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Author Topic: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution  (Read 148418 times)

10ebbor10

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #405 on: February 02, 2013, 12:05:14 pm »

You are not listening to me. REAL FARMING **IS** an optimization exercise.

The issue, is that the optimization that is optimal for the site, is only optimal FOR THAT SITE. That is how nature WORKS. It establishes and maintains local maxima, based on the available nutrients, and set physics.

What you are wanting is an inconsistent play experience.
Not completely. I don't think you got the point of most of the thread.

The fun in most games is that you have a choice between risk and reward, forcing you into risk management and such. With your thing, that is mostly impossible, as everything is predefined, and you can't really take risks. ((The weather system is about the only thing that has a little bit of variation, and even then not really, as the soil always contains enough of you can't plant.))

What you accomplished is creating a system that is neither fun, nor realistic. A system where there's always one set option that's the best for that site, and then added a lot of annoying stuff to get to it.
« Last Edit: February 02, 2013, 12:06:50 pm by 10ebbor10 »
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wierd

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #406 on: February 02, 2013, 12:08:07 pm »

That is only true of that particular embark, which happened to have been at the freaking north pole.  You cant grow crops at the north pole IRL either.

Try running the numbers with a temperate embark, and see what happens.


As for "Always the best for that site"--- Again, the only way for that to NOT be true, is to have an inconsistent experience. The real world is surprisingly consistent. The minerals in the soil dont magically transmute themselves, just to make it hard on farmers, the sun doesnt radically change its degree of output on a whim, and plants dont vary terribly on their nutritional needs, barring excessive human interventions. The major variable with agriculture *IS* the weather, and your location. Agriculture has a history of being boring, because once you know your crop and your plot of land, its easy peasy.


Always has been.


As for "Not getting the point of this thread"-- I was under the impression that the short list was:

"I dont want it to be a simple case of "Plant this, then this, then this", and I want it to at least partially represent the actual complexity/difficulty of soil management"

Mine does that. Both cases.  What's the problem, other than that it isnt an inconsistent and crazy fickle random pile?

On to the "You cant take risks"-- again, look at the embark! It's THE NORTH POLE. See? NORTH POLE. BIG capital, flashing, NEON letters! There *ISNT* a viable strategy for risk/reward there, because it is not viable for agriculture. EVER!

If you try the numbers someplace less insane, you will see that the soil has a LOT of "Buffer" to it, allowing for a VERY wide range of play styles. Soil range is 5000 (Yes, 5 THOUSAND) to 0.  You can rape and pillage the soil a WHOLE LOT before it croaks on a more sensible embark with this simplified system.  The sample I gave was extreme FOR A REASON.


(as for the quip about my absolute values on solar intensity, I suggest you re-aquaint yourself with the differences between direct rays, and indirect rays.  There really is a reason why the north pole is cold. The angle of incident at a polar region on earth is less than 20 degrees, the light traverses MUCH more atmosphere as it travels to reach the surface, and when it gets there, it has considerably less energy. That is why I fixed it at 25% for summer, and 0% for winter. The length of day does not offset the lower intensity by any noteworthy amount.)

For completeness, I will give you a more sensible embark, and several possible play strategies, just to drive the point home. This could take awhile though.
« Last Edit: February 02, 2013, 12:37:34 pm by wierd »
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10ebbor10

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #407 on: February 02, 2013, 12:44:06 pm »

The world tends to vary itself a lot actually. Pests, invasive species and the lot. It isn't 100% predictable like you make it out to be. There's the risk of crop failure, and a variety of irrigation and compost techniques that each have drawbacks and advantages. (Your system doesn't have that. Something either increases biomass(Good) or lowers it(Bad)).

Quote
As for "Not getting the point of this thread"-- I was under the impression that the short list was:

"I dont want it to be a simple case of "Plant this, then this, then this", and I want it to at least partially represent the actual complexity/difficulty of soil management"
Nope, the point of this thread is how to make farming a fun and hopefully quasi realistic experience rather than turning it into a simple optimalization thing, as you just did.

Quote
On to the "You cant take risks"-- again, look at the embark! It's THE NORTH POLE. See? NORTH POLE. BIG capital, flashing, NEON letters! There *ISNT* a viable strategy for risk/reward there, because it is not viable for agriculture. EVER!

