Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Shurhaian]

Right now, farming is overpowered. It is trivially easy, with only a few farmers, to have more food than you'll ever be able to use, or sell without giving the traders an immense profit(or just cutting out the middle man and offering it en masse). Brewing is made a bit more challenging only in that there's trouble keeping barrels in stock, but even that is in large part because of the bloat of edibles. (And that's assuming you aren't getting butchered meat and such.)

Some things could be changed on the growing end - for underground crops, the current seasonal system doesn't even make sense(and above-ground crops SHOULD have seasons), and ideally plants shouldn't get so many times to sow, grow, and reap per year.

But as a measure from the other end - what if the dwarves ate more?

Right now, the main problem with that is that meals and drinking are multiple-day binges. (If your dwarves are artificially fast, meals and drinking become non-problems.) If the meal task was shortened substantially, but dwarves got hungry and thirsty faster, yes, there'd be more traffic to and from the dining room, but each individual meal wouldn't mean so much in terms of task interruption.

Perhaps, in general, the dwarven life cycle should be sped up - get tired somewhat faster, sleep for less time, breaks aren't month-long vacations, and so forth - but speeding up meals and drinking would specifically help to make farming take a little more effort, and may make other methods of providing food more important for a beginning fortress, while not crippling the workforce with the time it would take to consume more meals as they are now.

Addendum: This won't alter the fact that a few farmers can keep a massive fortress provided. About the only way I can see to do that is to put more tasks into farming than the initial sowing. Irrigation and weeding come to mind there.

[existent]

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=22015.0
Check this thread out.

[Shurhaian]

All of which is a more complicated, more finicky approach to the problem and from completely the other end. I don't see anything there about consumption - only production. Consumption is something that could be tweaked(by Toady, though not the players) with, I should think, relatively little difficulty - and ignoring the demand side of the supply/demand balance doesn't seem sound to me, anyway.

That other people have already put thought into the farming end of things is exactly why this thread isn't about that.

(Edit) There's also the fact that the vast majority of things I see about "improving" farming are things that make it more complicated. While this is fine for players who have already mastered it, making all the difficulty of farming come from the supply end through such means makes it harder for new players to get into the game. This approach would require more farms/farmers than are usually necessary at the start of a fortress's life, but they would do so in a very simple way: by increasing the rate at which food is consumed. No extra gimmicks to master about the farming - you just need to do more of it.

[existent]

Because Toady has said he doesn't want to increase the amount dwarves eat in the past.

[thijser]

Well we are dealing with 2 problems here:
1 You can feed some 50 to 100 dwarfs with one farmer
2 Food export is way to profitable.

Now I can see how increasing consumption helps with 1 but that isn't going to help 1 while making production more difficult will make 1 and 2 better.
Now making dwarfs demand shorter meals more often will also make them stop working more often. This will make it difficult if not impasble on some maps to build for example a wall on the other side of the map because your dwarfs will want to eat/drink something before they reach their target.

[NW_Kohaku]

Because Toady has said he doesn't want to increase the amount dwarves eat in the past.

He has said that, but that's not what he meant by it.  What he meant was that he doesn't want dwarves to stop what they are doing to eat more often.  Dwarves currently eat 8 times a year, drink 18 times a year, and sleep about 8 times a year.

This was discussed in Improved Farming, but these two threads are more to the point, however:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=60681.msg1371687#msg1371687

Down with Prepared Meals, especially the parts where we argue about cutting food down to about a quarter vs. just eating a larger stack.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61215.msg1390985#msg1390985

Volume and Mass, where I lobby for making all objects no longer whole-number units, but masses of materials, so that creatures can eat food based upon a percentage of their body mass, which really has to happen if we are going to have animals start eating food, and have elephants balanced out.

There are more, but these stand out in my memory, because I participated in them recently.

(Also, I can't help but notice that you lead off by complaining about how "trivially easy" farming is now, but then say that Improved Farming is "too complex".  Keep in mind that Improved Farming is in the Devpages, which means that odds are, it's going to be going in before this "stopgap" ever gets considered.)

[INSANEcyborg]

I posted something similar in the improved farming thread, only instead of eating more often they eat more at once.  When a dwarf goes to eat, the food gets stored at the table (you can see it with "t").  My idea was to have them collect two or three at a time instead of just one.  The more they eat the longer before they get hungry, with smaller meals being more food efficient while bigger meals having less food breaks and better thoughts.   

[Shurhaian]

This will make it difficult if not impasble on some maps to build for example a wall on the other side of the map because your dwarfs will want to eat/drink something before they reach their target.

