Bay 12 Games Forum

This is ridiculous. Adamantine being scarce is intended. Dwarves walling themselves in is a result of not enough work being dedicated to the AI.

So using an exploit is fine only when it corrects a bug is what you're saying, correct?

NW_Kohaku cancels post: Dangerous Wall of Text

Seriously, look how much of this page is just Darbuk and I...

Concerning realism: it's not impossible to build a working car from scratch, but it's so much easier to use an existing one as a model, and make modifications according to taste afterwards. What we should aim for is not realism indeed, but verisimilitude and suspension of disbelief. Modelling after reality is the least likely to generate hidden imbalances we have to cure later.

The problem is that this game is, try though it might, never going to be realistic. 

Consider tiles.  There are 50 "steps" (or turns, if you prefer that term like I do) in a game hour.  An average dwarf may move one tile once every 10 steps/turns.  This means they may move at a rate of 5 tiles per hour.  Considering average humans can easily walk around 2 or 3 miles per hour in a leasurely stroll, then should we assume that each tile approximately covers a distance of half a mile per side, for a total area of a quarter square mile?

That's the ultimate reason why I don't like strict realism - it has to interact with something unrealistic at some point, and you are either going to have to fudge something so that it fits with the unrealistic and at least makes a balanced (if not really realistic) game, or you're going to have a grossly unbalanced and (still) unrealistic game.

An interesting point, and one that deserves looking at.  However, I have yet to suffer any real difficulty from having my dwarves meet the troubles of the first year with a couple of Wood Cutters in leather armor quickly called to the militia.  In my experience, by the time major troubles arrive sufficient immigrants are typically available to begin training a military force.  This is usually sufficient for defense, especially if proper defenses have been implemented in the form of cage traps and walls with gates.

Do you play games in Terrifying biomes, with zombies scratching at your wagon the instant you embark?  Even without orc mods, it's possible to have a serious military challenge to a small fledgling fort.

Quote from: NW_Kohaku

Most players do not have clay, and this sets up scenarios where you will forever be penalized (and anything that isn't optimal is a penalty) because of the way that the game unrealistically handles soil types.

This is a point you and I will have to disagree on.  I have never agreed with 'anything less than perfect is a penalty'.  I am far more of the 'anything less than average is a penalty', and on a agriculture friendly biome average results should be easily accessible for a number of crops.

Nor should you necessarily, just because you need a material doesn't mean that the traders are inevitably going to have it available in the quantities you require.  I for one do not see this as a problem, but another example of your 'anything less than optimal' statement, which I will state again I don't agree with.

"Anything less than perfect" and "anything less than average" are very, very commonly one and the same.  When perfect is expected (and in the "when do you quit" thread, many DF players say that they will delete their entire fort if they make a mistake that may permanently mar the beauty of their fort...), then anything less than perfect is a punishment.

Let's not kid ourselves about what sort of people play DF: By hook or by crook, they will find a way to power their fortresses by perpetual motion device, build towers whose only support is a horizontal beam, or carve an entire fortress out of obsidian, completely surrounded by a giant, enlarged magma pipe (regardless of the fact that the fort would exist at 1100 degrees, celcius).

So yes, I do feel justified in saying that players will accept nothing less than perfect, and will be upset at not recieving it.

I agree that is shouldn't require sand AND loam AND clay, Loam by it's nature is one of the best growing mediums. Again, consult ye the lesser oracle, loam is considered ideal for gardening for almost every kind of common plant.  Sandy loam may require a little clay, loamy clay may require a little sand, but loam would be the ideal for almost every form of surface plant.  As you can see, all of these soil types are accounted for here.

If you already have loam, or even sandy loam or Clay Loam, your only real concern for plants that aren't corner cases would be fertilizer and water.

Please don't act like I don't know what I'm talking about, it's a little insulting.

The problem isn't that clay or loam aren't theoretically available in DF.  The problem is that a wide variety of soils is generally only available to a fortress on an aquifer straddling two biomes, (and especially rare near a mountain, where players are going to embark most often, since they will have all the features players want in their maps) excepting psuedo-exploits by messing with worldgen or modding. 

unless...