If you try the numbers someplace less insane, you will see that the soil has a LOT of "Buffer" to it, allowing for a VERY wide range of play styles. Soil range is 5000 (Yes, 5 THOUSAND) to 0.  You can rape and pillage the soil a WHOLE LOT before it croaks on a more sensible embark with this simplified system.  The sample I gave was extreme FOR A REASON.

You know what risk means, right? It means that you don't know if something will work or not. For the North pole, it doesn't work, simply. It doesn't mean that you know that your system will work perfectly fine for exactly X years(give or take a few) before failing. That isn't a risk, that's just a perfectly stable resource with a limited supply.

((Oh, and the North pole could work quite fine for agriculture actually, with a decent heating system and if you farm only in it's summer (Constant daylight is nice).
Besides, an actual example of your system being fun rather than an exercise in futility might have been a better idea.))

Quote
(as for the quip about my absolute values on solar intensity, I suggest you re-aquaint yourself with the differences between direct rays, and indirect rays.  There really is a reason why the north pole is cold. The angle of incident at a polar region on earth is less than 20 degrees, the light traverses MUCH more atmosphere as it travels to reach the surface, and when it gets there, it has considerably less energy. That is why I fixed it at 25% for summer, and 0% for winter. The length of day does not offset the lower intensity by any noteworthy amount.)
While the angle is quite low, I remain by my point that your system doesn't make much any sense. The length of the day has a significant effect on plans that normally live in shadowy situations (provided you can heat them), and would be seriously beneficial to them. Sadly, that's another thing that your system can't do.

« Last Edit: February 02, 2013, 12:56:01 pm by 10ebbor10 »
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #408 on: February 02, 2013, 01:05:11 pm »

My simplified suggestion was meant to include water availability as a variable. I admit that soil type would also place additional constraints on gameplay, but it needn't get into such detail as the parts potasium to parts sodium in the soil. If that were the case, the only real solution is to import clays from different regions, and radically overhaul the clay types. (Some clays are volcanic, others are sedimentary, for example. They have very different soil properties, but both are usually just fine for pottery. If the local clay is deficient, which is why parts potasium is low, you would need a way to import a buttload of a different clay, and till it in, thus changing the soil tile type. As is, this would be rife for abuse, because you could simply import a bunch of fire clay, and keep tilling it into a 1x1 tile farm, until it is basically pure fireclay, unbuild the farm, designate it as a clay source, and totally break imports as the means of getting more. Same with sand, etc.)

Well, I don't think I've ever suggested that we actually change a soil layer type.

Soil in this suggestion is more like the contaminant of mud that's on the floor of caverns (in fact, I even suggested just making it a contaminant at one point), where the sandy silt soil merely directs a starting point for drainage.  In fact, since there is a biome variable for drainage, I think it better to use the fact that one soil layer may be sand or clay as merely a modifier of biome drainage.  (Sand in a swamp will offer less drainage than sand in a hill biome.  In fact, if proximity to a slope could be factored into starting drainage, it would be even more ideal.)

Hence, importing a lot of clay would only affect what sort of plants could grow there.

Of course, there could be something abusable about making your soil very acidic in a desert or significantly reducing drainage in that, since part of the idea is to make weeds just sprout naturally like grass, but make grass and the like play by the same rules as crops, if you make your soil significantly different from what the nearby grasses like, you can keep out the most likely weeds.

(Because it is a complex topic, the notion of tracking in seeds of invasive species - or young of pests - is kind of sketchy, and just based on invisible off-board population models, with possibly a division into different population counts based upon layer.)

I could see alkaline<->acid as a variable, because that would influence weather or not you grow wheat (prefers alkaline) or strawberries (prefers acid), but going too far is a problem.

I can agree with this - aside from soil nutrients and pollutants, it's just drainage and acidity for the long-term biome-based variables. 

Soil nutrients are short-term things based upon composting, as I already said (and honestly, if we want to play up carbon more, then H20, C, N, P would be fine instead of H2O, C, N, P, K and just fudge K into P, although that eliminates potash, but where it might be somewhat easier for players to understand) and have a value for its complexity I've already argued for.

