Is it okay if I don't want something greater, and I think it would detract from my enjoyment of the game?
Well, I have to say that a lack of any sort of resource management mechanics is detracting from my enjoyment of the game, however, from what you say later on in this thread, I think you are misunderstanding what I am proposing.
My only beefs with farming as it stands right now is that it's A) too-high output for dwarf-hour investment, and B) takes up too little space.
Again, I'll quote myself on why this is just not adequate:
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?!"
The way it's implemented doesn't need micromanagement right now; reducing yield wouldn't increase micromanagement; and just about any of the other changes in this thread would increase micromanagement a lot as far as I can tell.
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Farming's something that I want to have to plan my fort around, but not keep mucking with. You decide where you want it, you have to commit space and labor to it, you do what you can to keep it safe. It's the domain of the underclass. It needs advance planning, but not constant attention. I like planning; I don't like micro.
So tell me what that micromanagement is, specifically, in this system.
I am trying to work this system down to automate virtually everything that will just be a grind, but the current system is far too shallow, and if we are to make this game serious about not simply handing out infinite amounts of resources, this is where it has to start. I want to make the player make real decisions, not merely press the "fertilize" button over and over again, so I want there to be plenty of automation, but there has to be something else in there that makes the player have to care about his farms, because when we start having trees grow on farms, alchemical reagents grow on farms, and frankly, potentially anything that isn't a rock or metal or gem grow on farms, then it needs to make a player stop and consider how he's going to allocate a limited set of resources to growing the resources that will run his fort.
Since I'm a little tired, I'll just quote myself again on this general topic:
Now I would very much support a product cycle that took animal waste -> fertilizer and water needs firmly into account! But then, in terms of resource management, that would be the lion's share of the challenge and screwing with soil chemistry would just be a bit of window dressing.
Yes, the more work gets done on this, the more it moves away from focusing on soil chemisty. That's not really a bad thing, though, since you can just consider some of the other ways in which this game is detailed/complicated - metals and stones (and wood and bone) now have attributes that make them more or less suited for certain tasks than others. This requires a slew of complex statistics (many of which don't seem to have any purpose yet), but which don't really matter to the player - all that really matters is that different materials are better or worse for different purposes.
If we are going to make fertility management (and fertilizer and water management) the focus, then we need ways of making fertilizers different from each other, and that requires having different stats for them all... (And keep in mind that real-life manure has different qualities, based upon the animal and its diet... rabbit and avian manure are more valuable than cow manure, and free-range grazing cattle have worse manure than dairy cattle that are fed grains... theoretically, we might even go the EXTRA extra mile and stat out the values of every creature's manure. How would THAT be for a tagline? "Dwarf Fortress - We optimize our bodily waste!")
Anyway, back on track, the purpose of soil chemistry was never to force micromanagement, but rather to force the player to have to balance the system out, so that things are not QUITE as simple as "designate farm, get food". We don't have to force the player to mess with specific phosphorus rates, we just need to give the player a mechanic whereby phosphorus, even if invisible, plays a part in how one has to pay upkeep on their fortress. You can see that in the differences of how the nutrients really play out:
Nitrogen: Runs out fast, but can be replinished easily. Nitrogen-fixation cover crops are easy ways to replace this, but are useless except for grazers. Nitrogen-fixation food crops (like beans or peanuts) are lower-producers, and restore less nitrogen, but you get some nitrogen back, anyway, and you're still getting more food out overall. Nitrogen comes in most fertilizers (so you can avoid serious crop rotation), but nitrogen-heavy fertilizers, especially Urea, can acidify soil, forcing even more dependance upon adding stuff to the soil. (In Real Life (IRL) - Nitrogen is technically the nutrient that encourages growth, especially leafy growth. Overmuch burns the leaves, and can cause the plant to focus more on growing leaves than fruit.)
Phosphorus: Depletes somewhat slowly, but is difficult to replace. Biological waste (manure) gives you a spread of all three of NPK, but only some kinds of manure are really high in Phosphorus. No crop rotation method really adds more P to the soil, either, so you pretty much have to add something to the soil as a fertilizer to replace P depletion. Bone Meal is higher in P than other types of biological fertilizer (but also contains N and K), and the only other ways of artificially adding P in any serious quantity is through mining out P-containing sediment (good ones are not common), and then breaking up the stone. (IRL - This is the nutrient you want in as high a quantity as you can get - it's what helps contribute to the size of fruits.)
Potassium: Common in soil, and slow to deplete, but also slow to raise. You probably shouldn't need to go out of your way to replenish K too often. Most manures have plenty K, even if composted first, so just keeping up a regular manure schedule should keep K from being a problem. This should only become a problem if you go for intensive nitrogen fertilization rather than crop rotations, letting K gradually decline. K is slow to deplete, but once depleted, takes years to replinish. Potash is pretty much the most refined form of Potassium dwarves can make, but it might be better to just compost the whole tree for a broader spread of nutrients than burn it down just to get the pure potassium unless you are desperate for rebuilding K in the soil. Keep in mind that now, we can grow trees on our farms. It's kind of silly to chop down and burn trees for the ability to grow more trees. Especially if regular soil has nutrient depletion, and repeatedly chopping down trees can lead to eventually causing the untilled soil to deplete, as well, and you run out of wild trees to cut down. (IRL - You need as much if not more of it in the soil as nitrogen, but it tends to bind to the soil instead of being as freely water-soluble as nitrogen is, so it depleates at 1/10th the rate of Nitrogen. This element is critical in root growth, and disease prevention.)
