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[NW_Kohaku]

Well, to boil this down to the original reason I wrote this thread...

There were two major camps arguing in the old Improved Farming thread: people who said farming was too easy, and needed to be more complex and realistic, and the people who said that those solutions would add too much micromanagement.

I wound up rewriting the thread to try to incorporate every argument, explain what the problems were, why they were problems, what the most commonly talked-about solutions were, why they didn't solve every problem, and then propose solutions, explain why they solved the problem, and then give examples of what they would look like in play.

... and it wound up a manifesto-sized document that very few people read, so the thread keeps going back to many of the same argument of simple solution-it only causes micromanagement rebuttal.

It's a difficult trap that I'm in - I can either gloss over details and make an obviously faulty argument that seems to dismiss complaints, or I can make a holistic argument about why all other options are faulty, and face complaints that it's too complex to even bother reading.

[zwei]

It's a difficult trap that I'm in - I can either gloss over details and make an obviously faulty argument that seems to dismiss complaints, or I can make a holistic argument about why all other options are faulty, and face complaints that it's too complex to even bother reading.

You either need to learn brevity and make short, concise point that do not tire people with details, or you need to make that manifesto fun to read.

For example this: http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/29326904495/16-a-problems is very long read, but also lots of fun to read.

I would like to understand this discussion, but it feel like i have to spend day studying it to being.

[NW_Kohaku]

You either need to learn brevity and make short, concise point that do not tire people with details, or you need to make that manifesto fun to read.

For example this: http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/29326904495/16-a-problems is very long read, but also lots of fun to read.

I would like to understand this discussion, but it feel like i have to spend day studying it to being.

That would be what I tried doing with the tl;dr version, (making it "more fun", and also having pictures,) but making pretty pictures to go along with it grew tiresome.

I suppose the best solution for now would be to just rewrite the tl;dr version to make it shorter than it is, since it's longer than I remember.

[NW_Kohaku]

Alright...

I started just writing out a new one, and wound up creating something still kind of long, but close to as manageable as I could get without completely editing out large chunks of the conversation.  (Actually, I cut out the parts that were lead-ins to other possible overhauls, like magic biome types, and dietary models.)

The tl;dr Version:

Spoiler: The problems this tries to solve (click to show/hide)

The purpose of this thread is to solve several problems with the current game:

• Problem 1: Farming now is, generally, easy and boring.
  
  • Farming needs to be more interesting, with more crops that are different.
  • Current crops (especially above-ground) are nearly indistinguishable in how they are grown.
  • Farming should include more physical types of farms and farming techniques.
  • Different climates and biomes make no difference in how you farm or what you farm.
• Problem 2: Farming is currently a front-loaded challenge
  
  • We have a "learning cliff" currently - you have to know everything to get anywhere in the game.
  • Once you know everything, the game is too easy, all problems have been solved.
  • The goal should be to make something simple to start with, so any random new player survives their first year, but progressively more difficult as time goes on, challenging those who have mastered the basics
  • It should be possible for players to get by without knowing terribly many tricks, but with rewards for the player who truly masters the system, in much the same way as dwarfputing.
• Problem 3: Deep without micromanagement or pointless complexity
  
  • All automatable things should be automated.
  • Anything that is a simple "what's the quickest way to make the most food" math problem is a calculation, not a choice, and that is automatable.
  • Once all automatable functions are out of the way, high-level management choices should be made as a matter of a strategy, based upon comparing difficult-to-compare-mathematically things, such as short-term payoffs vs. long time setting up but better long-term payoffs.
  • The game needs to do the basic math calculations itself, but leave the grand strategy to players.
  • To keep players engaged, occasional challenges should arise to bring player attention back to the farms, but not in a micromanagement way.
• Problem 4: Creating a Medieval Fantasy Ecosystem Simulation
  
  • While abstracted, the game should leave players with the sense that this is an actual ecosystem, where the changes they make impact their world.
  • This can mean clear-cutting a forest leading to soil erosion that means no more "free trees", for example.
  • This can also empower players to purposefully alter the ecosystem to better suit their needs if they have a mastery of the concept.
  • If the game models real-world systems, even if abstracted, it creates learning opportunities through play.