Beyond that, the pollutants exist as penalties for specific types of actions. Biological pollution is basically the penalty for hot fertilizer - "nuking the soil", as you put it earlier, with uncomposted chicken manure as opposed to allowing it to lose a good portion of its N and taking up time, space, and labor composting it.  Heavy Metal is for composting certain creature types, especially apex predators and sentients, in excess, and also for magma-irrigation, which can boost fertility tremendously, but render many plants incapable of dealing with heavy metals. 

Salinity is something that borders a pollutant and a biome trait, however, but it can be used for penalizing brackish/salt water irrigation as well as reducing some lands to salt rushes until you can seep enough salt from the soil.

Rather than be "soil building" directly,  was more implying that it was soil building, *if* you did not harvest the crop, tilled it under, and left the plot fallow for one full year, because that is really what you have to do with soil building crops to re-establish biomass.

Instead, the desired protocol I had in mind, was to make agriculture expensive, because it is. The system I proposed (or thought I proposed anyway...) would have required soil neutral plants that have a low nutritional yeild be the primary route to soil building, via a very inefficient composting process on the side.

That's largely consistent with what I suggested, as well - only tiny few plants do well without biomass, and there are some "starter grasses/molds" that exist just for building up the soil and functionally converting the biome from a desert to a marginal grassland. 

Plain dumping compost and working on getting some grasses going with water before you work on getting real crops going is the idea for turning a patch of desert into a garden.  (Short of tundra/glacier, deserts would be agricultural hard mode for good reason.) 

Eg, you grow a boat load of ratweeds, because it is all your rotten marginal embark can grow to start with. You use some of it to make alcohol, so you don't get the game over screen, and rely on imported food and possibly poultry to survive starvation.  The rest of it, you directly shove into the composter. 

That's actually what I was suggesting plump helmets do.  They're basically an edible composter, capable of being grown anywhere dark with nothing more than a log and water, and where the end result is (partial?) compost and a mushroom.  You'd have to keep supplying logs to keep growing plump helmets, though, so it's not long-term sustainable, but it's how you can jump-start composting.

Of course, that's just a suggestion of a specific means of implementing the broader idea I was already talking about, especially with regards to making an easy start-up.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #409 on: February 02, 2013, 01:20:28 pm »

There are two things:

Lead Farmer should not be the best advice giver, so he can have reasonably inaccurate advice, he just should not give outright harmful advice. That is why skills and personality matters (and likes - if your agriculturist loves fisher berries, he will tend to suggest them when possible) - they are there to not improve, but rather to degrade his advice.

HE is there not for you, but for people intimidated by complexity - that screen you linked is very scary!

Also, he is not supposed to plan out entire cycle, just next season.

He can basically use same heuristics like that screen: Order plants by how well current soil would support them, fudge lit a bit by fertilizer requirements and tell player to use one of top three.

If it is supposed to be educational, then simple list of reason why it is better than current plan can be given (comsumes x which is abundant, restores y which is depleted).

In the end, you can just add +ses and -ses together with some weights, order plants and pick top one.

Well, the idea is that the game should already sort the crops by what is most capable of being planted in that predicted state.  (Although maybe the sorting alone could be done by the Lead Farmer?) Hence, (s)he'd just be picking the top name on the list unless they're bad at their job, at which point they'd be picking the second or third.  (Unless they weren't sorting based on yield, in which case you could multiply yield by suitability...)

I mean, it could be done, but I don't think it would actually help players understand the interface that much.

