Now then, moving onwards, I see basically two halves of your first post in this thread - the first half, you're basically just trying to say, "Here's how to accomplish the same goal with less complexity."
The problem is, "farms are too small/don't take enough labor" isn't the problem I'm trying to solve. Yes, that would be a simpler way to solve that problem, but as the argument in the old thread evolved, I realized that there was a much greater problem that needed to be tackled.
Maybe it's that you read more and added more to your response as you thought about it, (I do that, too,) but the second half of your post shows you're grasping what it was I was really trying to get at: The problem isn't one of "diffuclty", it's one of "choice". (This is why I spent a huge chunk of the first post just talking about "what the real problem is".)
At a basic level, crops right now are not different enough from one another - even with what you are suggesting, basically all underground and aboveground crops are fairly similar.
Yes, there's a difference created by a single variable of fertility, but that's just one choice, and that's not really enough. Yes, there's a difference in rate of fertility use, but that's only a single variable, and single variable problems are not
choices, they are
calculations. (For the distinction of choice versus calculation,
Extra Credits has a wonderful and concise explanation.)
To give an example of why adding multiple variables changes something from simple routine calculations to a choice, first consider the concept of the DPS character in (MMO)RPGs. Because they reduce their character down to how efficiently they can produce a single variable (damage over time), everything about that character becomes a simple calculation - "does this produce more damage over time than any other alternative?" It's a simple math problem, with a single right answer, and all other answers are wrong.
Now, there was a game I used to play a lot a few years ago called Battletech, in which you built futuristic robotic walking tanks called 'mechs and blew the crap out of your opponents. When building your 'mechs, you chose a final weight that your chassis would support first, then could add components to that chassis up to its final weight. But there was more than just mass involved - there was also "volume" in the form of critical slots. Heavy (and often slower but more armored and powerful) 'mechs had much more mass than light 'mechs, but they all had the same volume. You had some choices when you built 'mechs beyond just the weapons (which had differences plenty in both firing characteristics as well as range and drawbacks of their own) which often largely involved a choice between mass and volume. Making the chassis out of Endo Steel alloy made it lighter, but took up some of your slots/volume because it was bulkier. This was a no-brainer for the light 'mechs - you had volume to spare, but mass was precious. For heavy 'mechs, meanwhile, volume was precious because they could carry several times as much mass, but had the same volume to fit it all in. Denser materials were obvious choices.
They also had heat - weapons generated heat, (lasers are light and take no ammo but generate tons of heat, while cannons are bulky and heavy and require ammo but generate less heat) and you needed heat sinks to counter that. Heat sinks came in regular and double heat sink format - double heat sinks were twice as efficient at dissipating heat per ton, but occupied, you guessed it, more volume. Plus, you don't have to run ice-cold, you can accept some drawbacks if you're willing to run a little hot.
These are still things that can largely be reduced to a calculation (I actually did a middle school science fair on probabilities in this game to help me improve my game,) but just from the start, you can see how adding a variable or two can start to change the way that the game actually works out from being a strict this-is-more-damage-per-ton calculation to a more fluid, difficult-to-calculate game. (Some weapons, for example, have less range and power but better accuracy, and the faster both the firing and target 'mech moves, the harder they are to hit, meaning that you have to build around how mobile your likely targets are going to be, as well as your own mobility.)
You see, every one of those variables? They're a
resource, and when you have multiple resources that can be depleted trying to achieve the same goal, you create a more fluid, multi-variable system. And this doesn't necessarily make the game more
complex, just more
deep to have both minerals and vespene gas. It's a pretty simple and intuitive calculation to see that you don't have much vespene gas, and may want to focus more on marines or other non-vespene using units when vespene-poor.
By adding more variables/more differentiated resources into the equation, you create
incomparables, things that cannot be so quickly and easily reduced to a simple equation with only one right solution that always works. You have to evaluate the
relative worth of your different resources to you, and which is more precious to you at the moment, to decide how best to spend your resources.
So, let's apply one of these "simple choices of resources" to Dwarf Fortress: Let's say we start off by making crops actually
consume water, and need constant watering, whether by buckets or by irrigation system, as well as that we make water
finite but renewable, rather than having infinitely-spawning aquifer/stream/cavern lake water.