Quote from: NW_Kohaku

Which is still too much work for a proper crop rotation system.  Seriously, if you had to swap out the entire soil composition just to plant a new type of crop, when the point of planting new types of crops was to help change the soil composition, you just shot the whole point of the thing dead right there.

As stated above, you likely wouldn't, once you got a proper loam going on, it'd require only minor modification for optimal plant growth.  Little more sand, little more clay, and a little PH balance.  The avid farmer would be able to apply crop rotation to plots that grow specific kinds of plants.  (These plants like sandy loam, so I'll rotate these kinds of plants through this plot in an advantageous way.  These plants like clay loam, so I'll rotate them through this plot in an advantageous way).

Now, if the plants actually changed the composition of the soil (Which I don't think happens, changing it from clay loam to sandy loam for instance), you could apply this same technique.  But as far as I know plants don't tend to change the physical properties of the soil so much as the nutritional and chemical properties.

Are you actually suggesting a system of changing what type of soil you have entirely?  That would be an entirely different suggestion.

Regardless, I would rather we simply have a system where soil quality was set (in matgloss_stone_soil.txt) for every type of soil (which I talk about in a different part of this post) when the farm is built, and simply let the soil mineral levels fluctuate, rather than worry about changing the name of the type of soil you are farming on (although saying that soil is becoming sandy in the description of the farm wouldn't be out of place as a part of mineral level description...) being mixed or molded or changed.

[/quote]I am inclined to believe this [advanced drainage systems] was done, but my current easily available resources indicate only that tillage and incorporation of manure, plant matter, and such goes back to 3000 B.C.E. in Mesopotamia.  One could extrapolate that they likely utilized methods of modifying soil to make it better suited for certain plants merely based on observation.

I will inquire of the Professor of my upcoming class this quarter, which focuses on agriculture.
[/quote]

At the very least, complex drainage systems should be put out.  Even if they were period-appropriate, they make notions of crop rotation too labor-intensive to be worthwhile, meaning it forces the unchanging crop types farm I wanted to avoid with a system that encourages crop rotations, and it replaces it with functionally mandated fertilization to combat soil depletion.

Actually, it's entirely acceptable for a medieval-style society to rely on imported goods to feed themselves.  Cities frequently had large import/export organizations to facilitate that exactly (see the Hanseatic League), and there were massive seasonal fairs for this purpose.

Where this breaks down is the fact that we're dealing with a Fortress with a typical maximum capacity of 200 Dwarves.  A town of 200 people SHOULD be able to feed themselves, provided the crops are good.  The crops fail, and hamlets of 15 have starved.

I think you just made my own argument to yourself, there.

I admit they are a blending without reservation.  However, saying they trade using products that come solely from underground sources overlooks the fact that the use mules to pull their wagons, dogs to protect their forts, and cats as companions.  Add in that leather seems to be very much a part of their society (available at embark in a panorama of sources even), and I think that kinda punches a hole in the idea that they trade using products that come 'solely from underground sources'.  We can also add fishing to this list, and their abundance of available meat products from start as well.

My estimation of DF Dwarves is that they are very much a dual lived people, their homes and preferred dwellings are underground, but they are very much in touch with tapping and utilizing the resources of the surface.

This is really only a relevant discussion with regards to the need to trade for sustainable farming, which is basically the quote above that one, but anyway...

Animals and animal products are just as capable of being forced to be subterranean as anything else in this game.  I don't know about you, but I'm not letting my cows roam around in pastures aboveground.  They're mostly sitting in cages where they don't hog FPS, or maybe following my miners around in the narrow passageways, creating a little traffic backup anywhere I didn't make the hallways wider.  Same goes for my pet alligators and black bears.

Because sometimes it's logical conclusion, if implemented in a game, is masochism for masochism's sake.  I'm a fan of keeping things fun as much as you are, and I think implementing logs as a way to enhance underground mushroom farms is fun and interesting, making the players replace those logs at anything but an exceptionally infrequent basis would be crossing that line.   On the other hand, I don't think having to replace all your logs in a farm every 3 years is an unrealistic expectation.

