Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  
Pages: 1 ... 7 8 [9] 10 11 ... 35

Author Topic: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution  (Read 148390 times)

Cespinarve

  • Bay Watcher
  • Lege lege lege relege labora et invenies
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #120 on: February 07, 2011, 05:15:34 pm »

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

To be precise, the concept that Toady will let everything but early-game slide off his radar is what keeps me in despair. Tarn, it is time to add features that take time to test!
Logged
Nice one, not sure when I'll be feeling like killing a baby but these things are good to know.
This is why we can't have nice things... someone will just wind up filling it with corpses.
Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife — chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now it's complete because it's ended here."

monk12

  • Bay Watcher
  • Sorry, I AM a coyote
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #121 on: February 07, 2011, 05:50:30 pm »

From all indications, the reason that there is a dearth of late-game content in DF right now is because Toady is putting a lot of effort into making early game content fun and interesting, and the reason he is doing THAT is because a lot of the late-game content is going to be directly derived from the kinds of things happening in the early-mid game.

I will admit, however, that right now the game has a very gritty dark "decay of the great empires" thing going on. Especially in adventure mode, where the professional soldiers all want to join you because you are likely to lead them to death, and MAYBE a side of glory. I'm hoping worldgen options for flavor make it in one day, but that day is far, far off.

AngleWyrm

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #122 on: February 07, 2011, 05:54:44 pm »

  • 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.

A mechanic that might be interesting is to use amount of labor assigned as part of the definition of "how much effort it would take". Currently a 5x5 plot can be planted & harvested by two farmers, who keep up on the task. One farmer falls behind, and three gains very little in keeping the plot planted. If farmers had an additional job called Soil Maintenance that they could perform, then more farmers could be gainfully employed in the fields.

Soil Maintenance jobs could be generated whenever the soil conditions fall out of line with the crop that is planted in that soil. Then a dwarf would go add a bucket of water, or potash, or whatever kind of fertilizer moves the variables in the right direction. The ideal use of land then has a higher farmer count.

In the same way, farmers could get an additional job of Crop Maintenance, where they go to the field and check for vermin, and perform anti-vermin extermination efforts. This again adds to the labor and thus the number of farmers that make up the farming community within a fort.
« Last Edit: February 07, 2011, 06:07:02 pm by AngleWyrm »
Logged

NW_Kohaku

  • Bay Watcher
  • [ETHIC:SCIENCE_FOR_FUN: REQUIRED]
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #123 on: February 07, 2011, 06:37:11 pm »

AngleWyrm, you DO realize those are all things that have already been discussed, right?  You were in those conversations in the last thread.  You've been posting in this thread. Several of those things are things that I've already put into the suggestion, which I brought up in response to questions you asked, and which you are now suggesting back to me.
« Last Edit: February 07, 2011, 06:42:10 pm by NW_Kohaku »
Logged
Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

Improved Farming
Class Warfare

AngleWyrm

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #124 on: February 07, 2011, 07:24:31 pm »

It seems to me that clarity comes from bouncing an idea back and forth and refining it. Would you only allow yourself one go at this advanced farming idea, or have you revisited and improved upon it over time?

I'm only trying to make this suggestion better, the best way I know how.
« Last Edit: February 07, 2011, 07:31:03 pm by AngleWyrm »
Logged

Solace

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #125 on: February 07, 2011, 07:33:59 pm »

As an alternate, or possibly expansion I guess, to keeping track of soil fertility, there could be bigger uses and tradeoffs for /what/ you're farming? Say, when you just start out, you have an aboveground farm, because the soil is right there, and it's probably even self-watering. 'course, your farmer dwarves are largely helpless, so you put a wall around it as quickly as possible. But, keep making that farm bigger and bigger... one ladder-wielding enemy could torch your entire food production and slower farmers, and it's a bigger and bigger buffet to attract vermin.

So, you hollow out a huge area underground, and also have to invest in some basic watering, maybe just dwarves with buckets to start off. Not as efficient as an automatic system or some kind, but a decent middle ground, work-wise. And of your options, maybe there's, you know, cave-wheat that takes a lot more personal involvement, maybe even some fertilizer to grow in addition to water. Or on the flipside, you could have mushrooms that grow on their own... in a constantly damp environment, and not too efficiently, space-wise. But if you have a lot of time to get a huge cavern set up and constant irrigation, you could have a basic food source that just takes harvesting, cleaning, and protecting from vermin.

