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[Truean]

Area and Subarea Usage: Rough Theoretical Discourse. High Information Density. 38B(Gamma)

Area map scale issue, how many farms can Area X hold? Many factors, fertility, farming technology, fertilization, water and pest presence, etc. Solution, abstraction of factors into how many farm plots Area X can hold. More of aforementioned factors = abstractly more farm plots, effectively. Example rule, fertile subarea reflects fertility by "holding" more farm plots; infertile subarea reflects infertility by "holding" less farm plots. Example result, Fertile subarea "holds" 43 farm plots; infertile subarea "holds" 7. This only applies abstractly to formulas for crop production, but graphically and "in game" whole area is "farmed." This reflects an "average" plot of average fertility applied to varying soil and crop production factors across territories, and may change if factors change, such as irrigation, fertilizer application, etc.

Application: Portion of Land area "stat card."  (VERY abridged).
____________________________________________________________
Western Forvia's Plain
Subplots Total:
Growing: 34
Fishing: 5

Very gently rolling grassland, with a trout stocked pond (mid south).  Rich black topsoil, thin clay layer, limestone bedrock, and minor copper ore deposits. VERY light maple tree presence. Light blueberry presence.
_____________________________________________________________

This presents an at-a-glance view of an area for development. It has a Growing stat (number of "farm plots" it can have) of 34, fairly high. Small pong fishing is possible, as is chopping down a few maple trees, and picking some wild blueberries. This is simplified, other stats might be present as well.

All of this goes to answer questions of what can be done in and with the area. Potential development options include farming all or a portion of it (abstractly a portion of 34 available). Of course, building construction is also an option within this area. Everything has dependencies, from how much farming labor is required, to possible machine maintenance if those are used for irrigation pumping. Other factors may include infertile spots (exposed rock, ledges, paved roads, etc). These stat cards can hold all those input factors used previously in the foraging and farming sections, such as undergrowth or natural springs, etc, which make things easier or harder on skill checks.

Moreover, if a coordinate system with directory were put in place, it would be easier to determine exactly where this area is, and what areas border this area. This may matter for features spanning multiple areas: examples include streams, rivers, roads, canals, etc.

All that stuff about farming previously listed, feeds into this.

Why does this matter to players:

This presents a base for choices. Development choices include developing farming with minor fishing, and there's limestone under this area (potentially if you can know it is there and get it somehow under the rich soil and clay). This may yield food needed to support civilians and soldiers, or other crops. Alternatively, this area may serve as pastureland for livestock with water sources for them (assuming you might want to fence them in and make a barn?).

You want to build a town or a fort and have an army? This is part of how you feed it. If you want a trade empire, maybe you grow spices and this is relevant to how. Perhaps you use food as a diplomatic bargaining chip to secure alliances.... Perhaps you starve out the enemy....

[Truean]

Simplified food consumption model: Rough Theoretical Discourse, Abridged, 39A (Beta)

Food/Crop Stat Basics:
More complex food consumption model exist. This is a simplified version. Food has four primary purposes, nourishment, happiness, health, and improvement; it is stat scored and effectively divided into groups based on this.

Nourishment (Food): Staple foods, grain (bread), rice, potatoes, certain edible dwarven fungi etc, form the bases of most meals, and have a high nourishment value. Note, some happiness, health, and improvement may also be gained. Assumes food is not rotten. Cooking/preparation may modify or be needed (bread). 

Happiness: Concerning taste, spices, garnishes, sides, sauces, marinades, broths, dips, etc, primarily provide with happiness. Happiness begins subjectively and is modified by subjective measures (how much the consumer likes or hates the item(s) ). Moreover, variety is the spice of life, and spices bring happiness. Also, though overeating may be bad (health, etc) sometimes it's nice to eat more than the minimum.... Don't overdo it though. Eating the same thing day in and day out, may not bode well for happiness. Note that happiness may come from sources beyond food.

Health: Some foods are healthy, others less so. Sometimes the unhealthy ones provide happiness (junk food). Eating nothing but empty calories won't help (fast food). Eating fresher foods will help. Eating rotten or ill preserved food will hurt. Medicines may also fall in this area, penicillin is a mold, after all....