I would rather say that we can simply use a soil system (one that we, presumably, would already have if we are tracking mineral quality/quantity in soil) on farms - farms that are initially set up on little more than muddied stone simply start out with very poor soil for growing, and would require either fertilizer to kick-start the farm, or some special tending and (granted, unrealistic) nutrient-replinishing fallow-type crop to build up the soil to be ready for producing subterranean crops, rather than forcing one specific type of material be used to start a farm.  You can just make a log you set to rot in a subterranean field be a type of fertilizer.

Fair enough compromise?

Yeah, I believe I did mean to respond to that, sorry!  In a way I agree with you, Irrigation would be a fickle bitch either a pain in the ass or so easy to utilize as to be trivial.  This doesn't mean I don't want it implemented, just implemented with care.  (And I just came up with a couple of management techniques for it actually, mostly involving ditches that you flood occasionally to water the entire farmplot, and then throw the floodgate to seal off until it's time to water again).

I would still believe it ideal if there were either a forced bucket-brigade mechanic (no direct irrigation, realism be darned), so that farmers would have to water crops with buckets and access to water.  Watering in this way would just mean that more water-dependant crops would wind up taking more manual labor to water (unless you have really bad farmers who like over-watering crops), taking more trips to and from wells or water ditches.  This sort of Harvest Moon mechanic would prevent a "dig a ditch, fill it with water, and forget it forever" solution, and the labor it would take would reduce the need to force more labor from taking place in other forms of crop caretaking.

Alternately, I think for a "at least somewhat realistic" mechanic, it would be best for there to be a kind of irrigation ditch that would work at somewhat different rules than a normal floodgate and lever system that has to be worked by manual orders - an irrigation ditch and sluice gate (source of contention between myself and Silverionmox some pages back) would create a new system of a mock-ditch and fluid that would allow dwarf farmers to water crops and pull levers on their own accord without having to worry about them actually drowning themselves or requiring the sort of complex mechanics or CPU intensity of normal fluid movements.  Dwarves could simply have sluices near water supplies, and would automatically adjust sluices to feed water to an entire farm plot attached to that sluice, free of player control.

... Sadly, I doubt I can convince many people of that second idea, no matter how well that system solves the problem, just because it means treating a fluid as a non-fluid, and simply declaring that ditches consume a certain amount of fluid per unit time, which then produces properly irrigated fields, without an actual tracking of fluids moving across channels.

The sort of system where you actually have to dig an irrigation ditch, and fill it to exact levels, which then get depleted, requiring manual refilling is just too micromanagement-heavy that I doubt anyone would care for it.

Having irrigation ditches that never deplete in water is... well, it's unrealistic for one thing, and it would be easily exploitable by simply digging channels/pits every so often, and filling it by the pond zone command once, and ignoring it forever after.

I really think that one of the two ideas I said up top would be the ideal solution.

I do think that fertilization should be required for any kind of bumper crop yield, unless you're using crop rotation.  If you have crops slowly depleting and increasing various elements of the soil (PH and P/N levels) then fertilization could be avoided or at least utilized less, and crop rotation could happen in it's place.  Employing both of them for when deficiencies occur could produce an even more effective yield for the avid gardener, while leaving one option or the other open for 'above average but non-optimal yields'.

Crop rotation is what I'm really aiming for.  I would prefer it be possible to simply set up systems of crops that would replinish one another in a sustainable manner, without needing to go back and manually watch and ensure that you always have enough trees for potash, wood burners making that ash, and ash going to the farm plots (or any other method of fertilization).  Since we are dealing with players who live and die by the wiki, setups for how to do simple sustainable crop rotations should be fairly well known fairly quickly after they become implimented.

Fertilization would only be necessary in the case of either wanting to produce plenty of high-value crops in consecutive seasons, repairing very low soil quality fairly quickly, or just maxxing out potential yields.

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on March 21, 2010, 11:01:49 pm

"(r)epeat" would just repeat until you run out.
"(e)ndless repeat" would repeat forever, without being canceled.

For endless repeat, we'd have paralyzed dwarves just standing there sucking up CPU until the task becomes possible?

I'd like to put a delay in between the endless repeats to mitigate that, myself.  Maybe, if the task was impossible for a good bit of time it would encourage the dwarf to get food or take his break (and not take one later to balance it out.) 

I meant that an endless repeat would just be thrown to the bottom of the queue if it had no way of completing its task.

