Just an aside - bees make wax and that should eventually lead to candles, solving the darkness problem which has so far been ignored.
I otherwise tend to generally agree with Kohakus point of view, but I think the tiny gimmicks permitting you to do almost anything in an infinite variety of styles do add something to the spirit and enjoyment of the game. All within reason...
I don't mean to be too harsh on bees, as I was just trying to make a point, and that was probably a more clear example than others, however, the problem is not so much that it duplicates the function of other resources, but that it is difficult to get honey in large enough quantities to be meaningful, and all the resources that actuall get replaced are so absurdly abundant that they don't need replacement.
Animals that can be butchered replicate farming vegetables very well, with the exception of not being brewable. You can replace farming with herding and butchering, and people used to do this on glacier embarks, if you just accept the penalties for alcohol dependency going unfulfilled. This is because you can scale out butchering animals to cover all your needs, and it has micromanagement, but it's potentially tolerable levels of micromanagement.
Bees just plain can't support a fortress.
I love the new ceramics that were added, and called for their addition when I first joined... but everything they can do can be done by either wood or stone. If you want to make an earthenware large pot, you need to glaze it first, which means you need three pieces of wood and some clay to make an ash-glazed large pot, and it takes 2 jobs. It can contain 6 items. This replaces the function of a wooden barrel, which takes 1 piece of wood, takes one job, and can contain 10 items.
Wooden barrels beat glazed earthenware large pots, hands down.
In fact, you can also just make the stupid pot out of stone, which, again, you have way too much of, anyway.
Sure, you can decorate the pots for more dwarfbucks of value, but you can get that with all the stupid microcline mugs you can vomit out of your workshops endlessly, and that value is infinitely fungible.
Again, I love the ceramics, and will play with them regardless of them not having much actual use or function... but they serve no real gameplay role that isn't already filled by something that is much "cheaper" to produce because those resources are already massively overabundant.
Almost every need that building something can solve goes through one of the true major resources:
- Stone - Functionally free and unlimited. Nothing competes with stone, because you're desperate to get rid of this resource. (Hence, the suggestions to make stone harder to obtain or use.)
- Glass - A wildcard, glass is money for nothing if you have sand and a magma trench set up for it. Otherwise, it's useless for anything but random mandates, and you should just stick to something else. Sadly, it mostly replicates stone, anyway, which makes those functions useless, because stone has functionally negative value, and anything that gets rid of stone is a positive thing, even compared to producing items from nothing like glass. Take all the windows, trap components, and glass gems you want, though...
- Farmables - Infinitely extensible, and virtually free. You can farm all the food you want in a tiny starting farm plot. Pig tails are easy enough to grow that you should never really hit a limit on how much pig tail cloth you can produce, you just hit occasional snags in the production line. It's hard to compete with this, because it's so easy (hence, Improved Farming.) There are also animal products like eggs, which are laughably overabundant, and milk, which is laughably scarce. Use eggs as a replacement for food all you want, but never use milk, it's not worth it. See the problem?
- Wood - Infinitely renewable, but functionally limited at any given point in time, regardless of the elven annoyance, by how much land you can control that is dedicated to farming underground trees, or that you are willing to risk sending woodcutters out to harvest. Wood is more scarce than stone or farmables, so you want to use stone whenever you can, but less valuable than
- Metal - Difficult to put together, metal is still necessary for making weapons and armor, and maybe a couple other things that aren't replicated by something higher up this list. Metal is generally finite, except for good ol' goblinite and the scraps the caravans will toss you, and even then, it's more like a trickle compared to the renewability of trees. You want to conserve your metals, but in the right situations, you'll have an iron vein with enough ore to last you well past your immediate needs, allowing you to splurge on things like steel thrones for your duke or gold (nugget) statues for your dining hall.
- Whatever else you have - Unimportant because it isn't as scalable as those other things. Sure, you can have a few of them as a gimmick, but they don't really become a serious part of your fortress economy unless you actively handicap yourself to only use those types of products, even though you know there are better ones made from the resources above. Using bees for food? Not nearly as efficient as quarry bush leaves.
You know, I just remembered, I was intending to set this very argument up in its own suggestion thread, and use it as a way of tying together several different suggestions to balance the game's resource management out...
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Topic: Books (Read 3725 times)