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[Shades]

I personally think farming should just be altered to be on par with hunting and fishing. At least then it would be a choice on which is good.

If that means nerfing farming or boasting hunting and fishing I leave up to those that can balance such things.

I also think food values should be reduced so buying an entire wagon with a single stack of roasts isn't possible (unless maybe it's a dragon roast)

[Draco18s]

1.  It demands enough dwarves to make things harder for players.  This is a FPS issue; ultimately, your real cap on dwarves is your FPS.

Wrong.  Farming is always a percentage of your workforce.  If 1 dwarf can feed 10, then 20 can feed 200 and 5 can feed 50.  Having fewer dwarves does not impact how much of your population is "tied up" producing food.  If FPS is your concern, play with fewer dwarves.  QED

2.  It demands enough space to make things harder for players.  This is a FPS issue, again, since you real limit on space is how many FPS you're willing to sacrifice when you embark.

Wrong again.  Using 8% of the available land space of one layer in a 2x2 embark will not affect your FPS.  That 8% will feed 200 dwarves, even under a 12:1 tile to dwarf ratio.

3.  It demands micromanagement and constant attention to avoid a 'starvation spiral'.  This is, I think, something most people in the thread have rejected; micromanagement is not good.

Wrong a third time.  The goal of farming improvement is to increase the complexity that it takes to reach a balance between the various factors inherit to farming, which will almost entirely be managed by the dwarves thus not requiring the player's interaction.  Where the player comes in is building the infrastructure to make that happen (or you can not-build it and micromanage instead, allowing difficulty where the player desires).

[Joakim]

Well said stuff.

Well said.

[Aquillion]

1.  It demands enough dwarves to make things harder for players.  This is a FPS issue; ultimately, your real cap on dwarves is your FPS.

Wrong.  Farming is always a percentage of your workforce.  If 1 dwarf can feed 10, then 20 can feed 200 and 5 can feed 50.  Having fewer dwarves does not impact how much of your population is "tied up" producing food.  If FPS is your concern, play with fewer dwarves.  QED

But you are suggesting that players should be able to do less with the same total number of dwarves, by demanding that more dwarves should be tied up farming.  This is a bad suggestion in a world where dwarves are capped by FPS.

2.  It demands enough space to make things harder for players.  This is a FPS issue, again, since you real limit on space is how many FPS you're willing to sacrifice when you embark.

Wrong again.  Using 8% of the available land space of one layer in a 2x2 embark will not affect your FPS.  That 8% will feed 200 dwarves, even under a 12:1 tile to dwarf ratio.

Not every 2x2 area will have a big solid farmable area, especially not in the next version.  This is also not something that will always be easily predictable.

3.  It demands micromanagement and constant attention to avoid a 'starvation spiral'.  This is, I think, something most people in the thread have rejected; micromanagement is not good.

Wrong a third time.  The goal of farming improvement is to increase the complexity that it takes to reach a balance between the various factors inherit to farming, which will almost entirely be managed by the dwarves thus not requiring the player's interaction.  Where the player comes in is building the infrastructure to make that happen (or you can not-build it and micromanage instead, allowing difficulty where the player desires).

Ah, yes.  I forgot the fourth option:  The difficulty is purely involved in setting it up, and therefore only really poses a difficulty the first time, to the learning curve.  This is, I think, one of the main driving factors behind suggestions like these -- players remember the fun of learning Dwarf Fortress the first time and want to recapture it by deliberately steepening the game's learning curve.

But that isn't a good choice, either.  Such complexity will still hit new players inordinately hard and make the game less accessible, without providing genuinely interesting challenges to experienced players who know what to do to survive.

It is better to put the weight of the game's challenges in more dynamic things -- intelligent opponents and interactions by the larger world, say.  These are the things that will retain their difficulty and interesting nature time and time again.  The farming 'improvements' suggested here will just get boring after you've mastered them, and soon you'll be back here again, demanding that it be made more difficult still.

[Draco18s]

Said some stuff.

You got a better idea ("change nothing" is neither "better" nor an "idea") lets hear it.

Side note on: "not all 2x2s will have farmable areas"
There are regions that currently have no way of creating a farm currently, and these are considered "advanced difficulty regions" for good reason.  I see no reason why this would (or should) change in the future.

Ah, yes.  I forgot the fourth option:  The difficulty is purely involved in setting it up, and therefore only really poses a difficulty the first time, to the learning curve.  This is, I think, one of the main driving factors behind suggestions like these -- players remember the fun of learning Dwarf Fortress the first time and want to recapture it by deliberately steepening the game's learning curve.