Let's say you have two choices of crop types, one is going to provide more crops in less space and less labor, but takes large quantities of water. The other prefers little water, but takes up huge amounts of land to produce sufficient food.
Now, let's say you build a fortress in a tropical rain forest with a river in one playthrough, and a cold desert in another. Which one of those "obvious choices" are you going to pick? There's no reason to go for the arid plant in the rainforest, where you have the water, and farming the water-intensive plant is impossible in the desert.
This isn't something that takes up a tremendous amount of time calculating or learning something new, it's just making a change in the mechanics that will make playing in different climates force players to farm in different ways, making the choice of starting climate a
more meaningful strategic choice.
(Plus, it means that there are differentiated crops that can be traded from one region to another, meaning that you won't always find sites that have "everything".)
The goal of this thread is not to make "farming more difficult", I instead have several goals. The one we're talking about right now is
creating strategic choices. (The other goals will come later.)
That is, I want every type of crop in the game to have a
cost. Every crop has a
drawback of some sort or another, and that makes blithely farming the same crop over and over no longer a viable strategy.
The reason why plump helmets growing on wet logs is offered as only an initial strategy is because it's very inefficient with a resource that you have plenty of early on, but which becomes more precious as you go on: trees.
Initially, even a desert has several trees you can easily harvest, but if you rely entirely upon charcoal, wooden barrels and beds, and using trees as the source of your food as well, even a rain forest will eventually be clear-cut out to greater and greater distances. (And even if you have the trees on your map at all, you have to go out further and further into dangerous territory to claim them.) Worse, with non-farm tiles having their fertility calculated as a vague and abstracted wild fertility score, if you constantly clear-cut forests, you'll degrade the soil quality, and get less trees over time.
Note, that's not the same "kills your fort in your first year" problem that people tend to have with flooding their forts: It's a slow poison kill over time, something that gets the player that mastered the more obvious, immediate dangers, and merely walked into a longer-term, more subtle danger.
Now, what this has to do with NPK is that your fertilizers are your resource for keeping fertility up. However, by having multiple stats to each fertilizer and the farms, you can differentiate the fertilizers, whereas if you only have one stat with fertility, all fertilizers are basically the same.
Consider, for example what it means to have piercing and blunt damage in this game and what it means to combat to have its absurdly complex system (that you don't really need to understand to use). Speardwarves are capable of effectively combating very different creatures from hammerdwarves. You could reduce the game down to a simple hit point system and make each weapon just have damage, and it would be simpler, but you would lose a lot of what makes your choices in what sort of equipment you give your dwarves.
Now consider the difference having marksdwarves and the option to build magma moats and drawbridges that fling attackers into magma make to your strategic choices: I generally don't even bother with the effort of seriously training military dwarves, and just rely upon complex traps because I enjoy building the traps more than I enjoy the visceral combat. Many people, however, love the complexity that I don't want to bother with.
All these options increase the differences in how players can experience the game based upon their own choices and playstyles. We have that choice,
and that's fantastic.
Part of why I want to include heavy metal pollution, for example, is to let magma be an option to fertilize the land. With it, you can fertilize the land nigh-infinitely on demand with proper engineering, but it has a drawback: You put heavy metals into the soil, and that can kill many types of crops, making it unsustainable unless you use only specific crops that either purify the soil after magma-irrigating it, or by just relying upon metal-happy crops. It makes magma fertilization a vastly different kind of choice of what kind of fort you want to create. The same goes for the raft-based floating farms, and having them rely upon keeping a certain fish stock in the water to keep your farm going. If you have salty soils, you will have to adapt by growing saltgrasses that are only fit for livestock - meaning your location again changes the nature of how you feed your fortress, as you'll be more cattle-reliant.
And it's not really all that complex for the player to have a heavy metal pollution stat - as long as they don't add heavy metals to their soil by dumping magma on it, they don't have to care about it. It doesn't really change that fast, and it's just a happy green light saying everything's OK that they don't have to understand until they do something that turns it red.
So to go back to the big three of NPK, having three different minerals tracked, and having most basic types of fertilizer have those three minerals in different quantities lets players "just dump more fertilizer at the problem" if they so choose, even if they're over-feeding on potassium, for example, and could have found a more fertilizer-efficient solution to their farming by varying their crops a little, or they could just accept the waste and keep on keeping on. (Especially early on, when they aren't in a resource pinch quite yet.)
