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[zwei]

I've done what I can to make the suggested system complex even to those who know what they are doing, and to hopefully make the system dynamic enough that you have to adapt to each climate differently, and requires an eye towards keeping the system sustained.  If you have a real suggestion to make, then I'm all ears, but I'm sort of tired of people arguing against the farming upgrade simply on abstracts and game design idealogy that doesn't really mean anything.

He has extremely valid point:

If farming difficulty and challenge is result of system being too complicated to understand without wiki and with that functionality hidde in terrible ui, it is worthless. And that is real possiblity from looks of it.

No, it is worse than worthless, it is game killer.

If you want proper example, take military changes and monstrous user interface that was linked to them. It degraded game to having one major feature unusable. Farming is not really something you want to kill by reworking.

You can, of course add some neat ui to automate stuff and to handle many issues automatically (say, manager/military-like ui where you have overview of all plots and can assign plants to them easily, or where you can just say "plant 10 plump helmets each season"). You can have "ph" and "water" map overlays to help understand soil condition. You could define "conditions" alike standing oders where you say "plant 10 plump helments on tile with ph > 5, ground water = 1 and low nitrogen, 10 plants maximum".

But each of this adds possible point of failure. Any suggestion to refine this adds to 'ui from hell" factor.

Medieval landscape was extreme. The inhabited parts had a very high population density – no forests, only houses and farms. The wilderness was very virgin and untamed. Much unlike today.

Indeed, you can just look at satelite photos on google maps and see it for yourself, it really looks kinda like what was on screenshots.

[Fedor]

I have had it with the new military system!   

This savefile shows my fortress under attack by a Cyclops.  I have a reasonably strong, well-equipped military on which I've lavished considerable time and effort, but the interface is fighting tooth and nail to prevent me using it now, when I need it.

Keeping track of the cyclops is micromanagement hell because it goes invisible every time it changes elevation and re-centering on it is a PITA.

Organizing and equipping soldiers is a terribly tedious task, and the game interfaces make it extremely time-consuming to get the information I most need to determine how to mobilize in a crisis:  where the dwarves are, what their critical skills are, what they've got equipped, and what they plan to do.

While the fully prepared enemy moves in directly for the kill (and, the smaller the map I am obliged to choose because of CPU limitations, the quicker they arrive), my dwarves scramble to shuck the gear that won't kill fellow trainees and grab the stuff that will kill enemies.   Yes, I should have walled in the fort better, but I shouldn't have to to just be given a chance to grab gear!  Nothing in DF is more nightmarish than fighting the interface under extreme and unreasonabe time pressure.

I can't order about individual dwarves except by jumping around multiple layers of interface.  My legendary miners who I had formed into a special pick squad?  A couple of them decided to pick up equipment straight towards the cyclops!  Restation them?:  no effect, and every moment the cyclops comes nearer.  Delete the equipment choice in the military window that they might be seeking (a shield)?  Doesn't work; more time lost.  Desperate move:  disband the squad so that at least they become civilians and flee.  Everything would be so much simpler if I could just tell dwaves what to do instead of TRYING TO WRITE A BLOODY AI ALGORITHM!

And, finally, the killer:  Having given my men time enough to re-equip and assemble, and issued a couple of mass move orders to further concentrate the fighting force, I order all squads to kill the cyclops.  They immediate go and start TRAINING at the same instant one of my favorite dwarves is being hunted down and slaughtered far from any burrow he's allowed to be in.

Yeah, I'm done here.

The old military system was a micromanagement fanatic's cludge.  But you know what?  At least then when I selected a dwarf, I could directly order him to soldier up, move about, and kinda-sorta do as ordered.  Now, I have to fight my way through multiple layers of interface, multiple buttons that will only yield the required result when used in combination and exactly as mandated.  This would be a formidable task even with both effective, relevant information on the dwarves I'm doing stuff with  and some help text, but the first requires endless keypressing to get info out of several completely separate interfaces, and the second doesn't exist.

And that's when things work at all.  My archers never did learn how to reliably carry ammo about.  They train every so often, but it beats me what I have to do with ammo preferences, quivers, bucklers, and Armok KNOWS what else to get them to go into battle with the bronze ammo I made for them.