That said, being able to create at least some basic crop rotation pattern is something Toady would have to code, regardless, for the NPC farms, so having a list of crop rotation cycles that you could just copy-paste onto your own farm from a civilization knowledge screen would be the easy way to incorporate how-to instructions in the game. Especially if a straight-up "import" function were available, you could just tell a dwarf farm foreman to just do what the humans were doing.
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wierd

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #410 on: February 02, 2013, 01:31:20 pm »

you have to be careful with mushrooms as composters.  Mushrooms will take additional energy away from the substrate to grow, leaving depleted compost.  Mushroom compost is about as fertile as shredded cuir, only finer.  About on par with perlite or vermiculite. It helps keep soil from being cleachy, and helps it retain moisture and acts as a cation exchange medium buffer-- but that's about it. For a fertilizer, it is pretty dead. The mushrooms suck all that out to make mushroom :D

(Also, you might want to research growing mushroom on wood. Even fast growing ones take at least a year to establish a log before flushing, and only flush in the spring, after being sprayed with water. Japanese mushroom growers CHEAT like little whores by using sawdust instead of logs, and by repeatedly spraying the spawn innoculated sawdust with water to trigger fruiting. To help frame that with Shiitake:  Log: Innoculation time 12 months. Sawdust: Innoculation time 12 WEEKS. I suspect you were thinking more along the lines of straw or dung mushrooms, like morels, crimini, and the like--- those can culture quickly if growing conditions are held right, and can flush every 30 days until the compost is depleted. requires getting the compost wet and disturbing the surface of the compost to initiate flushing.)
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #411 on: February 02, 2013, 01:53:57 pm »

Diseases and Pests: Even if you have no way of fighting them, they make you try new crops and farming styles, as a consequence there is no such thing as the perfect crop.  Similarly when you run out of Hematite ore you start smelting the Galina that wasn't worth bothering with before.

On how this plays out:

I was thinking this would happen like this:  All creatures have a sort of trophic level stored in them, so that they know what order they are supposed to act in.  Every "pest tick" occurs very rarely (like once a month) with the results of a pest tick being stored and played out gradually over that month so as not to seem abrupt in-game.

The steps would then go like this:

1.  Population is temporarily multiplied by some vermin breeding multiplier.  I.E. every cricket lays 20 eggs or something, so you multiply current population by 20.

2.  Population numbers are compared with a general regional population number - low populations relative to regional populations has some pests move in.  (Migratory pests would be a special case.)

3.  Going up the trophic levels, area of influence is determined.  This means the bugs spread out over where they will try to eat food in a very rough manner.  (This is partly why whole farms are tracked as zones and wild surface is chopped up into local tiles instead of tracking individual tiles, to keep some of these calculations easier.) Bugs will converge on things that attract them and avoid things that repel them (consider each farm and wild zone to have a certain number of shares of the total population, and a favored plant adds to the shares they get, and hated plants like fragrant herbs will subtract from the total) and then each area will have a rough idea of what bugs are there.  (Extremely high shares could flag a whole area for a migratory pest invasion, like a locust swarm. Extremely low shares may trigger pests to leave an area - a maximum insects-per-share concept could be employed.)

4. When you get up to predator trophic levels, predators are attracted to their prey, but will also mostly stick to a nest if they have them in the cases of insectivorous birds or bats.  (This encourages placing bird/bat nests in/near farms.) They get divided up, as well.

5. Going from highest trophic level down, predators eat all the prey until they get their fill.  If there aren't enough bugs, they starve.  If it's close, a portion of the insects still survive because of hunting inefficiencies, and many of the birds/bats will starve because they weren't as good hunters or couldn't find the last straggler insects. 

6. Plant-eaters go last, and inflict damage upon plants by eating plants with their remaining numbers.  If there are no plants in the area they like, they starve, too. 

7.  Plants tally up the damage inflicted upon them, and their growth rates are impaired based upon the damage, possibly killing off a good chunk of the crop entirely.  Damage becomes apparent only gradually, over crop growth ticks (which only occur every 100 game frames).



Part of the idea is that pests will have more than one type of prey, as will the predators.  If you have a ton of crops that attracts a type of insect, they might swarm in, explode in numbers, and every time you try to plant that crop, they'll devour it before it has time to really get established. Only starving them out would stop them at that point, which means not allowing any plant they see as food to exist.

If you want to keep your bat/bird/spider/wasp/whatever predator populations artificially high, you could purposefully "feed" them some prey that is relatively harmless to keep their populations high for when a locust swarm comes, or something.

