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[JmzLost]

Good job with the cohesive improvements, it's much easier to understand why a particular change should be made when it appears as part of a larger whole.  I, too, like the way the changes would make a deeper game without unduly penalizing those who choose not to invest their time in learning the nuances of farming.

Something I haven't seen mentioned is init options.  In the Dwarf Talk referenced earlier, Toady mentioned the ability to change the level of magic from just artifacts/FBs to flying dwarfs on magic carpets with guns shooting fire.  A similar idea could also work for farming, where the "simple farming" option would only check for soil, and not track the condition of the soil.  A "complex farming" option would enable the full suite of nutrients, soil erosion, pests and counter-pests and counter-counter-pests, etc.  This would allow the people who don't want to mess with farming to save on FPS (minor) and memory (major), much the same as we can turn off temperature, weather, and the economy now. 

A bit early to talk about init options I know, but thinking in terms of simple, medium, and complex could offer a way to split the farming improvements into groups that could be implemented over multiple releases, allowing some of it to be coded now*, more later, and the most complex aspects even later still. 
* "now" meaning "whenever Toady finds time to implement this, if he chooses to go in this direction"

Again, good job, and thank you for presenting this in a unified manner.

JMZ

[NW_Kohaku]

I guess that if there were to be an init option (aside from just using the raws to make dwarves stop eating and drinking), then it would take out the whole system, and just make crops grow when you throw seeds at dirt... which is what we have now. 

But the thing is that init options are really only used when things are, generally speaking, badly implimented and something that can be removed from the game (old economy), or something that would be highly controversial (graphics).  There's no init option to turn the military off.  You just don't use the military, and rely upon engineering if you don't want to use it.  If you don't want to farm, then just try to find ways around needing to farm.

[ungulateman]

[INVADERS:NO]

There's your option to turn the military off.

[zwei]

In same vein, you can turn of farming by modding a bit and removing need to eat/drink from dwarves...

[NW_Kohaku]

Turning off invaders doesn't turn off what's in the caverns, as far as I know, but then, I've never actually turned it off, so I might be wrong on it.  Regardless, it doesn't turn the combat system off any more than removing dwarves' need to eat removes the farming system.  It just significantly reduces the application of it.  It's not like the Temperature init option, which shuts the whole system off so that magma is just really thick water.

Which brings me back to why, honestly, I don't really like the notion of an init option - it means the game will need two systems to handle the same one function.  I'd rather work it into the game that players can focus on aspects of the game that they want to focus upon and gloss over the parts they'd rather not than to have a giant wall of knobs that they manually set to turn one thing into regular mode, and another thing into dumbed-down no functionality mode.

[Cespinarve]

Well, I read your first two posts twice, and skimmed the others- I was more interested in your ideas rather than the specifics of implementation. A quite brilliant post, I really hope Tarn takes the time to absorb the implications. I especially liked your Class thread, I read that in its entirety, and I really hope for that to be in the works. Since you already debated the lack of FPS hits by this, I would like to add my dislike of a research tech tree, as it seems to belong to a different genre of game, and doesn't fit with DF to moi. The Farm Overseer presents a problem of skills- from the looks of things, you really don't want an unskilled Overseer being in charge, so either his skill-set should be Planting, so that his direct experience leads to better job performance, or else it ties into the larger desire of being able to request specific skilled migrants from the liaison. Otherwise, waiting on a skilled Overseer immigrant could prove fatal, and it would be one more complexity to juggle when picking starting skills.

As to the military/invader discussion, I always turn off invaders since .31 military, because I find the interface to be very, very bad (i.e. finding what dwarves you want for the squad, and having every dwarf show up on each squad page and so on). I have not noticed anything come up from the caverns, but then, i tend to avoid caverns.

[therahedwig]

Umm... not really.

Modern caskets are made of metal, designed to be pretty much hermetically sealed, put in a concrete vault, and the bodies are pumped full of embalming fluids.  None of that sounds particularly like the point is to "return to the soil".  You have to specifically ask for and pay for a "green burial" that involves the sort of "return to the soil" type of stuff you're talking about.

Even early Christians would try to put their dead in crypts, where they would presumably remain until the Final Judgement.  Even though it's not part of Christian or even Jewish dogma that you need to preserve the body for ressurection, they still tried to do it, perhaps because of Egyptian influence on the Jews, and Jewish influence on Christianity, which forbade cremation.

It's just that all of those get full, eventually, so they make more room by throwing out the dead nobody thinks anyone will miss so they can sell those plots again.

That's weird, I've heard archeologists claim pretty much the opposite, and all coffins I've ever seen were made out of wood.

Regional differences again I suposse?

.... Yeah, looking into it it is a regional thing. In my own country(the netherlands) it was apparantly forbidden to balm bodies till about two years ago. And only in few countries they make coffins from metal.

My point is, what you speak of is rather modern is it not?(And probly cheaper when it comes to the coffins at the least...) so in a medieval setting they would have their bodies return to the earth.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, I read your first two posts twice, and skimmed the others- I was more interested in your ideas rather than the specifics of implementation. A quite brilliant post, I really hope Tarn takes the time to absorb the implications. Since you already debated the lack of FPS hits by this, I would like to add my dislike of a research tech tree, as it seems to belong to a different genre of game, and doesn't fit with DF to moi.

