Current field implementation have several drawbacks:
- it should be disfavored in start game (berries and hunt are to be preferred) while still possible as some maps miss enough other resources.
- it should be more sensitive to raids (a raid which does not destroy a field but severely damage it should have an effect on its gather rate, while currently it's enough to garrison its gatherers and wait for the end of the storm)
To solve that, i had proposed some changes some time ago (see some discussion of this concept in https://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?/topic/20406-changes-in-farms/ ) which i've revived here in a working patch. The main ideas are:
- the gather rate depends on the health of the field (which symbolize their fertility)
- the fields are now built very quickly (15s build time), but their initial health is only a small fraction of the max health (30% in the patch), and thus the initial gather rate is small (30% of its full value)
- the field health increases slowly when it is gathered, and decreases when no gatherers (so in case of raid, if we garrison all our farmers, the productivity of the fields will decrease, possibly up to the destruction of the field).
- the initial increase of health when worked on is relatively slow and the initial decrease of health when unattended relatively large, so that fields are less an interesting source of food at start game, until we have researched the irrigation (available only at town phase) which improves the increase of health when gathered and reduces the decrease when unattended.