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[NW_Kohaku]

Complicated? A single full 1*10 ditch with a 7 square moisture spread would moisten 350 squares on its own. Double the moisturizing range, and it would be 1092 squares... for just one unremarkable channelette that even an untrained miner can dig out faster than cats breed. A channel replaces a lot of manual labour by the dwarves with a bit of planning by the player, which is just the effect we need. If you consider the bucket brigade a more economical use of dwarfpower, that'll still be available as well.

Considering their depth, most irrigation (or drainage) ditches afk are just the height a dwarf would drown in. A dwarf that can't swim nor pull himself up on the edge, that is. While the dwarves wouldn't get much bang for their buck by learning to swim (short legs, ya know), grabbing the edge is a trick they will master soon enough. And that's assuming a full ditch: a climate that needs irrigation ditches will usually see them no more than at height 3-4.

Finally, why shouldn't plants be able to use the moisture from non-irrigation ditches?

The problem comes when this essentially just turns into, from a gameplay standpoint, simply one more spike on the learning curve.  Yes, the more experienced players can easily handle automated pressure-plate-based water channels fed by water reserves, but quite a few new players find nothing but Fun when they start messing with water. 

As it stands, the people who have plenty of experience with water already will spend about 3 more minutes designing a resevoir, and then the entire mechanic of needing to water crops will be completely meaningless - they have jumped that hurdle once, and never will have to do it again.

The new players, however, now have to learn how not to kill themselves making an irrigation "ditch" deep enough to drown their dwarves within. 

It doesn't wind up adding anything to the play experience (basically being just building the exact same farm you've always built, but with a trench down the middle this time, and one more trick with water resevoirs), while punishing those not yet familiar with the system.  While there's plenty of ways that new players can kill themselves, not being able to do something as basic as FEEDING themselves without tunneling a resevoir and building a floodgate-and-pressure-plate system to provide precisely 4/7 water is a little extreme.  At the very least, a bucket brigade would wind up actually causing more labor to be consumed, which addresses the complaint of allowing a single legendary farmer to feed a full fortress, without requiring any more work than what the fort's well already takes.

This is where I have to go back to saying that "realism" should not be the (sole) objective - that it should be what the player is expected to do with the system that should be the goal. 

Getting players to have a chance to set up crop rotation schedules to maximize gain, but still be able to work on the fly, so long as they have extra farmland that they can leave fallow lets more experienced players have a little something to focus in on, while letting less experienced players slide by with somewhat sloppy work.  Players can go on and modify and extend such a farm to suit their needs. 

Filling a trench with water once, then never touching it again, however, is just a way to punish a lack of forethought, which isn't the same thing as rewarding further planning.  It loses all meaning once built, except as a roadblock to further farm expansion (you'll have to dig that trench further to make your farms larger, and that will mess up your precise trench-flooding mechanism).  It hinders instead of enables.

I'm all for adding complexity to a system that is too simple... but keep in mind that even for all the complexity of modelling the exact melting points of various materials in this game, the only thing that it really comes out meaning to players is "Build anything that touches magma with bauxite mechanisms instead of other stones", and you're through.

This, then, comes back to what it should mean to the player to have water required to run a farm.  I'm a little conflicted on the subject of a special irrigation ditch and a matching pump or sluice gate, but it would afford the player a menu where they could set it for the farmers to fill or empty irrigation ditches, depending upon the requirements of the crops in question.  Even better would be if you could simply shovel over irrigation ditches the way you can remove ramps, without having to build walls on the floor below to "undig" a trench.  That would allow for more easily extensible farmlands.

Still, even that, I have to wonder if simply letting it go by bucket brigade wouldn't be better, as it would at least be giving out a little more labor for the whole thing (better if watering gave experience, instead of just being another hauling task), making feeding a fortress take at least a half dozen dwarves.

[Silverionmox]

I really don't find it difficult to learn. 1. Plants need water. 2. Water flows in channels. Players that can't put two and two together and try to put a ditch near their fields... I've given up on them already. I agree that there should be the opportunity to learn why plants can't grow in a given spot: that's better accomplished by making a fertility analysis screen available at the press of a button next to the screen place where one chooses the crops to be planted.

Learning to fine-tune the water heights is further on the learning curve, and rightly so. One can just put the option on in a plant zone: "Water plants as needed." The game would compare the tolerance level for the plants with the moisture in the soil and fetch a dwarf if it's getting low. If  the player wants to spare the labour for that task for something else, he'll deal with planning, digging and filling the channels. If he wants to commit further effort to reducing the drawbacks of channels, he can deploy grates on top of them, he can automate the floodgate that fills them or fine-tune the water level in them. That sounds like a fine learning curve where every step is optional, but still gives advantages.

