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Author Topic: Improved Farming  (Read 132507 times)

Andeerz

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #390 on: April 29, 2010, 11:55:53 pm »

My suggestion holds even if tiles never get a fixed size.  If tiles are as big as they need to be at any given time, then what does it matter if a single tile designated as a farm tile is one acre or one square foot?  If it needs to be 5ft by 5ft, it'll do it.  My suggestion ultimately boils down to how many tiles I think farming should take and a way to make it work that is realistic, which is what I want and think would make the game more fun.

However, for the record, I hope very much that tiles get a fixed size some day.  If they never do, then they never do.  In that case, DF won't be the game I would like for it to eventually be.  I'll still like it though. You're right: it (farming) ain't broken.  It's just unrealistic and that's ok to some people, and to me it's pretty much a meaningless, contrived game mechanic that I begrudgingly tolerate, and I wish it would change.  Fortunately, there are many other things about DF that I love.

« Last Edit: April 30, 2010, 12:51:02 am by Andeerz »
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Zombie

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #391 on: April 30, 2010, 12:20:32 am »

I am not arguing at all about tile size.  My suggestion only holds if tiles ever get a fixed size, which I hope very much happens some day.  If they never do, then they never do.  In that case, DF won't be the game I would like for it to eventually be, and farming can remain as it is.  You're right: it ain't broken.  It's just unrealistic and that's ok to some people, and to me it's pretty much a meaningless, contrived game mechanic that I begrudgingly tolerate.  Fortunately, there are many other things about DF that I love.

I think you misunderstand. I agree that farming needs to be overhauled. I do not, however, think that that needs fixed-size tiles and I was simply pointing out that fixed-size tiles will cause more trouble than they are worth. For a slight amount of added realism, Toady would need to handle so many more things. Also, maps would likely need to be larger as not as much would fit in the gridsizes we have now. Larger maps means more rendering time, which means more calculations for pathing as well... This means a huge FPS reduction. It'd be nice to say, "I made a 200 meter tall statue of Urist McDumbass, my mayor that went berserk and got tossed into my HFS Express Tunnel" but it doesn't really -improve- the game in any conceivable way, except for satisfying people who want everything to conform to very rigid and exacting units.

Me being against fixed-size tiles has nothing to do with my feelings on farming. It is a nice thing to think about, but when you consider it from the standpoint that we already have FPS, CPU, and memory problems that we are just now getting over then you realize that more tiles to show the same amount of stuff is just not necessary. It's sort of along the lines of giving DF polygonal graphics. It would be cool to see, but the amount of power and processing required is simply unrealistic. The tile system in DF is modeled off of Nethack and Rogue and it isn't broken. In fact, "tile" is pretty much an accepted unit around here and around Nethack and Rogue communities. "One tile" means something very concrete, even if it isn't exactly clear what. It's like bad handwriting. It says something, we just aren't sure what.

IF YOU DO NOT READ ANYTHING ELSE, PLEASE READ THE BELOW SECTION!

What I am saying is that we can remove the unnecessary complexity and simply tweak how farming works, which is supposed to be what this is about. If a Dwarf eats 10 Urists of food each eating cycle and your farm produces 50 Urists of food in roughly one Dwarven eating cycle, then that farm can feed 5 Dwarves. Let's figure that each tile produces roughly two Urists per cycle. That's a 5x5 farm to feed 5 Dwarves per cycle. One dwarf could manage a 5x5 farm. That's a 20% producers-to-consumers ratio. Voila, now farms are successfully balanced to where you WILL need to upsize your farms with your population. If a 5x5 farm feeds dwarves with 1 of those dwarves producing, then you have a 1/5 ratio per 25 t^2 (that's tiles squared. Yes, I use them as a unit.) That's 2/10 for a 5x10 farm (read: 2 producers / 10 total). That's 4/20 for a 10x10 farm. You would need 5 full 10x10 farms to feed 100 dwarves. 10 full 10x10 farms to feed 200 dwarves. That's a MUCH more manageable number, while still maintaining the "realism" ratio of food production. Of course, this also means that Quarry Bushes would require nerfing. Honestly, that's fine with me as I only need one season of them in a 6x5 farm to feed my dwarves for almost a year. That's absurd. We can keep the FPS problem managed, though, by having each "tile" of farm able to produce a set maximum of food overall in Urists (or a Dwarven measure of weight) that is settable in the inits. Or we could be more invasive and make it so each "tile" of a planted <plant> is able to produce a set maximum of food overall. Food should also have some waste that cooks can reduce with skill. Quarry bushes have waste in their useless plant matter and roots, like other plants, while plump helmets should have little waste if any. The maximum is how much a legendary <relevant skill> can create from the plant or foodstuff in question. Everything else is lowered by efficiency percentages, which could be set via raws or inits. Legendary is 100% efficiency, obviously.

