Usually I like to reserve posts for either questions or things of some worth. I don't always do so, and because I generally have so little of worth, I end up with a high frivolous post ratio. That said, I apologize if this is redundant or useless. I know it's just an extremely minor thing.
One thing I find to be too easy is the farming, and one thing I found to fix it, and it really seems to work/balance, is to very simply change the GROWDUR values. The numbers I currently use are the following: 300 --> 1000, 400 (I think that is default. Basically anything that didn't have a specified GROWDUR.) --> 1300, 500 --> 1600. This keeps the ratios approximately the same as before modification.
This has several important effects.
1. it actually takes 1 - 1.6 seasons to grow things. This is relatively realistic, as one of the few crops I know that grow in 30 days (the equivalent of 300 growdur) is radishes, and not much else. Everything else takes 2-3 months at least.
2. Things that are only growable for 2 seasons must now, also accurately, be planted at the right time of the season. If I had Corn and it had GROWDUR:1300, this would be the equivalent of planting at the middle of spring to get a product by the end of summer. If I waited too long to plant, such as doing so in the beginning of summer, heck it just won't let me knowing that it will just fail. And I have done this RL: if you plant at the wrong time (as I did), you aren't going to get any corn.
3. You will be able to support your fort just fine, but you will need more space in which to do it (about 4X as much), and you can't plant plump helmuts to suddenly save the lives of starving dwarves. They will starve long before it is ready.
4. Everything you own will actually be more (to much more) difficult to coat with Dimple Dye dyed Pig Tail Cloth Images. Unfortunately, I too often ended up with a fort able to buy out entire caravans with this tactic after merely 1-2 years. NO MORE can I do this so easily. First, there is either a bottleneck at planters of seeds, or at arable land at first.
5. Your herbalist and what you can find around becomes even more necessary for a fort, as you may need to, depending highly on what you bring, depend on them for the first 1/3-1/2 year. The herbalist also becomes necessary if food ever begins to run short because of shoddy management of resources or unexpected fires. Again, this is because you can't just whip up a pile of plump helmut in 1 month. Farming becomes the society-stabilizing feature it is meant to be, not the instant fix, or the sudden infinite food source upon embark.
Notes:
1. I've yet to experiment with, or pay attention to, how multi-season plots are affected by addition of fertilizer.
2. I have in the past had objections when people thought plants would become unplantable. However the way unplantability works is it takes the growdur, and looks at the number of growdur-ticks until the season in which the plant becomes ungrowable. If the former is larger then the latter, it is marked in red and will not be planted. For example, if put on a 2-season plant with GROWDUR 2000, this means that after 24 GROWDUR-ticks, the plant becomes unplantable. If it was GROWDUR 2024, the plant would never technically be plantable. That said, however, if a plant grows fast enough and has 3 seasons (like peas, which can often get two crops in because of their cold tolerance, since one can plant quite early), it could get two entirely separate crops. Furthermore those plants with all 4 seasons will never encounter an ungrowable season, thus I use, successfully, specialty plants with GROWDUR of 15,000 (just under 4 years). It works.
Author
Topic: A simple plant thing to increase difficulty: (Read 1480 times)