The game doesn't need to be fool-proof; losing is fun.
Or simply use ramps for the ditches instead of channeling them out.
Or just wait until dwarves are less suicidal. If dwarves drown in ditches, it's because they can't pull themselves up on the edges yet, not because channels are so deep.

It does add depth to farming, because different plants will need different moisture levels to grow optimally, and you can't just embark in a sand desert and expect a copious crop of strawberries anymore.

not being able to do something as basic as FEEDING themselves without tunneling a resevoir and building a floodgate-and-pressure-plate system to provide precisely 4/7 water is a little extreme.

That's a caricature. The bucket brigade would still be available (standard, even) and building channels instead is just an option. You can even combine them, the bucketeers will still come if your channel doesn't work for some reason. You could even designate the irrigation ditch as a pond and keep it filled with buckets if you don't trust your floodgates.
If you embark on an aquifer, both irrigation and watering are not necessary anyway... Also, weather effects will come. No plant would need precisely 4/7 water in the ditch - at most in the soil (except for a few types of rare, fickle orchids maybe, at the modders discretion.. even then, an aquifer or channel at the right distance would provide just that.). A typical plant would have a tolerance range of say 2 to 6. Putting in Noob Moss with a tolerance range of 0-7 is trivial.

(You seem to oscillate between 'too hard for newbies' and 'too easy for veterans', though...)

Trying to determine the exact numbers of farmers a player will need is pointless at this stage. The numbers (How much time does this task cost? How fast do dwarves walk? How much food does a dwarf eat? How much do the plants yield? How much plants does one need to feed a dwarf? etc.) can and will change until the very last beta stages... and long after, in the mods.

[Kilo24]

I really don't find it difficult to learn. 1. Plants need water. 2. Water flows in channels. Players that can't put two and two together and try to put a ditch near their fields... I've given up on them already. I agree that there should be the opportunity to learn why plants can't grow in a given spot: that's better accomplished by making a fertility analysis screen available at the press of a button next to the screen place where one chooses the crops to be planted.

This makes waterless maps harder to do much in.  Additionally, it forces new players to worry about another significant part of the game, making it difficult to get a self-sustaining fortress.

My own thoughts are that, without modding, players should be able to maintain a sustainable food supply pretty easily in favorable biomes (not necessarily in a desert or on a glacier).  Whether that's through farming, hunting or fishing isn't as important as not forcing players to learn an intricate system to be able to simply feed their dwarves and therefore be able to do anything else in the game.  Currently, farming is the only food supply that offers that.

If it wasn't for that, I'd be a lot more eager to make farming more complex.

One idea is to make plump helmets ignore most of the farming changes that increase difficulty, but to stiffen the penalties on a food supply of little diversity through fixing cooking, making plump helmets less valuable, and maybe making the happiness penalties larger.  That way, you'd still be able to feed your dwarves, but further farming would still require much more effort and basically be a useful luxury rather than a necessity.

[G-Flex]

I really don't find it difficult to learn. 1. Plants need water. 2. Water flows in channels. Players that can't put two and two together and try to put a ditch near their fields... I've given up on them already.

That's not the hard part for a newbie. The hard part is realizing how to safely get that water from the above-ground river to your above-ground channels without it killing everyone or otherwise going wrong.

[CobaltKobold]

Losing is Fun

[G-Flex]

Losing is Fun

ahem

[Silverionmox]

This makes waterless maps harder to do much in.

Perfect!

Additionally, it forces new players to worry about another significant part of the game, making it difficult to get a self-sustaining fortress.

"Pick a place with a source or brook (they'll need that anyway) and when in doubt, stick to farming plump helmets underground."

My own thoughts are that, without modding, players should be able to maintain a sustainable food supply pretty easily in favorable biomes (not necessarily in a desert or on a glacier).  Whether that's through farming, hunting or fishing isn't as important as not forcing players to learn an intricate system to be able to simply feed their dwarves and therefore be able to do anything else in the game.  Currently, farming is the only food supply that offers that.

Trade & supplies from the mountainhome; newbies should get some free reinforcements with the first caravan.

Plump helmets

It does indeed seem easier to indicate in the tutorial that a plant or three are starter crops, rather than making the whole game granny-proof.