Improvement: Well fed is better able. Ill fed less so.... Armies march on their stomachs. Further still, discontent and unhappiness aren't productive. These can boost rolls, or conversely detract from them. One could think of medicines as being here, to a point. Any improvement values are, to some degree dependent upon Nourishment, Happiness and Health Values.

Food Consumption: Basics:

Living things need maintenance: here, eating. In the simplified model, your average person needs the food grown from average one plot area per time period to survive. Herding, fishing, or hunting also use this metric, but indirectly, as your average person needs the meat fish, etc, from one average plot area to per time period to survive. This is a base maintenance showing simplified numbers on how many people can be supported by what level of staple food production. This assumes a stable food with a high nourishment value. Happiness/taste etc is somewhat different, and like health and any .

This implies and applies the following. If you have 38 people, then you need 38 stable food (High nourishment value). The nourishment value has to equal 1 and comes in percentages of 1. Let's say for various reasons, the 38 food units (supported by 38 farm plots or area plots somehow) is cooked, or baked into bread or what have you, and this reduces the nourishment value to 0.75 (as an example), but the cooking provides a boost to happiness and health.... This simply means you need more food and is an "is" over "of" equation.

38
75

X
100

Solve for X. 38 * 100 = 3800. 3800 / 75 = 50.6 (repeating). So in that case you'd need a little more than 50 units of food to survive (and gain the cooking boosts to happiness and health, etc).

Remember the post immediately above this one about area and subarea usage? That helps answer how many of those "plot areas" exist to be farmed in a given area.... Those plot areas are the supporting measure to determine how much food is produced (and implicitly take into account more or less fertility via more or less plot areas in a given place).

So let's say your 38 people are going to require ... 51 units of food (round up) to survive the time period in question. Let's assume each farm plot area does well (rolls well on the food production roll) and produces 1 unit of food per farm plot area. Now let's factor in the geography and say there are 9 areas around the town corresponding to the cardinal directions (N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW). The soil fertility isn't exactly awesome but it breaks down to each of these areas having the follow example number of plots for our purposes here:

Oversimplified example~
N: 7 Plots
NE: 5 Plots
E: 6 Plots
SE: 10 Plots
S: 12 Plots
SW: 10 Plots
W: 9 Plots
NW: 8 Plots
Total Immediate Area Plots available: 67

This means a few things. First, the southern area is most fertile  of these, as are the areas around it. Second, 51 - 67= 16 plots not strictly required for staple food production (assuming no crop failure and average harvest as said above, one crop harvest a year, adequate steady labor, no pests, etc). Those 16 Plots of land could be used for other things, and assuming they're farmland (not woods, or other), they could be used to grow cooking crops, or surplus trade crop (spices, garnishes, etc), and these could either go into the food, or something traded.... Third, this place isn't very food secure, one crop failure and it has a problem. This of course assumes that only the area immediately around the place is usable for farming. To feed any expanding population, the place is going to need to either gain access to more territory (and set it up as proper farmland or something to produce food), or improve what it has. It can improve what it has in many ways, including irrigation, fertilization etc etc). In other words, it can grow (figuratively) vertically or horizontally. More people would need more food. More food would need more area plots.... Area plots can be gotten by getting other areas, or improving the ones you have (to a point).


Note, this post isn't about cooking, which is a separate post, but it's relevant for consumption purposes, because cooking essentially consumes food, or rather the nourishment value of it in the abstract to give other benefits (taste, sometimes preservation, etc). Cooking has thus far, only minimally been covered and not in the simplified sense of things.

[Truean]

I.) Economics, Production, and Trade.
II.) Presence in an area.
III.) Art Asset Updates

I.) Economics, Production, and Trade.

Another aspect is ownership or influence in productive matters: guilds, workshops, mills, trading companies, caravans, ships, warehouses, etc.

You can think of these economic entities as other characters you can interact with and / or control in a sense (hypothetically of course). They need things (much as organic things need food) as inputs or necessaries. They produce things/have abilities (effectively). Details vary with culture, and to some extent, individual customization and world influences.

