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[Dante]

@ INSANEcyborg: Some of the groundwork for these sorts of eating improvements has been laid. Toady's talked in the dev log about changing it for the next version so that dwarves are more willing to finish the task they're on before going to get food/drink/sleep/break, and iirc he also said that military dwarves would not only have an 'alert' setting where they wouldn't go get supplies until they were really hungry or thirsty, but they'd also try to wait to fill their backpacks and waterskins until 'off-duty' came up on their rota.

@ G-Flex: personally I agree with you, in that underground farming shouldn't be so effective (and especially with the water+rock combination we have now). But I don't think it's possible to nerf it "to the degree that having a large excess of food isn't really feasible for a dwarf fortress to accomplish", without making UG farming not-worthwhile in the eyes of most players. Even if you sped up rot, made farming much more labour-intensive, and dropped the plant stack sizes to 1 for underground farming, it'd still be a matter of numbers: say, twenty good farmers instead of two, and mine out a soil layer for plots, and you're back in the game.

[Nikov]

@ Dante (I hate using quote boxes.)

Good. Stacking needs to be fixed. Lets start mailing Toady our donations in random amounts of spare change according to denomination but not exceeding 25 coins with a little note, "Wouldn't it be nice to get all of this in one unified STACK?!"

I believe you misunderstood my notion of 'discreet' nutritional value. It is in fact analogous to portion size. Over time, a dwarf ticks up 'hunger odometer' and at a certain threshold he decides he's hungry and goes off to eat something. No matter what he eats, it resets the hunger odometer to zero and the cycle restarts. This is the current system. Under my proposal, the hungry dwarf eats an item and the 'nutrient value' is subtracted from the hunger odometer. The proceeding figures are utter dwarfgrime:

Food Type Dwarven Ale Dwarven Flour    Dwarven Sugar Plump Helmet Longland Flour Wild Strawberry

Nutrient Rating 0 100 10 80 110 50

Money/Happy Value 50 30 100 20 40 60

Dwarfgrime though it is, you can hopefully see what I am getting at. Each plant would be rated by both its 'wholesomeness' and also by its 'tastyness', as represented by the nutrient rating and the monentary value. Dwarves would be willing to pay extra for 'candy' like sugar biscuits, but their resulting sweet tooth would leave them ravenously devouring whole stacks of unhealthy foods to meet the nutritional equivelant of one dwarven flour biscuit. In this way I think that *dwarven syrup roasts* could finally be balanced; its not a meal, its desert!

Secondly having dwarves eat at certain points of their 'day' is entirely abstract. The dwarf might simply wake up, spend a second thinking about its day, notice its halfway to the hunger threshold and grab a quick snack before setting off for the mines. Once his hunger odometer is in the bottom 10% of the threshold value or less, the dwarf then walks off to work. He continues his toil until he gets a period of 'no job' to check on his hunger status, or until he becomes hungry and heads back to the dining hall. He's back at >10%, so off to a party or shop or to grab a sock from the clutches of a wolf. Then the party is over and he's halfway to hungry again with nothing else to do, so he gets his third bite to eat. By now maybe he's getting drowsy so its back to bed. If this process takes three months, the dwarf is 'on schedual', even if no actual schedual exists but rather a series of checks to an internal hunger clock.

Harsh reality is underground farming would require huge amounts of composting substrate strewn around the floor and would never produce the sorts of vitamins and minerals required to sustain man nor dwarf. However I am happy to dismiss that because I agree, it would not be very fun, fantastical or dwarfy. But I do stand by that above-ground farming should be in every way superior to underground farming for the purposes of sustainable food production. This is because underground farms are capable of some unique properties. First, they can be stacked vertically like shelves; this allows very efficient and centralized planning. Second, you can build them in any biome, at any temperature, at any depth, at any density; provided you have a water source. Changes might be made, say requiring sedimentary rock as a substrate or fertilization, but these seem trivial to the effect. You -must- build above ground farms above ground on top of soil and should weather influence the fields they will constantly be at its mercy. Cave farms can be anywhere you want below them and are much safer; not only do wild animals not sneak up and eat your crops, or a sudden drought cause the entire harvest to be lost, but goblins do not pop out of the earth surrounding your fields and kill your farmers. This is why cave farms are especially good in siege situations; perfect saftey.