The reason this thread is long is because it is arguing for why most simple solutions do not actually address all of these problems, and why a marginally more in-depth solution is needed.  Specifically:

Spoiler: The solutions proposed (click to show/hide)

• Solution 1: Multiple soil quality variables
  
  • Multiple variables for soil quality (instead of just a simple "fertility") mean that different methods of fertilization can be used without being a simple calculation. ("What gives me the most bang for my buck?") You cannot rely upon a single fertilizer type, you have to use several.
  • If you have differing amounts of different kinds of fertilizers, crops that consume different nutrients become more or less attractive from a strategic perspective - depending on certain types of crops means depending on keeping the flow of certain fertilizers moving.  This is a strategic, non-micromanagement choice, whereas a single fertility value simply requires automating the re-fertilization.
  • Some soil quality variables can be easy to change (like how recently plants have been watered) but others much more difficult (like if the soil is highly acidic), and some may be specific to the embark site (no growing tropical plants in an arctic tundra).  This means different embarks are going to require different crop types and farming methods that support them.
  • Several of these soil variables, especially the nearly impossible to change ones, may add variables to the game, but not terribly much complexity, as players will have few reasons to actually worry about soil acidity or salinity once you have already picked a plant suited for your soil.
  • Pollution variables can exist as a means of making players choose between short-term gains and long-term damage to their fields
• Solution 2: Pests
  
  • Pest creatures, from fungal infections to caterpillars eating leaves to locust swarms, can exist as a "disaster" form of macro-problem for players to deal with, keeping farming challenging and slightly unpredictable.
  • They can be controlled through both limiting the number of crops of a certain type (reducing the exposure to a single crippling pest infestation) and using natural pesticides - the predators of those pest creatures, or fragrant herbs that repel bugs.  (Birds, bats, and spiders eat insects, many herbs use pheromones to repel insects or attract predators of pests like wasps that lay their eggs inside caterpillar bodies.)
  • Since pests are not seen on-map, the relative population numbers of pests can be tabulated invisibly and infrequently, saving on processor power and not appearing complex to players.
  • Solutions to pests can be easy to understand, if not necessarily easy to implement - bat or bird nests near crops with birds/bats in them will keep pests down.  You then need to acquire and care for those creatures, however.
  • Since pests, especially diseases, are attracted to large, single-crop farms, it is a problem more for players who keep using simple farming methods for years, so it doesn't overwhelm players on their first few years, but challenges players in established forts to diversify.
• Solution 3: Different methods of obtaining Fertilizers
  
  • Crop rotations with crops like beans that are nitrogen fixators is a common and simple solution to one type of fertility deficiency, but not all.
  • Decomposing organic waste (including corpses, grinding down bones, and manure) into fertilizer is the most sustainable and reliable method.
  • Some fertilizers can be mined or traded for, but they are of finite or unreliable supply.  Minable Sulfur can be used to change soil acidity, and make some soil suitable for different crops long-term, however.
  • Exotic fertilizers, like magma, can be used, but require more elaborate engineering, and may cause soil pollution that limit what crops are viable
• Solution 4: Water Management
  
  • Water is consumed by farms.  This means you need to constantly bring more water into your fortress.
  • Water generation from off-map or aquifers would be slowed down, to make there be limits on how much water you can use.  This would mean desert embarks are tougher.
  • More elaborate systems are more efficient but take more time to set up and reward player engineering skills with better farm yields.  Simpler versions like bucket-watering are faster to set up, but consume more labor.  Newbie methods are not "wrong", and don't lead to dying, but there is strong incentive to learn.
• Solution 5: Polycultures - plants affect other plants
  
  • Plants can be planted with/near other plants, such as the fragrant herbs that repel some types of pests, or ground covers that reduce water consumption.
  • Plants like beans that add nitrogen to the soil can be planted with some crops instead of just in a cycle - supplying more nitrogen even as the crop grows.
  • It is an advanced farming method for advanced farmers, but not necessary for basic farming - an "advanced level" for people who master the system.
• Solution 6: More farmable materials
  
  • If you can farm trees for wood, plants for cloth, flammable oils, medicinal herbs, and many other resources besides just food (basically, anything that isn't mined can be farmed), then there is a reason to constantly upgrade farms - you want more than just basic survival on food, you want more stuff.  This lets the complexity of a farm for food become easy, but having to sustain more farms for more crops for more uses means that you are encouraged to farm more complex methods to gain greater yields for non-essential products.
• Solution 7: Nature plays by the same rules (but abstracted more)
  
  • Non-farm soil tiles have a generalized region that shares the same fertility and pollution values as farms.  This means that when grass/shrubs/trees grow, it takes nutrients from the soil.  When they burn or are decomposed, it returns nutrients to the soil, but if you harvest from the land without returning, then the soil loses fertility just like a farm.
  • Trees are therefore not an infinite resource anymore - you may have to farm them, yourself to get greater yields.
  • Wild animal and livestock populations play by pest rules, to a degree - you have control over what is attracted to your land, and livestock can get parasites.
  • You can eventually turn a land into a place where nothing grows or functionally change its biome if you work hard enough at it.  Garden of Eden or Hellscape, choice is yours.