Or the 5th option:
Lowering the learning curve, and lengthening its duration.

And I've proposed how such a farming system would work, multiple times, likely shows up in this thread somewhere too.

Oh yes, Here they are, in no particular order.

The idea is that soil nutrition is simple (2 bits for 2 axis), and almost never results in no yield for some crops (e.g. in the third link, plump helmets would lie in the middle of the graph, will always grow regardless of soil quality, but at possibly non-optimal levels).  Choices for the player:

• Crop rotation (each crop leeches one nutrient and replenishes another resulting in idea conditions for the next crop)
• Fertilization (queue up some fertilizer of 1 of 4 kinds: +N, -N, +P, -P, and fertilize the field to make idea conditions for the current crop--could be extracted to a single command and dealt with by the dwarves based on skill)
• Do nothing and always grow a few basic crops (e.g. plump helmets), but need more space

Crops that would die in the current soil would be indicated when attempting to designate the field for planting or would throw warnings ("Cave Wheat died in the soil: not enough nutrients.  Suggest fertilizing.")

Three unique kinds of challenge await the player depending on how they want to approach it (and for a new player, you farm plump helmets and use lots of space, which is very very simple to do).

Quad.  Erat.  Demonstratum.

[Footkerchief]

Quad.  Erat.  Demonstratum.

I pretty much agree with you, but this isn't going to help the discussion.

[Aquillion]

You got a better idea ("change nothing" is neither "better" nor an "idea") lets hear it.

Sure.  Wait until more of the game is finished -- the army arc and 'external' areas in particular.  If external villages are added, they will utterly change the gameplay impact of farming and make most of the concerns moot (either because most farming will now be abstracted offsite, or because the player will have to produce extra food onsite to feed offsite extensions.)  Similarly, feeding and supplying an entire army will radically change the way food is handled.

Or the 5th option:
Lowering the learning curve, and lengthening its duration.

And I've proposed how such a farming system would work, multiple times, likely shows up in this thread somewhere too.

Oh yes, Here they are, in no particular order.

The idea is that soil nutrition is simple (2 bits for 2 axis), and almost never results in no yield for some crops (e.g. in the third link, plump helmets would lie in the middle of the graph, will always grow regardless of soil quality, but at possibly non-optimal levels).  Choices for the player:

• Crop rotation (each crop leeches one nutrient and replenishes another resulting in idea conditions for the next crop)
• Fertilization (queue up some fertilizer of 1 of 4 kinds: +N, -N, +P, -P, and fertilize the field to make idea conditions for the current crop--could be extracted to a single command and dealt with by the dwarves based on skill)
• Do nothing and always grow a few basic crops (e.g. plump helmets), but need more space

Crops that would die in the current soil would be indicated when attempting to designate the field for planting or would throw warnings ("Cave Wheat died in the soil: not enough nutrients.  Suggest fertilizing.")

Three unique kinds of challenge await the player depending on how they want to approach it (and for a new player, you farm plump helmets and use lots of space, which is very very simple to do).

I just don't see a longer learning curve as a particularly good thing, or your soil nutrition example as something that would be any fun to deal with once you'd mastered it.

I'd rather see work put into things with the potential to grow into larger stories; these suggestions for farming seem like they'd add lots of complication without any real long-term payoff.  You'll just be entering the magic sequence of commands you memorized from previous playthroughs (or from the wiki).

[Dante]

Footkerchief, as always, the voice of reason and reasonableness.

Aquillion, the two main points we all seem to be going back and forth on are FPS and whether extra dwarf-work should be put into the game.

I don't think your FPS argument has any merit to it. Even a huge space increase would have negligible effect, when you compare day-to-day mining projects. As Foot points out, requiring a greater farm taskforce simply means fewer idling dwarves, except in a very few specialist cases where you have your whole population doing something, in which case either (a) there are already FPS issues to consider carefully because you're doing some sort of megaproject, or (b) you have a tiny fortress, so no idlers, so your FPS isn't going to take a hit anyway.

"Whether extra dwarf-work should be put into the game", for the sake of reality or fun or difficulty or what-have-you in farming, is something you seem to be arguing about in general, and because it's a matter of taste, there isn't going to be any consensus here.

However, I'd put it to you: since you don't think farming should change in any of these suggested ways, is it the case that you want to see balance much later on, as you suggested, even though it means the game is pretty badly broken at the moment? How much required balance can we defer indefinitely? (You said 'post-magic-arc', which is about as indefinite as it comes). Do you really want to see farming

abstracted offsite

?