If you skimmed here, please go up to the bolded message and read what I posted in its entirety. I feel as if it is an excellent compromise and has been compiled from several ideas I have read around the threads. It is not, by any means, an entirely original idea yet I feel as if it has overwhelming merit in addressing this problem using the new features introduced in 0.31.##.
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Draco18s

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #392 on: April 30, 2010, 12:23:53 am »

My suggestion ultimately boils down to how many tiles I think farming should take, which is different from what you want.  That's cool.

Even assuming that 1 tile is 2m square, attempting to justify real world measurements of food consumption based on 1 growing season per year (in most regions, you can sometimes get 2 if you plant two different crops and let them overlap during the summer) into a game that clearly has four full growing seasons that you can get two harvests out of.

That leaves you with approximately 4400 tiles worth of farms, or about 2 embark tiles (48x48 dwarf tiles ea.) on 1 z level.

Which is still too much IMO.
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Andeerz

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #393 on: April 30, 2010, 12:40:41 am »

Zombie, I like your suggestion!  I am all for implementing that, though I'd prefer my farming suggestion eventually when the prerequisites that I mentioned earlier are developed (with or without fixed tile size!).

Again, giving tile size some sort of realistic measurement value is NOT required for my suggestion.  This avoids a lot of the stuff you were understandably complaining about.

Also, there wouldn't need to be larger maps, just, among other things, the ability to control land outside of the immediate area which Toady would like to see implemented anyway.

Even assuming that 1 tile is 2m square, attempting to justify real world measurements of food consumption based on 1 growing season per year (in most regions, you can sometimes get 2 if you plant two different crops and let them overlap during the summer) into a game that clearly has four full growing seasons that you can get two harvests out of.

That leaves you with approximately 4400 tiles worth of farms, or about 2 embark tiles (48x48 dwarf tiles ea.) on 1 z level.

Hmmm... that's food for thought!  (no pun intended, well, maybe a little...)  I'm not sure if the source of the 0.07 hectare/person estimate I used took into account those factors or not, but I don't think it ultimately matters IRL.  But I can see where it could matter in DF since a single harvested plant of one kind provides the same amount of food as a single plant of any other.

EDIT: Zombie, oops I edited the post you responded to before you posted... :3
« Last Edit: April 30, 2010, 01:12:47 am by Andeerz »
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Zombie

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #394 on: April 30, 2010, 01:28:22 am »

I'm with you that fixed tile sizes are a cool idea and would add some immersion. From a logistic standpoint, though, they'd be horridly impractical with how DF works now. If Toady decides to, later, invest the time in multi-threading (glowing due to infamy of the topic) then I could see realistic tile sizes becoming a reality as you could handle pathfinding and graphics on separate threads. I'm only, really, against it because of the problems it would cause. Seriously. I also think that DF would require a large overhaul to get realistic tile sizes working, probably near as large an overhaul as multi-threading.

I figure that we need a new way to handle food anyway, and it is often handled by weight (or volume) IRL... It logically follows that a (relatively) easy fix to farming involves giving foods weights and setting an amount of food in weight that dwarves eat. This could fix the farming issues forever, or at the very least hold them at an agreeable non-absurd level if and/or when Toady decides to implement realistic tile sizes. Either way, food should be handled by weight so as to make things like Quarry Bushes slightly less absurdly superdwarven.

I think that, early on, your dwarves should have a basic time of it. A couple of farms feeding you until you hit enough dwarves to make tools to make farming happen faster... Then you're set until you get enough farms to train animals to pull larger tools... And so on and so forth. The suggestion I posed does not show a realistic consumption curve with rising classes... It's more of a linear model. Ideally, nobles and heftier dwarves would want (but not require) larger amounts of food. Not having that would give them frowny faces, but a bridge could fix that... ;) But seriously, as your dwarves feel the warm bosomy embrace of civilization, they likely will want more food so they can feel the warm bosomy embrace of their bearded wives. Eating meals consisting of 10 Urists of Prepared Meals consisting of two plump helmets doesn't, exactly, lead to having the body fat for the copious bosom that the up-and-coming Dwarven men like. So as civilization increases, dwarves want more than just their rations. If they can afford it, they might even want twice their "survival" amount. The 10 Urist a feeding cycle for a dwarf to "be full" is actually just a rough estimate of a "not starving" kind of full, so there is room for upscaling to where making more than the bare minimum five 10x10 farms for your 100 dwarves may actually be beneficial, especially with more modern tools.