I don't want to be kindly told the fine details of the military system that, used correctly, would have solved my problems.  I've spent HOURS ON HOURS pressing buttons to try and get dwarves to act like an organized fighting force (or even just a mob acting in unison), and my patience is exhausted.


Toady, you've delivered the finest game of its type ever made.  But the military interface is broken to hell and gone.  Until you cobble up something that works without a doctorate in anal-retentiveness, I'm turning off invaders and playing this game as a sandbox.

I love this dang game.  I just wish I could love all of it.

[Eduren]

-snip-

Take deep breath and calm down.

Yes it sucks that the cyclops got loose. Yes the Military system can be a pain. But its not the end of the world.

This game is in very early alpha by any reasonable development measure. There are going to be hiccups. While you have many valid points, you could have done this without the hate.

[OmnipotentGrue]

I don't see what's so bad about the new military screen, it only took me a few minutes to fully figure out, and now my dwarves generally do what I want them to do.

[Koji]

I have had it with the new military system!   
...
I love this dang game.  I just wish I could love all of it.

The first time I played I starved to death because I couldn't figure out how to dig.

The second time I played I got into the mountain but couldn't figure out how to irrigate.

The third time I played my fortress drowned in a flood.

The fourth time I played my dwarves were slaughtered by snakemen.

The fifth time I played I managed to repel the first goblin invasion.

After more than a hundred games, it's fun to lose again. Take the opportunity to learn the interface. It's clunky, but this is Dwarf Fortress.

[Jiri Petru]

Fedor: I feel your pain.
Eduren: The "this is just an alpha" argument got old several years ago. Moreover, it's no excuse for making a part of a game worse than before! (the part I'm talking about is military controls)

---

Ad Farming:

My idea of farming in Dwarf Fortress is:

• I designate an area of land as a farmplot
• I choose farmers and tell them: "Farm!"
• It works!

Anything more complicated is just bad design.

The AI would select appropriate crops for the soil type, would handle crop rotation, the dwarves would water the soil using buckets as needed, would plant and harvest automatically. It should be difficult, meaning it would be ineffective and require lots space, dwarfpower and time. Making it more effective would the the fun part - ie. creating an elaborate irrigation system to save dwarfpower, ordering better crops from a caravan that would have better yields on my soil, etc. But the interface should be extremely simple and intuitive (basically my three points above).

I would love more varied crops, I would love realistic soil types, I would love acidic crops that require acidic soil or crops that require lots of mud (rice) - all of it adds variety to the game, which is good. I want to drastically reduce crop yields because right now food is too abundant. But unless the AI is intelligent enough to handle most of the system automatically and unless the interface is good enough to make it easy to control, there's no point in implementing the farming "improvements". They would only make the game worse.

Examples:

• The player should never, ever be required to look up the most appropriate crop for his soil in a table on the wiki. The game should simply choose the best crop itself... or at least highlight it, saying "we recommend planting this!".
• I have a field and decide to change to a different crop. The new crop requires much more water than the old one. The game should automatically order bucket-squads to water the plants, I should not be required to look up the plant in a manual to find out the required water intake. The challenge should not be "your crops died 'cause you forgot to water them, sucker!", the challenge should be "half of my fortress is suddenly hauling buckets, I should make it more effective!"

I'm deliberately writing this here, not in the Farming Improvement thread because it's much more an issue of general design approach than an issue of farming. And yes, I'm very alarmed of the direction Dwarf Fortress is heading - all of the ideas are great but the implementation is often lacking. The current military system is a great example.
[/list]

[isitanos]

My idea of farming in Dwarf Fortress is:

• I designate an area of land as a farmplot
• I choose farmers and tell them: "Farm!"
• It works!

Anything more complicated is just bad design.

The AI would select appropriate crops for the soil type, would handle crop rotation, the dwarves would water the soil using buckets as needed, would plant and harvest automatically. It should be difficult, meaning it would be ineffective and require lots space, dwarfpower and time. Making it more effective would the the fun part - ie. creating an elaborate irrigation system to save dwarfpower, ordering better crops from a caravan that would have better yields on my soil, etc. But the interface should be extremely simple and intuitive (basically my three points above).

