There are two car dealerships in your town. One sells a Ferrari with 660 horsepower for $400,000. The other is a Toyota dealership, which sells a 200-horsepower Camry for $25,000. Which is the better car?
This question has more than one answer.
If you don’t have $400,000 to buy a Ferrari, there’s no decision. The Camry is your only option.
If you’re a billionaire, the cost probably doesn’t matter to you, and the Ferrari is better.
But if you can afford both, then chances are you look at both and realize that the Camry asks you to pay $125 per horsepower, while the Ferrari is asking you to pay $606 per unit of horsepower.
Unless you’re very rich, the Camry is a better deal.
Not a better car, but a better deal.
So it is with the Farm and the Greenhouse.
In the past, there’s been some discussion comparing Farms and Greenhouses, and some have questioned whether Farms are worth building at all.
But just as with the Camry and the Ferrari, it all depends on context, as we explain below.
It’s true that a Tier 2 Greenhouse has higher overall output than a Tier 3 Farm in most cases. However, this comparison ignores its costs, and the costs usually matter.
Let’s take a look at a sample map. We have four positions, A, B, C, and D, where we're considering placing food-producing buildings:
If you take a look at placing a Tier-3 Farm versus a Tier-2 Greenhouse at each of those positions (in the Greenhouse’s case, the upper-left corner of the GH would go at that tile), you get the following:
The Tier 2 Greenhouse costs 31 Nanites; the Farm costs only 18.
On a per-Nanite basis, the Farm is a much better way to spend your precious Nanites.
Of course, each building also has a power cost to keep it running:
The Greenhouse uses 8 power (at all tiers), and the Farm only uses 5 power (at all tiers). Here, too, a Tier-3 Farm easily beats a Tier-2 Greenhouse in terms of Barley produced per power cost.
The same applies across all crop types.
“Now wait,” you may be saying. “You’re not correcting for the fact that Farms produce nothing in Winter!”
And that’s true. But the same results hold even when you correct for seasonal productivity.
A Farm is productive 111 hours (3 seasons of 37 hours each) of the 167 hours in each Sol – or 66.5% of the sol. The Greenhouse is productive for those same 111 hours and has an additional 50% productivity during Winter, so it’s effectively active for 83.2% of the sol (111 hours + (56 / 2) hours, since Winter lasts 56 hours).
So, if you multiply the numbers in the right-side column for the Farm above by 0.665, and multiply the numbers for the Greenhouse by 0.832 … the same result still holds!
The Tier-3 Farm is STILL a more efficient use of Nanites and Power for any crop than a Tier-2 Greenhouse (I won't post the math here, but it's easy enough to do the math yourself if you don't believe me).
You can also look at it from the perspective of productivity for workers as well. In this case, the Greenhouse is slightly more efficient (in terms of food per worker) after correcting for seasonal productivity than a farm – but the difference is very slight, and arguaby not nearly as relevant as the power and nanite costs.
That's not to say the Farm is "better" in any absolute sense.
Just as with the car example, it’s usually the better deal, despite being less powerful in absolute terms.
Now, some people prefer the Greenhouse since it causes less inventory thrashing.
And that’s fine, and it can be a valid reason for choosing the Greenhouse in your case.
You might also feel that your colony is big and stable and you have plenty of power and Nanites, and it’s just simpler to place Greenhouses than Farms.
And that may be valid too – just as with the wealthy person buying the Ferrari.
But this should make it clear that the Farm is absolutely a good choice in many cases, and is often a better one. In most cases, a Farm at its higher tier is more efficient in terms of both Nanite and power costs than a max-tier Greenhouse.
(As a side note, the Farm has other advantages besides its higher efficiency: it has two smaller upgrade tiers rather than the one large upgrade tier of the Greenhouse, which gives you more flexibility in making decisions about when to upgrade. Also, it can move its farmed tiles, which means you can pave over some of the Farm's farmed tiles later on without having to recycle the Farm. Both of these give you additional flexibility in making decisions, and that flexibility absolutely adds some small amount of additional value to the Farm.)
Aven Colony is a city-builder that asks you to make careful decisions as you scale up your colony. In most cases, a building should be viewed not just in terms of its total output but in terms of its output relative to its cost to purchase it (Nanites) and the cost to maintain it (power usage) ... in the context of all the options it provides and your colony's current situation.
Also, in the long term, we're absolutely considering ading more types of food-producing buildings. We'd love to get your input as to what those should be! Please post your thoughts below.