What I most fear about this is that Toady will have a difference of game design philosophy, and that I'll never really get to know it through anything other than Toady simply not ever commenting on or implimenting anything like this years down the road.

Toady commented somewhere that he never really plays long-term forts anymore, and I think it can really start showing in the way that the game plays right now.  Not only is there basically no late-game content, but the game has a serious amount of entropy which is only being partially addressed.  Especially 40d, where the world was basically a static collection of individuals who just sat around waiting to be killed, with nothing you could do but kill them, but even now, reading some of the devlog stuff, it's just, "Oh, well, the lord of this castle was eaten by a crocodile, and nobody's going to replace him, so I'll just move on to the next castle, and hope the queen there doesn't get eaten by a badger."

You can even see it in the Threetoe stories how much entropic decay seems to dominate the theme - characters from outside sources are introduced, then weeded out one by one until maybe a couple characters remain at the end of each story.  Every conversation seems to involve snarling, threats of death, or actual death.  Anything approaching diplomacy or teaching through methods other than someone dying are uncommon.  It's just a set of opposing forces that manage to survive the elimination process to remain the lone standing actors.

It's the way that the games play out - you build a custom world, filled with various peoples from nowhere, and gradually eliminate them until there's nothing but a barren void, and you have to generate a new world to play again, because you're all out of challenges since everyone's dead.

In order to make this a better game, it really needs to learn to be more sustainable, where players can enjoy coming back to "their world" over and over again, and I'm afraid it might not be something Toady considers very important.

To a certain extent, this is my trying to divine the mind of Toady from the piddly tea leaves left behind in the very few responses I've seen, so I can't really know for sure, but it's also hard to rule out the suspiscion.  It's also extremely frustrating because there are so few means of trying to get information about what he thinks on these sorts of things, and in places like Future of the Fortress, he'll often just ignore the bulk of my questions entirely.  How the Hell am I supposed to make a compelling argument to appeal to a total black box?!  How am I supposed to refine my suggestions when I can't tell if he disagrees with something or not, and if so, on what grounds he is uncomfortable with it?

Maybe he'll just think, "Oh, nobody wants to farm. If they want to farm, they should just play Harvest Moon." the way that some of the people from the previous thread responded.  Maybe he likes NPK just for the gritty realism of it, but has no intention of making an automated system for handling it, and rather enjoys the forced micromanagement.  I have no way of knowing.

.... Yeah, looking into it it is a regional thing. In my own country(the netherlands) it was apparantly forbidden to balm bodies till about two years ago. And only in few countries they make coffins from metal.

My point is, what you speak of is rather modern is it not?(And probly cheaper when it comes to the coffins at the least...) so in a medieval setting they would have their bodies return to the earth.

Well, if this is a regional sensibility, then I don't think Toady is Dutch.  Dwarves definitely seem to have the Egyptian thing going on.  They demand elaborate tombs if they can, get sealed in stone coffins for all eternity without returning to any sort of soil, and they get buried with all their personal belongings, as well, instead of passing them on to their next of kin.  Death basically means everything about them and that they own gets sucked completely out of the cycle of life for all eternity, with no returning to any sort of cycle of life and death, and a potential for an ever-increasing number of ghosts that will glut the land.

Again, it's a sort of sign of a philosophy of gaming entropy, where dead things will continue to take up more and more space as time goes on.

[AngleWyrm]

But the thing is that init options are really only used when things are, generally speaking, badly implimented and something that can be removed from the game (old economy), or something that would be highly controversial (graphics).

The ability to turn off a feature serves an important function. It causes the designer of the feature to consider that if it is not fun, but instead some sort of slog or drudgery, then people will simply turn it off.

It also lets the players customize their experience, focusing on what they enjoy.

[NW_Kohaku]

If the designer thinks that he is putting something in the game that nobody will find fun, then he probably would be better off trying to come up with a system that people would find fun than generating a feature that nobody wants to use.

I am doing what I can to take all criticisms of this system into account to reformat the suggestion to suit every form of playstyle as best as I am able.  If there is something you specifically do not find fun or interesting, then say why.  If you can say why you enjoy one aspect of a game or are leary of or dislike some other aspect of a game, I can try to work around those constraints, and offer as much of the things people like as I can while offering mitigations of or reworking the portions that people don't like.  Tech trees, for example, obviously get plenty of flak, and I've yet to really discuss that section, but I'll obviously have to refine the gameplay so that it avoids the problems tech trees encounter.

Simply saying "why bother having food at all?" doesn't do much to help, however, and saying that you only enjoy the military aspects of the game, and consider any attention to infrastructure or industry make me wonder (to turn the "Harvest Moon" argument around) if you wouldn't rather be playing Call of Duty or Starcraft right now, instead.

[lordcooper]

I'm sorry, that was the purest definition of TL;DR I have ever come across.

Any chance of a brief summary?

