Although most of your points are fair, NW_Kohaku, I don't think you should dismiss Sid Meier's Civilization so easily. We're talking about Civilization, not Galactic Civilizations, which has the sort of good/neutral/evil "choices" you are talking about. On the contrary, Civilization has none of this pretext (pretext which isn't necessarily such a bad thing in the first place, but that's a discussion for another day). In case you have not played Civilization, we'll talk about the free alternative, FreeCiv.
I wasn't talking about Civilization when I was talking about good and evil. I was talking about how "Interesting Choices" often wind up not being very interesting and really wind up only being one choice that you stick with throughout the entire game. I could go with something like focusing on rapid population growth and expanding to many small cities as fast as possible in a 4X game, but that would have been fairly complicated and required more explaining than the easier metaphor of games that have Good/Evil side mechanics, like, say, pretty much everything Bioware makes.
I didn't say this was a property of Civilization, but of "all those games that have Good/Evil mechanics", which does not include Civilization.
In FreeCiv, you can choose your government type - each has its benefits and its drawbacks. Very early in the game, you must choose between Monarchy and Republic; both of these governments are unlocked by very different tech branches (relatively speaking), and thus you must choose one over the other. A very simplified way of putting it is that Monarchy allows you to garrison military units for free while Republic allows you to spend more money towards research. This does not deal with any hidden factors, which is essentially what is being proposed here. Here, I'm defining a hidden factor as anything that does not directly translate into gameplay metric - i.e. soil pH is first put into some formula dealing with plant fertility, which then determines the crop yield of that square. By my definition, soil pH is a hidden factor. Soil pH isn't necessarily hidden from the player, but I call it hidden because it introduces new information to the game without adding a new gameplay metric or interface for it - hence, it is "hidden", like encapsulated variables in a class.
Contrary to your assertions, there would be a 'best' method for balancing soil fertility, pH, 'feeder' crops, etc... I have done quite enough mathematics to know that such a system can be easily decomposed and turned into a simple model that will output me an answer as to what crops I will plant and when. I reiterate - this is interesting to me, and to some people. But this is not an 'interesting decision'. It's not a decision at all, after a certain point.
Even if there is a "best" method of dealing with soil pH, I return again to the metaphor of the cliff. DF is a game that isn't very hard in the normal sense, you can pretty easily build almost anything you want fairly quickly. What the game lacks is any "guard rails". Or in other words, when you find a cliff (or anything Fun, for that matter), you can be assured that the game is going to do absolutely nothing to stop you from walking off that cliff. The cliff is there, and if you don't pay attention, you'll walk right off it. This applies to the way that water or magma works - leave a gap, and you'll flood your fort, potentially dooming the whole thing. This applies to forgetting to set up a farm or leaving a hole in your defenses and letting goblin ambushers get in or plenty of other ways you can have Fun.
Basically, DF is easy when you know what you are doing, know where the cliff is, and respect it. It's not an "Interesting Decision" not to walk off a cliff, there aren't any "different advantages" to the "different approach" of walking off a cliff, but having the cliff there, and knowing you can walk off of it is not only perfectly valid, but give the game real meaning.
Think about a real-life sandbox. You can push that sand around however you want. You have plenty of "Interesting Choices" in whether you push sand to the left or to the right. But your actions never have any real consequences. The game is given meaning by the fact that it restricts your actions, but still allows for very great and wonderful things to be accomplished, so long as you respect the properties of the fluid system. Magma mishandled can easily destroy your entire fortress, but properly handled is the solution to a huge number of problems.
Or, to sum it up, it doesn't matter if you don't think it's an "Interesting Choice" or not, especially on paper, where you are throwing some fairly false assumptions onto it. What matters is that it's a system you have to put some thought into.
I also don't see what you mean by it being "hidden" because it doesn't allow any "interface for it"... The player will be able to alter soil pH through his/her actions, especially through the addition of fertilizer (nitrogen fertilizers tend to be highly acidifying), so it's not like the properties of steel or iron where you can't really change them, you can only pick the best one, it's a variable that slides up and down as the player does things to the soil.
The interesting thing about Sid Meier is that he has no hidden factors in his games. Everything is plainly visible to the player (except for maybe combat balance). Yet, I'd get just as many people to say "I wouldn't use Dwarf Fortress as an example for making games that are fun and not just a bunch of micromanagement..." Personally, I find this comment to be very hypocritical. I may not disagree with specific suggestions, but I agree with Hammurabi in that sometimes, the systems you are proposing amount to little more than homework. Though I admit that I like number-crunchy systems like the one you propose, I am afraid that it is hardly an 'interesting' decision, by most player's definitions. It's a non-trivial one that takes a little thinking to get through - which is interesting by a few people's definitions, including my own, but only because it takes a little thinking to get through.
It's not really hypocritical, I wouldn't hold up DF to be something that frees you from micromanagement, either.
I am, however, interested in
reducing this micromanagement even as I increase the complexity through a system that provides you with the tools to automate as much as possible - specifically, when you "solve" the problem of how to rotate your crops, the interface, as I have suggested through scheduling of tasks, would potentially allow you to have an agricultural system that is automated for as long as no disease suddenly breaks out, or farmers die for some reason.