Sorry, but that sounds like no fun at all. You want to dumb it down even compared to the current system. A little micromanagement is good, and I like to choose my plants and set up crop rotation myself. You haven't described a simple and intuitive interface, BTW, you have described automation, i.e. AI doing things for you, which is a completely different thing.

I would love more varied crops, I would love realistic soil types, I would love acidic crops that require acidic soil or crops that require lots of mud (rice) - all of it adds variety to the game, which is good. I want to drastically reduce crop yields because right now food is too abundant. But unless the AI is intelligent enough to handle most of the system automatically and unless the interface is good enough to make it easy to control, there's no point in implementing the farming "improvements". They would only make the game worse.

Examples:

• The player should never, ever be required to look up the most appropriate crop for his soil in a table on the wiki. The game should simply choose the best crop itself... or at least highlight it, saying "we recommend planting this!".

(...)

Toady likes to let us discover how the world works, and we'll eventually have randomly-generated plants and mushrooms that you can't even look up in the wiki. Experimenting with plants in the game to learn about their needs, or obtaining this knowledge in-game through skills or by buying the info sounds fun to me. The game should remember what you've discovered, though, and automation should pick up from then on, once you're supposed to know how much water, nutrients, etc that plant needs.

[zwei]

Toady likes to let us discover how the world works, and we'll eventually have randomly-generated plants and mushrooms that you can't even look up in the wiki. Experimenting with plants in the game to learn about their needs, or obtaining this knowledge in-game through skills or by buying the info sounds fun to me. The game should remember what you've discovered, though, and automation should pick up from then on, once you're supposed to know how much water, nutrients, etc that plant needs.

Entity populations would definitelly need to understand how something works and adjust to it (I would be awesome to read in history log "year 123: Humans adopted use of sweetberry as major food source after importing it from Elves. year 124: Humans started to spread to nearby low ph and swampy areas thanks to ability to grow enough food to sustain larger population.").

Discovery of such facts is awesome scenari, but when you are scrambling to get settlement running, you really want to let dwarf with "agriculture" skill handle it well enough that you survive. It does not necesarily have to be so good and once you get past ~50 dwarves, you need to take look at what he is going and -for example- place plots in better area, start decent irrigation system, trade for new plants, etc ..

Complexity can wait a bit. Researching plants sounds like year 3 or 4 project. It is good for game pacing to have simple way to do something (build plot, tell dwarf to farm, done.) that is trivial to set-up but which you eventually redesign later on (irrigation, carefull choice of plants, whatever).

[NW_Kohaku]

Not having farming will murder a fortress if you don't do it (or more likely, don't figure it out), having it means feeding dwarves is a piece of cake.  A couple of good military dwarves will eviscerate almost all opponents (that's getting much better with the HFS and the forgotten beasts - but still nothing can defeat the mighty constructed wall.) 
...
With the farming revamp, what I'm worried will happen is not that the game will be more challenging to experienced players, but that farming becomes automatic and irrelevant after a lot more work - and all that work will be necessary to get any food out of farming.  I don't want it to just mandate a long wiki cross-referencing session where you compare the alkalinity and moisture of soil to plant the best crops, then you forget about farming entirely (because that only raises the thin line between annihilation and irrelevancy).  Nor do I want to constantly micromanage seasonal crop rotation, because it's boring, easy to forget and screw up your whole food industry, and almost certainly not what the player wants to do in a fantasy world.

Well, being as you're setting up everything I could possibly say as either being "more micromangament" or "more automation", and BOTH are always bad, and we're only talking about this in the most utter abstract, tell me, Kilo, how, exactly, am I supposed to satisfy these mutually exclusive goals, especially when we're not even talking about the nuance or details, but just pure Gaming Philosophy?