I will admit that my perception of such things is somewhat distorted. I simply don't have a machine capable of running such a large map that dwarves don't have time to run back and forth across it multiple times before they need to break for meals, so I hadn't considered that fair point. Obviously, pushing the eating up to that degree would be excessive.

... What he meant was that he doesn't want dwarves to stop what they are doing to eat more often.  Dwarves currently eat 8 times a year, drink 18 times a year, and sleep about 8 times a year.

I can also see where that's coming from - and getting dwarves to go for a drink while they're off work for food(and to be smarter about breaks) is admittedly not easy. Still, part of the problem with the number of times they go off work for food or drink or break is the amount of time they spend at it. Not all of it(see above about interrupting long tasks), but a good chunk at the scale I work on.

... Down with Prepared Meals, especially the parts where we argue about cutting food down to about a quarter vs. just eating a larger stack.

I posted something similar in the improved farming thread, only instead of eating more often they eat more at once.  When a dwarf goes to eat, the food gets stored at the table (you can see it with "t").  My idea was to have them collect two or three at a time instead of just one.  The more they eat the longer before they get hungry, with smaller meals being more food efficient while bigger meals having less food breaks and better thoughts.   

That I may have a look into. Eating more food at once is certainly a way of increasing demand without increasing the time spent.

Volume and Mass, where I lobby for making all objects no longer whole-number units, but masses of materials, so that creatures can eat food based upon a percentage of their body mass, which really has to happen if we are going to have animals start eating food, and have elephants balanced out.

Large and small creatures would be nice to see tuned. It might make it interesting to play a smaller race - they might not dig as fast and they might have trouble lugging heavy stuff around, but they can eke by on less food, and might be able to do more hunting/gathering before they even need to worry about farming at all.

(Also, I can't help but notice that you lead off by complaining about how "trivially easy" farming is now, but then say that Improved Farming is "too complex".  Keep in mind that Improved Farming is in the Devpages, which means that odds are, it's going to be going in before this "stopgap" ever gets considered.)

Funny. Take two quotes out of context and jam them together and yes, they will look odd beside each other.

Once you have the farming infrastructure set up on the current scheme, the only difficulty is in remembering to cook meals / brew drinks now and then. The base supply is a cornucopia that needs no further work put into it. Thus, trivially easy. The suggestions I saw in the "improved farming" thread were more complex to implement and to learn. Changing how fast the dwarves ate was, I thought, something that could be tuned somewhat in the short term without needing to devote an entire development arc to a more detailed rebalance - certainly the detail would be welcome in the long run(so long as it's not done in a way that makes it insanely hard for newcomers to get into at all - this is not metalworking, which can be viewed as optional/longterm, but one of the critical needs of any fort), but this was, I thought, an opportunity to tweak somewhat while devoting more attention, for the time being, to other things.

[Hyndis]

Double or even triple growing time for crops.

Done.

[Shurhaian]

...okay, now I have to point out again: This is about the demand, not the supply, as a possible alternate approach to the problem. There are many, many threads about farming. I couldn't find any with a quick search that seemed dedicated to meals(when I searched, I hit a lot of chaff that only incidentally mentioned it).

[thijser]

Double or even triple growing time for crops.

Done.

Which would mess up the current season system. If you want to look at a diffrend season system based on tempreture go here:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=63653.0

[NW_Kohaku]

Funny. Take two quotes out of context and jam them together and yes, they will look odd beside each other.

oooOOOooh!  Funny, here I thought we were "pleaing for civility", even as we are sarcastically provoking fights with others by claiming they don't know what they're talking about...

Claiming that you were "taken out of context" is the oldest political trick in the book to weasel your way out of hypocritical statements, but let's look at this in its context, then:

Right now, farming is overpowered. It is trivially easy, with only a few farmers, to have more food than you'll ever be able to use, or sell without giving the traders an immense profit(or just cutting out the middle man and offering it en masse). Brewing is made a bit more challenging only in that there's trouble keeping barrels in stock, but even that is in large part because of the bloat of edibles. (And that's assuming you aren't getting butchered meat and such.)

Some things could be changed on the growing end - for underground crops, the current seasonal system doesn't even make sense(and above-ground crops SHOULD have seasons), and ideally plants shouldn't get so many times to sow, grow, and reap per year.

This is EXACTLY the point of Improved Farming - making farming no longer "trivially easy".  It does this by making farming harder, so it is not easy, and more complex, so it no longer takes up just a trivial amount of your time.  In other words, the exact solution to the problem you described.

Then...

