Farms are a type of farm building in Napoleon: Total War.
Description[]
Tenant farmers add to the agricultural wealth of a region and improve military replenishment.
Tenanted farms primarily produce cash crops. The landlord expects his rent to be paid, but successful tenants who develop the land can become quietly wealthy men. They may be able to buy their farms.
Historically, tenanted farms made a good profit but, like all farming, were subject to the vagaries of the weather. Crops failed with terrible regularity, forcing up food prices and causing social unrest.
Tenancies could be, and were, passed down the generations of families, something that allow tenants to see a point in developing "their" land with their cash surplus. For a landlord the main benefit of tenanted farms was the income. Landlords cold live the high life in a city and rarely needed to trouble themselves with the mud and muck of the countryside, at least as long as they had trustworthy agents and tenants! A leisured class of "gentlemen farmers" and rentiers therefore arose, all thanks to the efforts of tenant farmers. As a class, landowners suffered terribly in the French Revolution as the peasants who actually did all the work took bloody revenge for years of ill treatment.
General Information[]
Due to their very cheap cost and their short time to build, farms pay for themselves quickly, taking between 8 to 12 turns (including build time) to pay for themselves depending on the tax rate of the region. The economic benefits they generate in the long term are small but their cost is so low that there isn't much opportunity cost to building them. Farms also increase replenishment rates by a minimal amount, stacking with the replenishment benefits of technologies and other buildings in a region. As most farm resource locations begin each campaign with a farm already established, and as most other replenishment buildings and technologies are not available from the very beginning of the campaigns, regions with farms are usually the best locations for which to let damaged armies recover their strength.
Unlike in Empire: Total War, farms and their variants do not increase population growth, which in itself is not as major of a mechanic in Napoleon: Total War.
The Peninsular Campaign[]
In The Peninsular Campaign, farms require 150 gold and 2 turns to build.