Control over a whole "fortress" to make the analogy to a DF game term I don't use, would be a fairly rare thing overall, unless somebody specifically worked towards that goal. Even then, not quite an easy thing.

There can be de facto "political" (economic politics and government politics) that deal with distribution and production of goods. Trading can be a major thing. It can shape entire regions and even societies.

II.) Presence in an area.

Wherever you go, there you are. So you're standing, sitting or laying down somewhere. You may be in a village, a city, a wilderness area (above or below ground), or you could be on some mount/mode of transportation. You could be in a southwestern region of the ____ forest in that otherwise green blotch on the usual game map....

So what?

If you're somewhere, then what does that mean? For starters, it means you're not somewhere else, but you could be with travel. It also means you can do things in the area you're at (actions you can attempt to take). Much as in real life, you can perhaps hunt or attempt to in a forest. Or you can attempt to alter the place where you are. You can interact with any possible other individuals or things nearby. It's fairly open.

This may seem like common sense, but it's actually it's somewhat profound in a way. In a sense, it's the whole point of the game. Well, it's this and recording what players and others do in this sense.  It's also hard to explain sometimes, what you're doing in a place that is imaginary and doesn't exist in the real world.... Many a game has sunk due to this.

III.) Art Asset Updates

Still a work in progress and a spare time one at that. that said, the work is coming along nicely, as the idea is to have multiple different pallets to use. Oddly enough I'm running into scaling problems. My trees (as posted here and elsewhere), don't retain detail when zoomed out to show larger areas (and more trees usually). Of course the transparency effect both, a.) doesn't scale with zoom outs, and b.) has always been problematic. It's hard to, for example, show that tall grass is growing under the area covered by the tree's leaves in addition to elevation and slope effects. It's not something that can be easily done by static pictures. There are solutions, but work intensive ones my health currently has put on hold.

Questions:

A.) Given that static images can only convey so much, would dynamic images work?
B.) Is it overly difficult to construct something along the lines of a GIF using multiple pictures?
C.) Perhaps I might be able to make the equivalent of a GIF combining multiple pictures of the same map area, i.) tree canopy coverage, ii.) area view beneath tree canopy coverage, iii.) inhabitant/political information. iv.) topographical information (rudimentary lines and slopes), v.) economic/informational. vi.) Possible "z" level showings
D.) Are these things memory/resource intensive?

Does that make sense to people? Essentially the idea is a slide show on a loop (GIF?) showing different information about the same area through multiple maps of that area.

[Calidovi]

PTW, seems an intriguing idea.

[Skyrunner]

I'm not sure if I ptw'd here or not... so here goes :v

[hops]

PTW

[Cerapter]

I'm not sure how I've never noticed this thread before, but that I did, PTW.

[Truean]

Slots, the all important mechanic Simplified Version

So I've been tossing and turning over how on earth to standardize things like land area, building size, production from that, etc. I might be on the way to figuring it out: Slots. It's a simplified way to standardize things and give a basis to space and math for creating/ producing things:

Slots in Nature:

Picture a natural area: forest, grassland, swamp, etc. Let's say a grassland. How many farms, pasture lands, buildings, etc, can you put on that grassland. Answer, that's as many Total Slots as the area has, and here that's 17 or it's the denominator of 0/17. That doesn't mean you necessarily have to have 17 separate things. Assuming you want to / can fill up all 17 slots (the whole area) you can have many small things, or fewer and larger things. Do you want / can you have 17 small farms, or one large one the size of 17 of those small farms? Maybe some mixture of the two?

[Name of Grassland]
Total Slots 0/17
1 Farm Field 4/17
2 Farm Field 3/17
3 Farm Field 7/17
Free 3/17

The above gives you 3 farms, one of them the size of four small ones, another the size of 3 small ones, and the final one the size of 7. 3 Standard slot units are free and undeveloped. That may change if players want/are able to change that. This is a fairly small grassland, actually.