Can you still make farming more complex and yet not either a constant micromanagement nightmare or just another roadblock to a new person and another wiki-dive for an experienced one?  Yes.  Suppose that a race of snail-men invade, and their acidic trails screw with the soil composition which kills off the crops that they walked over; but that also lets you import acid-loving plants and grow them too.  Suppose that the sea gods get annoyed with you and send a tidal wave that, in addition to the obvious effects, leaves a lot of salt on the ground that screws with the plants you can grow.  Or have the invading goblins who can't find a way into your fortress get frustrated and start salting the ground and the water supply you use to water your plants.  These things are unlikely to happen to a new player yet bring new challenges to an experienced one - that's the best kind of challenge I can think of.  Forcing you to do the same thing the same way for each fort isn't fun.

And here we go, the rare actual suggestion, which happens to be something already in the suggestion, but since people only talk about it in the abstract, they don't realize it.

I have done my best to try to create situations like this - mainly through the use of pests.  Although perhaps a little unrealistic, pests are the best means of introducing some dynamic threat to your crops, and as such, the more I've gone over the system, the more I've elevated their place as a threat to farming.  Pests are more attracted to your fields the larger they become, and specific crop-targeting pests are attracted by having the same crops planted continuously.  The more you attract, the more overwhelmingly numerous they become.  Insect pests can be killed directly, if not nearly fast enough when they become numerous, but pests that are diseases or fungal parasites are far more difficult to combat once they take hold, except by simply cycling out of those crops for a few years (keeping the seeds in storage) to wait until those specialized diseases effectively starve out after not having their prey available to them.  Potentially, we could have cultured fungi that act as special fungicide.  We could also have plants that act as natural repellants of certain pests. 

This is all in the actual Improved Farming thread.  (I actually did another post on pests just yesterday.)  This has already been discussed by people who were interested in the subject and talking on the thread, as has most of the other fears people keep bringing up in this thread or others when farming comes up.  It's not like I just pulled this completely out of my rear to hoist upon people, there have been discussions of what the system should use to be neither micromanagement nor routine and fully automated. 

I know that you, kilo24, are certainly capable of thoughtful discussion, and I would really welcome it if you would join the actual discussion, but when Improved Farming keeps getting dragged out into these arguments about abstract concepts about what Improved Farming will entail, it always involves arguments against things Improved Farming isn't, and people wishing Improved Farming were changed more towards becoming what it already is. 

The current round pretty much starts here: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=22015.450;start=%1$d

Ad Farming:

My idea of farming in Dwarf Fortress is:

• I designate an area of land as a farmplot
• I choose farmers and tell them: "Farm!"
• It works!

Anything more complicated is just bad design.

Actually, no, THIS is bad design. 

What's the point in even having dwarves eat or drink at all if you want all your food handed to you without effort?  As Askot said, wouldn't this mean that it would be better still to just put [no_eat] and [no_drink], since in that way, you don't need the "bad design" of making people make a farm in the first place?  Why even bother with the "bad design" of having to look for metals or chop down trees, either, when you can just set up reactions that give you adamantine versions of everything you could ever want generated from nothing?

I've spent the past week or so with people coming up with every way they possibly could to mischaracterize the Farming system, and any time you ask someone to come up with something they WOULD like, it always comes up as either exactly what the suggestion already is (Oh, and hey, for that whole "let the game tell you when it's good to plant what?" is the Farm Overseer position), or it's some variation "Don't do anything, change is bad!  I hate having anything new, because then I'd have to learn something! Don't improve anything in the game!"

I'm getting just a little annoyed with it, to say the least.  For the past month, I've more or less wound up hijacking the whole Improved Farming thread because nobody but Draco18s, a small number of people who made one to three posts with useful suggestions, and myself were really willing to put in some input.  Now, everything we've done to try to make the system realistic, automated, and as flexible and exciting as we could is being hit with random potshots from the peanut gallery by people who don't even bother to understand the concept, attacks based on "not being Civilization" or based on it actually being realistic or based upon the notion that - God forbid - it won't be a total mockery of the notion that it actually takes some measure of skill to play this game.  Nobody who has made these complaints has come up with any serious way of improving the suggestion, and only one of them has even bothered to post ON the suggestion thread itself.

[Jiri Petru]

Relax, Kohaku. People just want to express their opinions and fears about the game without having to study dozens of pages in a different thread. You're saying all our concerns are already adressed in your suggestion topic? Great to hear that! I won't go read that because it has 40 pages and I can't really be bothered. I wasn't interested in specific suggestions, I just wanted to express my fears about future development. This is what this thread is about. You are taking it too seriously.

