Another thing I wanted to propose... IMO ALL harvestables should eventually upgrade into the Farmscraper (erm... Vertical Farm)
That won't work very well.
Doing that will cause tech bonus to improvements to all have the same values. This means you can't differentiate between a tech which should grant a bonus to plantation chain vs a tech that should grant a bonus to pasture chain or farm chain improvements, its all or nothing. (At least not without adding new xml tags) This is also why, even though it makes sense semantically, a future Cinnamon resource and the current Rubber resource is not going to be in Orchard chain, even though they are tree oriented. This is because the orchard chain has specific food bearing tech bonus which would make no sense being attached to an Rubber "orchard" and so on...
Other examples:
Plough doesn't make much sense to be added to Orchards
Spice and Drug Trade doesn't make much sense to add to farms (well some farms, but those farms are really plantations which do support it) Spice and Drug trade doesn't make much sense being applied to a pumpkin/wheat/rice etc farm.
you could do it with multiple versions of the Vertical farm, but you still need separate improvements for each, you can then custom tailer the yields and tech for those alternate chain improvements.
EDIT:
A more through analysis (based on the charts on page 7 and 9 in the Improvements discussion thread)
Assuming a player has max techs a vertical farm will provide at the most: +21
, +0
, +6
Switch from an Orchard to a Vertical farm will trade a minimum of 1:commerce
The best Orchard (dependent on underlying map resource) will give (+4 to +6)
, +0
, (+7 to +9)
This means giving up an orchard for a Vertical farms will result in a net loss of (-1 to -3)
and a gain of (+15 to +17)
and the loss of the underlying map resource.
Changing a plantation to a vertical farm will result in a net loss of (-5 to -7):commerce and a gain of +21
and the loss of the underlying map resource.
Changing a pasture to a vertical farm will result in a net loss of (0 to -2)
, a net gain of (+17 to +20)
and a net gain of (+4 to +6)
and loss of the map resource
Swapping a mushroom gatherer to a vertical farm will result in all gains apart form the loss of the resource.
The loss of the resource in all the cases can be eliminated by making the resource valid for the vertical farm. The question is though, should they be? (For mushrooms, I'd say yes, as they don't do much else)
It possible some other additional late game tech might help up the gains for orchards and plantations, to make it a more difficult choice.
As for pastures..... We may want to do something completely different, make them all obsolete with a lab-grown meat tech. Then make them just upgrade into the wildlife sanctuary.