However I appreciate your general agreement and hope we can hammer out the fine points as a community.

@ G-Flex " ...was talking to someone on IRC about this... "

Rub it in.

Seriously though, I agree dwarves shouldn't be good farmers. To me they seem the only race able to farm anything underground, but that's their one trick pony. Beyond that, the corn I used in my illustration has an interesting property; diets based on corn result in vitamin deficiencies. You have to seep corn in lye to create hominey or a variety of porriges to release the full vitamin and amino acid potential.

Speaking of soaking food in lye, LUTEFISK and that is all.

[Impaler[WrG]]

Dante:  Soil drainage dose seem to me to be getting close to too complex and as an extra piece of data for tiles would be a poor return on memory usage.  If it's a 'must have' then it should be a property of the soil type so the raws would specify [DRAINAGE:20] for peat and [DRAINAGE:100] for sand etc etc.  The drainage wouldn't vary beyond that and wouldn't be altered by the player so their are less 'moving targets' when thinking about farming.

I'd also like to add agreement to having a big disparity between above/below ground farming.  I'm an all underground farmer and my 12:1 plot/dwarf ratio reflects what I think a fair underground farm should be, surface farms could be better then 6:1 in a good climate considering all the drawbacks.

[Joakim]

@Dante

Good Stuff,

However I don't think you need to store drainage etc. per tile. It can be calculated once per farming plot when constructed/placed. So a farm plot will require, say, 10 water. In the menu it shows Water: 7/10 or something, with the amount of water on the plot shrinking faster or slower depending on drainage.

Also, low-to-medium quality soil/compost should be gatherable from suitable layers just like sand is now. And would be required as construction material when building a farm plot on a barren tile. Where necessary there could be an option of gradually replacing soil on the plot if the fort lacks fertilizers. A soil rotation scheme if you will. And maybe have a "compost" workshop that centrally fertilizes soil using whatever suitable stuff is available. Corpses, rotting food, etc.

[Draco18s]

Even if you sped up rot, made farming much more labour-intensive, and dropped the plant stack sizes to 1 for underground farming, it'd still be a matter of numbers: say, twenty good farmers instead of two, and mine out a soil layer for plots, and you're back in the game.

Actually, that result is exactly what we're looking for.

[Aquillion]

No.  That is an absolutely terrible idea, one that is actively harmful to the game.

I would be strongly opposed to any suggestion that sought to require more space or dwarves for farming. It sounds like a simple and straightforward solution at first, but when you examine it closely it doesn't hold up.

Mainly, the "real" limiter on fortress size, for a moderately skilled player, is FPS.  It isn't like a player can just choose to have more dwarves to cover the increase in now-essential jobs.  The most important and difficult limiter on the amount that can go on in a fortress at once is not food or living-space or anything like that; it is the FPS.  Every dwarf and every job uses up a bit of that FPS.  Similarly, the larger the space you build your fortress in, the more FPS you waste.

So when you increase the number of dwarves that a player must devote to farming, or when you make farming require more space, what you're really doing is requiring that they waste an increased amount of FPS on simple maintenance rather than accomplishing long-term goals and projects.  You aren't really making it more 'difficult' -- anyone who's willing to grit their teeth and see their FPS collapse can increase the dwarf limit or settle on a larger area and make bigger farms -- you're just making it 'more annoying'.  You're forcing players to choose between productivity and FPS.

Nothing should require such a huge area or a large number of dwarves.  It looks cute on paper, but when you actually compare it to the realities of the game, you find that all you're doing is making the FPS limit more painful; without the FPS limit, you wouldn't be adding difficulty.  I don't think that forcing players up against the FPS limit is a good approach to take.  Making it so you can do grand things with a tiny number of dwarves or in a tiny space is a necessary concession to the fact that the game cannot handle huge numbers of dwarves nor vast expanses of space.

The game should be designed so that players never want to have more than the default limit on dwarves, nor more than a tiny embark area.  Suggestions that make players require constantly more dwarves and more space are a bad idea.

This is a basic fatal flaw with all of the requests to make day-to-day fortress functions more difficult.  It isn't possible.

