Well, here's what I posted as the problem, and reason I was writing that massive
thread...
First, I need to explain why I felt the need to expand the scope of the solution to be greater than the original problem. This was because, in part, I recognized a problem of greater scope, and saw that farming was the perfect way to tackle the problem.
Basically, I noted a few months ago that there were essentially only two ways to really play Dwarf Fortress, and this was to go full-scale into the military aspects (which meant modding in tougher and tougher monsters, or restricting your means of dealing with monsters until the game still posed a challenge militarily), or to go into exploring the game as a physics sandbox, and create massive super-cities like Undergrotto, or else to build water-based computers out of gears, pressure plates, water, and logic gates. Why do we only play these two ways? Because just "playing the game" was not sufficient. You see, the game is "hard" at first, but this is only because people don't understand what they are doing because there is no tutorial, and smash into the "learning cliff". Once you've scaled it, Dwarf Fortress is fairly easy. You just need to set up what basically amounts to a wall between you and the nasties outside, and then have a farm, still, beds, and whatever other amenities you deign build for your dwarves. Once you have cleared this basic hurdle to immediate survival, the game throws very little at you as a growing challenge.
Now, I have already done a suggestion that deals with this problem from the perspective of trying to make late-game content more challenging by making dwarven society more complex the larger your fortress becomes through introducing social stratification and a need for luxuries to appease a higher class of dwarves. This, however, takes on the same problem from a different perspective.
Here's why this problem needs to be solved from the perspective of "Improved Farming": At first, the suggestion was to take up more space, time, and dwarves per unit of food that you need to put into generating food. Early on in the Improved Farming thread (referred to from here on as IF), Footkerchief hit on the core of the problem with this solution, when he said that the real problem was that farming was a "free stuff button". You see, as long as farming was nothing more than zoning land, and designating dwarves to throw seeds at the zone and eventually pick up all the stuff that grew out of that land, then we aren't really changing anything by requiring more dwarves or more time to do the work. If you require more land to produce the same amount of food, the player just zones more land (and eventually adds more dwarves to the farming labor to manage the sheer acreage). If you require more labor activities for dwarves, then you just wind up throwing more dwarves at the problem. If you require a longer growing time, you just double the farmland for every time you double the growing time, and wind up with the same amount of food per unit time. Either way, all this really changes is what percentage of your fortress's population is going to be farming at any given time, and doesn't do much to actually change gameplay or make it more interesting.
Then began the process of trying to add more to the process of farming, such as adding nutrients that must be managed, so as to make the game more realistic, and then the outcry began because many people could not see this as anything but micromanagement. They didn't want more complex farming, and they didn't want to think about farming at all. Cries of "if you like farming, just play Harvest Moon" arose, and they basically didn't see anything wrong with farming being simple, because if you only play DF for the bloodshed, why would you care about farming?
What we need to do is not to just change the way in which the player is asked to solve the problem, especially by just making what the player does have to become more complex, or to front-load everything onto a player so that we "add another hour of setup time when you start a fort." We need a change in philosophy. We need to reconstruct this portion of the game to make the player tackle the entire problem from a different perspective, one that should hopefully be more rewarding, and hence, more fun, not merely "making farming harder" or "making farming more complex".
Basically, I am arguing that the game needs to recognize itself as Physiocratic in nature. Like with an RTS game, or like with farmers in real life, players need to handle their environments with some respect for the idea that they cannot just have everything for free, that their resources are limited, and therefore need to be spent wisely to return the best profit. And, like with the Physiocrats, your primary resources in the game can essentially be seen in terms of the three basics of dwarfiness: Soil, Stone, and Dwarves. In order to make a game with serious choice and decision-making involved, all these things must have some sort of finite limit on their potential.
Now then, I'm throwing around a lot of abstract terms, so let me bring this down to earth a little to illustrate what all this means.
First, I want to go back to the whole "free stuff button" problem.
Currently, stone is effectively free stuff - you almost always have far more of it than you can store in stockpiles or get rid of, and therefore, you will use it without even considering it a cost - it's free! