Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Smew]

Same, I also don't see the farming as very unrealistic, seeing as how every tile is a quantum space big enough to hold dragons, etc, etc.

Estimates are a minimum of 3,000 sq ft per person per year for food production. Even if we assume that a tile is 10x10 (split the difference between a bed and a dragon, and that's likely still way too large since no two dwarves can occupy the same tile without one lying down) then you'd still need 30 tiles *per dwarf*. Toss in some magic with dwarves only eating once a season, with dwarven food producing more than human food, and so on, and we're still WAY off.

The US requires 5% of the population to be dedicated to agriculture, and that's with John Deere in the mix. In a fortress of 200, that's 10 dwarves doing non-preparation food tasks year-round. As it is now, a single dwarf can *easily* feed an entire fortress.

To balance, I'd put minimum farm size to feed one dwarf at 10 tiles running year round without fertilizer, 2000 tiles to feed 200. That's just shy of a full embark tile worth of plants and would require either an easy to setup (but possibly difficult to defend) aboveground operation, or some real effort to setup underground. A fortress of 200 shouldn't be a cakewalk, but I'd think that 10 dwarves could keep that kind of farming operation running, especially if you cut the size in half with fertilizer.

We keep asking for challenges to the game, I don't see why providing enough food shouldn't be one of them.

Haha, well, I agree, it should be harder, and I'd like it to be harder in the future, and we'll never work tile size down to an actual size, so oh well.

[Martin]

Haha, well, I agree, it should be harder, and I'd like it to be harder in the future, and we'll never work tile size down to an actual size, so oh well.

Well, I think the workload angle is the right way to approach it, because I agree, we'll never sort out a tile size. It would seem to me that if you have less than 5% of your fort growing food, even all at legendary, you'll starve. Figure out how many tiles a legendary dwarf can work full time, year round and make that the steady-state point for 20 dwarves to stay alive with food and booze (with reasonable assumptions).

Early in a fort, you'll have a lot of labor devoted to not starving, and it'd be hard to not embark with a proficient grower.

[eerr]

Haha, well, I agree, it should be harder, and I'd like it to be harder in the future, and we'll never work tile size down to an actual size, so oh well.

Well, I think the workload angle is the right way to approach it, because I agree, we'll never sort out a tile size. It would seem to me that if you have less than 5% of your fort growing food, even all at legendary, you'll starve. Figure out how many tiles a legendary dwarf can work full time, year round and make that the steady-state point for 20 dwarves to stay alive with food and booze (with reasonable assumptions).

Early in a fort, you'll have a lot of labor devoted to not starving, and it'd be hard to not embark with a proficient grower.

you can hunt or gather plants untill the caravan arrives.
if you need a "proficient" grower within a 2 years you are growing the population too quick.

[Slappy Moose]

Well SHIT, no wonder I have thousands of extra food barrels at all times. I always have at least ten 10x10 plots.

[WhatDoesThisLeverDo]

Well SHIT, no wonder I have thousands of extra food barrels at all times. I always have at least ten 10x10 plots.

Yeah I am of the same school of thought. I just like seeing my numbers tick higher and higher, and then imagine how long it would take for the food to run out.

[Noble Digger]

Yeah, it's fun to end up with 3500 booze and 6500 prepared meal units. You can buy an entire caravan in exchange for a bunch of delicious food, and give them a ton of extra just so they'll like you. It tickles me, to imagine them braving the harsh wilderness in wagons loaded with steel and clothing and jewels to taste my dwarves' awesome cooking and brewery

I beg you, someone, mod in psychoactive pharmaceutical plants so I can sell the elves marijuana to go with their numnums. They always talk about how they love trees, after all It can just be an uncookable, unbrewable plant with high value, which can be processed into hempen fibers at the farmer's workshop. Any ACTUAL effects are optional, it's the idea of it that makes me chuckle.

[ZeroGravitas]

Same, I also don't see the farming as very unrealistic, seeing as how every tile is a quantum space big enough to hold dragons, etc, etc.

Estimates are a minimum of 3,000 sq ft per person per year for food production. Even if we assume that a tile is 10x10 (split the difference between a bed and a dragon, and that's likely still way too large since no two dwarves can occupy the same tile without one lying down) then you'd still need 30 tiles *per dwarf*. Toss in some magic with dwarves only eating once a season, with dwarven food producing more than human food, and so on, and we're still WAY off.

The US requires 5% of the population to be dedicated to agriculture, and that's with John Deere in the mix. In a fortress of 200, that's 10 dwarves doing non-preparation food tasks year-round. As it is now, a single dwarf can *easily* feed an entire fortress.