Of course, the possibility of a building which has no products to complete any of its tasks certainly exists (especially, say, a carpenter's workshop), so I would have to say that this would probably require a small additional amount of code:

The game would have to check for if it goes through the entire code without successfully constructing anything.  If it can't build anything in its queue, it suspends everything, or otherwise buries its jobs in the job queue, the way that looms set to automatically spin thread into cloth currently do, until one of the materials it needs once again becomes available.

It would basically be the same code as what works the current "auto-spin cloth" code, but made more general.

- express values in hours of labour. While the value of labour may seems arbitrary and highly variable, over the centuries its the one commodity that's always valued the same by people, because supply and demand are always balanced: everyone has 24 hours in a day. For example, the services of a prostitute (which do not require other resources that may distort the pricing) have remained remarkably stable throughout the centuries at an average price of a day's labour.

So as the underlying mechanical value, the game probably will run the best by using hours worked as a basic measure of value. That way, it will be possible to compare between civs and groups that have no contact or are just not trading, or using completely different currencies.

I love how this is a reasoned backdoor argument for getting Toady to code in prostitution... PURELY FOR ECONOMIC REASONS, I ASSURE YOU.

Anyway, maybe it would be best to just have "The Dwarfbuck Standard".  Where DBs have an arbitrary, unchanging value, but are not actually put into the game.  Dwarves who perform labor recieve DB payment as they do now, and prices are a function of supply and demand relative to the total amount of DBs in the fortress as a whole.

Prices in real life, ultimately, are something of a matter of bidding.  The price of food will go up until only the richest can afford to eat if there is a food shortage, and that food would probably force them to spend almost everything they have, because they will only be able to afford the food if they can outbid everyone else who wants it that is willing to buy it.  People have priorities, however, and to properly model demand, there should be less of a fluctuation on something like, say, a puzzlebox, which very few people will pay absurd amounts to have, since it provides little practical benefit.

Of course, for game calculation speed purposes, you can't have bidding wars for every single product...

Actually, I just finished work on my own "Garbage Compactor" for my fortress, since I don't worry TOO much about losing some FPS or having dwarves do large amounts of hauling.

Just a Bismuth drawbridge (for the unusual color), a lever, some lockable doors, and a dump zone.

Less of a risk of smashing dwarves than using my main entrance's atom smasher.

Simplest, safest way of disposing of large amounts of junk aside from pitting in chasms or magma, and atom smashers are generally easier to locate wherever you want, without having to make some serious channeling and pumping the way magma requries.  (Not that magma isn't somewhat more dwarvenly than using engineering to break physics.)

Responding to Duke2.0:

Even if you predesignate, the dwarves will ignore that archery target because they can't path to the room.

Also, if you run out of bone or wood bolts, dwarves just plain stop shooting at practice targets.

I once ran out of bones and didn't realize it because I had tons of skulls lying in the stockpiles.  So I ran out of bone bolts.  So my marksdwarves stopped gaining experience.  I only noticed when my melee dwarves were all champions, and my marksdwarves weren't elites yet.  They were sitting on stockpiles full of iron bolts, but no bone bolts to shoot at the targets.

You should lock the hammerer, count, countess, and tax collector all in the same room, with a single farmer who is also captain of the guard. Make sure the farmer has a good wrestling/shield user skill. You can mod this with dwarf companion if you want to. Have him be a hunter and wear plate armor at all times.

Farmer feeds the nobles only the most basic food. They only get food from a single well. The only dwarves ever hammered in the fortress will be the children of the count and countess.

Nah, without a hammerer, the nobles are toothless.  I just keep the hammerer comatose, or lock her in a nice room while occasionally dropping food and booze to her.

Then my nobles are free to flip levers or work endlessly harvesting crops.

My hammerer, "Lefty", has been unconscious ever since that unfortunate spiking accident that nearly ripped off her right arm the first year she entered the fort.

I'm in a warm climate, and my dwarf that was bleeding was a craftsdwarf who should be staying inside, running from home to mealhall to workshop to stockpile.

I suppose it's possible it was sparring collateral damage, even though my barracks are out of the way, I frequently have dwarves (as I'm sure we all do) running into the barracks to eat the soldier's food.