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[aepurniet]

only the compiler knows that.

[metime00]

Actually it's already released, and I strongly suggest to use 0.31.12 to generate worlds and play them in 0.31.13.

I totally dislike the current picture. I like the mechanics but the overall sprawl doesn't work at all.

A few points:

1) Dark fantasy. There should be big regions of wilderness and unknown land with beasts and monsters. You should be able to explore them, find something interesting and die quite often. I don't want "harvest moon" fortress.

2) Scaling. Adventure/fortress mode scaling problems were not as noticeable before, but now they are. In adv. mode you have to eat more often, and plants grow literal months. In Fortress mode dwarves eat 2 times per month or like that, so 4x4 farm is enough to feed a full fort.

Here comes a problem... We have a fort with 4x4 farms in a world of 100x100 farms. It totally breaks immersion.


My suggestion to solve both problems is to decrease farmland itself (and build more cottages, because 10 people in 1 small house is wrooong) and limit their number. I.e. 1 farm per small city, 2 farms per 1 medium city etc.


I am sure that's temporary, but it was too obvious not to comment on.

This is the best idea I've heard on the issue, as I like the sprawl idea, but the implementation is far too intrusive.

Also, the generate in v 0.31.12 and play in v 0.31.13 idea was awesome, I got the best world I ever generated! I will be playing it for a long time

edit: The new version converted the 50+ towns into the new farms and such, really dampening the awesomeness of the world. Good thing I kept the world in the old version. I guess I'll just be playing v 0.31.12...

[monk12]

Oooh, just got an immigrant who is a novice at Military Tactics. Likely old news at this point, but such tangible hints of the future to come make me giddy.

[Andeerz]

Actually it's already released, and I strongly suggest to use 0.31.12 to generate worlds and play them in 0.31.13.

I totally dislike the current picture. I like the mechanics but the overall sprawl doesn't work at all.

A few points:

1) Dark fantasy. There should be big regions of wilderness and unknown land with beasts and monsters. You should be able to explore them, find something interesting and die quite often. I don't want "harvest moon" fortress.

2) Scaling. Adventure/fortress mode scaling problems were not as noticeable before, but now they are. In adv. mode you have to eat more often, and plants grow literal months. In Fortress mode dwarves eat 2 times per month or like that, so 4x4 farm is enough to feed a full fort.

Here comes a problem... We have a fort with 4x4 farms in a world of 100x100 farms. It totally breaks immersion.


My suggestion to solve both problems is to decrease farmland itself (and build more cottages, because 10 people in 1 small house is wrooong) and limit their number. I.e. 1 farm per small city, 2 farms per 1 medium city etc.


I am sure that's temporary, but it was too obvious not to comment on.

Hmmm... 10 people in one house isn't too far out there if we're gonna talk about realism and peasant life.  I know I have access to a good article about it and if I remember I'll link it!  But, this isn't real life, so meh.  And one or two farms per town (if you mean one or two large plots of land cultivated for farming) isn't too bad an idea, either, and sort of could reflect the real way of things, especially early in the medieval period.  Then again, I really need to read more on medieval agriculture, of which there is quite a bit of good literature out there!

Personally, I'm all for there being a bunch of sprawl if it accurately reflects the population growth.  It could be population growth that is the problem, or people waiting too long to embark, or both.  Even with all of the farmland back in medieval times at the height of population before the Black Death, there was still a lot of wilderness.  Sure, 12 percent of 1300's England was likely covered in farmland (and this is with a rather large population for that time), but what about the other 82%?  A small amount was urban.  The vast majority was wilderness and forests and stuff.  There's your "dark fantasy" right there.  And some of it could be arable if not for the trees.  Even with realistic farmland requirements, we could still have a lot of land and fun uninhabited places to explore.

Scaling - yeah.  This reeeeeally needs to be addressed.  I really don't see why people are so against realistic farm land requirements, though, other than they keep on thinking that doing so would somehow change DF into a game specifically about farming, which it doesn't have to, dammit.  More farm doesn't mean more work for the player, I think.  Just imagine a huge medieval city like 1300's London (~80000 people, maybe this would be significantly less if represented in DF).  It wouldn't look right if it wasn't surrounded by sprawling farmland.  Even when it was back in 1000 when it had about 10000 people, it would have been surrounded.  THAT would break immersion for me and maybe for a lot of people who have a grasp of the importance of agriculture.

[Arbitrax]

The prodcedure entry point DecodePointer could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll.

Anyone else got this error, or is it just me?

Bad sectors on my Hard Drive and a corrupt MFT are preventing me from updating Windows XP to SP1, so my guess is that's probably it...

...Oh well, I'll soldier on, in true Dwarven style!

[Untelligent]

1)  Dark fantasy. There should be big regions of wilderness and unknown  land with beasts and monsters. You should be able to explore them, find  something interesting and die quite often. I don't want "harvest moon"  fortress.

Sounds like the Night Creatures + Explorer section of the devlist.

(and build more cottages, because 10 people in 1 small house is wrooong)

I found a village where one cottage had a dozen people in it and the rest were empty so maybe this is a bug. I think I saw this on the development blog earlier, perhaps it didn't get fixed.

