It is, except for the fact that, as far as I know, those are videos. Being told to "watch this video of a guy building a farm" is not the same as being told to "take this save game, load it up and build a farm". A lot of things don't become apparent or problematic until you actually sit down and play the game.
I always thought people would actually spawn the worlds, and pause the video, and copy the actions they saw themselves to learn the tools. I thought that was the whole point of it.
Then again, I don't really like video tutorials, so when I was new, I just used the wiki alone to explain to me what every function I had under my command would be, and then went and built a fort with that knowledge, making sure to refer back to the wiki whenever I was trying something new.
Complexity is fun when it involves the interesting decisions. Complexity is bad when it gets in the way of making interesting decisions. For example, some of the Farming suggestions include adding crop rotations, fertilization, irrigation, pesticides, etc, in an effort to make farming more complex. But how do any of these suggestions add any interesting decisions to the game? Is fertilization just set up once on a schedule, like the different crop seasons? Or does fertilization need to be micromanaged?
You should probably put this in the Improved Farming thread itself, since this is directly relates to the way that that specific thread will be implimented.
To respond to the questions, however, the problems with current food production are several: The initial complaint was that you could essentially feed an entire fort with a single farmer and a tiny farm, although that has since been pushed to a less prominant spot in the thread. The other is that crops are currently fairly unrealistic, simplistic, and easy.
Currently, we only have 6 types of underground crops and 15 kinds of aboveground crops, including the three that have specific good/evil/savage requirements. Even this tiny number of crops is filled with redundancies, because strawberries are exactly the same thing as prickle berries except prickle berries are worth less. Nothing distinguishes most crops that are food crops, they all have the same required amount of care and upkeep (none except planting and picking), they all but Pig Tails and Plump Helmets have the same growing periods (41.6667 game days), aboveground, they even all grow all year long, and none of them require any more planning or infrastructure than making the land muddy once. So even the limited number of crops we have are already redundant, and farming is of absolutely no concern after your first month, when you are trying to get the soil muddied for the first time. (A task that, aboveground, is as easy as simply putting a screw pump next to a murky pool, and manually powering it.)
The purpose of the Improved Farming arc is to make farming a far more involved and scalable project.
Fertilizers, at least as far as I have explained them, (and to which Toady has given some
vague support, calling it "reasonable enough",) would be more of an industry than a button-push micromanagement. I am no fan of tedius micromanagment. The system, however, does involve careful consideration of when and how much to fertilize, as fertilizers can easily acidify soil, choke the plants in an excess of "Biomass", or, if we are even more realistic, even "burn" plants with an excess of nitrogen (or cause them to spend too much of their energy on leaves rather than fruits, lowering total yield). Fertilizers would hopefully be managed by a farming manager system that would allow you to schedule various tasks for farmers to take per field, on multi-year cycles, so that once you obtain a stable state, you could allow a field to run largely autonomously, barring some sort of outside disaster (see: crop diseases or pest infestations) requiring manual oversight.
The system encourages the deliberate building up of soil conditions, as well as infrastructure for the care of crops. Several planned crops are "rock breaker" crops that are designed to first build up the soil, especially if one is farming on mere wet stone. Soil pH must be aligned to specific crops - some prefer highly acidic soil, some prefer alkaline soil, while most prefer just mildly acidic soil. Biomass (the measure of how much "dead, rotting stuff") matters for plants, as well: Mushrooms need as much of it as possible, as they are not photosynthetic, and rely upon said dead stuff. Some plants form symbiotic relationships with soil bacteria that rot dead things, such as peanuts, which then can use those bacteria to perform nitrogen fixation, a necessary step in crop rotation. Others will actually just be choked by the chemicals that an overabundance of soil bacteria will cause, and require less biomass in the soil.
Toady, in that post, again gave some vague support for the idea of not simply having your dwarves merely bucket-brigade the soil to water it, or merely dig ditches, but to use a "sprinkler system" derived from the pipes that we are getting in the Improved Mechanics arc. This would necessarily require the engineering of a repeatably usable water source, and the care to realize that not all crops consume water at the same time, but also will drown when overwatered, as if you simply flooded the fields as if you were muddying them. As your farmlands necessarily expand to feed your greater number of dwarves, while at the same time, the number of different crops it takes to feed them to avoid pests (see below) increases, the complexity of this system also increases.
Perhaps more relevant to making "interesting decisions", however, as you grow more of a given type of crop, they are more likely to lure pests specific to that one species of crop. Like the boll weevil that killed the cotton crop, or the potato blight that caused the great Irish Potato Famine, overrelliance upon any single crop sets you up for disaster if a pest or disease spreads between your under-diversified crops. The intent of this is to encourage players to try to find a way to blend more crops into their lineups, which in turn, require more careful adjustments to the soil, as different crops have different soil quality requirements. The exciting part of it is that as your farms grow to be able to feed more dwarves, this means that you have to adapt fields to being able to support more diverse types of crops to avoid attracting devastating pests, or at least mitigating their damage if they do arrive. This, in turn, means that you have to develop more complex means of regulating soil conditions to the individual finicky needs of every specific crop, especially as similar crops or soil conditions tend to bring similar kinds of pests.
Is any of this an "Interesting Decision"? Well, I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I certainly am fascinated by it. But "Interesting" is ultimately a subjective term. Personally, I'm not interested in seiges. I'd much rather DF be focused upon the societal modeling aspect of the game, as well as its engineering aspects. But it doesn't hurt me much to let the mechanics reset the cage traps and unjam the weapon traps every few months if that means other people enjoy the game more because of it.
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Topic: Dwarf fortress: Margionally complex, but mostly just detailed (Read 13138 times)