There's also the fact that the vast majority of things I see about "improving" farming are things that make it more complicated. While this is fine for players who have already mastered it, making all the difficulty of farming come from the supply end through such means makes it harder for new players to get into the game.

You complain that Improved Farming is NOT a solution because it "makes it harder for new players". 

In other words, being "trivially easy" is a problem, and being "harder" is a problem.  Can someone try and argue some Golden Mean argument without being contradictory?  Certainly, but that's not what you're trying to do.  That's a self-contradiction, and that's totally in-context. 

What's really telling, though, is that this cognitive dissonance speaks to the heart of the problem with the people who argue against complexity in farming:

The problem with farming isn't so much that there's "too much free stuff", it's that, as Footkerchief put it, it's "a free stuff button".  You get something for nothing.  All the food you ever need for free.  So long as it's free, the problem doesn't change, you're just kicking the can down the road a little.  Make dwarves eat twice as much?  Just build twice as many farms.  You're still getting everything for free, it doesn't really change the game in any meaningful way.

If it's "trivially easy" to designate 50 tiles of farm and make one dwarf have a farming labor enabled, how much more difficult is it to designate 100 tiles of farm, and enable farming labor for two dwarves?

If it's "trivially easy" to designate 100 tiles, and enable the farming labor of 2 dwarves, how much more difficult is it to designate 200 tiles, and enable farming for 4 dwarves?

This is exactly the problem with plenty of these "stopgap" solutions, like with making "time slow down" or "adjusting the value of quality modifiers" - when you start arguing over changing the arbitrary value of a hardcoded variable for "balance" purposes, nobody is going to ever agree on what random, arbitrary value you pull out of thin air - some people want it easier, others want it harder, and you're talking about a completley arbitrary value, so it's purely a matter of opinion, and nobody's right, so the winner is the one who shouts most stubbornly.

Just look at the real basic materials in this game: Food, wood, stone, glass, and metal. There's a few other raw materials, but these are the ones that really matter.  With sand on the map, and magma kilns, glass is free - make anything and everything you can out of it.  Stone is free - make anything and everything you can out of it.  Food (including pig tails, bone, and leather) is free - make anything you can out of it.  Wood is limited (if renewable) in supply, so you don't make anything out of wood you can make out of something you have for free, but you still make plenty of barrels and beds and bins of wood.  Metal is the only thing you really have to think about conserving on, especially steel or bluemetal.

Farming needs to become more complex because the problem will never be solved until farming becomes something more than just a "free stuff button".  If you have to WORK for your food, then it becomes something far more meaningful.  Even if wood is common, as long as its a finite resource that is difficult to scale, you have to at least use SOME care as to what you use it for.  That is, of course, unless you go the extra mile and create the (hard and complex to build) tree farm to specifically expand your wood production capabilities.

Keep in mind that in this game, there are no real challenges (aside from rare FBs that have broken breath attacks) to a fort beyond the first couple years.  (Although I certainly have my own arguments for how to fix THAT problem.)  Survival IS the only challenge in this game, and if the game currently makes survival too assured, too easy, then it's not a bad thing to suggest that we make it a little more difficult to just scratch out a homestead and defend it from the wilds.  (And that's ALSO not to say that I haven't thought exactly about how to present this to players in the most meaningful way possible, but rather that making the system complex, meaningful, interesting, and an important, attention-consuming part of a player's fortress design took a higher priority.)

[Shurhaian]

The main reason I thought this might be a quick temporary fix is that it could be implemented relatively quickly. I never intended for it to be the only solution. Thus, "stopgap".

Other than that, I will only say: different people have different notions of "too easy".

[thijser]

A longtherm solution might be to make tiles produce less each time you plant something on it. That way large forts will eventually run out of usefull space to plant plants on. Additionally it might work if you reduce the bonus a planter gets and perhaps make it so that plants grow better if they are maintained. Add the option of a fort attracting pests if you have a lot of fields, and you have a difficult and hard system for old forts while new and passbly newby forts can enjoy the easy things that we are used to.

[NW_Kohaku]

We don't really need a stopgap to hold us over when the farming system is currenty being overhauled.

Just look at the devlog right now.  Toady's currently overhauling how human settlements are built so that they have large numbers of sattelite villages with massive tracts of farming land.

He's talking about the difference it will make in immigration when there are satellite villages to influence rent pricing.

Maybe the actual farm stuff will still be behind Adventurer Skills stuff, but he's still deliberately heading in this direction... and frankly, Toady isn't really one for doing these sorts of "stopgap" solutions.

Especially when the stopgap is just an arbitrary variable being changed to another arbitrary value.  He is, to his credit, a far more holistic thinker than that.