I'm still trying to cut off some of the most common arguments, even in tl;dr mode, so I could edit it down more from there if I wanted to, but then have to keep going back to explaining why this increases challenge over time...


Also, as one last thing, Toady's already planning on throwing something like this into DF, as seen on the dev pages:

Farming Improvements

• Soil moisture tracking and ability to moisten soil (buckets or other irrigation)
• Soil nutrient requirements for plants and nutrient tracking to the extent the farming interface can provide decent feedback for you, fertilizers can reflect this
• Harvestable flowers and fruit growing on plants, ability to plant trees
• Weeds
• More pests

When asked about it, Toady also said that he was interested in making the game as realistic as it could be while still being manageable, as his grandparents were farmers, and he had an interest in the topic. 

So, by and large, I'm not actually suggesting many concepts beyond what Toady was already considering doing, but that I'm suggesting ways of implementing the concepts in a way that makes the game non-micromanagey and as interesting as possible for players.

[Wastedlabor]

In the end it's about the emergent stories it creates. If the system is just sunk complexity everybody will ignore it until it becomes a micromanagement problem, or just work around it (eggs anyone?).

AFAIK nobody has suggested that farmland could spawn non-vermin creatures. Stuff like, plump helmet men or giant moths. Unexperienced farmers wouldn't notice there's anything wrong with the plant when harvesting, then go store those spawns in inconvenient places where there may be no proper containment.

[Draco18s]

AFAIK nobody has suggested that farmland could spawn non-vermin creatures. Stuff like, plump helmet men or giant moths. Unexperienced farmers wouldn't notice there's anything wrong with the plant when harvesting, then go store those spawns in inconvenient places where there may be no proper containment.

And this solves long-term difficulty how?  All it does is throw super-difficult problems (solvable via military) at a new fortress that has little to no military.

The proposed solutions that actually work have no up-front costs/difficulties and cause problems over time if left unchecked, and is solvable by a good setup that may not be achievable from the get-go (multiple crop types + crop rotation, etc.)

[10ebbor10]

AFAIK nobody has suggested that farmland could spawn non-vermin creatures. Stuff like, plump helmet men or giant moths. Unexperienced farmers wouldn't notice there's anything wrong with the plant when harvesting, then go store those spawns in inconvenient places where there may be no proper containment.

And this solves long-term difficulty how?  All it does is throw super-difficult problems (solvable via military) at a new fortress that has little to no military.

The proposed solutions that actually work have no up-front costs/difficulties and cause problems over time if left unchecked, and is solvable by a good setup that may not be achievable from the get-go (multiple crop types + crop rotation, etc.)

And more importantly, is entirely skippable if you really want to.

[NW_Kohaku]

In the end it's about the emergent stories it creates. If the system is just sunk complexity everybody will ignore it until it becomes a micromanagement problem, or just work around it (eggs anyone?).

AFAIK nobody has suggested that farmland could spawn non-vermin creatures. Stuff like, plump helmet men or giant moths. Unexperienced farmers wouldn't notice there's anything wrong with the plant when harvesting, then go store those spawns in inconvenient places where there may be no proper containment.

You might actually be interested in the Xenosynthesis side-suggestion, which tries to weave this together with the magic biome concept (that are supposed to replace good and evil biomes eventually).  Part of the point is that messing with magic would cause all sorts of life-forms to become magically altered, and a negative consequence like this could be a possible result.

As for the emergent storytelling question...

Well, how much does needing to dig out a space for stockpiles and workshops or circumvent an aquifer or set up training for military lead to emergent stories on its own?

How much does the fact that you have to do these things change the character of the emergent stories compared to if you didn't have to actually excavate, build, or work towards training dwarves?

Part of the idea I'm trying to convey with farming is that it's a foundational building block of how we solve all tasks in the game.  You can make combat "harder" by adding larger, stronger monsters to fight, or you can make combat "harder" by not having steel weapons readily available, by making training military dwarves up to legendary skill levels significantly more difficult, or otherwise taking away some of the advantages that people take for granted.

