's caravans.
+ Note that the departure time isn't determined until the end-of-season happens, however.
+ Early delivery cannot be forced until after end-of-season, too.


Village comm shop adjustments
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The rate at which villages produce wood, cloth, rope and leather for their shops has been slowed down by about 30%.


Production Adjustments
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Since quantity of farms is going to be increasing, there's some tweaks to production numbers to go with it too.

* Cost per game week per apprentice is now 500 gold if you have the Perquisites perk active. Cost without perk active remains unchanged.

* Level 3 Clothier now produces cotton:cloth at a conversion rate of 2:1 (previously 1:1).

* Sped up the base TPI on the Clothier by roughly 15%.

* Slowed down the base TPI at Lumber Mill by roughly 20%.

* Slowed down the base TPI at the Tannery by roughly 30%.

Further adjustments will likely come once we've had an opportunity to review how multiple farms ends up impacting things.


Expectations
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The combination of Facility TPI and their conversion rates, as well as the total number of farms, allow us to control the amount of commodities that get created into the game. Obviously the one we (admin) have most control over is facility TPI and conversion rates, as farms are a far harder variable for us to quantify (depends on number of people, what they decide to produce, etc). These facility numbers will definitely by subject to further tweaking as we continue to monitor input and output.

We expect that with multiple farms, comm production is going to bottleneck here (intentionally so!) so we would ask you take that into consideration before deciding what to focus your farm towards. Everybody going all in on pine or cotton across all their farms is almost certainly going to bottleneck, and you will essentially be producing waste cotton as a city won't be able to process it faster than you can produce. If you end up finding your farm producing excess, maybe give Provisioning a try and focus one of your farms on completing market orders for that!

Throttling in this way is a necessity for us, otherwise the market will just become flooded with commodities. We'll be trying to operate the commodity flow at a slow, global net surplus.

It may take us a while to get the numbers to the exact place we want them, so please have patience with us as we continue to tweak things in the future!

Penned by my hand on Falsday, the 10th of Ios, in the year 484 MA.
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