I actually have several things I want to know, but will limit myself to a couple topics, because I recognize my questions are fairly long and involved...
The first relates to the Improved Farming thread, which I have been fairly active in, especially after some renewed debate was kicked up by this post:
We haven't made any final decisions. I think a NPK+pH model does give you something back, because you'd get some really great varied local landscapes and it would take care of crop rotation, composting, naturally poor soil, or whatever else, but it introduces a farming interface problem to dwarf mode in terms of conveying the information in wholesome terms and allowing you to solve problems that come up.
Because of that, I went and made a series of posts on crop rotation and fertilizers but my questions regarding this are the following:
Will all crops use NPK+pH (+water) as a model, or will mushrooms and other underground crops need to have alternative sources of energy? Even simply making it be NPK+pH+water+carbohydrates (which require the occasional dumping of some form of "dead stuff" as a source of carbohydrates for a non-photosynthesizing lifeform, even a highly efficient one like fungi) would break out of the notion that all crops are photosynthetic.
Will it be possible to use Chemosynthesis in some form of underwater farming based on igneous stones, such as depleting obsidians to create things like tube worm farms, which can also be killed and tossed into underground farms for carbohydrates and nutrients to farm mushrooms?
Also, even if we are talking about mainly using crop rotation as a means of creating sustainable nutrient levels in the soil, there will still, presumably, be the at least seasonal need to irrigate the farmland. A bit of debate occured in the Improved Farming thread over how to do this, but I have been a proponent of using a smaller variation of the new piping that we are going to see in the Improved Mechanics, where they are smaller pipes that you just punch holes in, and dwarves can man a cutoff valve to allow water into those pipes on their own, without immediate player orders (and the pipes are closed as soon as they leave for any reason to prevent flooding), so that it forms an irrigation/sprikler system that dwarves can be either given scheduled orders to water, or can automatically start watering crops whenever they notice the soil is too dry, without giving dwarves the ability to actually open floodgates that might spread liquid Fun all over the lower levels of your fortress until you figure out what's going on. While this may be an overly long buildup, my question is will we be capable of having dwarves that, given the resources to do so, will be able to properly care for the fields themselves, or will we have to micromanage everything, and only those who build water clocks for seasonsal flooding schedules will have actually automated farms?
I'd also like to change gears and talk about something else that popped up in one of my own suggestion threads,
Class Warfare, which is about trying to make dwarves demand better quality of life and social services as your fortress becomes more wealthy and advanced, but it spun off into a conversation about how much autonomy dwarves could potentially have, especially if we rework the economic model:
As for the zoning for commerce part, that was simply an example of "loosening the leash", something else we could do, for example, is simply not assign labors to dwarves, and just have job requests which dwarves fill based upon what job they want to perform that day. If dwarves own their own workshops, that would be significantly changed by what they own.
It could even be a model where dwarves own the resources they harvest or create, and you have to "buy" it from them with fortress funds, and they can simply start setting up their own industries based on their own preferences, and you just post "contracts" to buy certain amounts of products or materials, and let the dwarves do the rest as they see fit, while paying them in money that presumably must be taxed of them.
That would be SIGNIFICANTLY slipping their leash, to the point where dwarves are total free spirits that you have very little direct control over. I'm asking for a matter of degree players would want their dwarves to become autonomous.
So, then, my question is:
Would you even consider changing the relationship that the player has with the dwarves right now (as unquestioned overlord and direct allower and denier of all things dwarves can and cannot do), so that dwarves can become more autonomous and individual, and possibly create a better simulation, while on the other hand, potentially dramatically upping the potential for Fun because dwarves are stupid and very likely to hurt themselves unless continually babysat, or perhaps more importantly, if it meant that the player had less direct control over his fortress, and had to rely more on coaxing the ants in his/her antfarm to do his/her bidding?(There, that post was only
slightly huge...)
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (Read 1609838 times)