Bay 12 Games Forum

To all of you saying spore had something about it that was removed and to those who say it was the same product all along, read this, it may explain a lot.

I was also going to make a big post about piracy but decided it was smarter not to take part in a futile debate.

The only one I really disagree with is the difficulty attributed to making the plots and assigning the farmers. Yeah, the plot size is limited, but still big. Building and setting the crop cycle is still pretty quick. I could easily do one of those 1600 tile farms in earlier posts in about 5 minutes.

Well, the key-words there should have been 'tedious and unfun' rather than 'difficult' in that designating huge farms spanning entire sites wouldn't be fun (until you start losing them to invading hordes that is.)

And assigning the dwarves is real easy: just turn on one labor. Things get a little more complex if you want to use fertilizer (need wood, ash it, make potash) but the game should always be optimized such that fertilizer is an option: if you want to micro your agriculture you get better yield.

Realistically speaking you would need A LOT of dwarves for a realistic farm, you know, the kind that spans acres and acres and requires lots of tilling (by hand!) In case there is some confusion, I am speaking about realistic farms as though they were already implemented, and if you want to know what I mean by 'realistic' I mean pretty much how it was in reality which you can look up on Wikipedia, I'm not sure if I can be much more clear than that.

The counter point Draco18s was trying to make (and should have spelled out clearly  ) is that most of the suggested additional steps (DwarfBusyWork) are automated. They won't really raise the difficulty of running the farms (interface and complexity wise), they just make the yield a little weaker.

For me the additional step that is required is the one that makes farming take lots of manual labor, large flat open spaces, and time, lots of time. Basically I want farming to be slow. Very slow. So that making any kind of sustainable farmland would require lots of effort and attention. If a fortress' only source of food is from the outside, then this can drastically change gameplay (it'll be more fun, if you see where I'm going with this.)

You know how a mason stands around in a workshop working?  That's "DwarfBusyWork."  It's what they do to stay occupied doing some task.  Farming currently has 2 tasks, both of which require almost no time at all: planting and harvesting.

As I made clear in this post, I would like to see farming made slower, if not more difficult. I imagine difficulties will come in when the hard back-breaking labor takes it's toll on your poor peasants and leaves you in dire straits.

Or lying on the ground surrounded by angry peasants. It's difficult to tell.

Quote

Now bear in mind I didn't bother to read most of the thread

You didn't, but I have.  It was an example of DwarfBusyWork relevant to farming.

DwarfBusyWork

What, ok now I'm confused.

-bear in mind I didn't bother to read most of the thread-

Also why shouldn't farm designating ever change? And are we even talking about the same thing? You need to elaborate a bit more.

I see some people complaining that making farming difficult would make the game tedious and unfun, however I believe the troubles and difficulties of farming (enormous fields, irrigation, pest control, fertilization, weather conditions, and an otherwise useless caste of peasants to do it all) could be put in the game and make it no more tedious than it already is.

Now bear in mind I didn't bother to read most of the thread so sorry if any of this has already been said and that I am not talking about this as if it was something to work on now and implement soon but more as something that would be good to see in the distant future when we have wheelbarrows, a better interface, and lots of automation.

Now with this suggestion I think that a lot of people believe we would have to make enormous farms in every fortress (to prevent early starvation) and that it would be made square by square, farmer by farmer as it is now. However, I think how it should be is how it is in reality: instead of every fortress being an agrarian center, many sites dedicated to farming (and nothing else) would be created by civilizations in world-gen and by the time the player starts playing all the agricultural infrastructure would already exist in the world and the player would merely have to create a trade agreement that would send caravans of food to their fortress.

My idea is that the player wouldn't have to do any farming if they didn't want to, and if on the other hand you might find the idea of running an agricultural fortress an interesting challenge to try you could do it and deal with the many obstacles of farming. Also if you were a farming fortress caravans would come to trade goods for your food instead of vice-versa.

Another great thing in addition to making farming a choice rather than a necessity, is that it would add meaning and goals to the game as civilizations will have an actual reason to expand and claim large amounts of land, you would have trade routes that actually matter, sieges would become an actual danger, and the underground river would become a treasured resource.

And each civilization will farm differently: humans will make above ground fields, elves will probably have orchards, goblins will farm livestock, and dwarves will farm underground. Although, farming underground doesn't make much sense realistically as it combines all the problems of farming with all the troubles of mining but, it would probably be safer when it comes to war thus averting the need for a large warrior caste to defend it and making dwarves a post-feudal civilization.

Lastly, if the amount of land needed is too much despite the low population of the DF worlds (compared to reality where even a small country has hundreds of thousands of people in it) then the time crops need to grow could be kept lower than it really is to allow for a bigger harvest.

Also I would like to remind everyone who read this far that this is a suggestion for the distant future where transportation is improved, dwarves have lots of automation in their lives, fields can be designated as large as you want, caravans are better implemented, and the game is generally prepared for this sort of thing. I just wanted to show how this could work without making the game less fun, if it is to happen.

Sorry if I rambled too much, I have a tendency to lose my train of thought...

I hope that all made sense and explained what I was thinking.

I will keep saying this until it becomes an Urist McMeme.

There's a term for that kind of thing and it's 'forced meme.'

I don't know if they were more aggressive, but most animals survived the version change with exactly the same code.

I'm pretty sure back in the 2D version elephants and gorillas and other 'benign' animals would mind their own business until some dwarf decided he was tired of living and attacked them, causing them to go on a murderous rampage inside of your very own fortress. This code was changed to be more reasonable in the switch to 3D (or so I remember.)

Also, how can everybody remember farms, permafloods, and nobles but not the dreaded fire plague?!

Did you know - Screw Pumps actually exist in real life?

I have to let you know; when I read this I felt as though you were asking me if I knew abnormally short people exist in reality.

Yeah, it was waaaay too late at night to make the reply coherent

Ah, well alright then.

At any rate, I was trying to say that yes, I know Boatmurdered was the 2D version, and yes, I know that every fortress was like that.  However, it still died, despite having the features that would make a perfect location in this version.

I was going to write a lengthy post about how resources do not cause the downfall of civilization (quite the opposite) and how Boatmurdered was destroyed by the incompetence and avarice of it's own leaders but, I decided that writing a short summary about it would be a better idea.