Now, maybe you have a bustling fortress city, with nobles, and even the commoners are well payed, which pays tax dividends or whatever. So, all these dwarves are pickier, so even if you have all the food you need, you might be pressured to grow much more demanding food, to keep them all properly happy and paying taxes. Oranges, which only grow outside, require lots of water and fertilizer, and don't take temperature extremes well. Or some medically amazing fungus, which is equally finicky in it's own way. Maybe instead of just growing crops, you need to produce more and more meat, and farming animals for meat takes way more food than just eating the plants directly. Or more simply, underground trees, which need a z-level or two above them to be free too, and maybe a much thicker amount of soil below.

And hey, if there's eventually magic and all, why not super-magic plants, with ridiculous requirements? A golden apple tree that only produces fruit when underground, but surrounded by regular, unpicked apple trees, which require sunlight. Vampire moss, which itself must be fed large amounts of meat.
« Last Edit: February 07, 2011, 07:39:38 pm by Solace »
Logged

NW_Kohaku

  • Bay Watcher
  • [ETHIC:SCIENCE_FOR_FUN: REQUIRED]
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #126 on: February 07, 2011, 09:46:51 pm »

As an alternate, or possibly expansion I guess, to keeping track of soil fertility, there could be bigger uses and tradeoffs for /what/ you're farming?...

Actually, I was sort of torn between writing the "farming alternatives" section and writing the Interface section next, but went with the latter.  Everything that you've described is the sort of choice I would like to include, yes. 

I also would include growing your own planted forests, growing silage to feed ranch animals instead of feeding dwarves themselves (which would require more land, but silage is much easier to grow, using much more marginal soil and less water), the ability to start fisheries, decorative flowers/mushrooms which can raise happiness if planted and maintained as a sort of "park", oxygen- or light-producing subterranean plantlife if we get the air quality or lighting arcs in, alchemical components, and even some oddball uses, like the ability to grow your own "gems" from some sort of hardened plant sap or a crystal-forming mold. 

Even just in comparison between food crops, how much the crop demands of the soil, how much water it requires, how much maintainance it requires, its vulnerability to disease, potentially its ability to be stored/rate of rotting, nutritional value, and commercial value can all make a greater variety of choice.

By increasing the criteria by which plants can be differentiated, a large number of truly different crops can show up with a meaningful choice between them, rather than the "plump helmets with another name" choice we currently have to modding in plants.



It seems to me that clarity comes from bouncing an idea back and forth and refining it. Would you only allow yourself one go at this advanced farming idea, or have you revisited and improved upon it over time?

I'm only trying to make this suggestion better, the best way I know how.

Is that what you were trying to do?  I had to wonder if you weren't really reading the responses or the original posts. 

Soil Maintenance jobs could be generated whenever the soil conditions fall out of line with the crop that is planted in that soil. Then a dwarf would go add a bucket of water, or potash, or whatever kind of fertilizer moves the variables in the right direction. The ideal use of land then has a higher farmer count.

The part you talked about "soil maintainance jobs automatically being generated" seems especially confusing, because that is the automation of tasks like fertilization that I have been talking about the entire thread, and a good chunk of the previous thread.  I have, in fact, gone out of my way to stress that fact at pretty much every opportunity, and to assure people that they will not need to manually micromanage every field's nutrient levels, that instead, it will be automatically queued. 
Logged
Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

Improved Farming
Class Warfare

AngleWyrm

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #127 on: February 07, 2011, 11:29:50 pm »

It's not confusing, it is adding clarity to the generalization of automation. I have offered a specific and clear picture of how to do it, rather than just saying that it will be taken care of.

