Bay 12 Games Forum

Basically, every unit has two loyalties. One to the fort and one to the parent civ, which are two seperate entities. Imagine what happens if someone becomes an enemy of the fort but still loyal to the civ, while the military are still loyal to both. The soldiers, seeing the enemy of the fort, go to kill them, but because of standard dwarf civ ethics prohibit murder, the guards become enemies of the civ(and may or may not be still loyal to the fort). Now, imagine what happens then.

That's just broken; ain't no hem-hawing about it, it's buggered alright.

Once again, I just have to ask why you think permutations have anything to do with anything? 

Quote from: AngleWyrm on August 29, 2010, 10:21:53 pm

The result is that people generating the game's plants are going to place them all in the middle of a vast space. The dwarve's job will then be to bring soil conditions to the middle of that space.

As for having "different types of mud", then of course there's no way to have a different kind of mud for every possible combination of values - if data on the soil is tracked in the "mud", which is a fine way of doing it (although soil layers will need a "topsoil" or similar "floor covering" for their data recording, although we could simply merge that with mud, and create a "soil" item that sits on the floor of any place that has soil beneath it, or is in a cavern by default, and which gets added to the tile when the tile is flooded,) so what we need is simply a soil item that has several variables attached to it that are kept in a seperate area of memory, the way that contaminants already do.

Eventually someone's going to create plants. Those plants are going to live in soil/mud that is one of the many types of rock/soil that are already in the game. Making plants will be a process of matching plants to habitats. And in order to do that, the rocks/minerals/soils in the game should have soil metrics. Mud would then be an instance of some soil/mineral/rock.

Also, as you have indicated, it is simply too difficult to understand the consequences of high dimensions. So you shouldn't include them.

You can't just create a field of perfect soil in real life by simply dumping all the fertilizer you can get your hands on in a giant pile, either.

I don't believe that assertion. If I want soil that matches some setting, I can just dump soil with that setting on my fields. If I want to adjust a setting up/down, I add whatever is missing or needs to be countered. And this brings up an aspect I haven't seen in this thread, the matter of moving soil that matches a criteria for a given crop. Maybe crushed Microcline is especially suited to growing UnderLillies. Transferring the rock to the fields could be one way to do it.

We have a wealth of rock types, and each rock type could have basic soil parameters (could be measured as %(max-min) for resolution needs). How many rock types are there? Quite a few ecological niches. It may be that 'mud' needs to be a type of mud, such as red sand mud, or orthoclase mud. Then it could be transportable.

As far as grasping the dimension/resolution problem, here is a picture of a box within a box. The inside box is less than three quarters of the volume of the outer box:

The inner boxe's dimensions are 9/10 of the outer box in all three directions. That means that the volume of the inner box is 0.9x0.9x0.9 = 72.9% of the outer box. Yet even knowing this to a mathematical certainty does not prevent the illusion that it must surely be more. The human brain is not particularly good at handling high dimensions and their results.

A six dimensional box covering 90% of the range in all directions would occupy only 0.9^6=53% of the total volume. The result is that people generating the game's plants are going to place them all in the middle of a vast space. The dwarve's job will then be to bring soil conditions to the middle of that space.

Depletion can happen slowly, but not repairs. Watering the soil immediately makes the soil wet, with no delay. Same with adding mulch to bulk it up with biomass, or adding fertilizer, or adding any other modifier. The soil is changed with the act of changing it, not as some slow years-long process.

Plants might make slow changes to the soil, but people can make very fast changes.

Also, 281 trillion colors is too much. The human eye cannot differentiate that many colors. 1000 bits of sound resolution is also too much; the human ear doesn't operate at such high frequencies. In other words, there's such a thing as the right size. Just ask Goldilocks.

256 points per crop != 256 points per measurement.

Could you go into some detail on this point?
I'm not quite getting what "256 points per crop" means.

Modelling Manure:

If we accept the seven-degree measure of soil as (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, pH, Water, BioMass) and use a simple 5-point rating system as {'very low', 'low', 'medium', 'high', 'very high'} then there will be 5^7 = 78 125 possible soil conditions, which ought to be more than sufficient variety for creating ecosystems.

Manure would be used to fertilize the soil. In order to do that, the manure would have a seven-degree measure of what kind of "soil" it is. Then adding manure to a plot could be as simple as a vector addition of (soil + manure) / 2. This would allow manure to pull the soil's metrics in the direction of the manure. If the manure is 'very high' in nitrogen, then the combination would be closer to 'very high' Nitrogen. On the other hand, if a manure is 'very low' in a given metric (maybe it is very dry), then the soil's watered condition would be pulled toward 'very low' Water.

I have two fishermen and two fish cleaners in my current fort of 90-ish dwarves. The four of them produce approximately 1/3 of all the food in my food storage area. I measured this by selling all my fish barrels to the caravan, and it left about 1/3 of my food storage area empty. My farming team consists of six growers, and two each of brewer, cook, and thresher.

...And even then, you have a choice between spreading raw sewage on the fields and composting it first, which makes the manure safer (more crops tolerate it, and it is less likely to spread weeds and pests) but releases many of the nutrients (especially Nitrogen) from the compost.  The benefit of this being that it would create a "closed loop ecosystem", where most nutrients stay within the fortress, and also that it would make you choose which fields get priority for the limited supply of fertilizer - do you balance it out, or grow some crops with high nutrient needs and let the other fields suffer lower overall nutrient replinishment, forcing a greater dependency upon Nitrogen-fixation crops and light feeders, and generally sacrificing productivity in one field for the productivity of another.

In order to make a "closed loop ecosystem" it should include the consumption and output of dwarves, which suggests modelling dwarf manure. It could also make chickens a valuable part of the system.