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm sorry, that was the purest definition of TL;DR I have ever come across.

Any chance of a brief summary?

Actually, I hate to break it to you, but that kind of was the summary I made to get it easier to understand the last thread that ran completely wild.

I guess I could go into super-generalization mode, which wouldn't be making any of the arguments for why these things would be good for the game, although I'm fairly sure that proposing radical alterations to game functions that people may not see as being broken until I explain why they are broken will only end up with instant, emphatic rejection of the idea on the face of things. Especially since that's exactly why the last thread devolved into such a shouting match that it required this summary in the first place.

But hey, I guess I could give it one more shot, against my better judgement...

• The purpose of this thread is to create a degree of complexity and difficulty in farming that the current idea of farming (throwing seeds at mud) does not produce.
• The goal is to make farming initially simple, yet gradually more complex the larger your farms become, the more food you try to grow, the more you try to alter your environment, and the more you try to grow non-food products, as well.  The purpose being to reverse the current trend of setting up one farm plot once (which is unfortunately complex and confusing to do for new people currently), and forever after ignoring farming, meaning the game's farming gets very simple after an initial burst of complexity.
• To do this, various models are simulated, including soil fertility, water management, diseases for crops, and land pollution.
• To ensure this isn't a massive wad of incomprehensible gibberish, especially to starting players, much of this process has automation, and I am working on trying to reduce the interface down to become as simple and intuitive as possible.
• It is a goal to use automation to ensure that players do not have to worry about micromanagement of soil factors, but instead worry about how much they want to develop their farms versus how much effort it would take to make their farms expand.
• This should also make plants in general far more detailed, and allow for crops to be more than just food that takes X days to grow, but detailed and different from one another, the way that the jump to 31.xx from 40d vastly expanded the details of animals.

I hope that was both concise enough and reasoned enough to answer your question, because I don't know how to boil it down any further than that without my argument losing all meaning. 

Please comment on what I could potentially expand upon or strip down in that summarized summary to make it clearer, so that I can just use that as a copy-paste response to people who voice similar concerns.

While I can fully understand the idea that what I have written is tl;dr, (I know there are some things I leave open in tabs 'to read' for a long time, myself) I also don't really want to make a habit of having to re-write out different ways to try to explain the same subject because having to explain the same thing over and over again really starts to sap all my will to do this. If I write all this text, and people can't be bothered to read any of it before they start to argue against it, its an incredibly exasperating experience, and why I stopped going to the Bay12 forums for about three months after the last thread.

While I'm not accusing you of doing anything wrong in just asking for a summary, for the sake of my sanity, I would ask you please help me make a better summary so I don't have to keep doing it for everyone who asks, because there are a lot of people who ask.  I would prefer to have some sort of copy-paste response I can give them.

I am doing what I can to take all criticisms of this system into account to reformat the suggestion to suit every form of playstyle as best as I am able.  If there is something you specifically do not find fun or interesting, then say why.  If you can say why you enjoy one aspect of a game or are leary of or dislike some other aspect of a game, I can try to work around those constraints, and offer as much of the things people like as I can while offering mitigations of or reworking the portions that people don't like.  Tech trees, for example, obviously get plenty of flak, and I've yet to really discuss that section, but I'll obviously have to refine the gameplay so that it avoids the problems tech trees encounter.

[Cespinarve]

Well, now you've just depressed the crap out of me.

I feel the need to to bribe Toady to get him to read that post about entropic fort death, just to find out his thoughts. I totally agree, we need later content! ARGH, NOW I'M WAY TOO DEPRESSED

[lordcooper]

Thanks for the summary of the summary, you've piqued my interest enough to read through the OP (when I'm a little more awake )

Can't really help out with a copy-paste summary until I've fully read the OP, but I'll let you know tomorrow if I have any advice

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, now you've just depressed the crap out of me.

I feel the need to to bribe Toady to get him to read that post about entropic fort death, just to find out his thoughts. I totally agree, we need later content! ARGH, NOW I'M WAY TOO DEPRESSED

*ahem* 

"I AM IN DESPAIR!  THE CONCEPT OF GAMEPLAY ENTROPY HAS LEFT ME IN DESPAIR!"

I wouldn't be too hard on him, though.  I obviously just talked about how frustrating it is to have to reiterate long, complex concepts to people repeatedly, and I know that it has to be a million times worse for Toady. 

That said, I think an "FAQ" section or occasional rewrite works wonders.  He at least tried that by reducing the hideously incomprehensible gibberish of the old devpage into the new one, which is more like a logical checklist than a pile composed of every thought he had on the game.  Perhaps he can try to do some similar organization on other topics.

Thanks for the summary of the summary, you've piqued my interest enough to read through the OP (when I'm a little more awake )

Can't really help out with a copy-paste summary until I've fully read the OP, but I'll let you know tomorrow if I have any advice

Actually, I think I should just make the last of my "reserved" posts become the "Teal; deer" post, that just has a summarized summary for people who aren't willing to dive headfirst into the whole argument.  Then I'll just quote or link that.  That might be the most effective means of heading off problems.