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[Hammurabi]

So, then, if we make some crop that is so easy to grow that you can grow it continuously without having to care about upkeep... why would you ever bother learning the system? 

There would be in-game incentives for growing the harder crops.  Dwarfs would grow unhappy only eating potatoes and drinking vodka(?) all the time.  Higher quality crops would produce better food/alcohol, making dwarfs have more happy thoughts.  Maybe Nobles could request meals with high-quality food.  Brainstorm some more ideas....

[tfaal]

Wasn't there a thread for this in the suggestion forum? It's not that farming isn't relevant to the current discussion, but if we're gonna be brainstorming ideas, it should probably go in a consolidated place where interested people can find it, rather than getting buried here.

[NW_Kohaku]

So, then, if we make some crop that is so easy to grow that you can grow it continuously without having to care about upkeep... why would you ever bother learning the system? 

There would be in-game incentives for growing the harder crops.  Dwarfs would grow unhappy only eating potatoes and drinking vodka(?) all the time.  Higher quality crops would produce better food/alcohol, making dwarfs have more happy thoughts.  Maybe Nobles could request meals with high-quality food.  Brainstorm some more ideas....

Players right now don't grow some of the few non-food crops, like pig tails, and just let dwarves go naked because there's no penalty for doing so.  Those who do often don't grow the dye-giving plants, because there's no particular benefit for doing so.

I would honestly like multiple forms of dyes, and clothing that can be dyed in more than one way, so I could have a blue and green military uniform, for example, but if I put that in, nobody but me cares because all most players care about with farming is bare minimal sustainance.

Now, if you could force them to care by making changes to dwarven society and make the happiness system less of a joke, you could go with more than that, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.

Kohaku: there are two kinds of difficulty.

The same goes for farming. Farming should be extremely easy to figure out! The difficulty should stem from extraordinary circumstances such as sieges, floods or grasshoppers. The player should always know what to do in terms of controls! Choosing the proper response, that's the challenge. Not knowing about the possibility of response isn't a challenge, it's bad design!!!

Well, for all your exclamation marks, maybe you'd be enthused enough to actually contribute to the discussion some way of improving the system beyond what has currently been laid out. 

I've done what I can to make the suggested system complex even to those who know what they are doing, and to hopefully make the system dynamic enough that you have to adapt to each climate differently, and requires an eye towards keeping the system sustained.  If you have a real suggestion to make, then I'm all ears, but I'm sort of tired of people arguing against the farming upgrade simply on abstracts and game design idealogy that doesn't really mean anything.

[DalGren]

*reply scrapped*
So your only point is to make it complex/difficult without actual gameplay or variety benefits? If we have to work hard on it, better be rewarding or provide different things.
If a new system implies having the same bland farm products for X times more work, it's absolutely not worth it.
Please explain what are the benefits of that proposal aside from being more complex/harder.

[Mel_Vixen]

Well if soil-quality gets in you have anyway to cycle the crops because they drain the soil in different ways. Some need more nitrates, some make the soil sour etc.

I do farm everything i can get my hands on. Heck i do even herding (thought no cows since they produce to much methane) to some extend so i can have a good diet on my dwarves. Strawberries etc. could be gathered but i like to farm the even thought in medieval times they weremore the garden/gathering crop. For trade i go normyl by dyed clothes/cloth so i have the pigtails too.

Later we might get herbs etc. for the Hospital.

As for being rewarding: Dwarves just like different food right now so my farm all i can farm approach keeps them more happy.

[NW_Kohaku]

Being more complex/harder IS the benefit.

That's exactly what the Improved Farming thread was all about - a complaint that farming was rediculously simple, boring, and unrealistic.

Improved Farming will make you actually have to work for your food so that it can't simply be taken for granted.

In actually working for your food, it requires you design systems to manage that farm and its workers and the resources going in and out of the farm, but if you want to boil it all down, yes, it's really all about "farms are no longer infinite wells of free resources".

Once again, I find it quite amusing that everyone likes to brag about how "hard" and "complex" and "realistic" DF is, but any time something actually changes to be made harder or more complex or more realistic, people run around like the sky is falling.  The current farming system is, quite simply, way, way too easy, and effectively just hands you all the food you could ever want on a silver platter.  (Same with livestock until they are actually made to start eating, and require feed or grazing, especially eating based upon their size and mass...)

The more elegant the system can be made, certainly the better it will be, but above all, a system of ANY kind needs to exist.  Currently, the game just makes agriculture, one of the primary focuses of society in the Medieval world, a quick 4-minute distraction to get the only farm you will ever need to feed your entire fortress running.  And that's an IMPROVEMENT over the "just designate any soil" of last version.