Rather than loading this entire algorithm into a single frame, (that would probably stop everything to calculate, although DF isn't really shy about doing things like that...) it's also possible to split the different calculations up, and divide them out across frames to be calculated, since we don't need to be exact, and invisible pest populations won't be directly impacted by anything else.  Hence, as soon as a pest tick is complete, the next pest tick can get started, where each step will be divided out across frames to keep the load relatively less noticeable. (This would mean that if a player changes a farm, the pest data wouldn't react for another pest tick, but that's an acceptable fudging of the simulation, since, again, players aren't going to be able to look directly at what's going on, and only really understand what's happening by result.)
« Last Edit: February 02, 2013, 02:04:53 pm by NW_Kohaku »
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #412 on: February 02, 2013, 01:58:54 pm »

you have to be careful with mushrooms as composters.  Mushrooms will take additional energy away from the substrate to grow, leaving depleted compost.  Mushroom compost is about as fertile as shredded cuir, only finer.  About on par with perlite or vermiculite. It helps keep soil from being cleachy, and helps it retain moisture and acts as a cation exchange medium buffer-- but that's about it. For a fertilizer, it is pretty dead. The mushrooms suck all that out to make mushroom :D

(Also, you might want to research growing mushroom on wood. Even fast growing ones take at least a year to establish a log before flushing, and only flush in the spring, after being sprayed with water. Japanese mushroom growers CHEAT like little whores by using sawdust instead of logs, and by repeatedly spraying the spawn innoculated sawdust with water to trigger fruiting. To help frame that with Shiitake:  Log: Innoculation time 12 months. Sawdust: Innoculation time 12 WEEKS. I suspect you were thinking more along the lines of straw or dung mushrooms, like morels, crimini, and the like--- those can culture quickly if growing conditions are held right, and can flush every 30 days until the compost is depleted. requires getting the compost wet and disturbing the surface of the compost to initiate flushing.)

I would say "sawdust" and make it like Japanese "cheaters" (I know American mushroom farmers do similar things), but that would mean introducing sawdust as an item and purposefully adding another job to a start-up crop that is made to make the game easier at the start.  (At the cost of a potentially ever-more-rare resource of wood.)

Realism can take some minor hits if it furthers the overarching goals. 

Tilling the plump helmets back into the soil, or just plain growing some sort of grasses instead of an edible crop would be a better way of starting up agriculture, but this is a way of creating some basic biomass that you can at least start out with growing crops on if we're dealing with completely barren soil, like in a desert or a cavern floor.
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wierd

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #413 on: February 02, 2013, 02:18:56 pm »

Ok, The silly forum ate the first submission terribly, and times out on subsequent edits with what I want to put...

Bascially, HERE is a calculator to calculate solar intensity at arbitrary locations on the earth.

Compare the north pole, to the equator.  Be dazzled.

apparently the forum's HTTP POST routine just cant handle a full year's simulated data. :D
« Last Edit: February 02, 2013, 02:28:11 pm by wierd »
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #414 on: February 02, 2013, 02:21:40 pm »

Water availability:
A tile that is unable to retain moisture (desert biome, without irrigation) will lose biomass per growing season (NOT YEAR!) at a rate consistent with its lack of moisture, with an upper bound of 25% per season. Thus, if not irrigated, dumping compost on it will result in all the compost vanishing without a trace in 1 year. Distance from a water source determines how moist it is, in desert biomes. Exact rate of falloff needs to be determined carefully to avoid game breaking consequences.

If you read the water management section, part of what I was talking about was that you don't have a broad, slowly-moving water meter, you have constantly depleting water.

This means that either dwarves are hoping for rain aboveground, and having to bucket-brigade water to plants (as unrealistic as that is, I know) as a labor-intensive method of pushing water, or else to use irrigation techniques that also consume water.

Small pipes that fit within a tile that don't involve a 3-meter-deep trench with 7/7 water are how that is calculated.

Biomass, drainage, and a ground cover plant can certainly alter water consumption, but it's basically a matter of making dwarves responsible for watering the crops as one of the farmer's primary duties.  (And farmer skill determines how well they understand how much water a plant needs - possibly under/overwatering.)

Keep in mind that underground regions have no rain.  Dwarf-moved water only.

Flooding is also something that has to be taken into account - players can easily drown a field.