I am more interested in the ability of the system to employ additional farmers, so that the population of the fort has more jobs. Currently a 200-dwarf fortress is not gainfully employed, and I see farming as a way to address this issue. If the crop yields are reduced heavily, then the player may be able to start with just a few farmers, and add a percentage of their incoming immigrants as the need arises. Granted farming is only one piece of a fortresses overall activity, but that piece could be enlarged considerably without negative effect, and may even reduce the propensity for people to kill off their immigrants.
« Last Edit: February 07, 2011, 11:37:18 pm by AngleWyrm »
Logged

Solace

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #128 on: February 07, 2011, 11:42:43 pm »

I suppose if you wanted to really simplify it, you could have a soil, fertile/not fertile boolean. Or on a slightly more complicated side, plants could subtract an amount of fertility by growing, different per plant. Fertility could increase by X for every Y time left fallow, or if fertilized. When magic or alchemy get in, there could be ways to add or subtract from the maximum fertility amount, or have it regenerate fertility faster. Before then, different kinds of soil could have their own max fertility, which would also mean some soil limits what you can plant, not just how often. Of course, you'd need a way to move the soil around, if you where doing that...

EDIT: For that matter, I wouldn't mind the ability to move around the "natural" floors. Dig out some diamonds, I get a free diamond floor... if only I had a use for a room way over there.
« Last Edit: February 08, 2011, 12:07:00 am by Solace »
Logged

zwei

  • Bay Watcher
  • [ECHO][MENDING]
    • View Profile
    • Fate of Heroes
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #129 on: February 08, 2011, 07:48:56 am »

I think early fort focus stems from how game is developed, i would guess that it goes something like this:

New build is made, new pocket world is generated, fort is started to playtest lastest changes. Repeat for any semi-major change.

With this approach, first X minutes of gameplay are going to be quite polished because they are all that is needed to test stuff like pottery industry. There was this bug where dwarves went to sleep and never woke up - when it was introduced to game, no fort lasted long enough to make it aparent there was a bug...

NW_Kohaku

  • Bay Watcher
  • [ETHIC:SCIENCE_FOR_FUN: REQUIRED]
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #130 on: February 08, 2011, 04:28:45 pm »

Today is "Interface Mockup" day.  It is taking WAY too long to do this crap by spreadsheet.  Anyway, I should have a decent mockup sometime tonight, provided "tonight" includes 3 AM tommorow, as well.

I think early fort focus stems from how game is developed, i would guess that it goes something like this:

Yes, that's the sort of thing I am talking about... Same with the bugs in 31.01 with stats rusting but not rising.  Same with the too-fast skill gain and rust and the ability to dig out and build up whole mountains in a season - it's designed from the perspective of someone who never spends more than three game years in a fort.

If we have slower mining, slower smelting, and metal wear and replacement were designed for long-term fortresses, we would see a different system.  Now, it's just "designate the whole mountain and smelt everything".

I suppose if you wanted to really simplify it, you could have a soil, fertile/not fertile boolean. Or on a slightly more complicated side, plants could subtract an amount of fertility by growing, different per plant. Fertility could increase by X for every Y time left fallow, or if fertilized. When magic or alchemy get in, there could be ways to add or subtract from the maximum fertility amount, or have it regenerate fertility faster. Before then, different kinds of soil could have their own max fertility, which would also mean some soil limits what you can plant, not just how often. Of course, you'd need a way to move the soil around, if you where doing that...

EDIT: For that matter, I wouldn't mind the ability to move around the "natural" floors. Dig out some diamonds, I get a free diamond floor... if only I had a use for a room way over there.

Unfortuantely, that's sort of the total opposite direction of where I was going - the objective is to make the game more complex in a way that doesn't overload the player, not to make the game really simple, so that there isn't any differentiation between plants and very obvious choices for the player.

The point of having a simulated ecosystem that is only vaguely within the player's control, as I outlined in the first few posts, is to make a "Simulated Fantasy World" where you aren't necessarily just pushing around lifeless blocks that obey your every whim, but are trying to make it in a complex, interdependant ecosystem that you don't really have absolute control over. 

Simplified systems destroy that sort of dynamic.  Complex systems with an interface designed to simplify and streamline what aspects you can control are what foster that sort of dynamic.  Complex systems are what make DF such a unique game.  Complex systems with an interface that makes it easy to understand and control are what DF should ideally be working towards.
Logged
Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

Improved Farming
Class Warfare

penco

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #131 on: February 09, 2011, 09:37:19 am »

I read the whole massive original post but not all the replies, so forgive me if this has already been said.

