This issue WAS covered at length earlier in the thread, it's just that Hammurabi either hasn't read it, or just doesn't care, because he wants to employ
argumentum ad absurdum as a strategy for arguing to remove the entirity of farming, see:
So where does this lead? IMO, the conclusion I come to is that farming just needs to be scrapped. Dwarfs need to import their food. In literature, dwarfs mine metal and gems, convert it to tradegoods, and trade it for food and other items. Farming, if included at all, could be on a very limited scale for some dwarf-only plants. The produce could be used as one of the ingredients in dwarfish alcohol.
You see, while Hammurabi seems to want to claim he's just sticking up for "his own playstyle", the problem is that he's really arguing to utterly remove from the game any playstyle but his. I don't care much for the military, but I certainly don't argue for the removal of all the military aspects of this game (except in parody of the notion of removing aspects of the game, as I did earlier in this thread). It's frankly a little counter-productive to argue for the REMOVAL of systems and complexity from the game, when we are supposed to be ADDING enjoyable complexity to the game. (And that is, after all, exactly what "more features" are - more complexity - the more "things" you add into the game, the more complex it will be, almost by definition, unless every one of those features are useless and ignorable.)
Farming is the economic activity off of which all civilization is based off of, and land requirements are a big reason for why many conflicts occurred in the past, as well as how history unraveled in the way it did. If we want a game that reasonably models the rise and fall of civilizations as well as management of a settlement, then farming should be modeled as realistically as possible.
Yes, entirely. Agriculture is the basis of the economy, and as such, if we are to add any serious depth to the economy, we have to eliminate the problem of the economy being completely lobotomized from the bottom up, by making resources no longer an unlimited "free stuff button", starting with farming, which, as it starts to involve the lumber industry and the like, as well, will become essentially the biggest chunk of the entire economy, with only really stone, glass, and steel being seperate. That is why it shouldn't be easy to simply flip the "now stop growing cotton, start to make rice" switch, and should be of at least some concern to any player, even if only to defend their satellite farms from which they import food in a military fort.
It is for the same reason that an RTS game has a cost to the units that you build - resource management is a fudamental aspect of any serious game, the basis of any "Interesting Decision", and to add real decisions to the game, we need something to make even renewable resouces not simply a matter of adding more land or simply upping the population cap and designating more farmers.
Kohaku, you've constantly shown that you don't understand what I mean by an interesting choice. I'm not even trying with you any more on it.
Actually, Hammurabi, the problem isn't that I don't understand your meaning of Interesting Choice, it's that you are either unwilling to read what has been written, or unwilling to understand, if not simply moving the goalposts just to prolong the argument.
I'm not seeing any "Decisions" in your ideas. Each plant type will have a preferred pH level. Players will look up this value in the Wiki and apply the appropriate amount of fertilizer. Different crops will need different amount of water. Players will water them according to the Wiki values. Crops will need to be rotated. Players will rotate them according to the Wiki. Maybe this level of detail will be interesting to some people. But I don't see any real decisions here, other than doing it the optimal way or purposely doing it the suboptimal way. Don't add complexity if it doesn't add choices for the player to make.
Here's a quick idea of Interesting Decisions. Have the different types of plants/food have a real effect on the dwarfs.
Plump helmet - baseline food, no modifiers
Pig tail - Makes the dwarfs work harder, more productive, but creates some unhappy thoughts
Sweet pod - Makes the dwarfs sleep more (lazy), and more contented (happiness goes up)
Quarry bush - Adds small boost to combat skills, with corresponding loss to non-combat skills
Dimple cup - Adds small boost to non-combat skills, with corresponding loss to combat skills
Muck Root - Not a Dwarf favorite, but the Humans value it highly in trades
Now there are interesting decisions to make. The player will have to plan ahead, deciding what to plant now base on the type of food he wants 6 months from now. Give the player several plausible choices, with the choice possibly having a real effect on the game.
Here we go, your idea of "Interesting Decisions" - having different kinds of crops that you might want to plant for different situations. That is, the decision is in the kind of crop you want to plant.
WELL THEN, let's just have plenty of different types of plants and have different uses for each plant, right? OK, that's entirely a part of what I've detailed. (See
here,
here,
here, and
here. More coming the less time I have to spend arguing this same argument with you all day every day.)
But wait a second, why choose? Why not plant ALL the plants all the time, the way we can right now? It takes no more ability or work or thought on the part of the player to have any one crop as opposed to any other.
THIS is why farms cannot be a "free stuff button". See this again:
I don't know why soil pH is the preferred whipping boy of those who oppose added complexity, but it's really the easiest variable to deal with, at least, unless you run out of lime.
Anyway, I'll continue to defend added complexity in the model by referring back to the "free stuff button" problem.
Currently, stone is effectively free stuff - you almost always have far more of it than you can store in stockpiles or get rid of, and therefore, you will use it without even considering it a cost - it's free! Anything you can make from stone, you make it from stone, because stone is free - free rock mugs, free statues, free tables, free chairs, free doors!