Nitrogen alone, for example, is what can be fixed with simple nitrogen-fixating plants (like beans, peanuts, and the clover in "fallow" fields) and many polycultures actually include a nitrogen-fixater like beans alongside a nitrogen-hungry plant like corn or wheat for just this reason... but crops don't live on nitrogen alone. You need the phosphorous and potassium, as well, and that means adding in other fertilizers. These other fertilizers might heavily favor one nutrient over another, and meanwhile, crops might heavily favor feeding on one nutrient over another (including those beans that actually restore nitrogen rather than feeding on it).
Now, compare this to what you have said was a simpler alternative that accomplishes much the same thing: Just having one fertility, but having plants "differentiated" by how much they drop the soil down per harvest. You're still only talking about a single-variable calculation, "how much food can I produce from this land per unit time". Dropping multiple fertility levels at once simply means asking how much extra time it will take to reset the fertility up to levels where it can produce again, so if you have to spend six seasons resetting fertility and two seasons growing with one crop to produce a certain amount of food, and you have to spend two seasons growing and two seasons resetting the soil nutrients to grow 2/3rds as much food, you've still got a simple, straightforward calculation to make.
Once again, by creating more variables, you create more opportunities for incomparables to appear, and make the choices deeper without actually making them terribly more complex or mathematically-intensive.
You can sit down and calculate everything out if you want to, or you can just notice that strawberries make your fields too potassium-poor for what fertilizers you have, and that you can cut back onto wheat-and-bean agriculture that focuses more upon nitrogen.
There are also other biological products that are farmable, as well: some animals are inefficient but can be quite useful to have, for example. Maybe you want a moat full of alligators as a defense. Alligators are carnivores, which means you need to farm cattle that are fed crops that means you need to expand your
You can farm trees for wood, cloth for clothing, oil for industrial uses or starting fires, and even magical or alchemical plants that have esoteric uses. All of this, however, requires more advanced farming techniques beyond your basic farming methods, and carry more risks, and therefore, are the rewards of a player who takes the time to plan and go into the complexities they didn't need to go into and blew off as a new player. (Again, I point to the dwarfputing and various machinery-based solutions to problems as a complexity no new player needs to learn, but where an advanced player can reap great benefits.)
Then, there's the pests.
One of the things I remember watching on a documentary was that the ancient Chinese first invented fruit tree orchards using grafting, but that insects kept eating their fruits. The Chinese noticed, however, that some trees had a specific kind of ant on them, and those ants didn't eat the oranges they were growing, and that, even better, they ate the insects eating their oranges. The Chinese quickly learned how to foster the growth of these ant colonies, and even built little bamboo "bridges" from the boughs of one orchard tree to another to let the ants that protected the orange trees cross between trees more easily.
This is kind of like how hidden kobolds force you, as a player, to add additional defensive mechanisms to sniff out hiding enemies that evade traps: guard dogs at the gates. (And you need to put them after a blind corner to prevent them from getting hit by goblins with crossbows as a slightly more complex defensive measure.)
Now, let's say that in DF, as you set up your orchards after a long, intensive process of growing the trees (possibly even via grafting, which would be a feat in and of itself of trade), and it's only once you have established those oranges that the pests come in. Now, you have to defend the oranges by planting ant colonies to protect the orchards. To make it a little more tricky, maybe the ants can be killed off by a disease or frost, themselves. A wise player keeps some extra ant colonies in reserve in a safe portion of their fort in case the front lines are wiped out. You'll need to feed those ants, though, so maybe sacrifice some meat that they'll eat by setting up a one-tile stockpile near them, and keeping it stocked with some meat.
It's the same "the game creates a new problem you didn't see coming -> player builds a counter to that problem" mechanic that basically everything else in the game runs on... and it's actually not something front-loaded the way that everything else in the game is, you don't have to learn about it until well after you have established your fort.
Because these pests only set in when you have a large farm with established crops, it's again, not a first-year problem; Not one of the front-loaded things that makes learning DF so hard. It's a third-year problem. It's the additional difficulty added after you have proven you can survive levels one and two.
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Topic: Improved Farming, Rebooted: Agricultural Revolution (Read 148980 times)