Composting is VERY inefficient! It is this way BY DESIGN. At LEAST 50% of the biomass of the source material will be lost, and up to 99% at the top end, based on the crop.  here is a tentative list of made up values that look good without being tested:

I really wish you'd be willing to consider and speak in the terms of the model already proposed, as it makes things much easier.

We're not using the same crops, we're using different variables, and parts of the model I'm talking about have very different consequences for what it means to have a plant not reaching its full potential, especially as a consequence of dwarven ineptitude as well as drastic player-based disruptions of a field.  (I.E. flooding or a horse being pastured in a field that is growing corn or something else very disruptive.)

This isn't either reality or some bare-bones simulation, there has to be consequences for the stupid crap you'd never do in reality, or else there's no reason not to do it in the game.  (I.E. leave a chicken to drop manure directly into your fields - because hey, chickens don't eat yet, anyway, and that adds more fertilizer directly to your field!)

That's why you need pollution variables.

Another thing the system I proposed also does is include possibilities of flood-based fertilization, like the old versions of the game.  That is, water from a particularly silty source can add fertility to a land it covers (when it leaves behind mud as a contaminant on the soil). 

Magma, also, is a possible tool for periodic flooding for fertility.  But it needs a consequence, and that means pollution.

(I'd also say your concept of how long it takes to get to the magma sea is pretty off - I set up magma forges in the spring of my first year if I'm not pump-stacking them to the surface.  It's only the pump stacks that take forever, and there's no reason you wouldn't start with underground farming in such an obviously hostile surface biome.)
« Last Edit: February 02, 2013, 02:34:17 pm by NW_Kohaku »
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wierd

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #415 on: February 02, 2013, 02:30:03 pm »

Part of my problem is that the model you provided is unnecessarily complicated. It's rather intensive, for little gameplay benefit.  I purposefully toned everything down absurdly, because most of the same results can be derived from it, if you put conservative enough values in.

As for growing mushrooms "The japanese way"-- that way was only RECENTLY (in the past century!) discovered! :D Research "Mushroom millionaires"

[wow.. sounding so argumentative.. I apologize in advance...]

As for breaching magma sea in the fake simulation taking forever: 7 dwarves. :D
« Last Edit: February 02, 2013, 02:39:02 pm by wierd »
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #416 on: February 02, 2013, 02:36:30 pm »

Part of my problem is that the model you provided is unnecessarily complicated. It's rather intensive, for little gameplay benefit.  I purposefully toned everything down absurdly, because most of the same results can be derived from it, if you put conservative enough values in.

One of the really critical aspects of this proposal that you seem not to have read is that players aren't calculating out for themselves any of the soil fertility.

Players aren't manually micromanaging fields by directly ordering fertilizers placed on them.

The farmer dwarves decide on this.  Farmer dwarves watch soil fertility, and add fertilizers to the best of their ability to understand the soil (meaning they over/under apply fertilizers when low-leveled) on their own.  They irrigate the fields on their own.

This is how you cut down on the micromanagement - you aren't in charge of constantly punching an "add more compost" button.  The only thing you are in charge of is giving the farmers permission to use certain types of fertilizers.

This is why having different types of fertilizers to manage is important - your job isn't bookeeping each type of fertilizer, your job is simply making sure that what you are "ordering" from the soil doesn't "cost" more of your multiple fertilizer "resources" than you can sustain.  (Similar, in effect, to the way that an RTS game has multiple resources for you to manage.)

Doing it this way actually results in significantly less complexity and tedium for the player than even what you are proposing, while still giving the soil fertility elements much more depth than what you are proposing.  Once set up once, so long as you keep the fertilizer resources balanced, it is self-perpetuating, providing no major outside disturbance comes along.
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wierd

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #417 on: February 02, 2013, 02:44:36 pm »

Part of my problem is that the model you provided is unnecessarily complicated. It's rather intensive, for little gameplay benefit.  I purposefully toned everything down absurdly, because most of the same results can be derived from it, if you put conservative enough values in.

One of the really critical aspects of this proposal that you seem not to have read is that players aren't calculating out for themselves any of the soil fertility.

Players aren't manually micromanaging fields by directly ordering fertilizers placed on them.

