But land and dwarves are resources. One reason I really want to see larger farms is that it's simply too easy to fit en entire fortress into an extremely small space.
But even dwarves are essentially valueless. With how easy it is to replace any losses, people often just execute their dwarves for their own amusement. Just go search for "Naming Bridge" in the Dwarf Mode Discussion Forum.
The only value in a dwarf comes from when one dwarf is more efficient at working than another, and that is because you can then have less dwarves (kill the excess) so that you can preserve the only number players really do care about: FPS.
We need to change the nature of the game by making resources actually
worthwhile to the character, something they are glad to have, and something they are more cautious about wasting. (Or as someone else said, you always need more of [X] whatever [X] is, so you have to be cautious of how you spend it.) Even far simpler games than DF, like your typical RTS game, you have to be cautious about the expenditure of your resources because they aren't infinite, even if they are renewable.
Now with that said, don't worry, you'll probably have larger farms. Just because larger farms or more farmers alone isn't a solution doesn't mean that larger farms can't be part of the solution. And much of the choice in what crops you plant will probably be based upon the relative amount of land you need to till to feed your population. (That Agave is a very slow grower with little need for maintainance, so you can feed your population with few workers and little need for fertilizer... but it takes massive tracts of land to plant enough of those to actually keep a fortress running, and probably too much to really be viable all by itself.)
regarding page 34--don't think I've seen it and don't think anyone else has. Have you considered starting a new thread with a well organized and maintained OP?
That kind of defeats the point, though, doesn't it? We're supposed to be putting the whole discussion on one thread. When we start splitting this up into different threads, then people only read the main thread, and ignore the linked threads. Believe me, this is more of the "Suggestions Rubbish Bin" than the "Suggestions Forum" for the vast bulk of suggestions.
Kotaku, I find it funny how you are a strong proponent of very detailed realism when talking about soils, nutritions, etc., but when someone demands using more "real" proportions of land and dwarfpower, you suddenly don't need realism at all. 
I'm a proponent for realism when it can fit, makes for a good mechanic, and there is no serious downside to using realism. When realism is simply impossible to maintain, however, I recognize this, and admit that realism simply isn't possible.
I proposed Volume and Mass based upon making a hard defined tile size and types of stacks. When someone mentioned time, however, I said that there's simply no way we could play the game in a scaled real-time. (One frame would take approximately 1/4 of a second. That would mean that even at 100 FPS, you are only experiencing gametime at 25 times, or it would take 322.56 hours of gametime (assuming continuous 100 FPS) per year... Or two weeks of continuous running.
More to the point, however, is that you are trying to cubby-hole me into being a proponent of "Realism for realism's own sake". I argue for a better, more complex game. If realism is achievable with that, it's all the better, because realism adds to verisimilartude, and that is one of Toady's major goals. Still, I'm fully capable of recognizing when realism is not an advisable goal, and it is only a secondary objective. The primary objective is changing the nature of how the player sees and interacts with the game, so as to make the game a more challenging, and hence, rewarding experience.
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Topic: Improved Farming (Read 142473 times)