Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeah, I guess it would take some extra overhead time for them to eat more/drink more. Maybe the amount of time it takes a dwarf to actually consume food could be shortened quite a bit, to compensate a little.

The only problem with that is, it takes a week for a dwarf to walk from one side of the map to the middle.  They'd never get any work done (and they'd have to take a food/drink break three times in that period!).

And like most folks, I'm in favor of a substantial increase in the amount of farm plot necessary to support a dwarf. It seems likely that it will require an increase in dwarven food consumption in order to really do it right. Like maybe instead of eating one meal every six weeks, they eat six meals once every six weeks.

They would take the same number of meal breaks per year, they'd just eat more per sitting.

Unfortunately the wiki does not go into any detail on stack sizes or modifiers for farming skill, in either the Grower page or the Farming page.

If dwarven consumption is increased to a meal/week + 2 drinks/week, a dwarf would consume 156 crops/year. If a typical stack size is guestimated at five, and harvesting is reduced to only four harvests/year, then each tile produces 20 crops/year. That gives 7.8 tiles of crop per dwarf. A maximum sized 10x10 plot would then feed/booze about 13 dwarves, a 5x5 plot would nourish 2 dwarves, and a 3x3 plot would take care of one dwarf.

Assuming the stack size is near five.

Aha. Well correction corrected.

The mechanic of just add more [resource] until an ideal condition is achieved applies to every kind of resource, whether it is dwarves, or some pH adjusting soil additive, or anything else. It's the nature of a resource. A precious resource with several possible uses is a different story, because then there's a choice. For instance I had to choose what to forge next with my slowly arriving steel bars.

If you don't like the game mechanic of matching plants to environments, then I suggest you come up with a mechanic that involves some genuine play. Instead of just saying 'something to think about,' be specific about what the player will decide.

As far as dull button-pushing is concerned: adding a soil additive, then waiting for some timer to expire, then adding more additive, then waiting for a timer to expire -- micromanagement. Left the world of game and entered the world of marginally interactive simulation.

Also, do you want all plants on an embark to be from the same ecosystem? Rock is the most obvious and visible part of the ecosystem, and comes in a variety of types.

So tell me what that micromanagement is, specifically, in this system. 

Micromanagement, as opposed to planning, is actions that only maintain a person's strategic position, instead of advancing it. Busy work tends to feel like imposing on someone else's time. Just to help define useless button-pushing.

The resources a player can allocate are the dwarves. Currently they are not precious enough, being overabundant to the point where people become annoyed at the volume and start killing them off.

I'de like to see some plant variety, and I think that the key to decision making is going to be matching plants with environments. So some work has to go into making rocks somehow contribute to crop yield. Maybe a particular plant gets a plus to stack size when it grows on it's favorite rock types, gets a minus to stack size on it's hated rocks, and yields normal stacks everywhere else. This process could become even more detailed by having minor/major bonuses so that there's five levels of stack size bonus, defining the relationship between each plant and every rock type. It's going to add to the raws though.

It also opens the door to a new process: Moving earth. It might be desirable to transport boulders of a given soil type to a designated farming region, and then crush them into mud.

E for Excellent game to play while drunk