[drvoke]

and build more cottages, because 10 people in 1 small house is wrooong

Actually, most agrarian societies, and anyone living in poverty, generally live in multi-generational households, so that's grandparents, parents, and siblings, sometimes aunts and uncles, etc...

Before the industrial revolution, even in the US, it was often one single room with a couple beds, marital sex acts performed in the presence of others (after they're asleep, obviously), etc...  Nothing "wroooooong" with that in a simulation of what is apparently an agrarian society living in grinding poverty.

However, its implementation here DOES seem like a bug if there are several other empty/unoccupied cottages, and if that's the "wroooong" you meant, then I suppose I agree. lol

[Spreggo]

I think the real problem is that each town/farm has a huge border that is non-embarkable.
In the world I gen'd, there seems to be still large tracks of wilderness, but the one or two fields in the middle of it spread out a no-embark rectangle over the whole area.
A combination of this and the other issues with unchecked growth and sites not returning when unused is blowing the actual amount of sprawl way out of proportion.

[existent]

About the size of the farms-

Throughout Europe, 80-90 percent of the population struggled to coax a living, and perhaps a surplus, out of the soil.

In England, the idea farm size for a family was a "yardland" (24-30 acres) in size. Only about a quarter of the English farm families had this much land (or a bit more) before the Bubonic Plague , most had ten or fewer.

(http://www.hyw.com/books/history/agricult.htm)

[Spreggo]

I think Toady is going to have to make some decisions regardless of realism about what percentage of land in-game should be used for sprawl. Ultimately the sprawl is for effect and that should be remembered. DF is not a simulation of our world, which is why we still love all the weird stuff about it.

Plus, I still haven't seen the same 'realistic' percentage quoted twice, which makes me think that no one actually knows.

[existent]

I think Toady is going to have to make some decisions regardless of realism about what percentage of land in-game should be used for sprawl. Ultimately the sprawl is for effect and that should be remembered. DF is not a simulation of our world, which is why we still love all the weird stuff about it.

Plus, I still haven't seen the same 'realistic' percentage quoted twice, which makes me think that no one actually knows.

True, and true, but the game is based in reality. The entire point of the farm sprawl is to add a touch of realism. Now, this is necessarily Earth realism, but believability. Maybe DF doesn't need to line up to European comparisons, but it needs to make sense for DF.

The point is to reach a balance that makes sense in whatever world DF is set on.

[Andeerz]

Plus, I still haven't seen the same 'realistic' percentage quoted twice, which makes me think that no one actually knows.

It's not known for sure, but there are damned good guesses and 12% is a very reasonable estimate!  This paper is pretty good.  There are other papers on the matter that support the model presented.  Perhaps when I get back home I'll link those ones as well if interested.  There's one about France at around the same time that shows a land use for agriculture about half of what is currently used in France today.  Making a model of farm sprawl that has some semblance of verisimilitude will need to have some basis on reality.  I mention these real life examples simply to illustrate a good maximum of land to expect to have been used for agriculture if we are going to set this game in a medieval-esque setting and want to replicate a medieval feel.  And I don't think fantasy and medieval are mutually exclusive.



I mentioned this percentage and source earlier in the thread.

[Khift]

The point is to reach a balance that makes sense in whatever world DF is set on.

So, if a 4x4 farm plot can feed 100 dwarves, and each of these farm sprawls have 100x100 farm plots, then each sprawl can feed 6,250 people... so, we're talking what, one to two farm sprawls per city? Sounds about right to me!

[I jest, I jest.]

[cameron]

i had dwarf fortress close without warning during the finalizing sites bit of world gen on a large world at around 300 it also crashed a bit after embark. 


the finalizing sites issue seemed to be consistent once the world gen got over 250 or so years, so it may be from the number of sites.

also i rather like the new sprawl, if you seem to have it everywhere try to have less civs, a shorter world gen or a bigger map. as 200 years on a large world with 120 civs left me with only pockets of sprawl around cities and towns with the rest of the map as wilderness.

Edit-- the world gen closing during finilizing sites seems to only reproduce with certain world gen conditions mostly involving extremely low elevation variance

[Jiri Petru]

The problem, I think, is simply that the world generation runs for 1050 years which is way too much. The population keeps spreading and eventually people live everywhere, which is "realistic" outcome for a medieval that lasts a thousand years I guess, but it's exactly the reason why world gen should be limited to a couple of hundreds years.

The other issue is the population growth is too big. During most of the history, and especially in the medieval, the population grew only slowly - most of the time it stagnated. A lot of the land was uninhabited because there wasn't anyone to inhabit it (if there were, you can be sure the farms would be all over like in DF). Wars, diseases and shorter lifespans kept the population low. Dwarf Fortress has wars but doesn't have diseases, malnutrition and other fun stuff that would keep most of the population from living to 80 years of age.

Third, I think that Dwarf Fortress terrain isn't varied enough - there's not enough land that would be impossible to grow crops on. In reality, most of the "wilderness" would be in places that are difficult to reach (river canyons), don't have water (hilltops), are too steep, or are simply nor fertile enough. If there was a flat fertile land (like basically all of the DF map now), it was stuffed with fields and people.

All in all, I think the DF sprawl system is good but infinished - the game just lacks other mechanisms that would keep it balanced. But yeah, Alpha, I know.