Big Farm and Economic Development Modeling

I began playing Big Farm Mobile Harvest maybe back in December of last year. It is sort of like a farming version of a city-building game, but it's a bit more economic-development oriented than city-building games tend to be.

I've been playing it a lot. It's been my main game in recent months.

Most city-building games are mostly about creating a built environment and taxes are your main source of income. This game is much more like a business model of revenue generation where you need certain inputs to get certain outputs, plus you need to manage schedules, having enough people available, etc.

I need fields to grow plants that get turned into animal feed so I can produce value-added products. There's a market where I sell this stuff for not only money but also special items (nails, bricks, boards, books, etc) needed to do other things.

There's a lot of juggling involved to try to arrange to keep things flowing smoothly so you have enough resources to keep other things productive. For a time, I had too little productive capacity at the basic level and this was problematic. Then I upgraded my fields in various ways, including simply having more of them, and a lot of the problems I was having promptly resolved.

This sort of thing is why I like the game. I also spent a couple of years attending meetings in town for organizations trying to do economic development around here. This kind of dynamic is remarkably similar to real world economic development challenges I have personally witnessed.

For a time, a local organization was wooing an out-of-town group for an event. From what I heard, the deal fell through because there isn't enough hotel capacity here to support a big event.

In fact, I have heard that a recent study indicated we need something like 200 more hotel rooms in the area just for "normal" usage. So if you wanted to do an event, you probably would need to do some research and come up with a figure a bit higher than that, find some way to woo hotels to the area and then get back with your event organizers and see if they are still interested.

And maybe the local organization had no idea that the lack of hotel capacity would be an issue. It's impossible for me to say if this is something they "should" have known or not. Sometimes you get lessons like that via the school of hard knocks.

But if you are in a small town -- as I am -- or even an unincorporated community, that kind of mistake can be very damaging to your economic development plans. It's a huge waste of limited resources to spend a lot of time wooing an event organizer only to find you don't even have the capacity to host them.

They may never want to talk to you again after you have spent months wasting their time. They may even spread the word or other people may gossip about it, further hindering your ability to make connections.

It may be a huge blow to you psychologically and emotionally. You may feel like a fool and a failure and cringe at the idea of talking to other out-of-towners about your dreams of bringing businesses or events to your area.

If you are in a small community and wanting to do planning and economic development, a good investment of time and energy is developing your mental models and doing research to catalog what resources you currently have before you run around trying to make connections out in the world. Once you have some idea of where you stand and what kinds of things might be a good fit currently with only a little bit of stretching to make it happen, then you are ready to start pounding the pavement (so to speak) and trying to find potential business partners.

Games can be part of your education and research plan. Just make sure to pair it with also reading up on real world economic development.

All modeling tools have their limits and their pitfalls and it is up to the people using them to be aware of that and also beware of it.

A Couple of Old Screenshots

Game Mechanic Tips

A major bottleneck in the system is that you can only construct or upgrade one thing at any given time. So I try to plan what I want to upgrade or construct to some degree to try get as much value as I can out of that.

Though as I have gotten higher in level, I am finding that other bottlenecks are a bigger limiter. I am finding that I spend less time trying hard to keep something under construction (whether new construction or upgrading) at all times because sometimes I am trying to collect enough resources to do a particular upgrade.

One cool game mechanic is that, like with Village City Island Sim, I can move things around after they are built. "Extra" decorations -- things which provide happiness -- can be boxed up and saved for later instead of being destroyed.

Initially, I was simply thrilled because it gives me maneuvering room to rearrange things even on a fully built out map. I don't need to have open space available to rearrange things because I can box up some decorations temporarily to free up enough space to move some things around.

But then I realized that it also means I can fill empty land when I buy new land, even if something is under construction. Boxing and unboxing decorations is unrelated to construction, so if I keep some "extras" on hand, I can immediately fill up newly purchased land, even though it may be enother twelve hours before some upgrade is done.

Higher happiness lowers the dollar cost of stuff, so it's actually very useful to keep extras on hand and to unbox a bunch of decorations immediately to fill up empty land I just bought. Plus it means that when I upgrade to better decorations (in terms of density of happiness points), the resources expended were not wasted.

Though, to be honest, I have cashed out some old decorations. That's also an option. So while I do keep some extras on hand, I don't keep a huge backlog of stuff in store.

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