First off, I want to say that I strongly agree with "the problem" as you first stated it, which is that the game is just too darned easy, that the first 2 years are the only mildly challenging part, and that the game quickly becomes stagnant unless the player either jumps to difficulty mods/self-gimps or jumps to a total sandbox-mode gameplay mindset.

A sandbox mode is all fine, but a game that doesn't have any lasting challenge is pretty lame, I hate to say it. If I want to build stuff, I will play with Legos or maybe even Minecraft. What distinguishes DF from Minecraft is that there are forces that oppose your sandbox, and you are challenged to survive. This survival part is currently so brokenly easy that it is stupid.




Having said that, I really like the suggestion in general to make farming more difficult and to make resources more scarce. However, I am not sure if this is the best way to implement those changes mostly for technical reasons.

People report massive FPS spikes because of changes such as stone temperature with magma or constant water flow. I can't help but cringe when I think of my computer trying to chew another enormous set of variables for every square of soil (which is A LOT of squares). The problem is not so much that it will eat up memory. Rather, it will consume too much processor time. The game would constantly have to check a whole set of attributes on every soil tile on the map. That translates into a big slowdown.

Of course, this would not be such a big deal if DF didn't run entirely in a single thread.

One way to reduce the slowdown would be for soil quality, nutrients, etc to be tracked by layer rather than by tile. Since there are only a handful of layers of soil opposed to thousands of tiles, this would put a lot less strain on computers.



The changes you mentioned are awesome mainly because I really like the idea of limiting resources. However, I think that could really be accomplished without dramatically overhauling the soil system. Just make seeds more scarce. If each plant only had a % chance of producing a seed when processed, that would end the whole "infinite agriculture" problem. The % chance of getting a seed could be influenced by dwarven skill, whether the plot was fertilized, or what-have-you. This would be the way to re-implement some of the ideas you mentioned.

Overall, I don't know if your suggestion solves the original problem of the game being too easy. Even if crop yields are reduced greatly, it would still be very easy to thrive. First of all, you could just move your farms every few years to more fertile land. Second, with the huge availability of meats and fish, you really don't need to eat plants at all. Of course, you still need booze, but if you use all your ag resources to grow booze crops, you'd never run short of the stuff.



Compost and mass conservation are interesting ideas. Compost is pretty much win-win. It sucks wasting valuable wood as a fertilizer, and it would be nice to do something with all those corpses. "Potty time" could be implemented reasonably as long as it was combined with a cut to eating and drinking times.



------------------

Here are some suggestions of my own:


1) Slash n Burn

Allow dwarves to set fires above ground just like in adventure mode. This would burn all the flora in an area and then leave fertile soil for farming. This should be required before surface farming can occur. There would have to be some sort of fire containment mechanism like surrounding the plot with stones. After a certain number of seasons, the plot just stops producing (either based on soil nutrient variables or just based on a hard-coded amount of time based on the biome and soil type). It has to be destroyed, and substantial time needs to pass before the ground can be slashed, burned, and farmed again. In between, no plants grow in the space.

The benefit of this is that it requires your farmers to constantly move. It makes you choose between farming and having the option to harvest lumber and natural plants. It rewards players for keeping large amounts of surface open as opposed to walling off a small courtyard and doing farming there. Since crop yields would be finite, players would have to prioritize crops (food vs textile, basically)

Of course, this mechanic would have no place in underground farming, so for it to really make a difference, the above-ground crops should be much more valuable than below-ground ones. Below-ground crops should have lower value and some sort of catch to them that makes them finite, such as your idea of requiring logs for plump helmets. All below-ground crops need to have a catch like that.


2) Rebalanced meat industry

Any change attempting to rebalance farming needs to be accompanied by a rebalance to the meat industry. The only product absolutely unique to the farm industry is booze, since clothing can come from leather/silk and food can come from meat/fish.