Also, the discussion fluently developed up to this point. No need to be angry we're not taking it to a different thread.

What's the point in even having dwarves eat or drink at all if you want all your food handed to you without effort?  As Askot said, wouldn't this mean that it would be better still to just put [no_eat] and [no_drink], since in that way, you don't need the "bad design" of making people make a farm in the first place?  Why even bother with the "bad design" of having to look for metals or chop down trees, either, when you can just set up reactions that give you adamantine versions of everything you could ever want generated from nothing?

I didn't say food should be free and abundant. I said farming should be easy to learn and control (because it's a critical feature that each player needs to learn as easily and quickly as possible). These are very, very different things.

It has been said many times: having an obscure system/controls that take ages to learn, but once you learn them the game is as easy as before, is not a "challenge". Well... it is but a bad one. Good challenges don't rely on difficult controls and hard-to-learn solutions.

And the other way around - making the interface and controls easy to use isn't "handing the food without effort". Seriously, one shouldn't even consider increasing the challenge by making controls harder. That's evil!  Having a two-click way to set up a farm isn't necessarily "handing the food over" too. As I've said before, it could be very inefficient, and making production more efficient (via more detailed options and micromanagement) would be the challenge. My point is, I guess: when implementing features, first make sure they are user-friendly, only then proceed to make them more complex.

(EDIT: Also, if you make the system too complex and difficult, people will just say Screw it and import all their food. Don't forget we'll have outlying village sprawl now so getting food from outside will presumably be easy. You can't make farming more difficult than trading and then hope people will use it.)

BUT! A peace attempt! Toady said the farming improvements depend heavily on what he'd be able to communicate to the player meaningfully. He seemed reluctant to implement a system that couldn't be easily understood and handled in the interface. Which is an optimistic good sign, I guess.

[Kogan Loloklam]

I can answer tfaal's questions. I don't know for certain if village entities will work the same way, but currently...

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?

Yes. If you go into adventure mode right now and ask villagers about their families, you constantly hear about how bronze colossus x has slaughtered their great grandpappy and now they want vengeance.

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.

I believe immigrants are already pulled from the entity population of the civilization you are embarking from.

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

See answer number 1

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.

This can already happen.

...

No wonder you hate the thing, you don't seem to have a understanding of it at all.

A few tips:
1) Setup your uniforms and use "Assign Uniform". Uniforms is the best way to ensure you can set a "type" to each position. This is a supremely powerful tool, use it.
2) USE YOUR SCHEDULE MANAGEMENT SCREEN
3) Setup patrol routes and set your squads to half train, 1/4 patrol along them instead of a constant train or a constant patrol. They won't gain skill as quickly, but they will be always responding. This will ensure you always have an active force in action and your dwarves as a general rule won't be unhappy with long patrol routes (if you set it by position favored seasonally, you can make a rotating schedule that makes it even more sure.)
4) Setup station points, use them in lieu of patrol points for key locations.
5) Don't hesitate to copy and paste in your schedule management screen.
6) Never, never, never have your dwarves who use weapons in their work assigned to squads. This is heavily bugged and it'll result in weaponless dwarves fighting like idiots, or any number of other odd issues.  If you -must- have a squad like this, remove their "mining" tag before you activate them. It'll prevent a drop the pick dance.

With uniforms, proper alerts, and scheduling you will not have many of the issues you are complaining about.

Some of the issues are due to how your barracks are setup as well. I suggest you have a weapon rack and armor stand for each soldier in the squad in their barracks. For archers, ensure that the weapon rack and armor stand is there inside the designated archery range. Also ensure every archer has access to a quiver. If they aren't shooting, check to see if their quivers have any arrows in them. Keep your ammo designations very simple if at all possible.

Furthermore, Ensure you "dry-fire" your military a few times, to be sure you have worked out all the kinks BEFORE an invasion occurs. Any time you see "cannot follow orders", something is seriously wrong with how you configured things. As long as they are in uniform though, they should respond to direct orders given with the s menu. This is especially important since squads default with a "10 minimum" for their scheduled orders. This in my experience causes problems, and I sometimes miss it after I setup a new alert status or new squads in my custom alert statuses. Activating them and ensuring they do what they are supposed to do in the numbers they are supposed to do it in ensures that when the next disaster comes in, the military is ready for it.