pH: Like Potassium, this shouldn't move around too much. It's mainly a problem when first starting a farm, when trying to change from one set of crops to another, or if you use acidifying fertilizers for a fair period of time. This should be slow to change in general, taking a full year to change + or - 1 pH. Most real life crops grow around 6.0 to 6.8 pH. Alkaline (7.0 to 8.0) crops tend to be "desert" crops that prefer low-water environments. Alkaline soil prevents some nutrients from being available to crops. Highly acidic soil (4.5 to 6.0 pH) are the sorts of things you see in extremely rainy areas. Acidic soils tend to hurt crops, but can wind up being better suited for some crops, because the weeds that would choke them out are less tolerant of the acid (and the higher content of iron and other elements) than the crops are. Soil acidity is changed by liming the soil (with limestone or chalk) or by using elemental sulfur (brimstone).
Water: It's water. Plants need it, obviously. They need lots of it. Plants that are suited for dryer soils have to make do with a lower amount of sugars, and tend to be either less nutritious or just plain slower growing than plants that guzzle water. This means that your water supply can determine whether you are tilling a broad area to make use of slower-growing or less-nutritious crops that take less water (and labor per tile) or concentrated farmland that take plenty of water.
Biomass: This is undecomposed stuff mainly for underground fungi to grow off of. Aboveground, this goes up and down pretty freely, depending on how much of the plant gets tilled back into the soil. While fallow, it depletes naturally as soil bacteria decompose it into nutrients, and plants can become vulnerable to diseases if this gets too high, while others prefer a thicker layer of humus. Underground, however, this is more important, and represents the need to constantly supply underground farms with more energy in the absence of photosynthesis. This requires plenty of dead stuff being added to underground farms. For fully subterranean civs, it might force that magma farming I mentioned earlier as a way of growing some chemosynthetic life to use to decompose for biomass.
There's also the things I talked about with needing to potentially clean air or generate light underground being solved with farmable underground molds that generate oxygen or can glow... these would also require access to the same watering and soil chemistry needs as other plants, forcing a choice as to where to put your resources.
Again, simply making the numbers the right numbers for one field for one crop isn't supposed to be the game. It's making players take a look at what they can use as resources to fertilize their fields, and trying to work out what combination of crops and systems for irrigation or fertilization or other aspects they can use to make the most of whatever resources they have in shortest supply.
I like the idea of additional detail, that would ramp up crop yeilds based on some player interaction/knowledge. But I'de like it to be additional fun stuff, rather than a necessary slog. Maybe by spending time applying pH adjusters and additional nutrients, the number of farmers needed is effectively reduced because of an abundance of crops. So the skilled player gets more mileage out of his staff, whereas the beginner can get by wastefully.
Actually, this is supposed to be part of the system... If we force farming to be more dependant upon either adding something to the soil or by careful crop rotation and resource management so that you can get by on just the manure, then we can make the entire need to feed your people be a scalable difficulty.
Your starting seven can waste as much as they want to - just chop down trees, and grow plump helmets on the logs after you muddy some dirt! Easy! You just have to take some external resources that are finite in amount.
As your fortress gets larger, however, if you have to depend upon cutting down trees to feed your mushrooms, then you're going to run out of trees. You have to work with less fertilizer, and have to stretch your resources out more just because it's finite. You need to rely more and more on the manure you can get in a scalable amount from your dwarves and your livestock.
If water has a more meaningful finite nature, as cavern water supplies and brooks and the like are less useful supplies of water, then you can waste as much water as you want early on... but as your farms get bigger, you need to take the same finite supply of water, and feed more crops with it.
If you rely upon just using readily-built-up soils from soil layers, then as you expand, you have to start using less and less desirable stone types, and break them and build the soil on them to make them useful as you expand your farms, increasing the overall amount of work it takes to set up any given farm. (And as you have to expand it, your aquaducts have to move more water further through the fortress... plus you'll have the sewers to build around, as well.)
Then there's the problem of pests. They're meant to be a way of forcing crop diversity, by making crops more vulnerable to pests the more that you rely upon them. This forces the player to reach out to perhaps less desirable crops than they would at first reach for as their fortress starts up.
Basically, the longer you go on, the larger the farm, the harder and more complex it gets. This is the scalable, end-game-is-harder-than-setting-up mechanic that was discussed back around page 31 that set this whole thing in motion... and you just can't do this without some sort of complex background mechanic in place.
So again, if you find something in this that is simply routine button-pushing, tell me what you think it is, and I will try to automate it, but that doesn't mean we need to keep the farming system so dumbed down that it renders the game completely unable to model prioritzation of needs or making players consider costs versus benefits of certain actions because we're afraid of making something better if it takes some player thought. Making the player think about whether he wants to pay the price for getting something he wants, or forcing the player to pay back what he takes out of the land are hardly negative things.
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Topic: Improved Farming (Read 142380 times)