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[Soralin]

I'm also wondering how many crops I should allow per tile... what I'm coming down on will basically be giving players enough food to feed 1 dwarf per 2 tiles, even with crop rotation systems that mean land goes fallow occasionally.  Should I be cutting this even more?

I'd prefer more then that, I mean, you could stick your 7 starting dwarves in a 4x4 room, and have enough space left over for a tile of water, and maybe a bed they can take turns with, and have a (semi-)sustainable fortress.

But then I'm on the large farms side of things, I'd like to see big sprawling farms in a fortress, something that's a major noticeable part of a fortress that takes some work to build up, along the size of workshop or living quarters sections, or such.  Something like a 4x4 or 5x5 per dwarf might be nice.

It's a little hard to balance all this stuff when I have to keep in mind how much longer some crops go between bloomings and others...

Yeah, like for example, the Bacchus berries that you have up there, compared to the Floral Mycotree, even after it's gone into fruiting, takes half of the resources or less, to produce 150% of the harvest, in half the time, and without a growing stage required before then.  Although the treestuff is a higher value (per item at least), and I think you mentioned something about flowers back there, and wood from trees, so there might be other benefits too, but I'm going to get some sleep now.

I thought that "Bacchus" came from some alternate word for grape, but I can't find a link proving that now...

Bacchus is the Roman name for the god of wine and related things, so it's fairly appropriate

Dionysus or Dionysos (English pronunciation: /ˌdaɪ.ɵˈnaɪsəs/; Greek: Διόνυσος or Διώνυσος, pron. [di.'o.ny.sos]) is the ancient Greek god of wine, wine cups, wineskin, grapes, theater, and fertility. The god who inspires ritual madness, joyful worship, and ecstasy, carnivals, celebration and a major figure of Greek mythology. He is included as one of the twelve Olympians in some lists. Dionysus is typical of the god of the epiphany, "the god that comes". He was also known as Bacchus, the name adopted by the Romans[1] and the frenzy he induces, bakkheia. In addition to winemaking, he is the patron deity of agriculture and the theater. Hailed as an Asiatic foreigner, he was thought to have had strong ties to the East and to Ethiopia in the South. He was also known as the Liberator (Eleutherios), freeing one from one's normal self, by madness, ecstasy or wine.[2]

PREFSTRING: symbolic dignity

Although that might not fit with it

[NW_Kohaku]

Yeah, I'm going to definitely have to start thinking more in terms of game balance, and less in terms of trying to make an ass-pull attempt at realism, which, as I put more concrete numbers down, so that I can compare these things, becomes easier to do.

As for mycotrees, they're actually supposed to be giving less food.  Bacchus berries take plenty of upkeep, which takes more farmer time.  Mycotrees, as an orchard tree, once established will take some watering and a small fertilization effort per year, but ultimately take less farmer upkeep than Bacchus Berries do.  Effectively, you can just plant two or three times as many mycotrees for the same amount of dwarven upkeep.  (At least, that's the idea behind it...  I still have to work on balancing all this.)

edit: For example, this http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/html/fg/fg68-e/ website that I used on the Kappa Gourds gave fairly good insturctions on how much Phosphorus and Potassium gourd-family crops actually need.  (It's been hard to find similar guides to other plants.)

oh, and you can't cut mycotrees down for wood, they grow too fast, and are more of a vine, anyway.

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, this makes me think that I should just write some kind of formula linking these things together to give a ballpark "balance"...

quantity * value = GROWDUR * (nutrient consumption - soil replinishment / 4)

[Draco18s]

oh, and you can't cut mycotrees down for wood, they grow too fast, and are more of a vine, anyway.

Like real grapes.

And I suppose you could cut the Mother Vine down (it is rather large around the base today) but I don't think anyone would like that idea.

[NW_Kohaku]

Bacchus berries are grapes, floral mycotrees are fungus-vines that are there to be the underground equivalent of a citrus tree.

[Soralin]

As for mycotrees, they're actually supposed to be giving less food.  Bacchus berries take plenty of upkeep, which takes more farmer time.  Mycotrees, as an orchard tree, once established will take some watering and a small fertilization effort per year, but ultimately take less farmer upkeep than Bacchus Berries do.  Effectively, you can just plant two or three times as many mycotrees for the same amount of dwarven upkeep.  (At least, that's the idea behind it...  I still have to work on balancing all this.)

Ah, yeah, at the very least you wouldn't have to spend time replanting them each year.  If there's more upkeep then that to them, then that's another factor that could be added in the raws, and dealt with in balance.