This is why I compared it to muddying the soil of a cave just once - you have to solve the problem once, which is its own problem with right and wrong solutions, but once you have solved it, you have solved it for good, without having to keep coming back to micromanage it.
The point is that you have to build that system in the first place.
(It's also only number-crunchy if you want to approach the whole thing from a "Plan out your entire agricultural system from embark" route. Ultimately, if you just look at your soil, see it's high in nitrogen, moderate in phosphorous, and high in potassium, and has mild acidity, and that you have your watering mechanisms set up, then you can just plant pretty much any depleter that doesn't have high phosphorus requirements, and when things get low, plant replinishing crops. Eventually, you'll be able to work out a stable system without really having to get your hands dirty, so to speak.)
1.Different advantages to different approaches. I think this is what is meant by "interesting choices". So far we're talking about a difficult optimization problem with one unique solution, which would mostly recede into the background once solved (with some replayability with population growth, and in the next fort if crop availability varies). But if I could optimize the system towards different goals, then I have a worthwhile reason to come back to it later as my goals change. This is where "either-or" trade-offs tend to come in. Maybe one crop is best for taste, another for health, another for labor-intensity, and another for safe storage. Maybe some combinations give dwarves indigestion and unhappy thoughts when mixed in the gut. Maybe one irrigation method gives a higher average yield with erratic variations, while another is more consistent but less bountiful. There can still be good and bad choices within such a system; my design might fail to perform as I intended. But since the player has chosen the goal towards which he is trying to optimize, this has the potential to be more engaging.
I think I went over this pretty thoroughly above, but, again, something isn't necessarily a bad idea just because some answers are obviously "wrong". If every choice was just as good, but somewhat different from another choice, then there'd be no way to lose, now would there? In that case, (as with the .5% increase reference Makaze makes), NONE of the choices become interesting, because you don't have any real negative effects.
In any event, again, I've described a system where there are many different kinds of crops you can use to start a repeating cycle. Different crops do different things, but all you really have to do is recognize that some crops will cause changes to the soil that you have to balance out with changes caused by other actions in order to balance them out. Particuluarly valuable crops will have very high and finicky requirements that will require several years of specific resetting of the soil to be able to plant them again (such as, again, the Sapphiric Rock Mold, that grows
precious gems out of highly alkaline soil), while others are very easily put in cycles. Different crops also have more uses beyond just simply feeding your dwarves, as well, as some crops make great alcohol, while others cannot make alcohol at all. Some crops are used for making cloth or dies or potentially the components of future reactions. When we gain the ability to start applying chemicals to weapons, you can bet that most poisons are going to be grown in your gardens. Toady is also putting in farmable trees so you can get your lumber from farms if you want to set it up that way. You can use orchard trees for low-maintainance, low-yield crops. You can even make farms into gardens or parks for your dwarves to enjoy. All of this by managing the balance of a few factors in the soil, but where you can choose to have completely different results for your work, depending on what you want to gain from it, and whether or not you are capable of balancing out the checkbook by finding a way to put back everything you took.
In other words, what you are arguing that I put into my suggestion is
already there.
I keep listing these things, but nobody ever seems to want to acknowledge this...
- Complex interaction with other subsystems. The proposed farming system sounds mostly self-contained so far. Insert water, seeds, ground, labor, and time, and in return you get some number of food units that prevent your dwarves from starving and supply some industries. The time you spend thinking about agriculture would be spent thinking only about agriculture, and if you're successful, all you get is a farm system that works. But if I have an incentive to use a large outdoor area for a particularly space-inefficient crop, then suddenly I have to worry about defense of all that space. If some crops required tilling the soil with (expensive?) metal plows, that crop might be out of reach until you start a metalworking industry. If the elves start selling terminator seeds to grow lembas wafer plants, then I start caring about diplomacy. Maybe some plants give off strong tell-tale scents that goblins can use to find you more easily. And so on.
Goblins already find you through cheating and not having any Fog of War.
Anyway, again, this is something that's already rolled into the system, as best it can be done.
Tree farming is already a part of this, so you have the lumber industry in it. Your highest-grade irrigation system is to use metal pipes to create a suspended set of "sprinklers" using the water pressure you can get from standard hydrostatic pressure, which isn't that far off from requiring metal plows.
You are also forgetting just how you procure fertilizer, or what it is... "Fertilizer" is made of either dead stuff (plant or animal), manure, or possibly a few rocks that can be mined (especially if all you want to do is raise soil pH, you add Liming agents, which basically means powdered limestone or chalk). Animals become a big part of farming, especially when they finally start having to be fed, as well. Bonemeal is probably the best source you'll get in-game for restoring potassium. Potassium actually gets its name from Potash, which means burning trees (which could be funny if you were trying to grow trees in a farm just to burn them into potash to spread back on a farm).
While you probably won't need to actually consume much metal continuously, or use precious gems or glass at all (unless we want a "real greenhouse"), pretty much the rest of the resources in DF will be involved... Especially as these farms necessarily become much larger and more complex, and require constant inflows of water meaning that you need continuous access to a replinishable source, since that means that you'll build your farms where they need to be built so your irrigation pipes can be supported and fed, and the rest of your fort has to be built to accomidate that, the way that magma forges demand a reshaping of your fortress plans currently.
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Topic: Dwarf fortress: Margionally complex, but mostly just detailed (Read 14109 times)