You can make it more of a pain for the player in terms of controls; I think it's fair to say that almost nobody wants that, but I'll bring it up.  The issue here is that still, if you're a decently skilled player you can still almost do it on autopilot.

Or you can make it require more detailed knowledge.  But if you know how to do it (or if you read the wiki), that doesn't make a difference.  I tend to feel that this is what most of these threads are really aiming for, even if they don't know it -- people recall the fun they had when they were just figuring out Dwarf Fortess and want to recover it.  But that was about discovering mechanics.  Once you've discovered them, it will still be easy, and you've only managed to increase the game's learning curve for everyone else by adjusting the knowledge required to keep ahead of your own increasing understanding of the game.

Farming was not "hard" in the early versions, say.  It required an annoying step where the player had to constantly remember to cycle the floodgates every year, and if you didn't know to stockpile for winter, you could starve...  but once you knew the basic things, it was trivial to set up a fortress where you'd never have to think about farming again, aside from that irritating yearly floodgate cycle.

Similarly, most of the suggestions here don't really make farming "harder" in the long term.  The only ones that seriously limit it are based around space and FPS constraints; even then, anyone who wants to see their game slow to a crawl can still embark on a larger area, raise the dwarf limit, and produce as much food as they want.  I don't see that as a desirable trade-off to force people onto.  The other ideas are even worse -- you're left with the choice between raising the difficulty curve of the game, without really improving it in the long term, or adding micromanagement, which it's fair to say few people want.

For difficulty, it is better to focus on improving opponents and adding a wider variety of threats; I don't think fiddling with the mechanics of farming is ever going to achieve the desired effect.

[Joakim]

Aquillon,

Burrows will probably make it possible to make the game far more efficient, by limiting which dwarves do what. Besides, a screenful of extra space is hardly a problem, is it?

You're saying "everything is easy when you know how to do it". Yes, but that goes for dealing with "improved opponents and a wider variety of threats" too. 

A more complex farming system makes it more rewarding to set up a functioning farming system that feeds an entire fortress. Right now the only difficulty involved there is interface issues.

[Aquillion]

Burrows will probably make it possible to make the game far more efficient, by limiting which dwarves do what. Besides, a screenful of extra space is hardly a problem, is it?

You're saying "everything is easy when you know how to do it". Yes, but that goes for dealing with "improved opponents and a wider variety of threats" too.

A screenful of extra space is a problem.  Remember, space will be somewhat more constrained in the next version due to all the underground stuff.  2x2 fortresses should be playable and should not suffer any severe disadvantages just because the player wants to save their framerate; suggestions based around making farming take more space would punish those fortresses much more than anyone else.

More importantly, if it "isn't a problem", your desire to increase the space required for farming is pointless.  You want it to be a problem, don't you?  Otherwise, there's no reason to do it.  But it is only a problem due to FPS constraints on embark sizes, generally.  It punishes people with slower processors much more than anyone else, because space will be at a premium for them.  To people who can settle on huge expanses that are almost certain to have lots of soil, it's a nonissue.

Improved opponents and other such threats can demand the player's attention whenever they come up, without being annoying.  This gives them many more options for interesting challenges.  It could, theoretically, reach a point where you have to come up with a new strategy to beat every army.

Farming can't do that.  As this thread has shown, people don't want to have to constantly attend to their farming the way they would attend to a major invasion or natural disaster.  In the long run, that means that it can't be a fun or interesting challenge on its own; it will always be either easy once you know how to do it, or irritating in its pointless and repetitive demands on your time.

Development time should therefore go into more unique and special challenges, things like new forms of invasions and opponents, or natural disasters and diseases, or large-scale political and environmental issues that lead to such problems -- things that come up and then can be decisively resolved, or which are part of long-term evolving narratives of events.  Those are the challenges with the potential to become interesting.

Something that the player has to deal with 24-7 -- and which never really changes or evolves over time in a dynamic and interconnected fashion, the way local politics and intelligent opposition can -- will never be a fun or interesting challenge in the long term.  It can serve as the backbone for other challenges, but trying to make it challenging on its own, in a vaccum, is a losing proposition.

[Joakim]

First of all, FPS:
In what way does a screenful of space take up any noticable amount of resources? Besides, that would be for a mountainhome-sized fortress of 200 dwarves, right? Pathing would be several orders of magnitude more demanding on the CPU for a fortress of that size. I.e. you won't be able to have a fortress that need such a big farming space if your computer can't handle such a farming space.