Actually, this makes me think that I should just write some kind of formula linking these things together to give a ballpark "balance"...

quantity * value = GROWDUR * (nutrient consumption - soil replinishment / 4)

Yeah, it can be good to keep things roughly balanced, just as long as everything doesn't end up being the same, but there seems to be enough factors present with the system here to allow for a good versatility in possible crops too.  The two main things you want to avoid happening are having the same one or two plants always used in every situation, or where all the plants are so similar it doesn't matter which you use (and the lesser issue of plants that are never used).  Just having the variety of factors that these have, those situations should be less likely to occur.

There's also the question of what factors it's being balanced around.  For example, if you're just dealing with farming for survival, the value wouldn't be a particularly useful factor there, and you'd just want to produce as much as possible.  Or if you're setting up a fort somewhere really inhospitable, then nutrients and soil factors may be a key factor.  Or if you have a really well established fortress, and you want to keep nobles and such happy, then all the value 1 foods in the world won't help you there.

So for example, if you're focusing on survival being a key point, then quantity/GROWDUR might be the major factor.  If you want high quality food for nobles and happy dwarves and such, then value of the individual components is of importance over anything else.  If you want produce to sell to others, then (quantity*value)/GROWDUR is likely the most important(taking into account soil costs, so something like the listed formula).  If you're trying to survive in very inhospitable conditions, then quantity/(nutrient consumption - soil replenishment) might be the key factor.  Or if you're trying to grow them in a desert, then quantity/water consumption might be the main factor.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be a linear balance either, plants which excel in some categories might be much worse off in others than what would be expected linearly, as well as other additional effects which can be factored in.  Although you don't want to specialize too specifically or obviously.  You wouldn't one plant that's always obviously the best for all low water conditions or one that's always the best for x, etc. either.  Actually, most of the plants you have so far seems to be doing fairly well in that regard, so just something to keep in mind.

Although, there are enough factors here you could probably just provide a variety of plants with a variety of conditions, and as long as there's not ones that are better in every way than another plant, you'll probably end up with a variety of different plants that are good for different conditions and situations.  It wouldn't be too hard to beat the plump helmets or dwarven syrup factory/sunshine choices that currently dominate.   Although I can't even tell if there's much of a difference in growing speed or quantity/time in the current system, simply because it's so easy to produce a giant surplus with a tiny amount of anything that that alone makes it not a major factor.  That's something to keep in mind, if it's too easy to produce a large quantity of food, then all those differences between plants cease to matter much, since you could just get enough food by brute force quantity approach.

[Xainiax]

some ideas for a germination farms:
1 it could be the only way to get seeds
2 half growth cycles on germination farms that produce some vegetables as you dont need the vegetable to get seeds on some of them
3 needs nutrient re-population every 2-3 years or else the farm produces less products could get by with only 3 checks a season(early, mid, late)
 3a could have nutrient sources from organic extracts,  meat, or very large domestic animals that pass by randomly leave "dropings"
 3b seperate skill and workshop to make farms nutrient rich
4 diseases and tending
 4a diseases/weeds could use the container system to "grow" inside plants making them unusable and incapable of growing untill treated
 4b if a germination farm is infected it produces seeds of the disease or weed instead of crops which the dwarves will accidently plant
5 grading 1-10 on plant/seed quality
6 plant germinating farms before crop farms as the seeds arent retrievable on most crops.

[NW_Kohaku]

My current system is:

Crop Yield = Growdur * (Sum of nutrient requirements) / value / constant

Where each nutrient has different categories that give points...

For every 1000 Growdur (roughly 83 days), consuming around 50 nitrogen is considered "high", and gives three points.  (This is roughly 2 nitrogen every 3 days.)  83 Nitrogen (one a day) is "Very High", and gives four points.  40 Nitrogen (1 nitrogen every 2 days) is medium, 2 points.  And 25 nitrogen (1 every 3 days) is low, for one point.

Phosphorus goes 22 as Very High (1 every 4 days), 17 as High (1 every 5 days), 12 as Medium (1 every 7 days), and 7 as Low (1 every 12 days).

Potassium goes 12 as Ultra High (1 every 7 days) (5 points for that, somet things are K killers), 9 as Very High(1 every 9 days), 6 as High (1 every 14 days), 4 as Medium (1 every 21 days), and 2 as Low (1 every 41 days).

For water, Very High watering is 3 per day, High is 2 per day, Medium is 1.5 per day, and Low is 1 per day.  (There is also a very low that has less than .5 per day that will be for desert-type plants.)  Having advanced watering systems will be a major labor-saver, as it will enable the watering of multiple plots at once.

For Biomass, Ultra High is 3 per day, Very High is 2 per day, High is 1.5 per day, Medium is 1 per day, Low is .5 per day, and many photosynthetic plants don't consume it at all (or even add to it).

