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[NW_Kohaku]

Wait, do you mean actually removing the ponds from the game in non-marshlands? That's just silly, then we wouldn't have aboveground water sources in places without rivers.

Could be solved easily enough if we could build cisterns that collect rainwater the way that murky pools do.

Or that rainbarrels idea that's been around for a while...

[Quatch]

About the ponds: probably just a marshy area. If this is the normal then that's not very realistic I think.
 

I get murky pools in scortching deserts, that can't contain water for more than a couple minutes before going dry, and they're STILL about 4 of them on a 4x4 desert embark.   How do those things even exist before your dwarves get there?  They evaporate faster than rain can fill them.

Well, dried ponds and riverbeds shouldn't be nonexistant in deserts, actually pretty common. We could re-name them appropriately though, with murky pools [dry lakes] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_lake) becoming playa, sabkha, alkali flats (what would _you_ do with an easy source of nitrates and lithium?); dry rivers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadi) being wadi, etc.

Ephemeral rains, flash floods, canyons, there is lots of room for water features in the desert.


Although I do agree: in non-marshy lands pools should be larger and less frequent. DF soils are basically all infinite drainage on the surface and aquitards below the surface.

Seeps and artesian wells moving through permeable strata for the win.
[note: this post added about 4 new words to the autocorrect dictionary. Another use for DF found.]

Could be solved easily enough if we could build cisterns that collect rainwater the way that murky pools do.

All constructed flooring should be impermeable and collect water. Then we'd have to consider drainage in above ground forts, and a working surface storm sewer would be the logical outcome. If you had permeable and tracked soil water flows, subsurface storm sewers for de-watering would also be useful.

[dree12]

That same reasoning can be applied to strength. Endurence is more of Willpower plus calorie system, so that can be replaced too.

And yet Toughness ≠ fatness, nor is it an arbitrary number that is the same for any human.

Also, Endurance is more than willpower plus calories. Calories are an expression of energy available to the body, not energy usable by the body. Endurance is more of efficiency of energy used and availability of that energy. Two people with the same amount of willpower and the same amount of calorie intake can have quite different endurance amounts. This is easily seen when you compare Olympic sprinters versus Olympic marathon runners. One trains up speed, the other endurance. Do you wish to claim sprinters have less willpower than marathon runners? Or that sprinters don't eat enough?

You argue for "simplifying" the system while making it more complex. Remove aspects because you feel that something tied to appearance can represent something that you cannot even tell in human appearance. I don't understand why, except because it can be. Is there really any great benefit to removing the arbitrary numbers that can be assigned to creatures in dwarf fortress that represent abstract concepts like toughness, willpower, stamina, and strength?
(Muscle mass is not directly equal to usable strength in humans as well, but at least there it is close enough that I could let it slide.)

Bottom line, justify why it is needed. Just to "reduce the variables" isn't a good reason, because we don't have a true to life simulator that can simulate the pressure in the veins so only the exact amount of blood comes out. We also don't simulate the lungs oxygenating the blood which is then pumped via the heart to pass oxygen to all the important body parts. There are MILLIONS of variables for every bit of tissue in your own body, so why reduce the variables that represent this to create a sum whole with tissue interactions that are based on appearance modifiers, when the appearance of a body changes due to those hidden variables in the first place?

It seems odd to me, and I don't understand why it should be done your way rather than how Toady is currently progressing with it. Again but with less math and more justification.

I think I have justified it enough. DF keeps track (or will keep track) of enough information to "simulate" Strength (mainly mustle), Toughness (a combination of many thing like skin material, blood pressure, blood thickness, bone density+elasticity), and Endurence (efficiency, Willpower, metabolism, calories), because put simply, those do not depend on knowing the shape of the body. We could add 50 different other factors to those, but produce an argument that any of those need knowing body shape. You could say that Toughness also includes blood salinity, but soon, we'd be tracking that.

[Jiri Petru]

Yes. Brooks should have 3/7 water. You can swim in them, but not drown. Maybe some smaller like 2/7.

Such an amazing and simple idea! This would also mean you wouldn't need to have the counterintuitive "floor on top of 7/7 water" system. People would simply cross the water. The only new thing required would be sloped river/brook banks.

Also, will villagers actually harvest the crops, store them, then eat them ? In general, will villagers have needs (like food and drink) and a schedule by which they live? I think this would enable you to put in mills and barns and wheat silos and stuff while giving them real purpose. We could cause all kinds of mischief then, like sabotaging their food production lines. This would then have real consequences.