Secondly, small embark screens.
How will it be a severe advantage? A 2x2 fortress have 96*96 = 9 216 tiles per layer. The maximum I saw someone suggest was 12 tiles to feed a dwarf, that would be 2400 tiles for a 200 strong fortress, which is almost exactly 48*48 tiles, i.e. a quarter of a layer. If you split it up on, say, four layers you will need 24*24 tiles per layer. It will take up about 7% of a layer. That is the maximum suggested. I think the sought effect can be reached with 4 tiles/dwarf, which gives us 8% on one layer or 2% on four layers. For an enourmous fortress. Since you can (and I guess will) get all features at ~150 dwarves, that gives us 150*4=600 tiles, which is 25*25 tiles.
What I'm trying to say with those numbers is that you will have plenty of space available even on the smallest map. Especially since you can always wall in caves using all that stone you got left over from clearing out your farming area.

Thirdly, gameplay.
Farming in and of itself wouldn't bring that much more gameplay, especially since most of this stuff ought to be automated. What is added is a bunch of extra decisions like deciding between defensibility and soil quality, more possibilites to specialise your fortress (mining colony, farmstead, etc.), providing extra challenge for those who want a survival-type game in barren lands, help make trading more interesting and probable other stuff too.
It's this kind of depth that makes DF the awesome game it is. It's why I donate.

Fourthly, who says ambushes interrupting my castle projects aren't annoying?

[Dante]

I believe you misunderstood my notion of 'discreet' nutritional value. It is in fact analogous to portion size.

No, I got it, and it would still be an improvement over portion size. I think we're on the same page. I just meant that, it would be possible to go even further, and have different types of nutrition provided by different foodsources. That on top of monetary value, quality level, and the different happy thoughts a dwarf gets dependent on their specific food preferences.

If this process takes three months, the dwarf is 'on schedual', even if no actual schedual exists but rather a series of checks to an internal hunger clock.

I somehow had got the idea that you were talking about meals per actual-in-game day 
But yeah, and the numbers can be tweaked here to better fit gameplay - which could well mean giving food larger nutrition values and dwarves larger hunger values (just as the creature sizes have been inflated for the next version) - thus giving some complexity to the system, and allowing for actual variance between a three-seed-biscuit and a giant-cave-swallow-roast.

not only do wild animals not sneak up and eat your crops, or a sudden drought cause the entire harvest to be lost, but goblins do not pop out of the earth surrounding your fields and kill your farmers. This is why cave farms are especially good in siege situations; perfect saftey.

I agree with the general sentiment about subterranean farms. I should note though that in current gameplay terms, it's really really easy to make an enormous, completely secure aboveground farm: just channel out the top soil layer and pave over it with stone, thus making it part of your fortress and effectively an underground farm. It would be easy to make above-ground farms require the [outside] tag, not just the [light] one, but then greenhouses paved over with glass blocks - which should work - wouldn't.

@ Impaler[WrG] and Joakim - Yes, something like a fixed draining value for the type of soil (sand vs peat, as you say) would be just as effective. Now that I think about it, I can't actually think of a reason why you'd have to alter the specific drainage value of a tile, because all you can really do to terrain is make it muddy or burn it.

@ Aquillion - I appreciate the FPS problem, because my computer is rubbish. I personally agree that "desire to increase the space required for farming is pointless", or at least fairly pointless.

I've pointed out that simply requiring extra space isn't going to cut it, because you could boost the plot-per-dwarf ratio a literal hundredfold and still feed your fortress by mining out a single soil layer on a 2-by-2 map. (That's the tiny embark area you're talking about).

Basically, you said that the only solutions fell into FPS-busting, micromanagement, or raising the difficulty curve . This almost matches up to how I initially categorised solutions: extra work for dwarves, extra regular work for the player, or extra work to get farming set up.

However, differences: I don't agree that a greater dwarfpower requirement equates to a FPS hit. It equates to more difficult farming, because, with the same number of dwarves, you have to assign more of them to farming. i.e. you have to make do with less.