The constant is 120.  That just makes the numbers fit

If you want to just grow for subsistance, and don't care about crop value, you should just go for low-value crops (I'll put a few more in).  Your first few should definitely be short-term crops, as well, but it's really better to sew some longer-term, larger-yield crops as soon as you aren't literally living hand to mouth.

[Draco18s]

Bacchus berries are grapes, floral mycotrees are fungus-vines that are there to be the underground equivalent of a citrus tree.

Well, I was kind of referring to the fact that The Mother Vine* kind of looks like this:



Four people holding hands can wrap themselves around it once (based on what the current owner said on the radio--to me it looks like one person could do it).  You could chop it down for wood, by why would you do that?  It took 400 years* to get that big.

*The Mother Vine is the oldest cultivated grape vine in America.  Every other scuppernong grape vine being cultivated can trace its ancestry back to the Mother Vine.

[NW_Kohaku]

Oh, one of the things I've been thinking about while typing these crops up is in how climate should be playing a part in the above-ground crops...

Many of these crops list specific types of soil they grow well in.  (Peanuts prefer loamy soil, Tomatoes grow better in silt or clay loam, and grow faster in sandy (that is, loamy) soils, but do not provide as much produce, etc.)  I'm not able to really put this into the format I have right now, but feel like I should note it somewhere..

I also want to say that we should be able to make a distinction between open-air aboveground crops and "greenhouse" aboveground crops.  I think that it should be possible to have natural rainfall generally take care of all your watering needs if you happen to live in the right kind of climate for such a thing, especially since most of these seeds are probably going to have to grow as wild crops, unless you buy seeds off of elves and humans, and this could be a potential way of really differentiating fortresses, based upon having a large enough crop library that every different biome you embark upon will give you a different set of crops that you can naturally grow (at least, aboveground).

Rain, however, is too infrequent and generally too long to be a reliable instrument in agriculture in this game.  While we might potentially convince Toady to make rain more "realistic" in having more frequent rain that continues for shorter periods, this might actually be better simulated in having "invisible rainfall" that makes rain more constant over the course of the year, is capable of watering crops automatically, and would simply make the rain you really see the somewhat rare serious rainstorms.  (Of course, I've also had some embarks that I swear I was in Monsoon country...)

*sigh* but now, that means that instead of just doing the crops I really think about, I should go back and do some desert crops, and other lower-maintainance gardening.  (Of course, one of the results of these changes, though, would be to make survival in a desert significantly more difficult, although not as difficult as on a glacier.  It will become impossible to live without a good supply of water when animals start requiring feed, as well.  This may make calls for "rainbarrels" a more serious cry, and make life in deserts that does not involve embarking along a brook or digging straight for the nearest aquifer or underground lake pretty impossible.)

[Draco18s]

sandy (that is, loamy) soils

Sand != Loam



Loam is an even mix between Sand, Silt, and Clay.

[NW_Kohaku]

I was going by what the website said (although I've gone through about 100 different gardening sites by now, so I can't even remember which one), which was describing loam as a "sandy soil".  Presumably, they did not consider pure sand to be "soil" at all.

[Draco18s]

Presumably, they did not consider pure sand to be "soil" at all.

Of course, neither is pure clay or pure silt...

[CapnMikey]

There's also the question of what factors it's being balanced around.  For example, if you're just dealing with farming for survival, the value wouldn't be a particularly useful factor there, and you'd just want to produce as much as possible.  Or if you're setting up a fort somewhere really inhospitable, then nutrients and soil factors may be a key factor.  Or if you have a really well established fortress, and you want to keep nobles and such happy, then all the value 1 foods in the world won't help you there.

So for example, if you're focusing on survival being a key point, then quantity/GROWDUR might be the major factor.  If you want high quality food for nobles and happy dwarves and such, then value of the individual components is of importance over anything else.  If you want produce to sell to others, then (quantity*value)/GROWDUR is likely the most important(taking into account soil costs, so something like the listed formula).  If you're trying to survive in very inhospitable conditions, then quantity/(nutrient consumption - soil replenishment) might be the key factor.  Or if you're trying to grow them in a desert, then quantity/water consumption might be the main factor.

These are some excellent points!  The whole post, actually.  The whole concept of superficial vs. meaningful variety is one of my obsessions, and sadly one of the main places I feel the current game falls flat.

[Hammurabi]

I worry that an increased complexity in Farming won't provide any real challenge for veteran players, yet make it more difficult for newbies to get out of the first year.  I suggest having one basic plant (name it Grumbleroot) that grows almost anywhere with little setup.  Grumbleroot can be cooked into Grumblecake, a foul tasting meal.  Gumblecake can only be of basic quality, has no trade value, and causes slight unhappy thoughts to any dwarfs that have to eat it.

The rest of the farming/food can have all those complexities that have been suggested.