I imagine Toady wants to put the functional minimum in now and perfect it later. Which leads me to speculate all the fields and crops will be automated, won't require any labour (ie. if you embark on top of them you won't see people hauling clops the same way your dwarves do) and won't actually feed anyone. (except in world-gen). I expect nothing about the game except the visuals (and population numbers, obviously) will change for now.

---

As for the villages and landscapes: it seems Toady is implementing the medieval English manor system, judging by the looks of the villages. I guess this will have to do for now, and can be expanded someday in the future. There are of course dozens of different medieval village types and landscapes... mostly tied to the "biome". There's a huge potential in it, and unlike many other DF subsystems, this part of the fame would actually be visible and would immediately improve the feel and looks of the game. Oh boy... I'm dribbling again...

[Kogan Loloklam]

I think I have justified it enough. DF keeps track (or will keep track) of enough information to "simulate" Strength (mainly mustle), Toughness (a combination of many thing like skin material, blood pressure, blood thickness, bone density+elasticity), and Endurence (efficiency, Willpower, metabolism, calories), because put simply, those do not depend on knowing the shape of the body. We could add 50 different other factors to those, but produce an argument that any of those need knowing body shape. You could say that Toughness also includes blood salinity, but soon, we'd be tracking that.

I disagree still. You are advocating the removal of the abstracted "strength" value (among others) on the basis that you can bring it from hundreds of other variables that are tracked.(for who knows what purpose, since it increases calculation time, but for the purposes of this argument, we are ignoring that, since we cannot be sure exactly how much)
Human strength, since that is what we have chosen to focus on primarilly, is a very complex little pickle. First you have to agree how you are to measure strength, since there are many different ways it could be measured. We'll measure strength with two swordsguys. We have one real bulky swordsguy with muscles on muscles. Next to him we have a fit guy who just has muscles. Let's take a look at their structure and see who is stronger...
First, a little class on how arms move...
A human arm is constructed in billions of variations. They all have some pretty solid basic principles behind them, but these aren't manufactured objects created in a plant with very tiny tolerances. Tendons are attached at different points in these arms and arranged in different ways. Like I said, Millions of variations.
Paying attention? School isn't out yet.
A muscle is basically a cell that can lengthen, shorten, or remain the same size. This is how all locomotion in a human body is done. Your brain fires chemical signals to these organs to make them grow or shrink. This shrinking and growing of the length of the cells causes your bones to move, since the bones are connected to the tendons which are connected to the muscles. Now when the muscles tighten, they are attempting to bring their tendons closer together with tension. This might cause an arm to flex, or straiten out. It might move weight into the air, or open the hand to let go of something. Usually several different muscle groups are working together to do each action.
Ready? Here it comes...
When a tendon is connected to the bone half a micron higher than in another person, you are changing the physics required for the muscle to operate. Some operations will require more work for one individual than another. With half a micron, you are talking about a very tiny amount of effect. Something that could be lost in rounding errors, though if you were precise enough you'd see a difference. Let's toss a monkey wrench into things though, and let's say that one muscle is now on a object that is two entire inches longer than another.
You are now not talking about an amount that is infinitesimal, but about something that is a great deal different. Now let's put one tendon twisted about 1/32nd of an inch along the arm. Now you have a situation where you cannot even compare muscle mass in a scientific way, because you have two entirely different systems of doing something.

This is what human strength is, and why you cannot really "measure" it. Give one guy 2 inch longer arms and twist the connection points of one set of tendons, and now they have two different capabilities in using their arms. One is much stronger than the other one in certain actions than the other.

One might have the perfect body build to be a swordsman, while the other has massive inefficiencies for it. for the same result, one would have to spend a lot more effort, but that one that isn't built for swordsmanship might be perfectly built for axeplay, and they'd reverse their build if they were both axemen.
So, in our above example, they have equal strength, even though one is much bulkier than the other.

Tracking muscle may give an IDEA of strength, but it should remain a derivative of the strength attribute, and not the cause of the strength attribute, because we cannot track the connective location and efficiency of every tendon in the body.

If I'm wrong please correct me, but I don't think I am.

Something like this exists for every single attribute you think should be replaced with something else. RPGs abstract a lot, because there really isn't any other way of doing it.

[Xenxe]

Judging by the shear amount of farmland for those villages posted in the screenshots does this imply any farming changes like making things take longer to grow?