Also, seriously, even a gigantic increase in the required farm area per dwarf would only give a negligible FPS hit. Even if it was an issue, it would just make farming harder in that it would encourage aboveground farming, or more streamlined fortress design to compensate.

Also, you didn't consider the reduced-yield-unless-player-works-on-farms, e.g. composting (the optional-micromanagement scenario). Or the idea that farming can be made more difficult through soil depletion or what-have-you which doesn't affect the learning curve because it only sets in for older fortresses. Or the possibility that people who don't want to be more involved in their farms might have to supplement their food sources with one of the many other ones already available in the game.

Edit: ninja'd by Joakim's calculations.

[Draco18s]

No.  That is an absolutely terrible idea, one that is actively harmful to the game.

I would be strongly opposed to any suggestion that sought to require more dwarves for farming. It sounds like a simple and straightforward solution at first, but when you examine it closely it doesn't hold up.

What?  Really?  You're OK with a single legendary dwarf supplying all of the food and beverage needs for an entire fortress?
Because 1 dwarf really can do that.  1 dwarf set with only brewing, cooking, and farming enabled (hell, even set "only farmers harvest), and he will still probably spend more time idle than actually working.

Note: this is likely a slight hyperbole, but is closer to the truth than farming needing 10 dwarves to maintain a fortress, which is where I'd like to see it.  I'm almost certain 2 dwarves with only brew, cook, and farm can actually feed and entire 200 dwarf fort with no help.

[Aquillion]

First of all, FPS:
In what way does a screenful of space take up any noticable amount of resources? Besides, that would be for a mountainhome-sized fortress of 200 dwarves, right? Pathing would be several orders of magnitude more demanding on the CPU for a fortress of that size. I.e. you won't be able to have a fortress that need such a big farming space if your computer can't handle such a farming space.

Secondly, small embark screens.
How will it be a severe advantage? A 2x2 fortress have 96*96 = 9 216 tiles per layer. The maximum I saw someone suggest was 12 tiles to feed a dwarf, that would be 2400 tiles for a 200 strong fortress, which is almost exactly 48*48 tiles, i.e. a quarter of a layer. If you split it up on, say, four layers you will need 24*24 tiles per layer. It will take up about 7% of a layer. That is the maximum suggested. I think the sought effect can be reached with 4 tiles/dwarf, which gives us 8% on one layer or 2% on four layers. For an enourmous fortress. Since you can (and I guess will) get all features at ~150 dwarves, that gives us 150*4=600 tiles, which is 25*25 tiles.
What I'm trying to say with those numbers is that you will have plenty of space available even on the smallest map. Especially since you can always wall in caves using all that stone you got left over from clearing out your farming area.

Again, remember, with the new version there's probably not going to be as much room.  There will be enough room to build our current fortresses, but not to suddenly sprawl wildly beyond what we've used until now to take big 12-square farms for each dwarf you have.  This will be made even worse if it becomes harder to find usable farmland, which is another common suggestion in this thread.

Similarly, with 30% of your dwarves (or however many) stuck making food, you will have to have more dwarves just to do the same things you could before in a reasonable timeframe.  This will slow down the entire game either way; those 30% of your dwarves devoted to farming are, in the long run, not contributing much interesting -- they're just maintenance, doing the same repetitive tasks forever.  Framerate gets wasted enough ways as it is; I don't see the point in requiring that players devote a big part of their framerate to feeding themselves, too.

Thirdly, gameplay.
Farming in and of itself wouldn't bring that much more gameplay, especially since most of this stuff ought to be automated. What is added is a bunch of extra decisions like deciding between defensibility and soil quality, more possibilites to specialise your fortress (mining colony, farmstead, etc.), providing extra challenge for those who want a survival-type game in barren lands, help make trading more interesting and probable other stuff too.
It's this kind of depth that makes DF the awesome game it is. It's why I donate.

Fourthly, who says ambushes interrupting my castle projects aren't annoying?

Ambushes are different every time, and in the long run they have the potential to tie into larger stories involving the civilizations they come from.  They require constant creativity and new approaches to deal with, and have a huge amount of room to grow in terms of the larger narratives produced by the game.