The farmer dwarves decide on this.  Farmer dwarves watch soil fertility, and add fertilizers to the best of their ability to understand the soil (meaning they over/under apply fertilizers when low-leveled) on their own.  They irrigate the fields on their own.

This is how you cut down on the micromanagement - you aren't in charge of constantly punching an "add more compost" button.  The only thing you are in charge of is giving the farmers permission to use certain types of fertilizers.

This is why having different types of fertilizers to manage is important - your job isn't bookeeping each type of fertilizer, your job is simply making sure that what you are "ordering" from the soil doesn't "cost" more of your multiple fertilizer "resources" than you can sustain.  (Similar, in effect, to the way that an RTS game has multiple resources for you to manage.)

Doing it this way actually results in significantly less complexity and tedium for the player than even what you are proposing, while still giving the soil fertility elements much more depth than what you are proposing.  Once set up once, so long as you keep the fertilizer resources balanced, it is self-perpetuating, providing no major outside disturbance comes along.


It also results in a system that is counter-intuitive to one of your starting axioms:

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Here's why this problem needs to be solved from the perspective of "Improved Farming":  At first, the suggestion was to take up more space, time, and dwarves per unit of food that you need to put into generating food.  Early on in the Improved Farming thread (referred to from here on as IF), Footkerchief hit on the core of the problem with this solution, when he said that the real problem was that farming was a "free stuff button".  You see, as long as farming was nothing more than zoning land, and designating dwarves to throw seeds at the zone and eventually pick up all the stuff that grew out of that land, then we aren't really changing anything by requiring more dwarves or more time to do the work.  If you require more land to produce the same amount of food, the player just zones more land (and eventually adds more dwarves to the farming labor to manage the sheer acreage).  If you require more labor activities for dwarves, then you just wind up throwing more dwarves at the problem.  If you require a longer growing time, you just double the  farmland for every time you double the growing time, and wind up with the same amount of food per unit time.  Either way, all this really changes is what percentage of your fortress's population is going to be farming at any given time, and doesn't do much to actually change gameplay or make it more interesting.

All this method does is increase the front end, by making players have to learn that they cant pasture animals on the farm, cant put raw poo down, etc--- and increase the labor costs and sizes of the farm plots, because statistically, it will level out with a large enough area operated, and enough dwarves working fields.

Example:

If bugs are a distribution pest, I just need to increase the size of my plantation an appropriate variable according to the distribution of pest losses, and increase the labor pool. The inclusion of the pest is just a frontloaded obstacle, that raw planting increases can overcome. Variances over time are just noise on the distribution, and can be further eliminated with larger plantings, which increase the SNR.

Losses in soil fertility can be offset by adding more farming labor, and adding non-food producing farm plots, that do NOTHING but produce compostable materials. Increasing the size of the cleanup crew, and penning a bunch of animals to get poop is just offsetting the freestuff button to a different location, rather than removing it. 

Ipso facto-- The model does not do what it wants to do, and cant do what it wants to do, because the goal is unachievable using the model, nor with any self-consistent model.  That is the argument I was trying to get across to 10ebor10, without success. The model would have to introduce game breaking levels of randomness in order to push the SNR over the point where simply adding more crop plots, and adding more labor would (be able to) silence it.

This is ironically what natural biospheres do: They create a local maxima based on statistical scattering over a large enough plot, which incorporates rather than tries to overcome inefficiencies.

While the solution is inefficient, it is still a valid solution. Thus it runs afoul of the axiom.

One could argue that you run into a physical realestate limit by what your embark can hold, but this neglects megaproject growing operations, exploiting multi-zlevels.  Again, running head first into the "Front loaded", and "Not solvable by throwing more dwarves and land at it" axioms.

So, in order to overcome this, you have to produce an infinite resource sink, to overcome the easy buttons, which I did. (soil conservation is a money pit.)

You have to make the site sufficiently variable that a "Throw dwarves at it on autopilot" solution wont work, and make the system sufficiently dynamic that it breaks that as well. I did. The polar embark illustrates that quite well. Autopilot isnt an option there at all!