[Askot Bokbondeler]

Judging by the shear amount of farmland for those villages posted in the screenshots does this imply any farming changes like making things take longer to grow?

pertinent point, lime green that

[NW_Kohaku]

It can't just be crop time.  Real life crops take something like 45 to 200 or so days to grow, as opposed to the 25 or 42 days now.  While a potentially huge jump, for sure, that alone isn't enough to make tracts of land as massive as we're seeing necessary.  The farms image we saw showed farms bigger than most embarks. 

Compared to, say, 5x5 is all that's necessary for a whole fort, where we get roughly 1 tile is necessary for every 4 dwarves, or even 8 dwarves if you really stretch it.  (Although this is based largely on abusing quarry bush leaves and/or boozecooking.) 

So we're comparing 25 tiles to let's say, rough guess here, 6,000 tiles in one village of about 50 people.  Of course, some of that food goes off to the cities, but historically, this was largely subsistance agriculture, even if that was mostly because of being forced to work only semi-arable land.

Growing times that may, at their worst, be 5 times longer don't cover a gap of 240 times the size...

Even if half that field was fallow, there's still a gap of 60 times as much land per person fed.

I'm guessing either fields are going to produce less, or dwarves are going to eat more.  And by "more", I mean "more at a time", because Toady doesn't want more eating breaks.  And that meadow might mean that animals will soon start needing to eat, too, so you can't rely on livestock to be an easy meal ticket, either.

[Neonivek]

I think you may be reading a bit too far into this.

Not only do areas outside the fortress have to deal with real time but they also have to deal with much larger populations then a fortress ever dreamed of.

A Fortress has 100-200 dwarves max in most cases.

Cities in Dwarf Fortress once the changes have been made are dealing with thousands.

I highly doubt there is going to be as dramatic of a change over the output of farms inside a fortress... At least to the extent that I do not believe we will need extensive farming plots that cover over half our fortress space. (Though that would make sieges deadly if Fortresses relied on the surrounding towns for food)

[Jiri Petru]

Don't forget the farms might not even be functional, ie. I doubt they'll actually produce food as a resource to be consumed. And even if they did, Fortress Mode has its own rules. I'm not saying I wouldn't like farming changes (I would) but these are probably coming in later...
...wait...
...farming improvements ARE a part of the new development list, right? So perhaps some will indeed slip in the upcoming release.

Anyway... we know a village from that screenshot has 100 people while its production can feed 150 people. If you want to calculate something, use these numbers 

[NW_Kohaku]

I think you may be reading a bit too far into this.

Not only do areas outside the fortress have to deal with real time but they also have to deal with much larger populations then a fortress ever dreamed of.

A Fortress has 100-200 dwarves max in most cases.

Cities in Dwarf Fortress once the changes have been made are dealing with thousands.

I highly doubt there is going to be as dramatic of a change over the output of farms inside a fortress... At least to the extent that I do not believe we will need extensive farming plots that cover over half our fortress space. (Though that would make sieges deadly if Fortresses relied on the surrounding towns for food)

I think that forcing players to either put up a very large amount of space and effort for their food or forcing them to rely upon their sattelite villages is pretty much what is going to come... I mean, why else would we care about having to protect villages of dwarves in the surrounding land if we didn't need any of the crops they produce?

Don't forget the farms might not even be functional, ie. I doubt they'll actually produce food as a resource to be consumed. And even if they did, Fortress Mode has its own rules. I'm not saying I wouldn't like farming changes (I would) but these are probably coming in later...
...wait...
...farming improvements ARE a part of the new development list, right? So perhaps some will indeed slip in the upcoming release.

Anyway... we know a village from that screenshot has 100 people while its production can feed 150 people. If you want to calculate something, use these numbers 

Yes, Farming Improvements has been my pet suggestion thread much of the time lately, I've basically put in an additional 6 pages onto the topic, and have been trying to work out the best way to use the NPK+pH system Toady seems to be leaning towards.

Anyway, if we do go by 6,000 tiles for 150 people, we're still talking about 40 tiles per one person in the village.  Of course, if they are exporting food to support a city population, we have to know if the city does not produce any of its own food, how many people are in the city, and how many villages it takes to support a city to get a hard number. 

I think that real-life medieval peasants wound up eating about 90% of the food they grew on their own farms, thanks in large part to the fact that they were really stretching their land to its limits. 