Farming doesn't.  It's a timesink, both in terms of development and the time spent doing it.  As long as you have enough soil (and are willing to embark on a large enough area to ensure you have that soil) and are willing to kill your FPS by raising the dwarf cap to ensure you can afford that many farmers, it will still be the same thing every time.  The only decisions it really presents players are horrible decisions, because in reality, the biggest constraints on arable land and workforce (assuming they aren't self-imposed challenges) is the embark area and the damage a large population does to your FPS.  The choice isn't "Should I focus on crafting or farming?", but "Do I want to kill my FPS by increasing my area and population so I can handle both farming and crafting?"

Barren areas exist currently.  If you want to embark someplace with all stone and no water, nothing prevents you.

Overall, I would rather see new challenges come from improvements to the game's larger, more dynamic world, not by making basic maintenance tasks harder or more complicated.  It's understandable that people want more challenges, but come on, look at the devlog -- more challenges are planned, and much, much better and more interesting challenges than what's suggested here.  When those things are in -- when we have better sieges and armies and horrible monsters and who knows what else -- you'll be glad that farming still works the way it does, because if it were made harder it would just be a distraction from the fun of the challenges and narratives that the game is going to produce when it is more complete.

No.  That is an absolutely terrible idea, one that is actively harmful to the game.

I would be strongly opposed to any suggestion that sought to require more dwarves for farming. It sounds like a simple and straightforward solution at first, but when you examine it closely it doesn't hold up.

What?  Really?  You're OK with a single legendary dwarf supplying all of the food and beverage needs for an entire fortress?
Because 1 dwarf really can do that.  1 dwarf set with only brewing, cooking, and farming enabled (hell, even set "only farmers harvest), and he will still probably spend more time idle than actually working.

Note: this is likely a slight hyperbole, but is closer to the truth than farming needing 10 dwarves to maintain a fortress, which is where I'd like to see it.  I'm almost certain 2 dwarves with only brew, cook, and farm can actually feed and entire 200 dwarf fort with no help.

I don't see it as a problem.  In the long run, the only effect that requiring more dwarves would have is put more burden on my FPS for dwarves that aren't helping with longer-term, more interesting tasks.  Why would you want to do that?

[Nikov]

Look, if you can't handle a 200 dwarf fortress on your computer there's a population cap for you, Aquillion. You do not have to argue against an overwhelming majority of players who want farming reworked because you percieve it will render your game unplayable. Bear in mind I'm building 200 dwarf fortresses on a Pentium 4, complete with waterfalls and getting 20 fps. I don't mind it in the slightest.

[Draco18s]

Similarly, with 30% of your dwarves (or however many) stuck making food

30% of 200 is 60.  No one ever suggested that many.  5% tops.

[Aquillion]

Look, if you can't handle a 200 dwarf fortress on your computer there's a population cap for you, Aquillion. You do not have to argue against an overwhelming majority of players who want farming reworked because you percieve it will render your game unplayable. Bear in mind I'm building 200 dwarf fortresses on a Pentium 4, complete with waterfalls and getting 20 fps. I don't mind it in the slightest.

A bad idea is still a bad idea.  And this particular idea is plainly one that means different things to different people, going by the discussions.

But the point is, requiring more dwarves to farm sounds cute at first, but doesn't actually do anything, from a gameplay standpoint, beyond put more burden on your FPS.  Everything in the game scales; once you can set up a fortress that handles 5 farming dwarves, you can set up a farm that  handles 25 farming dwarves.  The only really serious limiter is FPS, and the only real effect of requiring more dwarves for some task is to cut away at that dwarf-cap imposed by the FPS.

Because we have to labor under a dwarf cap imposed by FPS, I think it would be better to stick with abstractions that use the minimum number of dwarves possible (and therefore the minimum amount of processing possible) for each task.  This will allow for a greater diversity of things to happen in a fortress at once and will allow players to pursue more interesting goals, instead of having a huge chunk of your capped population stuck farming.

Individual processor power doesn't come into it; no matter how good your processor is, there's a cap.  The important thing to realize is that that cap prevents players from expanding their population to match with expanded farming requirements.

30% of 200 is 60.  No one ever suggested that many.  5% tops.

However many.  It's either too low to matter (in which case it's not worth doing) or it's high enough to be an issue, in which case the biggest problem it will cause is going to stem from the fact that your population is ultimately capped by FPS concerns.