I am hardly the only person with this view.  The Improved Farming thread has always been about making farms less productive, more labor-intensive, and more realistic, and it is on the devpage now because it's one of the 10 most popular suggestions in the forum.

[DalGren]

Wait what? So it's harder for the sake of being harder with no other gains?
I am all for extremely complex systems if you can do great things with them (like general architecture in DF, you can do 1x3 rooms or 5x6 rooms with ornate walls and furniture). But an extremely complex system just to obtain "game time"? (what food essentially comes down to). That's homework.
Make it complex if you can make it rewarding, if not, there is a limit on how complex you can get. Make it so you can have the reddest, biggest, tastiest tomatoes of the vicinity if you spend time, but don't over-complicate a simple timer/happiness mechanism such as food.
Still, what available crops are into the IF thread? There HAS to be some advantage to make up for the added complexity. Wood sources? Chemistry? Healing herbs? (realistic or fantastic style). Have you planned about modding so those advantages can be added at least? Plus, IF only seems to be "difficulty once" as in once you solve it, it's the same as now. Let me know, this is interesting.

[isitanos]

Oops, I started to form this while it was a huge oddball quote pyramid. It's been edited since. Well that changes things, but since I went through the effort of creating this, here it is. This is how I came to asking this question:

The convo broken down in spoilers:

Spoiler: isitanos (click to show/hide)

Link
 Adventurer Role: Explorer
 * Lands and beastiary
 o More overland map features and local variations

Will you keep improving the underground in the short term, and add incentives to dig down and face the dangers to find useful stuff? I'd love if you could bring back cave rivers, and get them to repopulate (and have creatures not get stuck or suicide in waterfalls), together with surface rivers. Some rivers could disappear underground and resurface elsewhere, as happens in real life.
A sea monster swimming up the river and attacking you from either underground or the surface would be a Fun surprise.

Spoiler: Toady One (click to show/hide)

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The previous problems with cave rivers make me wary of them, but it would be cool to get the place looking nicer. The underground is pretty dreary right now. The treasure hunter role is the best bet there, probably, though that might focus on areas of concentrated local interest at first. I guess enough of those makes for an exciting underground, but we'll probably need to find some middle ground stuff to avoid over-saturation. Dwarf mode wants interesting stuff all over underground but it makes adventure mode cave exploration goofy.

Spoiler: Jiri Petru (click to show/hide)

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How about if some features were added at embark? You could generate the word with the feature frequency optimalised for adventure mode, and then throw in some extra features when the player embarks in fortress mode. Or alternatively scan the neighbouring map squares and move the features from there to the embark idea or something. Or something... The question is whether retrospecting "cheating" like this (that could probably help even in other ideas) is something you might consider, or a thing that doesn't fit into your idea of simulating the world.

Another example might be ore veins and gems. Generate the world with realistic (low) amount of these, then throw in some extra ones to the embark area. Presumably hardcore players could turn off these extras in init, playing a realistic fortress in an area with a single metal vein, not veins of every metal possible. (Site finder would be needed to avoid completely empty areas, though)
[/q]

[spoiler=Toady One]
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I think it is more likely that you'd just get to interact with features in a wider area by being able to send out squads/armies through the underground layers to off-screen sites that have been harassing you, and then you'd get to seem them in their full glory (even if it is in frozen time or whatever).
Taken strictly as an isolated single-fort worldless game, it would make sense to add a special feature on every level, and perhaps that kind of thing would work as an init option, but when it comes to villains/etc. I prefer having a historical villain attack from offscreen over a generated villain base being guaranteed, for example. We'll have to see how it plays out as you have more off-screen interactions. If it takes care of itself at that point, with the occasional point of interest actual being under the fort, perhaps with site-finding options, then that would be good. The deepest underground can more afford to be glutted with features in adv mode as well, so that should also help a bit.

Spoiler: isitanos (click to show/hide)

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For the record, I don't get what's the excitement about having every single underground feature in every single fortress. Which means that once you've seen one fortress' underground, you've seen them all. Rather than regularly having, say, all 20 interesting features, I'd rather have 4-5 picked at random, and hopefully some variation on the contents of each of these. For obsessive compulsive or very casual players that must absolutely have them all, or for the time where you absolutely need a specific feature for a community game, some option that adds these features to the underground after embark would be perfect.