You've suggested that with a new system, we'd find farming an initial challenge but eventually get to learn it, and it would cease to interest. This is a persuasive idea, but you don't take into account solutions such as occasional disasters (RNG or emergent - pestilence, blight, swarms of locusts), or a farm system that continually scales in difficulty with the fortress, or much less abstract plants which would require the player to work out how to change their modus operandi to suit the specific local biomes/climate. What say you to things like these?

[Aquillion]

Footkerchief, as always, the voice of reason and reasonableness.

Aquillion, the two main points we all seem to be going back and forth on are FPS and whether extra dwarf-work should be put into the game.

I don't think your FPS argument has any merit to it. Even a huge space increase would have negligible effect, when you compare day-to-day mining projects. As Foot points out, requiring a greater farm taskforce simply means fewer idling dwarves, except in a very few specialist cases where you have your whole population doing something, in which case either (a) there are already FPS issues to consider carefully because you're doing some sort of megaproject, or (b) you have a tiny fortress, so no idlers, so your FPS isn't going to take a hit anyway.

"Whether extra dwarf-work should be put into the game", for the sake of reality or fun or difficulty or what-have-you in farming, is something you seem to be arguing about in general, and because it's a matter of taste, there isn't going to be any consensus here.

However, I'd put it to you: since you don't think farming should change in any of these suggested ways, is it the case that you want to see balance much later on, as you suggested, even though it means the game is pretty badly broken at the moment? How much required balance can we defer indefinitely? (You said 'post-magic-arc', which is about as indefinite as it comes). Do you really want to see farming

abstracted offsite

?

Unless something's changed, my understanding is that eventually the goal is to abstract much of your fortresses' day-to-day work offsite to save FPS.  Farming is probably one of the most obvious candidates for such abstraction, yes.

And my understanding is that balance issues have always been delayed until after the magic arc, since balancing things is pointless when so much of the actual game itself is not in yet.  Any time spent trying to balance to difficulty now is just development dropped into a black hole -- it's going to have to be tweaked again later, and may be completely wasted once things like offsite expansions are included.

You've suggested that with a new system, we'd find farming an initial challenge but eventually get to learn it, and it would cease to interest. This is a persuasive idea, but you don't take into account solutions such as occasional disasters (RNG or emergent - pestilence, blight, swarms of locusts), or a farm system that continually scales in difficulty with the fortress, or much less abstract plants which would require the player to work out how to change their modus operandi to suit the specific local biomes/climate. What say you to things like these?

Again, those are all things that really have to wait until (at the very least) the implementation to offsite expansions is probably considered; and balancing them would probably have to wait until the magic arc, which is likely to be the cause behind many strange plants or natural disasters.

[Draco18s]

Unless something's changed, my understanding is that eventually the goal is to abstract much of your fortresses' day-to-day work offsite to save FPS.

Somehow I doubt that.  If you abstract anything remotely challenging offsite (and can do so trivially) then what was the point?  All you've done is removed the challenge from the game and ended up with a bland, gray, nothingness of little note.

(It'd be like adding an "autosolver" to Bejeweled which will always pick the most optimal move at any game state and do so wtih super human reflexes).

[Dante]

Unless something's changed, my understanding is that eventually the goal is to abstract much of your fortresses' day-to-day work offsite to save FPS.  Farming is probably one of the most obvious candidates for such abstraction, yes.

But surely any of that sort of stuff would be optional. People have different goals and pet projects, and for pretty much any feature in the game, there's someone who enjoys mucking around with that feature the most. Do you have a source?

Also, I can see what you're saying with balance issues, but I know that Toady does put in little fixes and suchlike if something is really bad/annoying. Case in point, he just made sand and glass tradeable items. Not having them wasn't a game killer, but it was bad/annoying because of moods and demands. I can't see how that's different from farming, except in terms of scale. And I don't think that a decent fix would take more than a couple of days.

wait until (at the very least) the implementation to offsite expansions is probably considered

wait until the magic arc, which is likely to be the cause behind many strange plants or natural disasters.

I'm sorry, but seriously, what? You need offsite villages and magic to get vermin attacking your crops or disease building up in the soil? You need offsite villages and magic to have a farm system that scales, introducing new problems with higher population densities? You need offsite villages and magic to have plants like cacti or rice or realistic fungi which have specific growing needs?

[Nikov]

Motion to table discussion of a farming overhaul's effects on FPS.

[Draco18s]

Motion to table discussion of a farming overhaul's effects on FPS.

Seconded.

[Nikov]

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

[Aquillion]

Motion to table discussion of farming until after the Magic Arc.