Spoiler: random info (click to show/hide)

I have 2 squads in my current no-immigration fortress. A Marksdwarf squad of 1, and an axedwarf squad of 2.
A List of alert statuses in my no-immigration fortresses:
Inactive (No active orders. It's used to ensure that my military dwarves can help in civilian tasks)
Training/Civilian Alert (All year long my dwaves train. Set to exactly the amount in the squad. This is the standard order for my marksdwarf)
Upper Skirmish (Axedwarves patrol my "road". Set to 2 for the months caravans arrive, 1 the rest of the time. Marksdwarf is scheduled to run to the pillbox on the surface. This is my standard order for my highly trained axedwarves)
Upper Defense (Axedwarves station on a point just a little in front of my Trade Depot. Marksdwarf is stationed behind some fortifications looking into the entrance hall)
Lower Skirmish (Axedwarves patrol the area just in front of my lower defense. Marksdwarf stations behind a fortification in my lower defenses)
Lower Defense (Axedwarves patrol my prisons, which is the first thing that is accessible in my lower defenses. Marksdwarf has same orders as for Lower skirmish)

My dwarves always follow my orders, and have racked up about thirty kills between them with these settings. I haven't had to give a direct order to my military very often, and when I do, because of the patrol status they are already close, on duty, and prepared. There is always about a day of chaos if I change the alert status, so I avoid changing the status except in peaceful times or when the new alert is so critical that the chaos is worth it (Upper skirmish has to be abandoned right away in the event of an invasion, since my military isn't strong enough to deal with those without my siege engine and trap backup.)

View efficient military with as much importance as efficient farming. It takes a bit to setup, but once it is you can ignore it and it'll mostly take care of itself.

[NW_Kohaku]

People just want to express their opinions and fears about the game without having to study dozens of pages in a different thread. You're saying all our concerns are already adressed in your suggestion topic? Great to hear that! I won't go read that because it has 40 pages and I can't really be bothered. I wasn't interested in specific suggestions, I just wanted to express my fears about future development. This is what this thread is about. You are taking it too seriously.

Toady said the farming improvements depend heavily on what he'd be able to communicate to the player meaningfully. He seemed reluctant to implement a system that couldn't be easily understood and handled in the interface. Which is an optimistic good sign, I guess.

Only the past five pages have been involved in the current discussion over how, exactly, Toady could be able to impliment exactly what Toady said about being able to communicate it meaningfully. (Most of the thread is, in fact, from over a year ago, and the whole thread is over two years old.)

I'd also say in reference to nobody wanting to read the Improved Farming thread while they still want to comment on it that this very thread is already over 50 pages long, and I seem to remember your "Complete Interface Overhaul (Now with Sparkles)" thread being far, far more intimidatingly lengthy, and even referencing multiple other threads for further reading in its first post.

[Cruxador]

Um, can I point something out? This thread isn't for discussing lots of big, in depth suggestions. We have an entire subforum for that. This thread is just for discussing what's going on right now in development.

On that note, we've got some rather delicious looking rivers now.

[NW_Kohaku]

Also, while I think that combatting pests is going to be the real dynamic factor, there's also the simple fact that water and fertilizers may not necessarily be reliably present in your fortress as a means of presenting challenge to players.

Actually, at the risk of throwing some more gas on this fire, I've been operating on some assumption that we would be able to use waste/manure as ferilizer.  (Something Toady recently said in a Q&A session that he supports such things for fertilizer and for the building of sewers, but is simply opposed to "potty breaks", which was why I asked this back in the last round.)  This would mean that, in addition to having to build an aquaduct, we would also have to build sewers to push waste into the compost heaps, or to move it to where it can be spread directly over farms.  Waste management, then, would become part of farm management.

[Mephansteras]

I like the new rivers and brooks. Should make getting a water source up quickly for the first year much easier to do without hunting for a 'good' embark location as much.