First of all, the meat yield of an animal should be based on a logical idea of how much a dwarf consumes. Since a dwarf eats twice per season, one piece of meat should be equal to half a season's worth of food. Therefore, a kitten should produce just a fraction of an edible piece of meat. The butcher's shop and fishery should be reworked to track these fractional meat amounts and then finally give you an edible piece of food after enough meat has accumulated.

So...

-a cow should produce maybe ONE piece of meat
-an elephant should produce 2-3 pieces of meat.

Hide yields should be reworked accordingly based on the size of a dwarf relative to the size of a creature. It should take 5 or so cat hides to produce 1 cat leather. Likewise, a single elephant hide should produce several elephant leathers.

This would make meat and fish MUCH more scarce and, as a result, MUCH more valuable. It makes sense both realistically and economically. I've always thought it dumb that a single elephant can basically feed a fort for a season.


3) See above for suggestions regarding seed scarcity and tracking soil quality layer-wide as opposed to tile-wide.
Logged

NW_Kohaku

  • Bay Watcher
  • [ETHIC:SCIENCE_FOR_FUN: REQUIRED]
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #132 on: February 09, 2011, 12:07:08 pm »

You didn't exactly write a brisk read, yourself, you know  :P

People report massive FPS spikes because of changes such as stone temperature with magma or constant water flow. I can't help but cringe when I think of my computer trying to chew another enormous set of variables for every square of soil (which is A LOT of squares). The problem is not so much that it will eat up memory. Rather, it will consume too much processor time. The game would constantly have to check a whole set of attributes on every soil tile on the map. That translates into a big slowdown.

A fairly common concern.

Note that temperature slowdown occurs because every tile is calculated for heat.  If you have a 4x4 embark (each embark tile being 48x48 regular tiles) with 200 z-levels, then you have 4 * 48 * 4 * 48 * 200 = 7,372,800 tiles in an embark.  Cycled through every temperature check. 

Now then, the soil system I am proposing makes soil a "floor covering", and in that same area, would be 147,496 tiles to check (and I further proposed conglomerating embark tiles worth of wild soil together at that, which would significantly reduce this number down to about 16 plus however many plots the player makes, which is not altogether dissimilar to what you just said in "tracked by layer", anyway).  These are performed on growdur cycles, which occur every 100 normal frames, further reducing the number of calculations taking place by two orders of magnitude.

Many of these calculations are not terribly complex, at that, and this is thanks in large part to keeping much of the system as an abstracted system outside the sight of the player.  You can fudge around nutrient values between soil tiles near one another if the player never can measure the exact amount of phosphorous that last tuft of grass took from that one tile. 


The changes you mentioned are awesome mainly because I really like the idea of limiting resources. However, I think that could really be accomplished without dramatically overhauling the soil system. Just make seeds more scarce. If each plant only had a % chance of producing a seed when processed, that would end the whole "infinite agriculture" problem. The % chance of getting a seed could be influenced by dwarven skill, whether the plot was fertilized, or what-have-you. This would be the way to re-implement some of the ideas you mentioned.

Overall, I don't know if your suggestion solves the original problem of the game being too easy. Even if crop yields are reduced greatly, it would still be very easy to thrive. First of all, you could just move your farms every few years to more fertile land. Second, with the huge availability of meats and fish, you really don't need to eat plants at all. Of course, you still need booze, but if you use all your ag resources to grow booze crops, you'd never run short of the stuff.

There is more than just the problem of the game being "too easy", it's also a problem of the game being "too shallow".  DF has complexity, but not very much depth.  I like to compare it to the creatures in 40d - they had plenty of stats on them, but really, all that mattered in a creature's stats was their size.  Right now, there's very little plant diversity because there's only one or two metrics you can really even judge a plant on - the rate at which you get food, and the value of whatever other use you might be able to get out of that plant.  Nobody wants hide root because it's just a silver barb or a dimple cup, but worse.

We can make the game much more deep and involved than it currently is, but it requires that we actually add into the game the metrics by which we can actually differentiate one plant from another.

Just changing seeds, or just changing how many dwarves work the fields doesn't address this problem.  Plants are already easy enough to care for that if you give them only one concern - getting enough seeds to keep planting them - then you're just changing the decision metric to still be only about judging how best to solve one simple math problem - what gives me the best probability of getting seeds? 

