When creating multiple farms, each new one adds a set of farmers even before the farm is completed. This means if you pause construction, a tonne of villagers are now defined as farmers and are no longer able to be builders or labourers. This can mean by adding one farm that the pool of labourers is reduced to 0 during construction, even if it’s paused.
Farmers shouldn’t be allocated in this manner, it should depend on completed fields. It makes no sense to suddenly double the farmer count when a farm is not built, for example. Every other building works this way - people are not allocated as workers until the building is completed.
This is not a bug as only farmers can build farms.
This is extremely unclear. The labour icon for construction is the same as every other icon, and the description for farm does not say ‘This can only be built by farmers, not builders’. If it is by design that only farmers can build farms, then this must be clear to the players.
How else are players supposed to know that only farmers build farms, as the only exception to the rule that builders construct everything?
Maybe think of it this way. When you construct a building in real life you hire builders to do that. But would you hire builders to plow/prepare a field for planting? No, of course not. Builders wouldn’t know how to do that, but farmers do. So you’d hire farmers to prepare your fields and look after them. That is what the farmers are doing in the game. Once your labourers have cleared any trees/stones from the crop field area farmers go in and work the land to get it ready to plant your crops.
I guess if you’re really that low on labourers you could reduce the farmer numbers in the professions window and untick the auto refill so they don’t get automatically added again. But then you’d have to remember to put them back when you want to start work on the field again.
I understand the real-world logic of it, but it should be written clearly for new and returning players.
Learning the mechanics of a game logic should not be trial and error, and leaving this unexplained will inevitably lead to confusion and frustration, for what should be easily solved with some explainer text.
This should not be a point of contention - new players will come across this and it will cause confusion. Some text to explain why this is the case will solve the problem before it occurs! Trying your players how to play your game should not be an issue.
Please consider adding some explainer text.
I assure you it is trial and error to learn mechanics of almost every single game out there.
You fail here simply by assuming the field is “built” and that creates your confusion, it has never even came to my mind it could be done by builders 
What would be useful when building fields is to have an indication of the number of farmers needed to build that field, scaled depending on the size of the new field. Right now, even when a field is being built, the construction tab doesn’t even give us the number of farmers working on it. It’s okay when you have plenty of laborers, but when you don’t, it can create the situation olileauk described, which can be frustrating.
The game already tells you when you lay out a field how many farmers will be assigned to that field - field size 9x10, workers 8. The number goes up or down depending on the size of the field.
Damn, didn’t see that before. Thanks!