A particularly ingenious (or sadistic) fortress builder may even elect to trap goblins and train them to pull the farming tools. When Toady codes that, I will have a Goblin Farming Union.
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If I had a dollar for every dwarf whose feelings I didn't care about, I'd have seven dollars, with more coming in the fall.

Urist McSharpblade, Axe Sheriff cancels Justice: Needs more than an axe for this.

MULTI-THREADING - I'm talking about it!

Andeerz

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #395 on: April 30, 2010, 01:36:30 am »

Heck yeah, dood!  I follow dat!  ...and and and it makes me wanna add the weight stuff and consumption curve stuff to my suggestion...  >.>
« Last Edit: April 30, 2010, 01:57:42 am by Andeerz »
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Canuhearmenow

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #396 on: April 30, 2010, 01:38:45 am »

This suggestion certainly isn't going to win the hearts and minds of newcomers.

Frankly, however, the arguments of "realism" going on in the previous pages HONESTLY makes me think they were being sarcastic, because the arguments I were seeing were, frankly, insane.

Just because you have a firm grasp on the game doesn't mean you should intentionally make it more challenging just because you're bored. The most recent version is straining newcomers already.
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Zombie

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #397 on: April 30, 2010, 01:59:16 am »

This suggestion certainly isn't going to win the hearts and minds of newcomers.

Frankly, however, the arguments of "realism" going on in the previous pages HONESTLY makes me think they were being sarcastic, because the arguments I were seeing were, frankly, insane.

Just because you have a firm grasp on the game doesn't mean you should intentionally make it more challenging just because you're bored. The most recent version is straining newcomers already.

I'm actually considering reprising this thread in a less daunting way under the OP constraint that only ways to improve farming and directly related offshoots are to be discussed... This is a very good topic, but it has a quite daunting pagecount of "realism" bickering that seems to only contribute to more of the same. If someone wants to make a secondary thread for proper discussion and move relevant posts there, that would be stellar.
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If I had a dollar for every dwarf whose feelings I didn't care about, I'd have seven dollars, with more coming in the fall.

Urist McSharpblade, Axe Sheriff cancels Justice: Needs more than an axe for this.

MULTI-THREADING - I'm talking about it!

Andeerz

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #398 on: April 30, 2010, 02:08:07 am »

Indeed.  I second that, Zombie.  If you don't do it, I think I will.
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Zombie

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #399 on: April 30, 2010, 02:21:10 am »

Indeed.  I second that, Zombie.  If you don't do it, I think I will.

I'll take care of it. If it breaks rules, then the mods can feel free to delete it. This thread has gotten crazy, though.

EDIT: New thread made, with clear rules in place.
« Last Edit: April 30, 2010, 03:02:31 am by Zombie »
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If I had a dollar for every dwarf whose feelings I didn't care about, I'd have seven dollars, with more coming in the fall.

Urist McSharpblade, Axe Sheriff cancels Justice: Needs more than an axe for this.

MULTI-THREADING - I'm talking about it!

Shades

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #400 on: April 30, 2010, 04:34:21 am »

Indeed.  I second that, Zombie.  If you don't do it, I think I will.

I'll take care of it. If it breaks rules, then the mods can feel free to delete it. This thread has gotten crazy, though.

EDIT: New thread made, with clear rules in place.

How about we don't as it doesn't help at all and makes no difference. At best it just means people have to trawl through two threads now.
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Zombie

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #401 on: May 01, 2010, 12:55:43 am »

Indeed.  I second that, Zombie.  If you don't do it, I think I will.

I'll take care of it. If it breaks rules, then the mods can feel free to delete it. This thread has gotten crazy, though.

EDIT: New thread made, with clear rules in place.

How about we don't as it doesn't help at all and makes no difference. At best it just means people have to trawl through two threads now.

It means nothing of the sort. It provides a clean slate for intelligent discussion with clear guidelines. If you have something to say, you can say it there and enjoy a pleasant conversation or you can continue complaining about how you think this is all pointless. Either way it does not matter and the new thread will, hopefully, be a breath of fresh air to anyone who wants to seriously talk about farming in DF.

EDIT:
Also, please allow this thread to die gracefully. Any concerns you have can be addressed in the new thread. If you made points here you would like to bring up there, then please do so while abiding by the rules of the thread.
« Last Edit: May 01, 2010, 12:57:34 am by Zombie »
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If I had a dollar for every dwarf whose feelings I didn't care about, I'd have seven dollars, with more coming in the fall.

Urist McSharpblade, Axe Sheriff cancels Justice: Needs more than an axe for this.

MULTI-THREADING - I'm talking about it!