I really don't find it difficult to learn. 1. Plants need water. 2. Water flows in channels. Players that can't put two and two together and try to put a ditch near their fields... I've given up on them already.

That's not the hard part for a newbie. The hard part is realizing how to safely get that water from the above-ground river to your above-ground channels without it killing everyone or otherwise going wrong.

When the interface is fixed, that's something that a player will attribute to their own learning process rather than the game. As they should.

[lucusLoC]

@NW_Kohaku

i think a lot of your issues will be address by other suggestions. filing in a channel from above is suggested in the realistic mining thread, and floodgate control is suggested in a few of the mechanics threads. a lot of this thread makes assumptions about future improvements to the game, and it is important to keep that in mind. digging full size channels works for the current map structure, and barring a change in that i think we should keep irrigation channels as full depth. its not too hard to figure out how to flood a channel to 7/7 without it overflowing.

[NW_Kohaku]

Losing is Fun

ahem

Actually, I like Semantic Stopsigns better.

I know that I, for one, never once enjoyed losing.

(You seem to oscillate between 'too hard for newbies' and 'too easy for veterans', though...)

That isn't self-contradictory.  I do believe that it is too hard for newbies and too easy for veterans.  Someone who is already skilled in large aquaducts will simply set one up without having to think too much about it.  Most other players, however, rarely do much more than possibly make a ditch to make a stagnant pond feed a single well.

Learning to fine-tune the water heights is further on the learning curve, and rightly so. One can just put the option on in a plant zone: "Water plants as needed." The game would compare the tolerance level for the plants with the moisture in the soil and fetch a dwarf if it's getting low. If  the player wants to spare the labour for that task for something else, he'll deal with planning, digging and filling the channels. If he wants to commit further effort to reducing the drawbacks of channels, he can deploy grates on top of them, he can automate the floodgate that fills them or fine-tune the water level in them. That sounds like a fine learning curve where every step is optional, but still gives advantages.

So you're not even going to tell them?  HA! It hardly matters, though, there's absolutely no way you can play this game at this point without using the wiki, and the wiki will tell you what water levels are best, anyway, making that notion moot.

It does add depth to farming, because different plants will need different moisture levels to grow optimally, and you can't just embark in a sand desert and expect a copious crop of strawberries anymore.

We're not disagreeing here.  We're pretty much only disagreeing on how (or if) irrigation should be performed. 

That's a caricature. The bucket brigade would still be available (standard, even) and building channels instead is just an option. You can even combine them, the bucketeers will still come if your channel doesn't work for some reason. You could even designate the irrigation ditch as a pond and keep it filled with buckets if you don't trust your floodgates.
If you embark on an aquifer, both irrigation and watering are not necessary anyway... Also, weather effects will come. No plant would need precisely 4/7 water in the ditch - at most in the soil (except for a few types of rare, fickle orchids maybe, at the modders discretion.. even then, an aquifer or channel at the right distance would provide just that.). A typical plant would have a tolerance range of say 2 to 6. Putting in Noob Moss with a tolerance range of 0-7 is trivial.

That's not what I'm against.  What I'm against is making a system that absolutely requires you set up a single static system.  Once you have made an exact flooding mechanism like this, you cannot really change it - you can't expand it freely, as you are trying to learn (especially if there is nothing telling you how much fallow farmland you will need, or if you need to segregate seperate farm plots because different crops will need different water levels), even moreso when you actually are intentionally trying to make players learn through trial-and-failure.

Punishing players by making their systems of trenches and farmlands completely unalterable once built without destroying their entire aquaduct system can easily just ratchet it up from "Losing is Fun" to "Playing is Masochism".

At the very least, an irrigation ditch system would be more easily altered and rectified, and the only reason you can give against it is that you don't want to add another system for water... (While proposing new complex systems for farming in general...)

Trying to determine the exact numbers of farmers a player will need is pointless at this stage. The numbers (How much time does this task cost? How fast do dwarves walk? How much food does a dwarf eat? How much do the plants yield? How much plants does one need to feed a dwarf? etc.) can and will change until the very last beta stages... and long after, in the mods.

So we shouldn't even try thinking about it?  The longer something is kept in alpha, the more players can explore its intricacies, and its bugs can be rooted out.  After all, patches often cause more problems than they fix.  What level of demand on your labor does it take to start making your fortress fall apart? This isn't a single independent variable - you have variable labor demand in numerous other fields, as well. 