If farming changes mean that you have to have an open-air orchard that leaves you more exposed to sieges, then "building an orchard" doesn't make an emergent story in and of itself, but it does severely change the way that those emergent stories about sieges or flying enemies turn out.

And besides that... isn't the whole point of emergent storytelling that it's not something strictly planned for?  It's something that springs up from interactive game elements that alter one another in unexpected ways.  Toady never planned on Boatmurder solutions to sieges or that they would lead to burning socks that kill a whole fortress. That was an emergent story that arose out of an emergent gameplay technique that caused an unforeseen consequence.

The only way to plan for emergent gameplay and storytelling is to create more interconnected gameplay mechanics that can cause such emergent behavior to arise.  Water flows are a big part of this specifically because engineering how water moves is something that plays upon one of DF's great strengths in the player's capacity to control the flow of water through emergent gameplay techniques.  There is also the use of fertilizers, based upon either manure collection or killing, decomposing, and transporting biological waste to the farms, all of which are a good source of emergent logistic techniques, including minecarts and drawbridge catapults.  Beyond that, the entire polyculture concept is based around letting crops interact with one another in potentially unexpected ways, especially if you include the part where the crops can be procedurally generated at worldgen each time.  ("It turns out that when you plant 'flaming trouser kumquats' with 'stinky matted bushes', they produce food while only needing a small supply of my mashed kitten fertilizers and water!")

[Draco18s]

And more importantly, is entirely skippable if you really want to.

"Bring X with you, setup your farms with Y rotation."
Yep.  Pretty much.

Of course, I'm very pro-other changes as well (such as needing more than 0.52 dwarves needed as farmers to feed an entire fort of 214).

[NW_Kohaku]

I do think it's worth saying, however, that while I will certainly explain and defend what I have suggested, especially if I don't think people quite understand what they are criticizing, I do want people to criticize the idea and help me make it better.

Simply saying "this idea is wrong" ends a conversation, "this idea doesn't solve the real problem because..." tells someone how they can come back with a better argument.

For example, to revist this...

In the end it's about the emergent stories it creates. If the system is just sunk complexity everybody will ignore it until it becomes a micromanagement problem, or just work around it (eggs anyone?).

Eggs as they exist now are a result of incomplete implementation.  Livestock will need to eat eventually, and you'll no longer get your free eggs.  (You'll have to either set up pastures that have enough vermin and edible plants to feed those birds, or else set up troughs you stock with harvested feed... so you aren't getting away from farming by having livestock, anyway.)

Carnivores, in particular, are going to take feeding other animals, which means raising and caring for livestock just to feed it to the carnivores, and raising crops just to feed to the livestock. 

(I cut this portion out of the tl;dr version because it was too long, already, and was just an assumption of extension of current trends, not actually a part of farming...)

[Draco18s]

Eggs as they exist now are a result of incomplete implementation.  Livestock will need to eat eventually, and you'll no longer get your free eggs.

Don't livestock already eat grass?

[NW_Kohaku]

Eggs as they exist now are a result of incomplete implementation.  Livestock will need to eat eventually, and you'll no longer get your free eggs.

Don't livestock already eat grass?

Only grazers do.  (Notably, since grazing was introduced, nobody really uses cows anymore...)

Most birds or reptiles are not grazers, and hence eggs are a source of infinite free food. (Turkeys, for example, produce large numbers of eggs with no need for food, themselves.)

Most broken of all, the best animals for infinite free food are things like crocodiles that not only don't eat anything, but also lay tremendous numbers of eggs that never get preyed upon, and also are huge creatures that produce tons of meat when butchered. (Although cows are larger, which is also why cow bites are stronger than alligator bites...)

[Draco18s]

Only grazers do.  (Notably, since grazing was introduced, nobody really uses cows anymore...)

Touche.

(Although cows are larger, which is also why cow bites are stronger than alligator bites...)

I love Dwarf Fortress.

[jseah]

Hi, just posting to say I'm still reading this. 

Amusingly, I have so far read everything except your tl;dr version.  >.>

I'll get to doing that. 

[winner]

I have a major in agricultural science.
I have read this entire thread,
and I make ecological simulations for fun.

So I feel entitled to an opinion about this.
(I'll let you know that opinion when I've finished testing these ideas in a toy program)