Spoiler: Toady One (click to show/hide)

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The all-feature thing is requested, especially back in 40d, but it's not what we were talking about here. Your 4-5 suggestion is along the lines of the situation I was staying would still cause trouble, because even if you only have 4-5 features, or one per layer per 4x4, say, you'd still have a glut of them as you walked over the adv mode map. It would be like increasing the density of the new village map I posted by sixteen times and making them all really neat. It's good for fortress mode, but very weird in adv mode. Like a carnival or something.

Spoiler: Kogan Loloklam (click to show/hide)

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I'm curious about how important having every underground feature is to people.

I remember when it was limited, I would usually look for either a underground river end, or a chasm. I looked for these because I liked having fancy waterfalls in my fortress. I didn't need 4 or 5 features. And as I played, I stopped looking for those features too. And a short time later we got our undergrounds in their current state.
Right now I use the underground for it's different raids. I make my fortress connect to the surface first, then connect it to the underground. I do this to increase the chance of a game-ending raid without triggering the deepest HFS.

Ultimately, I don't need a ton of features. Connection to a cavern layer that allows the HFS is more then enough, and that only so we have the option to be besieged in a few more directions. For adventure mode, a fortress alone is a point of interest. More people go to see Mesa Verde(561,163 in 2006) each year in Colorado's 4 corners than go to see New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns(407,367 in 2006).

I'll put my current fortress up as a candidate for exploration over anything I've found in the underground currently any day. If it doesn't add anything to the design of my fortress, it's presence underground isn't needed. If it does add, it's presence explains partially why my fortress is there anyway. So make them rare for adventure mode. As long as we can see them, we can place our fortresses where we want to take advantage of what we need to. That way adventuring will remain more fun. But on that route, I am unhappy with the current interface between adventure mode and lost fortresses...

I don't think when we talk about underground features in this train of thought we are talking about Plump helmets or the Bottom of the world HFS. I think we are talking about cave rivers and cave lakes, and chasms and natural ramps up/down, as well as

Spoiler: the HFS associated with the HFS (click to show/hide)

Mysterious Constructions

So, how important is it that the site you are on has features that you cannot currently go to any random point in the underground and have a 100% chance of finding it? I'm pretty certain it's near zero on the importance scale, since the big things, Magma and HFS, are now accessable on every site. I might change my mind if off the map animalmen can't raid once stuff is added, since that used to be a major drawing point of cave rivers and chasms. Some people might want it all, but that is what world gen seeds are ultimately for, so those people can find those sites and share them. It seemed a pretty thriving setup in the past. There are problems if they couldn't be seen in the embark map, but as long as they can be I don't see too much of an issue. Ultimately spawned "features" aren't that important in fortress mode, but will make a great deal of difference for adventure mode. Cavern water is as good (or bad, your choice) as pond water currently (last I checked, anyway) so even the loss of the "great pond" doesn't affect much, since it's the plump helmets that are desired for the wine.

 To recapitulate a bit, before the 2010 versions quite a few people wanted to have either all interesting features or a combination of their favorite ones (magma, chasm, cave river, flux stone, terryfing biome, for instance). Toady responded with the site finder, which I used several times myself, only to realize you often had to generate several worlds for your ideal combination even to exist. So yeah, having every feature on every site was kind of an implicit feature request. That, and people missed the old 2D DF progression where you'd always encounter the cave river, magma and HFS in the same order. Toady brought this back in DF 2010.
 
 The problem with the new underground is that it's pretty much always the same. You can't start a new fortress and wonder, "what am I digging into? what wonders and dangers lie down there?" For Dwarf Mode, I'm not interested in underground features only if they allow "activities" such as invasions, but also for the surprise and fun of exploration.
 
My proposed solution, that should reconcile and improve both Fortress and Adventure mode undergrounds:
 - The underground needs to go back to being random, so you can embark somewhere and be surprised by what you find down there. Personally I'd extend that even to magma and the bottom layer (which could sometimes be a bottomless chasm instead of HFS, for instance).
 - Instead of "cheating" on every possible embark site and putting all features down there, worldgen should have a list of stuff desired by Dwarf Mode players, such as biomes, alignments, underground features, neighbours, etc. Then, it should cheat just enough to ensure that there exists ONE site in the entire world for every combination of those features. For instance if we pick 10 desirable features, there'd be 100 full-featured sites, and the rest would be random. 100 squares is not much in a Large DF world...
 - Since those full-featured sites were manually placed, the program should remember them so that instead of having to scan the whole map, the site finder can instantly propose them. Or you could even directly pick from a list of those sites with their respective features for a quick embark.
 - Ideally how much worldgen cheats to set up full-featured sites for you should be an option, as well as the list of guaranteed features.