---------------

edit for happened while posting:

@NW_Kohaku

i think a lot of your issues will be address by other suggestions. filing in a channel from above is suggested in the realistic mining thread, and floodgate control is suggested in a few of the mechanics threads. a lot of this thread makes assumptions about future improvements to the game, and it is important to keep that in mind. digging full size channels works for the current map structure, and barring a change in that i think we should keep irrigation channels as full depth. its not too hard to figure out how to flood a channel to 7/7 without it overflowing.

This still doesn't address the problem of making farms take multiple z-levels because of channels for no reason...

[Silverionmox]

Someone who is already skilled in large aquaducts will simply set one up without having to think too much about it.

Which is ok, that's the reward for being skilled.

Most other players, however, rarely do much more than possibly make a ditch to make a stagnant pond feed a single well.

Which would be adequate. A single 7/7 square would moisten 48 squares around it, after all.

So you're not even going to tell them?  HA! It hardly matters, though, there's absolutely no way you can play this game at this point without using the wiki, and the wiki will tell you what water levels are best, anyway, making that notion moot.

Of course, that information ought to be available in-game as well (which plant tolerates which water levels). If you've got a farmer of mediocre skill (who in other words already knows what he should do, but just can't do it very well yet). And there's no point in telling them. The standard option would be to water plants by bucket, and it's up to the player to solve the question of how to bring water to his plants more efficiently. (hint: dwarves dig - water flows sidewards into empty spaces.).

We're not disagreeing here.  We're pretty much only disagreeing on how (or if) irrigation should be performed.

That was a given.

What I'm against is making a system that absolutely requires you set up a single static system.

It doesn't, it's optional. Whether the canal system is expandable that depends on the particular system. Anyway, this possible problem contradicts that other one you mentioned, namely that a player would only need to set up irrigation once and then never needs to look at it again and that would be too easy.

Once you have made an exact flooding mechanism like this, you cannot really change it - you can't expand it freely

Why do you think that? It depends on the particular system you set up.

Punishing players by making their systems of trenches and farmlands completely unalterable once built without

Again, the player chooses their way of providing moisture. Praying for rain might be a viable option someday. Anything would work with a moisture level system.

At the very least, an irrigation ditch system would be more easily altered and rectified, and the only reason you can give against it is that you don't want to add another system for water... (While proposing new complex systems for farming in general...)

It would only be more confusing to increase the types of ditches (how much difference can there be between a hole in the ground and a hole in the ground, anyway?), and forbidding a standard channel to moisten the surrounding soil is competely counterintuitive. While DF's learning curve is steep currently, that's mainly a matter of interface obtusity. We don't need to flatten it entirely by adding foolproof channels - learning is fun, and if nothing can go wrong you can learn nothing. Finally, irrigation ditches would be useless menu clutter for those who have mastered the secret and arcane art of digging a channel.

[...]you have variable labor demand in numerous other fields, as well.

Which is exactly the reason why it's pretty much wasted effort to judge a system by its impact on the balance of the game as it is now. Hauling, for example, will be redesigned and that alone will completely unbalance the whole division of labour as it exists. The same for skills, trading arc, etc.
Secondly, were that even done, the time cost or needed frequency of any job ought to be in the raws - changing it will require merely changing some numbers. What we need now is to determine which jobs we need, finding out how often and how long they need to be happens later. For example, if you find that farmers have it too easy and need to spend more time on their land, you could increase the time that planting, weeding and harvesting jobs take.

Thirdly, it's a matter of taste. I'm going for a 5% of the population involved in farming in the best possible case (yearly natural river flooding), with the average starting fortress at 2/3 or so (if farming is the only food source). Other people might want to make it so that it's merely a background noise and stays at 5-10% throughout the game, or want to go for a hardcore reality-based serf community and aim for 80-90%.

This still doesn't address the problem of making farms take multiple z-levels because of channels for no reason...

Is that a problem? Even the simplest building takes up multiple z-levels too. I see it as a plus actually, the levels would influence each other more, giving more planning possibilities. Anyway, if you don't want to bother with channels, embark in a rainy biome or one with an aquifer, or a river, or go for the buckets, or put Oslavod the Weeping Shepherd of Furrows the microcline statue in the middle of the fields, or a temple of the water god, or do whatever turns out to be viable.

[Darkond2100]

I think a small set of tags governing what they can eat would be enough, and the actual code could be based (I'm guessing) almost entirely on the code that's already there for dwarfs. Something like
[GRAZER]
[SHRUB_EATER]
[VEGETABLE_EATER]
[MEAT_EATER]
[MEAT_SCRAPS_EATER]
[VERMIN_EATER]
would define whether they ate grass, shrubs, things from farm plots, meat, scraps of unbutcherable meat / chunks, or vermin. For example.