Currently, wood is limited in supply, but still fairly cheap - you can make a huge variety of things out of wood, but really, you tend to stick to barrels and bins and beds, and maybe some charcoal, but not too much. Wood is something you can't just consume completely without any care in the world. You have to put at least some thought into conserving it for the things you really do need, because you only have so much of it in any given year.
Currently, however, steel and to a lesser extent, bronze are relatively difficult to make. You need fuel, metal that you have to find and are in somewhat limited (although still fairly abundant) quantities, and you're prone to supply shortages. You can't just build steel chairs for all your dwarves, you have to really consider what your priorities are for steel. (And also note that steel and wood are both inifinite, they're just limited by the amount you can harvest per unit time.)
Frankly, these are the ONLY concerns about resources/materials that you really have in Dwarf Fortress.
So yes, you can add a few more jobs onto the processing part, or a little more land onto the farming part, but it doesn't change the fact that it's still basically like glass when you have magma and sand or like stone - it's free stuff, you'll never run out of it, so there's no reason to ever consider it. Food is a default, automatic, easy gimmie, and will continue to be even if you have to up the number of dwarves working - most players just wind up killing off dwarves that they wind up have idling because they can't find any jobs for them, anyway, so simply assigning a larger proportion of their labor to farming is no difficulty, and if their entire supply chain is automatic and thought-free, then the problem will always remain.
This is why we need "additional complexity". It's because we need SOME complexity in the mechanic whatsoever, so that it isn't just a "push button, get food" mechanic.
I've frequently seen arguments against the farming thread based upon "this isn't a Farming Simulator", and that they don't want to have to care about generating resources or, really, anything besides seiges... Which frankly, seems like it's selling the game very short. DF's not JUST a Warhammer Simulator, either. We have to care about something in our fortress, and since, at the moment, we have nothing to really care about except whether or fortress continues to exist or not, food is as good a place as any to make the player actually have to care about resource management. Heck, this isn't even more dramatic a claim than what every RTS since the days of Dune 2 has done, or every city-building strategy game has ever done. Currently, almost everything you do is free and limitless and as such, there is nothing stopping you from ordering massive mining or construction or industrial projects without ever having to consider costs. There are hardly even opportunity costs associated with anything - all the defenses and food production you'll ever need can be set up in a single season's time, and even making more processing only means you have to wait for more dwarves to show up to do more of the jobs to make the ratio of foodworking dwarves still sufficient. It just means the fortresses have more dwarves, and the FPS goes lower.
The only way we really solve the problem DF faces is by making the player recognize that farming is not free, and that you can't just scale production forever, or demand things made completely without thinking about them.
Crop rotations (where sets of crops have to be chosen to accomidate one another), pests and pest control, and supporting fertilizer industries, all of which must similarly change in focus every time you want to produce more of one form of food over another. These make players stop and consider what they are going to need in the future, and build accordingly. They make players no longer simply respond to a shortage of one product by simply adding more dwarves to that production line. It means you have to consider either conserving on some resources or take the time to accomidate the solution to the problem.
This is what DF needs more of - a need to stop and think about your problems - rather than simply making all your problems a matter of oversight and not paying attention when your supplies started running low.
You want to know what the problem/facepalm moment/way I killed my fort I see most frequently coming up about farms is right now? "I forgot to start a farm." Farming is currently so mindless and so assured that people just plain forget the entire mechanic is even there. "Wait, you mean there were parts to this game that weren't the military or possibly mining?!"
DF is supposed to be better than this.
So yes, if you decide, arbitrarily, that you want such-and-such a crop, you can determine what it takes to make that sort of plant, and build a field and system so that you can grow that crop. If you pay attention, you can make that sustainable in an automated fashion, provided you are willing to stick to that decision of crops, and stick to that level of growth. You want different crops? You want more crops? Well, you have to go back to work at it a little. You have to give back to the land what you take. Your actions have consequences, so you have to consider the consequences when you consider the actions. That's the basics of making an Interesting Decision.
Does this mean that we are suddenly doing some big-bad evil thing of making a player stop and do a little work to get what he wants out of a system? He has to think about how to go about getting the reward he wants? Yes, of course, that's what a game is supposed to do - provide the player with a little challenge for a little reward.
Who wants to build a fortress where everything is killed for them, every need is supplied for them, every megaproject takes no time, because you can just designate where the walls are supposed to be, and it gets filled in by the click of the mouse? No, it's the work you do for those things that give them meaning.
And this is why I say you don't really understand what it is you want, Hammurabi: You want your planning and ability to design systems and everything that I'm proposing, but you claim you want it for free, that you don't want to work for something, that you just want it handed to you. You reject it simply because it's *sigh* FARMING, and therefore, it's beneath your notice. It's only noteworthy if it's a tech upgrade you spend 3 turns worth of your Civ's research points on gaining a +50% population growth rate.
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Topic: Improved Farming (Read 140746 times)