Still, let's be a little generous, and say that it feeds 200 people, or 50 people more than the town itself holds because it exports a quarter of its food (and none get stolen or lost).  Then we're still talking about 30 tiles of farmland per person, as opposed to the current 1 tiles per every 4 dwarves.  That's still a huge leap in productivity, unless proper farm management makes a really huge different in terms of outputs (nameless farmers who spend their entire lives farming are always novices, and only get stacks of 1 crop?). So even with crops taking 2 to 5 times as long to grow, and having to let fields fallow every other year, we're still talking a pretty huge leap in land designated for agriculture.

[Skid]

Also, it looks like the middle of those farmlands are going to be cut out to make room for various buildings and such.  With say, five people to a hut, that still takes 30 or so huts plus various other buildings in the middles of each farmland.

[dree12]

I think I have justified it enough. DF keeps track (or will keep track) of enough information to "simulate" Strength (mainly mustle), Toughness (a combination of many thing like skin material, blood pressure, blood thickness, bone density+elasticity), and Endurence (efficiency, Willpower, metabolism, calories), because put simply, those do not depend on knowing the shape of the body. We could add 50 different other factors to those, but produce an argument that any of those need knowing body shape. You could say that Toughness also includes blood salinity, but soon, we'd be tracking that.

I disagree still. You are advocating the removal of the abstracted "strength" value (among others) on the basis that you can bring it from hundreds of other variables that are tracked.(for who knows what purpose, since it increases calculation time, but for the purposes of this argument, we are ignoring that, since we cannot be sure exactly how much)

Something like this exists for every single attribute you think should be replaced with something else. RPGs abstract a lot, because there really isn't any other way of doing it.

Disagreeing again. Your argument states that the human arm can be constructed in millions of ways, which is correct. However, unless an arm is defected, it can be assumed that any arm with higher mustle mass is going to be "stronger" than the other compared arm. In this case, a tendon slightly off isn't going to affect the arm so much it gets a ±10 to the strength measured in attribute units. A tendon off enough will produce a "functionality slightly impared" with the appropriate strength penalties. The same argument applies to toughness as well, just more complex. Endurence, is, as I said, trivial to implement with what we already have (efficiancy, metabolism, the calorie system, Willpower).

The arm shape does not really matter much when it comes to lifting stuff. DF abstracts bodies to be a bunch of interconnected circles, but a circlular arm with the same mustle is going to lift the same weight, apply the same force, etc, as a rectangular arm. With Toughness, the situation is complicated slightly, but with a better idea of tissues introduced in this version, the body shape is again negliable.

And, conclusively, yes, RPGs do abstract a lot. But that doesn't mean you can't use what's already tracked to unabstract things.

[Kogan Loloklam]

---

While I can argue with you all day, it won't be very productive until you get a much broader base of knowledge than you have. I suggest you begin with some basic physics knowledge, then maybe a little anatomy.


As for the farming debate,
I don't know, I mean a 10x10 plot (100 squares) feeds 200 with decent growers. If you got the seeds, 20x20 (400 squares) easily feeds 200 without much skilled workers at all, and 48x48 (2304 squares) all farmed might provide more food than a fortress with 200 dwarves could use in 5 years. (I'd go so far as to say 10)
So, in theory, 1 little regional map square could feed 2000 dwarves.
These are going to have to be some VERY big cities to take into account this food surplus, or else farming is going to have to change significantly. I think what would be best would be if farms are worked like workshops, and it shows planted area based on seeds planted taking up the space it would theoretically take to plant enough for every day of food for 1 unit of food harvest. (I think dwarves eat 4 times a year, so some 80 tiles per planted seed (basically a 8x10 plot)
This makes the massive farms make sense.

Maybe not 80 tiles extreme, maybe half that, but you get the idea.

[tfaal]

I have some questions regarding entity populations.

Will historical events be able to affect a subset of a population? For instance, a megabeast attack that kills one tenth of a village's residents. Would this affect the individual histories of population members we meet?

Will portions of a population be able to emigrate to another site? Ideally this would towns with immigrants, whose history could be traced back to another location via an immigration wave event.

Finally, will the family members of people we meet have histories themselves, including the possibility of their death?

I'll be honest with you here, I'm mostly just hoping to find a farmboy orphaned and displaced by a dragon attack and bring him along on my quest to kill the foul creature.

EDIT: Oh, and about the villages, are they really supposed to be as close together as they are here? It seems rather... claustrophobic.