I'm going to post this link to Extra Credits' monologue on choice again, although you probably didn't see it the first time, anyway, so it's all good.  The key to setting up a challenging or difficult choice is that you need to make the player want to further at least two mutually exclusive goals at the same time.  If all your choices are based upon just one metric (having enough food, based entirely upon having enough seeds), then you can't make a player stop and choose, it's just a matter of solving the math problem of "what course of action will get me the most seeds, and hence, secure my food supply?"  There's nothing much in that decision tree that gives a player some sort of conflicting desire to do anything else, except maybe some players' desire to spend as little time thinking about a farming system as is absolutely mandatory. 

In order to set up conflict in the choices, I have involved several ways in which the player's innate desire (get as much valuable stuff as possible) are in conflict with other desires the player has. (The fear of an environmental backlash from overexploitation of the land, long-term degradation of the land versus short-term boosts in productivity, the threat of pests vs. the potential to grow greater numbers of more valuable crops, the choice between different forms of biological resources if trees are put on farms to compete with food crops, as are very tedious to grow but powerful alchemical ingredients when I get around to my next suggestion on alchemy, and of course the simple amount of player time and dwarf labor it takes to design and manage systems of ever-increasing complexity.) 

Do you not believe that these are sufficient conflicting desires?  I am always open to more suggestions on how to set up a conflict of player choice, but at the same time, you need to make sure it actually does this in a way that sets up a conflict of choice, and is not just a way to try to make the game "harder" without really adding to the depth of choice.  If all you have is one calculation to make on what is the best way to get enough seeds to sustain your farm, then once you have made that calculation, and make it every time, then the game is just as "easy" as it was before you made it "harder" - the problem is solved, and there is nothing else to think about.


Here are some suggestions of my own:

1) Slash n Burn
This is somewhat similar to the way that we were discussing making Plump Helmets grow (by cutting down logs, and letting plump helmets grow on the logs in cool, moist caverns).  The specific idea that burning the tree on the spot as a means of producing potash, however, is a bit new.  I'll try to include that in my fertilizers section when I get to writing it.


2) Rebalanced meat industry

I have talked extensively about this in several other threads, including the previous thread, and believe that the major solution to this is to let animals produce stupidly large amounts of meat, but to make dwarves eat more (and crops produce more food). 

If cows need to eat grass, and produce less meat than turning that field into a corn field would have produced, then you have essentially eliminated the problem of livestock producing more meat.  To make animals not worthless, those cows could eat grass from more marginal land, and their manure could help in the reclamation of soil fertility.  Herd size would need to be maintained at a level balanced to the fields you are capable of providing for their feeding.

If elephants need to eat a stack of 50 units of plant matter at a time, 250 in a year, then suddenly their 200 units of food when you slaughter them seems much less enticing.



Work continues on the Interface section.  This is taking far too long, but some of these decisions are much harder than I would really think they should be, in terms of deciding how to actually give players the buttons to actually push to make the things happen.

I expect this to be my most controversial section, since scheduling is still a bit on the obtuse side, even considering how long I have spent trying to find a way to reduce it down.
Logged
Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

Improved Farming
Class Warfare

Solace

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #133 on: February 09, 2011, 02:53:20 pm »

Unfortuantely, that's sort of the total opposite direction of where I was going - the objective is to make the game more complex in a way that doesn't overload the player, not to make the game really simple, so that there isn't any differentiation between plants and very obvious choices for the player.

The point of having a simulated ecosystem that is only vaguely within the player's control, as I outlined in the first few posts, is to make a "Simulated Fantasy World" where you aren't necessarily just pushing around lifeless blocks that obey your every whim, but are trying to make it in a complex, interdependant ecosystem that you don't really have absolute control over. 

