- Watering crops.
Having both drought/overwetting and heat/cold rolled into one seems to be a bit too simple - you can’t get cold weather in the middle of the summer, for instance, so planting cold-sensitive crops is a surefire way to avoid any issues with weather. Same with hot weather in spring or autumn. However, having separate system for water makes agriculture a lot less surefire (as it was in medieval times): you could have a dry hot summer, so the crop that want more water wouldn’t grow too well, or you could have a rainy hot summer, so that crops that don’t fare well in rainy weather would fail.
Not to mention we also could have all the shenanigans in the world for setting up a low-tech irrigation system.
- Field maintenance.
As a person who tried to grow cabbages on the top of the mountain I was seriously disappointed by how easy it could actually be done (flattening the ground over and over was the worst part). Field fertility I think should be moving considerably slower (both up and down), as currently it doesn’t actually take that much time to turn desolate wastes into green gardens (nor it takes long to drive lush green areas into desolation).
Secondly, even the most hardy crops need to fail spectacularly if planted in the rocks. Believe me, I tried (irl). At the moment, peas don’t seem to mind all that much if you just throw them into the barest of the land, if you just remove weeds first.
Finally, the “rockiness” parameter drops down waaaaaay too easily. For a thing that only ever goes down and never up - it should be much (and I mean much) more resistant to change, especially so at higher values - it’s easy to pull some remaining rocks out of your field, it’s much less easy if your field is mostly rock in the first place!
Overall, currently risky agriculture isn’t really all that different from a proper one: you’re simply limited to peas and turnips for a while, and you need one extra year to magically get most rocks out of your field (even if it was mostly a rock in the first place).
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Fertilization
“Next year we’ll dump compost here” seems to be overly simplifed, if we’re having a system here - let it be more granular! Compost should be a properly parcelled item (like “waste” already is), and we should be able to move it to fields in a more granular matter: use only a little for a little fertility boost with no downsides, use more for better boost but also explosive weed growth, and finally use a lot - with heavy risks of crop failure due to over-fertilization (as well as explosive weed growth). -
Pests
We have diseases, so why not have pests too? Unlike diseases, these can easily spread around no matter the distance (not at the game scale), so you can be deeply ****ed if you’re growing mostly the same crop around your town, even if fields aren’t together. However, unlike diseases, you can kinda-sorta suppress pests via manual work, so that’s another important difference.