Slots in Above Ground Buildings:

Let's look at that Grassland again and those 3 free slot spaces .Let's say those are close together, because that way we can build a building on it that's slot size 3.... Just like with the farm fields, we can make one large building using all the space we have, or we can have more smaller buildings. As you can imagine, this means those three slots, if used for a large 3 slot unit farm house, can potentially hold 3 slots worth of separate rooms.... (bedroom, kitchen, living, etc)....

This gives us

[Name of Grassland]
Total Slots 0/17
1 Farm Field 4/17
2 Farm Field 3/17
3 Farm Field 7/17
Farm House 3/17 (1 bedroom,1 Kitchen, 1 living room)

Slots in Above & Below Ground Buildings

Now add Z levels.... It's the same idea as before, but in 3 dimensions, this time height. Essentially, you're doing the same as above with the "Slots in Above Ground Buildings" part, except again for another layer. This is how you can have underground layers, or a second story on a building....

______________________________________________________________________________________________

As a preview, slots are incredibly important, because they influence lots of things like production, storage, need satisfaction, etc. Clearly, a larger carpenter shop will have more room and be able to hold more workers to create more wood works faster..... That is, the more slots that carpenter shop has, the more production it's capable of.... The more slots devoted to bedrooms, the more people can get sleep and room requirements they need (also the more slots each person's bedroom is, the larger it is, and the more luxurious under normal circumstances). Storage Areas with more slots devoted to them can store more materials, causing fewer work stoppage and providing more breathing room for haulers.

Players want to create more of something, devote more slots to allow more workers to contribute to creation.... Those workers fit into those slots.... The more workers working on something, the more labor is available to create that something. This may mean things get created faster, or better, or with less strain. Also, some infrastructure / equipment takes up a slot, but provide some benefit (heavy custom forges might take up a slot, but you can smelt better and forge better with them).

Now in some cases, you won't be able to use all of a given area's slots without some kind of infrastructure, depending upon what you're trying to do with it. I won't go into specifics here, but unless the land is incredibly fertile or fertilized you can't just have an entire area be farm fields. You might also need roads, or irrigation. Buildings may also need hallways, or stairways/ramps to connect multiple Z levels. Clearly, sometimes you'll have natural features that take up slots, such as a river, and you're going to need that to do things with boats or perhaps water sources. You might be able to theoretically put in a canal where there is no river for boat traffic, and a road doesn't seem to be desirable for some reason, but a dock needs say.... water.

Moreover to create that farmhouse listed above requires a certain amount of resources and one of those is labor. Another might be either stone or wood or some combination of the two. That's another benefit of "slots" as a simplification method, size is somewhat determined by the amount of materials used in construction which will inform the amount of labor needed. In other words, a slot will take X materials, Y Labor, and Z Time to create.... Depending upon what's going to be filling that slot.

Finally, for a more complicated version, all those previously mentioned production roll formulas listed in older posts. More slots generally = better facilities and space so that will increase the success probability, and conversely less slots will have the expected effect..... Thus, space, labor, and productivity are somewhat linked.

[Truean]

Random and semi random events: (draft: Soon to be redone)

Card games, board games, computers, and good RPGs have dynamic events. You don't know what is going to happen next neccessarily. Yet, randomly shuffled card decks can be predicted a bit, and that adds a layer to the game that can be as simple or complex as you want. Basically, it is a way to have different things happen at different times to spice things up in many areas: combat, crafting, etc. Here's the template (hurriedly done, will be fixed later):

(Circumstance Type: Combat, Crafting etc)
(Dice Range) (Effect)
(Dice Range) (Effect)
(Dice Range) (Effect)

Combat Circumstance:
1 Slight Negative Effect
2 No Effect
3,4 Positive effect A
5,6 Positive effect B

Again, this is over simplified, but imagine a card deck with a small number of cards in it. Shuffle, draw one. It has an effect on it that happens. Now imagine you can influence or pick what that card says/it's effects.... You essentially customize the possibilities of the circumstance / luck roll. Speaking of luck, imagine luck as a character stat that influences both how good a circunstance roll you make and what circumstances (cards) are there.....

More luck will mean better results for rolls and better possibile outcomes (cards). The impact is potentially large because it spices up a dull game and adds useful things.

(draft)