Good that you quote yourself, because I'd likely not have found your original post without you linking to it, what with being buried 3/4s of the way through a rant-heavy topic, and having been made over a month ago.
i am also going to be shamelessly stealing ideas, and i will attribute them if i can easily find the originator. otherwise just know that most of these ideas are not my own, but have merely been adapted to suit my own tastes.
I don't think this is called "stealing someone's idea", I think it's called "agreeing with someone", and I think people react to it positively, generally speaking.
assumption: dorfs only eat 8 times a year and drink 18 times a year. any farming considerations will have to take this into account. toady has already stated that he does not wish to increase this, so end numbers will have to reflect this.
EVERYONE NEEDS OT KEEP THIS IN MIND WHEN MAKING SUGGESTIONS! if you make a suggestion that in any way modifies the amount of food output by a farm you need to check it against the amount of food consumed. otherwise you may just wind up with people making one big farm, running it for a year and then letting it sit fallow for the next few years (and have their farmers doe something else) since it made enough food in the one run to feed everyone.[/quote]
I think people recognize this, but that they are arguing that current food production is either too easy, too simplified, or too productive. As it stands, I really think that most players pretty much never have problems with food production. Even the total newbies to the game are more likely to kill themselves in other manners than simply forgetting that they need to feed their dwarves. As others have pointed out, with use of quarrey bushes, you can make a single legendary farmer push out enough food from a 25-tile farm for an entire fortress. Expanding beyond this point if you somehow need more food is pure simplicity - just make a bigger farm, and maybe add more farmers. In fact, most people are more worried about accidentally producing too much food, so that they have trouble consuming it before it spoils.
Yes, it's a valid point that we shouldn't make farming require impossible amounts of labor... but we can certainly do things that reduce farm output for quite a while before we actually start impacting food production so much that it starts to strain a player's ability to feed his dwarves.
In the quote, however, you take on one of the more extreme suggestions, which I do not believe holds terribly broad support.
I think that, instead of necessarily arguing about solutions, we have to find what problems people percieve with the current farming system.
The person you quoted may see a lack of struggle to feed your dwarves as a problem, and wants to make it more difficult. Alternately, he is looking at a lack of "realism" (I put quotes, because oftentimes, whenever one speaks of realism, they often focus on one aspect that is unrealistic, while ignoring many other unrealistic things, and people can actually argue over which unrealism is worse than other unrealisms) in terms of farm acreage (that is, angry over the relative size of farms, and percentage of farmers in your labor force).
Personally, I think the problem is that the system is so simplistic that it dissolves differentiation between crop types, but I'll talk about that later, and respond to the rest of your post.
it seems that a lot of the discussion is revolving around irrigation and fertilization, and the complexities inherit in the systems, so i will weigh in on the issue.
1. watering and moisture levels
(i discussed the 1/7 deep ditch in my map data overhaul thread, found here: http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=50043.0)
this method would mean that new players would have a simple way to do bucket brigade irrigation, while advance players would have a way to save dorf power for other uses.
i also think we can count on the advanced mechanics thread to produce some useful results for water level management, so i do not believe that is going to be an issue in the future.
... Hmmm... I suppose I can be content with a 1/7 ditch.
However, you should realize that if there's a labor-free, completely static, and no-maintainance needed method of irrigation, then nobody will EVER use the bucket-brigade method, at least, except as a stop-gap while they dig the ditches.
A lack of a reward is as bad as a punishment.
The thing about a "wetness radius" irrigation system is that you can simply dig a hole in regular intervals, declare it a pond, have dwarves bucket it full, and it would never, ever need further maintainance. In fact, such a system would look almost exactly like the bucket-brigade method, but, for the cost of just digging a couple holes, would water far more plants.
(That is, unless plants actually were capable of "drinking" the water the way that dwarves draw water from wells, which would mean those irrigation ditches would need regular refilling, which would require either player micromanagement, which I don't think any of the advocates of this system wanted, or would require farmer scripting that would ensure refilling...
In fact, I think such a method of plants "drinking" water is the only thing that makes sense if we are going to be using a ditch irrigation system. It would also make different crop demands for water actually mean something.)