EATER and HUNTER tag differences would be good too. You know, for domestic creatures.

[profit]

There are many things here but few of these solutions fix the heart of the problem really...  And many are unwieldy and hard to implement.

We need to look at this problem from a different way...

1st thing is we need to define the problem.

In my opinion the problem is this: Too little of the total available labor is needed to produce food for an established fortress.

NOT:
Farms are too easy to build.
Farming is too easy.
Too little knowledge is required to set up a farm

Any of those add burden to the new players while not increasing the difficulty of a veteran.

So....
Looking at farming as a whole from that angle and working within the confines of the games systems we need to come up with some type of solution that only makes it more labor intensive, not harder to design.

Ideally it should be easier, in order to help new players.

Things which are problems:

#1 The games Hauling mechanic. Carrying a single seed is unrealistic and adds tremendously to planting times.. making where you put your seed stockpile FAR more important than your farms size.

#2. The games stacking mechanic.  Goes with #1, but it causes stacks to be tremendously more efficient.

#3 Game time dilation.   Makes it so that hauling takes far longer than it should.

#4 Eating Habits. Dwarves eat only a few times per year making farms seem excessively productive.  Needed for #3 though.

Any system proposed has to work within those constraints.

So ideas on how to fix this?  I have a couple but please if you are going to contribute one, do not suggest flood gates, fertilizer, doing special key strokes, or anything which increases the learning curve more... Besides those never fix the problem, they only mask it a bit for the new players.


My first idea:

Have a field operate as a single unit.   By this I mean:

#1 The field has a set amount of seeds it needs to plant (if the dwarves have less seeds it does not get fully planted but make this transparent.)

#2 All seeds are brought to the field in a single trip if possible.

#3 Everything the field produces is harvested in pre-sized stacks with any leftovers going onto an odd stack. Maybe 10 maybe 20 food per stack.  (since hauling the food to the barn usually takes a couple nights, not years this is the only way I can think of to make it work in the games mechanics.)

#4 Dwarves that are working the field just need to be on the field.

This will fix a couple problems:

Hauling will now not require as much time.
Plants that produce stacks already will not be massively more efficient.
It will be easier for new players.

Next thing I think would be good:
Reduce the productivity gap between Dabbling and legendary farmers.

Legendary farmers should not be able to plant 5000x as fast as a dabbling one IMO.

If dabbling farmers produced on average .6 food per seed and a legendary one produced 1.5, and it took them similar times to plant, it would go a LONG way to restoring balance.

This would fix:

Farming operations becoming so much more efficient with time.
Incredibly efficient operations being able to be built to the detriment of realism and balance.
Incredible balance issues IE: when a single farmer dies it sometimes cripples a fortress.

I have more ideas but honestly I think we should stop there and see if with those two ideas farming is brought back under control...

I would like to see the butcher lines used more, but I do not know of a way to get them in  without shoehorning and forcing new players up a steeper learning curve.

Just remember everyone... Goal here should be more challenge to veterans while remaining simple to grasp.  New systems like watering and stuff would be good for bonus food, but should NOT be forced upon new players to survive.

[Draco18s]

In my opinion the problem is this: Too little of the total available labor is needed to produce food for an established fortress.

Some people think that this is in fact not the problem. 9.9

[G-Flex]

I wouldn't say it's the problem, but it's definitely a problem. It's a bit silly how only a couple dedicated farmers are necessary even for an extremely large fortress, especially for such an essential fortress function.

The reason I say it's not the problem is because simply being able to throw more dwarves at the issue doesn't make it any less difficult or complex.

[profit]

In my opinion the problem is this: Too little of the total available labor is needed to produce food for an established fortress.

Some people think that this is in fact not the problem. 9.9

Yes yes, hence why I used "In my opinion"

I wouldn't say it's the problem, but it's definitely a problem. It's a bit silly how only a couple dedicated farmers are necessary even for an extremely large fortress, especially for such an essential fortress function.

The reason I say it's not the problem is because simply being able to throw more dwarves at the issue doesn't make it any less difficult or complex.

Yeah, I just was hoping for those things as a starting point, then stepping back and taking a look at things again... It needs a lot of work, but we need baby steps in well thought out directions which make things easier for new players and more challenging for veteran players...

Yes, I believe it is possible to have it both ways.