Spawning extra brooks and rivers is - in my opinion - a bad way. Normally Rain and aquifer-water should be enough for farming and if not herding sheep might be a good solution. I would say that the villages could have one mayor up to one well per field. Dry regions also developed often enough crops that could coop with the dryness. Hehe an droughts were and are a problem you have to deal with.
Desert farmers, which basically means the likes of the Middle East or North Africa, farmed their land either through irrigation by rivers (especially by digging canals, which were giant state projects to help feed their populations) or through the use of springs and wells tapping aquifers. In a DF unlimited aquifer landscape, a desert aquifer, of course, carries none of the risk of depletion (and doesn't have that pesky iron oxide dissolved in the water, either).
I honestly think that a better way to handle keeping enough water around for farmers (other than limitless aquifers, which aren't nearly the hassle when you don't need to dig beneath them, anyway) would be to have farms that are open to air simply take rain water as effective irrigation. That way, you can have farms that grow crops appropriate for the rainfall of the region that grow there (if, perhaps, not the most regular crop yields because there isn't absolute control over the water supply).
Well in the medieval times there was deforestation for 2 mayor things:
- making charcoal
- Building ships
The Roman Empire did use the wood mostly for charcoal thus for metalwork which ended in the fact that they had to import wood from the Kelts for high prices. Later the big countrys like Spain or great Britain etc. drained there forrests for these gigantic fleets.
A Village will only deforest the area it needs for being self-sufficient everything else would be to Labor intensive.
Actually, there's plenty of examples of nations that completely devestated themselves through deforestation. It's actually believed that the Greek city states fell (and gave Rome the chance to rise) because they cut down so many of their trees that they largely stripped their nation bare, and let the soil get swept out to sea, which impared their ability to feed their people (and destroyed their ability to make the navies that made them so powerful in the Mediterranean), and so they fell into decline. The entire "Mediterranean Climate" is actually a man-made climate generated of a deforested forest climate.
The city state of
Teotihuacan, as well, in ancient Native American Mexico, often has its fall traced to its deforestation - especially for the high-temperature (high-fuel) fires it used to constantly re-apply its propoganda murals, and also, as that website I like says, "the massive deforestation of the surrounding area to produce limestone caused the drying up of streams and erosions of fields, ruining the surrounding farmland."
In fact, the start of the Industrial Revolution can be traced to the time when England managed to almost totally devastate
its hardwood forests, at which point it turned to mining coal, which it had abundant supplies of, for fuel, which required a machine that could pump water out of the coal mines, which gave birth to the coal-fired steam engine that revolutionized the world.
Frankly, just look at how we players strip the land bare in ever-widening circles as our fortress needs more and more wood for beds, barrels, and fuel for industry. If something can be made of stone or something you can grow on a farm, or glass if you have sand and a magma , you use those first. If not, and something can be made of wood, you make it of wood. If not, then you make it out of metal.
The best rule of thumb that I can think of is if that a system does not encourage creative solutions to problems, then it should be either redesigned, scrapped, rendered invisible to the player (unless he specifically wants to see it), or automated as best as the game engine can handle. The "encourage creative solutions to problems" is vague, and should be weighed against the strain that the system places on the player.
In other words, if an increase in farming complexity only gives us the crop diversity we have now but with extra work for the player (through, say, queueing watering or fertilization jobs), I'd oppose it strongly. The more effects that encouraged creative solutions that it could have would lower my resistance (like letting other things affect quality of the soil such as fortress location and my aforementioned suggestions for events affecting salinity/acidity). But I'd never want to force the player to waste any significant amount of time doing things that have no creativity involved. That applies to all of Dwarf Fortress, and is at the core of at least my complaints about the UI.
First off, be careful about the difference between slashes and backslashes.
Also, leaving a break of a couple lines between [/quote] and the response really helps people who might quote you in the future, even if you don't make that mistake.
Anyway, as I've been repeatedly trying to say, this is exactly the sort of thing I have been doing my best to include - whether through aquaducts, sewage and waste treatment, pests that offer dynamic problems, and expanded types of crops, including biome-specific forms of crops and massive increases in crop diversity. I honestly have trouble thinking of anything more to put into it, and if you can, by all means, do add to it. (Although I would prefer a swarm of locusts attacking your farm and maybe at the most the acidic slugs over "Poseidon crashes a tidal wave on you"... when you're in a cave.)
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (Read 1610943 times)