Many times I wished I could follow a underground river with some logic to where it was going rather than forge ahead through the stale water underground in my quest to find previously mentioned HFS. It'd also have been easier to remember landmarks if there was a flowing landmark. I remember passing one particularly interesting bit of terrain that I could never find again because there was no point of reference to measure it off of. Too much was the same underground.
Anyone who has done some serious cave crawling in the newest versions of DF probably knows exactly what I mean.

I'd like to see underground features like rivers, and springs where underground rivers flow into the surface. Huge underground oceans and massive underground rivers. Not every place can have them, but they'd enhance the feeling of underground exploration. When you add in old tombs from lost underground dweller civilizations that sprang up and disintegrated before the beginning of time, you've got some real fun underground activities to do. Dwarf Mode doesn't benefit, but they can certainly be embarked on for flavor. That's what I've thought we were talking about when it came to underground features.

Those are very good ideas, more along the line of what I actually expected from the new underground. Even in dwarf mode, digging into one of the features you described would be much more interesting than into the current generic one. One of the reasons I'm looking forward so much for the return of cave rivers is that caves are often dry underground riverbeds, so the same algorithm could be used to generate both. See for instance the plan of this cave whose explored part goes more than 1000m deep under the surface (more on this site).

Actually this brings to mind a suggestion for Toady: why not make a kind of hybrid Fortress/Adventure mode? Let's say your miner discovers a natural underground tunnel you'd like to explore beyond the confines of your fortress: "possess" the dwarf, and go exploring in an instant adventure mode where the dwarf keeps his current equipment and characteristics. The fortress can continue running during that time, but since the time scale is so different, fortress-mode dwarves will probably take one step for every hundred ones your adventurers take (which is actually great, CPU-wise).Then you can have two systems:
- Option A) your fortress runs (in slow motion) on its current orders unless your instant adventurer enters the site again, is killed, or retires somewhere.
- Option B) your adventurer can rest somewhere safe, allowing you to switch back to control your fortress for a moment, issue new orders, and then switch to adventuring again.The instant adventurer wouldn't be able to explore the fortress itself: as soon as he enters the fortress site from any side, you'd resume your fortress overlord role, and the dwarf would resume its normal life, maybe with some weird dreams and extra experience/equipment from its possessed adventures.

[nbonaparte]

Compare the suggestions for farming to the military changes from 40d to .31. Unwieldy at first, but rewarding because of the level of control you get. We adapted to that. More complex farming can work as long as there is enough automation to make it possible to set it up and forget it, but to have more control if you so desire. (and by that, I mean automatic production of fertilizer, crop rotation, planting schedules, etc. Everything. Unless something out of the ordinary happens, it should be able to run itself.)

[G-Flex]

Compare the suggestions for farming to the military changes from 40d to .31. Unwieldy at first, but rewarding because of the level of control you get. We adapted to that.

You might want to choose a less quirky/controversial example in order to make your point. The military interface definitely has some outstanding issues and annoyances, although it has great potential and advantages.

[Quatch]

Compare the suggestions for farming to the military changes from 40d to .31. Unwieldy at first, but rewarding because of the level of control you get. We adapted to that. More complex farming can work as long as there is enough automation to make it possible to set it up and forget it, but to have more control if you so desire. (and by that, I mean automatic production of fertilizer, crop rotation, planting schedules, etc. Everything. Unless something out of the ordinary happens, it should be able to run itself.)

I'm glad you bring this up. I like the new military's flexibility, power, and control, and really the interface for it is no harder than the rest of DF.

Farming is too simple, and it does need to be harder. Building a fortress is partly about feeding a fortress, and it should require thought, planning, and skill to set up. This is the basic challenge of DF.