2. fertilization
i do not think it would be too hard to set up a simple soil quality tag, though i do not believe we need more than 1. if we had a poor, normal and rich tag i think that would be adequate. on a scale of 0 to 7, 0 through 2 are poor, 3 through 5 are normal, and 6 and 7 are rich. fertilization would increase the level by 2 or 3 points. a basic crop would produce 1 unit at poor, 2 units at normal and 3 units at rich.
Here's where I want to interject about why I have a problem with crops as they are, now.
Current crops are few in number, and there is a significant degree of overlap in what we already have.
A prickle berry, for example, is just a wild strawberry that has less value with virtually every other aspect of it being the same. Hide Roots are one of only four colors of dye, and their use is heavily discouraged because they're simply lower-valued blade weeds. Unless an important dwarf really favors one type of crop, there is no reason but to repeatedly farm the same high-value sun berries, quarrey bushes, sweet pods, pig tails, and blade weeds over and over.
What if we had multiple facets of soil quality, however? What if hide roots only took a little of soil quality A, but fixed the soil with soil quality C, and did nothing with quality B? What if we had a high-value crop, but which heavily depleted C and B, and took only a little of A, while improving soil quality in no degree.
Suddenly, low-value crops would have value, if only as a means of making use of a farm without demanding constant fertilization. This would give players a reason to consider crops for some reason other than what their eventual products might be.
d. a farmers skill determines failure rate of crops. a regular no prefix farmer should have a failure rate of 2 in 10. a farmer with no skill should have a failure rate of 6 or 7 in 10 (so unsustainable, and thus a cost to train them). legendaries should of course not have a failure (barring outside circumstances of course). as farmers skill up they also work faster, but the speed difference between not farmer and legendary should only be a max of 25% [edit: probably more like 15%]. since the production is not determined on the speed of the farmers anyway this will just mean that a legendary will have more time to work on other stuff, or you will need 25% fewer field laborers if they are all legendary (not unlikely). harvesting and watering are also "hauling" jobs and not give farming xp, only planting and tending do.
i do not think anyone has commented on this. i think it really helps with the mechanic.
I don't think people have commented on this one because it's one of those extreme "make farms bigger and harder" posts, and relies upon that.
This supposes that what passes for legendary "only" gets crop failures 1 year out of 5.
I'm ultimately not interested in it, because I don't think size is (terribly much of) a problem, I'm more interested in variety.
i do not know if the tile number issue has been settled, but i think my argument for why it should be increased still stands.
Fine, make farms larger. It's not really my concern, because I don't think the problem is size, but such thorough simplicity that no crop differentiation can take place, except by value, although I think they could stand to be somewhat larger.
you are not going to be able to get "more advanced farming" without adding variables, and anything else is just basically going to amount to messing around with grow timers and having farmers "do things" to the crops to keep them busy. this does not mean i am against thing like a "weed plot" job, but it does mean that i think the "weed plot" job needs to have a concrete effect. perhaps weeds reduce soil quality and crop yield. i am not sure how to convey that info (about weeds) to the player, and i do believe that all the info about the health of the plot needs to be communicated to the player, but kept simple enough so that noobs can handle it in much the same way that they do now.
planted crops should automatically set their field maintenance levels for moisture and fertility, though player should be able to change them if they so desire. farmers should automatically do the job necessary to keep them where they need to be.
and i have already seem a few of the "why add it if you are just going to automate it anyway" complaints. let me make it clear: crops can be "fire and forget" for the player if they so desire, but they should never be "fire and forget" for the dorfs. if your crops are outside and you get besieged your farmers will not be able to care for them during their grow cycle, and that should affect their production even if you do manage to beat off the siege before harvest time.
Partly preaching to the choir, but differentiating the crops is a definite difference. That's why I talk about "desert crops" that don't need water, or crops that increase or decrease soil quality.
It's not my suggestion, and I'm fairly ambivalent on the subject, but I would think the "remove pests" suggestion would have actual pests spawn and eat the crops if you didn't have someone getting rid of them... which sounds like a noticable and concrete effect to me.
I also have to ask who, exactly, you are agreeing with, arguing with, or trying to persuade with some of your comments... You seem to be launching out arguments against a myriad amalgamation of arguments from over 5 pages.