•I notice you're not a fan of my cooking thread. That's ok. I'm bummed that you didn't notice that I've been unifying all suggestions into a working big picture in that thread, but rather than walls of text I like to narrow items down to concise suggestions. I actually asked toady in the dev thread whether he likes megathreads, and he said he was ambivalent on them since he reads all suggestions anyway. So a goal of unifying all suggestions together into a working whole is probably the ideal thing to do with them.
Well, to be honest, once I posted it, I thought I was being a bit harsh. I still don't think "throw everything into one big pot, even if two ideas conflict" is a good way to go about things, but I have to admit that part of what made me a little more harsh was that you weren't trying to link back to the original threads you were taking some of the ideas from, and it was a momentary spike of annoyance that set the tone of that post.
I'm not so much opposed to what you are doing, or the whole concept, but I like to have a unifying goal to achieve, some sort of experience the player is supposed to have, to guide what I am working at.
Oftentimes, suggestions are just "this would be more realistic". It's an obvious goal to go for, and one I obviously follow myself, but it has to be tempered by recognizing the impact on play the suggestions will have. You need to ask yourself what sort of changes in playstyle will this likely get out of players. Games are ultimately about forms of conditioned response - if you lose when you do one thing, and don't lose or maybe even win if you do a second thing, players naturally become conditioned to doing the second thing. At the time of the last thread, I had a pretty large argument in a separate thread about what constituted "interesting choices" (see
Extra Credits' clip on the subject), and it partially helped me whittle down how much of this system you actually see and control, and how much of it works on autopilot.
Anything that is a calculation (anything where one solution is clearly always better than all others) should be automated or at least, automatable. Anything that players can't interact with isn't much of a system. You need something where you set up conflicting goals for players to actually feel weighed down by choice. This is partly what I am building this whole suggestion up towards - making the player choose between the value of the resources they can extract from the land (in terms of farming nutrients and hunting wildlife, but similar in terms of mining veins of blue stuff), and the fear of the potential disaster they can create for themselves if they are too greedy (in terms of depleting the soil, killing their farms, inviting a blight that wipes out their crops, and similar in terms to unleashing the HFS and having your fort overrun).
Also, honestly, I only read the first page, as at the time, I was still just coming back to the forum, and wanted to focus my catch-up reading material on the parts most important to the game itself. (I read that FotF response, as well.) So I wasn't aware of attempts to make it more cohesive. I know it's not quite fair to throw out a massive thread, then not actually read someone else's big thread, but I wanted to get as much as I could out while the initial burst of energy was still going, and then come back to read that thread in its entirity later.
•What about something like magical stone types that cave plants are getting energy from? We would probably think of them as magnetic or radioactive, but that doesn't need explaining since dwarves would never understand it in this time period anyway.
This is one of those things I'm thinking about. "Green rocks" are kind of blah for a power source, but they could be a default or a supplement. The advantage of green rocks is that they would be fairly obvious to see, understand, and manipulate. The disadvantage is that they aren't particularly hard to manipulate, and that damages the dynamic I want to aim for.
I want player's actions to have consequences beyond their most immediate impact, so that there are long-range consequences that must be weighed against short-term consequences. If all you are doing is moving a rock, you can just move the rock somewhere else when you're done with it, and you have no fear of long-term consequences. If something like unicorns create the "Good" biome, then making unicorns really, really valuable, and letting dwarves slaughter them for their parts satisfies a short-term goal, but killing too many means they flee your fortress, never come back, and the "Good" biome dissapears.
The point of most of this is to get players to experiment until they can find ways to make sustainable systems that balance competing natural forces in the game while generating the most of the resources the player wants to obtain. Importantly, these competing forces you must balance are complex and dynamic enough that there isn't one single simple solution you can always apply to every situation, and can find easily on the wiki. At the same time, total collapse of the system shouldn't be sudden and utterly irreverseable, it should have chances for the player to see warning signs, and make adjustments. This means tempering the instinct to just "make more farms" whenever you want more biological material. Things can't just scale perfectly, there has to be additional complexity as you scale.
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Topic: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution (Read 148737 times)