You will also need to limit the total number of plants that can be planted at once, at an arbitrary cap, to avoid "Nature's solution" to complex systems: Brute force and over abundance. The game already does this by limiting seed reserves. (though a clever player could overcome this by leaving crops unprocessed, and micromanaging seed production to handle more crop plots than normal.)

Other than feeling artificial, and being overly simplistic, I don't see the problem.


The argument you just made, boils down to a contradiction.

"I dont want it to be an easy button"

"Your solution is just micromanagment, and mine has automation."

Automation is an easy button. :D  Removing the easy button makes it require micromanagement by default. :D
« Last Edit: February 02, 2013, 03:09:22 pm by wierd »
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10ebbor10

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #418 on: February 02, 2013, 03:07:37 pm »

All this method does is increase the front end, by making players have to learn that they cant pasture animals on the farm, cant put raw poo down, etc--- and increase the labor costs and sizes of the farm plots, because statistically, it will level out with a large enough area operated, and enough dwarves working fields.
Actuallym you can pasture animals on the farm, and can put poo down. It reduces in a certain negative effect, but with the right growing sheme and correct fertilizer use it might in some way be viableish. There's no sense in putting in an option that is always useless.


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If bugs are a distribution pest, I just need to increase the size of my plantation an appropriate variable according to the distribution of pest losses, and increase the labor pool. The inclusion of the pest is just a frontloaded obstacle, that raw planting increases can overcome. Variances over time are just noise on the distribution, and can be further eliminated with larger plantings, which increase the SNR.
Not really. First, it isn't that front loaded, as your small scale farms won't suffer from it that much. Secondly, doubling your plantation size will work for a month, but then the pest population will explode to match, once again destroying your crops. Just adding more won't help, as the pests will just eat it all, once they are numerous enough.

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Losses in soil fertility can be offset by adding more farming labor, and adding non-food producing farm plots, that do NOTHING but produce compostable materials. Increasing the size of the cleanup crew, and penning a bunch of animals to get poop is just offsetting the freestuff button to a different location, rather than removing it. 
At one point you're going to reach a pollution build up of some kind of another, that makes the original fields untenable. The point of this suggestion is not to prevent the useage of adding more dwarf power to be a viablish solution, but just to give other options that will often work better, because they require less farmers. It's the same with the current hauling system, you can use dwarf power solely, which works well in the short term, but eventually you will need to switch to wheelbarrows, better organisation or maybe even a minecart system.

Quote
Ipso facto-- The model does not do what it wants to do, and cant do what it wants to do, because the goal is unachievable using the model, nor with any self-consistent model.  That is the argument I was trying to get across to 10ebbor10, without success. The model would have to introduce game breaking levels of randomness in order to push the SNR over the point where simply adding more crop plots, and adding more labor would silence it.
What's the problem with adding more dwarf power being a viablish solution. After all, dwarf power is only one of the resources you have to manage.However, the point is that adding dwarf power won't often be the best solution. However, if a player doesn't want to mess with the farming system, he can, as adding enough dwarf power works(kinda).

A hundred unarmed recruits can kill a bronze Collossus, but it might not be the easiest way to approach the problem.
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wierd

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Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution
« Reply #419 on: February 02, 2013, 03:13:11 pm »

10ebbor10:

The simple fact that it runs headfirst into the established rules and scope of the project being undertaken to begin with, as cited.

Also, directly pasturing animals on farm plots, with the exception of slow growing winter crops, destroys said crops, negating the purpose for planting in the first place. Also, raw manure is deadly to most plants, meaning penning chickens or dogs on that farm plot will destroy it from hot nutrition, per Kohaku's solution.

Again, about pests-- Kohaku's solution has pests as a distribution. Since the distribution does not reach 100% density, it cannot reach a point where simply throwing more plants in wont effectively silence their impact.  Further, purposefully leaving areas of cropland wasted/dead would further mess with their spawning calculations, because of the coarseness of the calculation, as a consequence of CPU overhead. You could cheat by leaving dead feilds lying around.

On the scope of Contaminant buildup, there is little if anything preventing the player from using the "Screwpump filtration" system with locally topped up irrigation systems and windmills to effectively destroy contaminants, making it into a "Front loaded" problem.
« Last Edit: February 02, 2013, 03:22:25 pm by wierd »
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