Shades

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #402 on: May 01, 2010, 04:36:49 am »

It means nothing of the sort. It provides a clean slate for intelligent discussion with clear guidelines. If you have something to say, you can say it there and enjoy a pleasant conversation or you can continue complaining about how you think this is all pointless. Either way it does not matter and the new thread will, hopefully, be a breath of fresh air to anyone who wants to seriously talk about farming in DF.

EDIT:
Also, please allow this thread to die gracefully. Any concerns you have can be addressed in the new thread. If you made points here you would like to bring up there, then please do so while abiding by the rules of the thread.

We can seriously talk about the topic here, we have established that trying to pin a size to a tile is a silly concept and most of us feel that farming does need to be more of a challenge.

Ignoring all the points here and starting a new thread doesn't help the discussion as the same comments will be repeated there.

Just because you have a firm grasp on the game doesn't mean you should intentionally make it more challenging just because you're bored. The most recent version is straining newcomers already.

This is a fair point, although I think most newcomers having problems is more related to other aspects than farming. Especially in the 0.31 version. Possible it would make sense to have 'hardness' levels in the start game option in some way but that is probably a separate discussion.

Assuming the other aspects of the game were not excessively complex for a newcomer do you still hold the view that farming shouldn't be made harder?
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Its like playing god with sentient legos. - They Got Leader
[Dwarf Fortress] plays like a dizzyingly complex hybrid of Dungeon Keeper and The Sims, if all your little people were manic-depressive alcoholics. - tv tropes
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Shades

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #403 on: May 01, 2010, 10:48:20 am »

What I am saying is that we can remove the unnecessary complexity and simply tweak how farming works, which is supposed to be what this is about. If a Dwarf eats 10 Urists of food each eating cycle and your farm produces 50 Urists of food in roughly one Dwarven eating cycle, then that farm can feed 5 Dwarves. Let's figure that each tile produces roughly two Urists per cycle. That's a 5x5 farm to feed 5 Dwarves per cycle. One dwarf could manage a 5x5 farm. That's a 20% producers-to-consumers ratio. Voila, now farms are successfully balanced to where you WILL need to upsize your farms with your population. If a 5x5 farm feeds dwarves with 1 of those dwarves producing, then you have a 1/5 ratio per 25 t^2 (that's tiles squared. Yes, I use them as a unit.) That's 2/10 for a 5x10 farm (read: 2 producers / 10 total). That's 4/20 for a 10x10 farm. You would need 5 full 10x10 farms to feed 100 dwarves. 10 full 10x10 farms to feed 200 dwarves. That's a MUCH more manageable number, while still maintaining the "realism" ratio of food production. Of course, this also means that Quarry Bushes would require nerfing. Honestly, that's fine with me as I only need one season of them in a 6x5 farm to feed my dwarves for almost a year. That's absurd. We can keep the FPS problem managed, though, by having each "tile" of farm able to produce a set maximum of food overall in Urists (or a Dwarven measure of weight) that is settable in the inits. Or we could be more invasive and make it so each "tile" of a planted <plant> is able to produce a set maximum of food overall. Food should also have some waste that cooks can reduce with skill. Quarry bushes have waste in their useless plant matter and roots, like other plants, while plump helmets should have little waste if any. The maximum is how much a legendary <relevant skill> can create from the plant or foodstuff in question. Everything else is lowered by efficiency percentages, which could be set via raws or inits. Legendary is 100% efficiency, obviously.

I was playing just now and looking at how to balance raws to achieve similar effects to this and although I quite like the results of this suggestion, 10 10x10 farms is a fair amount of land. I realise that is part of the point of this but it might just be easier to make planting take longer and leave everything else the same. That way you'd just need more farmers to keep the same number of fields planted.

I agree that quarry bushes (and likewise syrups) scale up this problem significantly.

Also have you thought about how the new meat from butchering compares with farming now? It seems to me that a single animal gives a lot of meat, possibly on the same level as a season of crops.
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Its like playing god with sentient legos. - They Got Leader
[Dwarf Fortress] plays like a dizzyingly complex hybrid of Dungeon Keeper and The Sims, if all your little people were manic-depressive alcoholics. - tv tropes
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right. - xkcd

Silverionmox

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Re: Improved Farming
« Reply #404 on: May 01, 2010, 11:10:36 am »

The talking point that comes up so often is the land area required, and what it should be and how it balances with the rest of the game. Well, that's not really important. The game will sooner rather than later come with a main productivity number for farming, standard set at 100. The people who think farming is a waste of FPS (but don't want to have offsite trouble either) can set it at 999, the people who want to play a world at the brink of starvation can set it at 25.

Instead, let's concentrate on, for example, what variables should matter, how they are influenced, what farming tasks can be influenced by the player and what tasks the dwarves ought to to automatically, etc.
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