Hopefully for the non farmers, it will eventually be possible to use your military to feed your fortress: pillage and demand tribute. Then they'll never need to farm.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

Wait what? So it's harder for the sake of being harder with no other gains?

perhaps you would enjoy df more if you added the tags [no_eat] [no_drink] to your dwarves... harder for the sake of being harder is good, as long as it is the right type of difficulty. having your dwarves survive the winter is much more rewarding if you actually have trouble surviving the winter. in good df tradition, survival should be your reward, right now, after you figure everything out, df ends up being too easy.


having bigger farms just means that we'll have to defend them better, and have an alternative food source before we can dig and flood a big enough room or secure enough cavern. the absurd amount of food we get from farms plus the fact that stuff never spoils once it's stockpiled is terribly annoying, i often reach a point where i cease producing food at all, after a couple of years, all the fish, brains, flour and tallow roasts i've stockpiled can sustain me for decades. i have a similar problem with the current abundance of veins, i don't care it's ruining my fort's aesthetic, but with all that iron lying around, i feel bad for giving my militia wooden shields and bone scale armour

[NW_Kohaku]

Wait what? So it's harder for the sake of being harder with no other gains?
I am all for extremely complex systems if you can do great things with them (like general architecture in DF, you can do 1x3 rooms or 5x6 rooms with ornate walls and furniture). But an extremely complex system just to obtain "game time"? (what food essentially comes down to). That's homework.
Make it complex if you can make it rewarding, if not, there is a limit on how complex you can get. Make it so you can have the reddest, biggest, tastiest tomatoes of the vicinity if you spend time, but don't over-complicate a simple timer/happiness mechanism such as food.
Still, what available crops are into the IF thread? There HAS to be some advantage to make up for the added complexity. Wood sources? Chemistry? Healing herbs? (realistic or fantastic style). Have you planned about modding so those advantages can be added at least? Plus, IF only seems to be "difficulty once" as in once you solve it, it's the same as now. Let me know, this is interesting.

Toady's little bullet point includes planting trees - both orchard trees for fruit (implicitly annoying to set up, and not as productive, but low maintainance after the first year or two and a reliable, low-labor source of food, if possibly taking high acreage relative to other crops to feed the same numbers), and for wood.

"Healing Herbs" can only exist when Toady makes them available by expanding the current symptoms mechanics, which is beyond the scope of Improved Farming, but something I would like to see, and farming is the obvious place to get them, especially as Improved Farming can make it possible for there to be growable herbs that are, thanks to high soil requirements and

Chemistry can only be as good as the number of products we can really make from chemistry.  You can make plastics and paint and shoe polish from peanuts, but those things don't really have a place in DF right now.  Maybe someday we'll get an Improved Materials Science thread, but the game's number of materials are rather rudimentary right now - pretty much everything is made of food, wood, stone, or metal.  (Yeah, sure, there's a few extras, like gems and glass, but they're basically not terribly important.)

But for all that, the primary benefit still IS the complexity.  The fact that it's a real system you do have to grapple with, and a real challenge to the survival of your fort, so that there actually is a challenge to your fort that doesn't come in the form of hostile creatures. 

And yes, I've been doing my best to come up with ways to automate it so that it is a solved problem specifically because I don't like tedium, and I doubt too many others do, either.  The challenge is supposed to come with the scaling of the complexity of the farms - that you can't simply set up a single farm system that will produce all your food needs forever, you need to build more elaborate systems as your fortress expands, especially in response to problems like water consumption (and aquaduct engineering to supply it), the rate of fertilizer use (especially underground, where mushrooms need some sort of biomass to feed growth, as they aren't photosynthetic, which means either cutting down increasing numbers of trees as fuel for farms, or finding some substitute biomass to add to those farms), and especially pests, which are increasingly attracted to your fields the more crops they hold, and which multiply rapidly when they gain access to a food source.

[DalGren]

Ah from your seemingly definite answer about the difficulty being the improvement I thought nothing new was coming in. I really want apple trees and jewel crops xD That's the kind of reward or variety I was asking for.
I'll make the bestest apple pies in all of The Real of Enchantments or whatever. Yeeeeeah.
Syndromes will surely make more farming activity logical and necessary too, so I am all about it too. Specially if procedural crops make it in...if I can grow and produce my own unique brand of poison with plants, then it sure will be rewarding!

[Kilo24]

I still am worried about making an elaborate farming system a necessity for new players to learn (and for more experienced players to set up for every fort.)  Systems like that make it so I can't help but imagine that most of the failed fortresses littering the ideal world Toady has in his slogan of "Losing is fun" won't be from goblin invasions or dwarven revolutions, but rather because "Mayor Urist couldn't figure out how to farm, so everyone starved" or "a single troll killed everyone because the leader couldn't figure out how to build a military."  I know most such systems can be disabled in the .ini or raws, but new players shouldn't be expected to do that.