Simplified systems destroy that sort of dynamic.  Complex systems with an interface designed to simplify and streamline what aspects you can control are what foster that sort of dynamic.  Complex systems are what make DF such a unique game.  Complex systems with an interface that makes it easy to understand and control are what DF should ideally be working towards.
Just because it's a simple system doesn't mean you can't have complicated effects or requirements from it. :P

*Say, an easy-to-grow early game plant, needs to be on the surface, and surrounded on all sides by empty space, so it eats up a lot of land. Maybe reduces the fertility of those spaces as well, so it can't be easily shifted one space over every season. You're basically paying in space, and space you have to carefully defend or laboriously clear out.
*A plant that gives a good output of some variety, but attracts a lot of vermin or weeds, or otherwise needs a lot of personal attention. Instead of paying in space, you're paying a lot more in dwarf-hours.
*Weeds in general. Plants do grow on their on in this game, anyway. I've also advocated for reproducing and digging vermin elsewhere. On the positive side, you could intentionally let edible vermin eat plants that are useless to your dwarves, and harvest /them/.
*Something like clovers, which add to fertility, but also aren't too useless themselves, mainly giving a small bit of food to livestock of some sort.
*Plants that give off miasma or magic effects, and therefore need to be blocked off and tended only by those that can handle their unharvested forms. Maybe a plant that gives off undrinkable water, which has to be collected and dealt with somehow.
*Weed-like plants which don't have to have the seeds harvested or be manually planted, but give low yields and therefore need a lot of space and water.
*Trees or such that aren't destroyed by being harvested, but take a lot longer to reach their first harvestable state. They may require areas above or beside them cleared, if not require sunlight itself. Possible varieties include a "honey-root" tree that can only be harvested from below.
*And, well, any other random requirements. Maybe a plant that requires bees or something to pollinate, requires being near to some other sort of plant, or needs a unique or at least rarer fertilizer or type of water. Beer-fruit, or something.

EDIT: Choice examples: Do I prioritize space efficiency or labor efficiency? What pays off in a few days, or pays off more in a few years? Do I set up only farms that can handle general-requirement plants, or do I make special areas for the miasma-emitting or vermin-attracting plants, and if so, how do I water them?

EDIT2: For that matter, the same plant could have different roles at different parts of the game. Strawberries are productive, but are really hard on fertility. Just starting out, you could move your tiny strawberry farm every season, but as time went on, that'd be harder and harder to do, so you stop planting them. But even later, you decide you've got a big enough system to handle all the fertilizers it needs.
For a more fantastical plant, some sort of corpse-tree. If you have one, you could feed it the bodies of invading goblins, no problem. But if you rely on it more and more, and suddenly you have ten to feed, now you need a whole industry to grow food for farm animals you slaughter to feed your grove of corpse-trees.

EDIT3: For that matter, ethical choices. Corpse-trees could produce better fruit if fed goblins than cows, but they could produce even better things if occasionally fed a dwarf. What to do...
« Last Edit: February 09, 2011, 03:35:20 pm by Solace »
Logged

penco

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Violate the Earth!
« Reply #134 on: February 09, 2011, 02:56:15 pm »

Thanks for the detailed response. The choice article you posted was interesting but not something that I wasn't already trying to get at with some of my suggestions. I think the primary choice in agriculture needs to be between safer but far less valuable below-ground crops and valuable above-ground crops that expose your dwarves and the food supply more to pests (birds, locusts, etc) and to attackers.

A secondary choice is between farming and livestock.

Farming:
-Fast, cheap food
-Extensive and valuable textiles industry
-In general, export-oriented (nice clothes don't provide a huge happiness boost but fetch a huge price)

Livestock:
-Very valuable but slower food (meat and milk)
-Cheaper, less versatile leather
-In general, domestically oriented (high happiness returns but with much less net value produced)


Livestock should require certain diets. Only less valuable beasts should want to eat underground plants, and most should want above-ground ones. Fish as animal feed could be good also.

(except in very rare cases, fish should be the absolute lowest-value food)

The thing that throws a wrench in this dichotomy is alcohol. It is virtually a requirement to be fully stocked with booze at all times. Currently, booze comes from plants only, which doesn't match at all with the plants vs livestock divide. This will be partly amended if mead is added after honey is implemented. Another easy solution would be to give the option to ferment milk (look it up).



I still think the best solution from an FPS perspective would be to track the quality of soil on a layer-wide level rather than by individual tiles. Huge reduction of variables to check and very little lost in terms of the suggestions you originally made.
Logged
Pages: 1 ... 7 8 [9] 10 11 ... 35