To balance, I'd put minimum farm size to feed one dwarf at 10 tiles running year round without fertilizer, 2000 tiles to feed 200. That's just shy of a full embark tile worth of plants and would require either an easy to setup (but possibly difficult to defend) aboveground operation, or some real effort to setup underground. A fortress of 200 shouldn't be a cakewalk, but I'd think that 10 dwarves could keep that kind of farming operation running, especially if you cut the size in half with fertilizer.

We keep asking for challenges to the game, I don't see why providing enough food shouldn't be one of them.

Please don't even bother with real-world comparisons. It's a complete waste of time. There are so many DISSIMILARITIES that you can't possibly draw any conclusions based on the real world, and that's before you even consider that "dwarves are magic".

For example:
Dwarves are half the size of people. This might mean they eat half as much, but it's also possible it means they eat some exponential factor less, because perhaps growing larger requires exponentially more food as a larger body is less efficient.

Dwarves require alcohol to function properly.  Apparently they metabolize it in some hyper-efficient way that requires less food.

Dwarven food products are not the same as human products. Perhaps dwarven food and alcohol products have 50x the calories in them that real-world food products do.

and on and on. I don't mean these to be some individual points that need refuting and explanation, the point is that it's a foolish waste of time to make real-world comparisons or use the real-world agriculture sector as guidance for Dwarf Fortress agriculture.

DF agriculture IS boring and overly simplistic and too easy. It should be changed to make it more challenging. But the fact that real-world agrilculture is harder has nothing to do with it. DF agriculture is LESS FUN than it could be. That's the reason for changing it, nothing to do with the real world.

Along the same lines, cooking is too simplistic and isn't fun. Alcohol cooking is exploitable. There's a lot wrong with the entire food chain in this game, from agriculture to eating.

[ZeroGravitas]

Haha, well, I agree, it should be harder, and I'd like it to be harder in the future, and we'll never work tile size down to an actual size, so oh well.

Well, I think the workload angle is the right way to approach it, because I agree, we'll never sort out a tile size. It would seem to me that if you have less than 5% of your fort growing food, even all at legendary, you'll starve. Figure out how many tiles a legendary dwarf can work full time, year round and make that the steady-state point for 20 dwarves to stay alive with food and booze (with reasonable assumptions).

Early in a fort, you'll have a lot of labor devoted to not starving, and it'd be hard to not embark with a proficient grower.

you can hunt or gather plants untill the caravan arrives.
if you need a "proficient" grower within a 2 years you are growing the population too quick.

It's still  better to take a proficient Grower because the Grower can grow more food BEFORE the caravan arrives, which you can then process and cook into roasts and trade with the caravan.

It's hands down the  most efficient way to make trade goods, and it's fairly obvious it's the optimal strategy. The embark points invested in proficient Grower will produce more value than points put  in any other skill, domestic animal, or items.

[Derakon]

Unskilled cooked meals aren't worth all that much money. You'd get a faster return by making mechanisms, or stone mugs if you have flux/obsidian. Now, if you have a skilled cook in addition to your skilled grower, that's a different matter.

Most of my forts spend about half of the fall madly making trade goods, while all of spring and summer are spend carving the fortress out. Thus, the ability to make trade goods rapidly is more important than the ability to make them efficiently (the two are not always the same).

[Leafsnail]

It takes a ridiculously small amount of fields to feed a large fort.  You may want to supplement these fields with dimples, pig tails and other clothiering stuff.

[eerr]

why not start a clothing industry? just make sure all your dwarves have good storage, and sell off every item that remains in the stockpiles.

pig tails-dimples+blade weed, mill/loom, weave, sew decorations, enjoy!

I've never started a clothing industry before...

[Martin]

why not start a clothing industry? just make sure all your dwarves have good storage, and sell off every item that remains in the stockpiles.

Part of the problem is that if you have any kind of sieging taking place, unless you've modded a lot of wealth out of the game, you'll never have to produce a thing to buy out caravans. What you pull off of dead bodies and out of dead caravans to ambush will keep you in trade forever.

A better economics model (which is coming) will fix that so that the humans won't constantly buy mountains of goods that don't fit them or anyone else they trade with, but for now, there's not a lot of need for clothing industry outside of making sand bags (which do deteriorate over time and need to be replaced, but that's a SLOOOOW process).

[Leafsnail]

Your dwarves clothes do fall to pieces after a while, but most players don't care and just let them walk around in rags.