People keep saying this as if it's a bad thing.  Here, I keep hearing people say how much they enjoy playing this game because it's "hard", but when one of the most absurdly easy things in the game finally looks like it might be updated, everyone's going all Helen Lovejoy, and yelling "Oh! Won't SOMEBODY think of the newbies?!"  Why can't the people who enjoy having to design a complex infrastructure have it?  This game isn't even nearly as hard as the Sierra Citybuilder games right now, it's just that it's less forgiving of mistakes when you DO screw up, anyway.  And frankly, whenever people are asked about why they enjoy DF, it's because of its realism and complexity... so why do people keep getting so gunshy whenever the complexity might actually be improved?

Honestly, I'd like to see the game force you to scramble to feed your people, but if we get a system where it's possible for dwarves who honestly wouldn't know silt from sand, then you can just bring fisherdwarves and herbalists and plenty of food stocks and hope you can just trade your way to all your food needs, then that's perfectly fine, and it ensures that there's no real reason other than utter negligence for a player to starve.

And if this means that many players lose a fortress before they can figure out how to adequately prepare to feed their people, so be it.  They'll learn from their mistakes, and be better players for it.  It's the ability to overcome a challenge that defines a game, after all.

As Jiri said, failing is currently more due to not knowing what the game wants you to do, not in using the tools you have to come up with a solution.  Trial and error to figure out what the game wants is a hallmark of old text adventure games, and it's something that should die out in the vast majority of games.  That's not negligence on the part of the player, nor a fun challenge - it's keeping the player in the dark and is pretty frustrating.

Most of the challenges in Dwarf Fortress are either capable of utterly destroying a fortress (or of doing enough damage that tantrum spirals finish you off) or are irrelevant, based on how/if you handle them.  Not having farming will murder a fortress if you don't do it (or more likely, don't figure it out), having it means feeding dwarves is a piece of cake.  A couple of good military dwarves will eviscerate almost all opponents (that's getting much better with the HFS and the forgotten beasts - but still nothing can defeat the mighty constructed wall.)  Once you "handle" those things they don't have much effect on the game any more.

With the farming revamp, what I'm worried will happen is not that the game will be more challenging to experienced players, but that farming becomes automatic and irrelevant after a lot more work - and all that work will be necessary to get any food out of farming.  I don't want it to just mandate a long wiki cross-referencing session where you compare the alkalinity and moisture of soil to plant the best crops, then you forget about farming entirely (because that only raises the thin line between annihilation and irrelevancy).  Nor do I want to constantly micromanage seasonal crop rotation, because it's boring, easy to forget and screw up your whole food industry, and almost certainly not what the player wants to do in a fantasy world.

Can you still make farming more complex and yet not either a constant micromanagement nightmare or just another roadblock to a new person and another wiki-dive for an experienced one?  Yes.  Suppose that a race of snail-men invade, and their acidic trails screw with the soil composition which kills off the crops that they walked over; but that also lets you import acid-loving plants and grow them too.  Suppose that the sea gods get annoyed with you and send a tidal wave that, in addition to the obvious effects, leaves a lot of salt on the ground that screws with the plants you can grow.  Or have the invading goblins who can't find a way into your fortress get frustrated and start salting the ground and the water supply you use to water your plants.  These things are unlikely to happen to a new player yet bring new challenges to an experienced one - that's the best kind of challenge I can think of.  Forcing you to do the same thing the same way for each fort isn't fun.

Once again, I find it quite amusing that everyone likes to brag about how "hard" and "complex" and "realistic" DF is, but any time something actually changes to be made harder or more complex or more realistic, people run around like the sky is falling.  The current farming system is, quite simply, way, way too easy, and effectively just hands you all the food you could ever want on a silver platter.  (Same with livestock until they are actually made to start eating, and require feed or grazing, especially eating based upon their size and mass...)

Had I my preferences, I'd make enough food very easy to get for up to, say, 30-40 dwarves, but institute gradual mechanics that made it more and more of a challenge for larger fortresses.  Food really should be a big potential problem in DF, since it's a realistic problem from medieval history.  But learning elaborate farming mechanics are not a good thing to flat-out require for a game.  I'd love to see elaborate schemes being able to minimize the effects of the system of diminishing returns that would stop a fortress from getting too big (and see these farming megaprojects posted on the board), but players need to be able to make that transition from newbie to experienced player to innovative designer as smoothly as possible.

Speaking for myself, I don't boast about how "hard" DF is.  I do so with Demon's Souls, with Devil May Cry 3, with Spelunky - but DF's difficulty is not in someone that knows what to do becoming better at the game, but in learning how to play the game in the first place.  The fact that that latter part takes so long really is only good for fostering a sense of elitism among DF players and makes for a worse game.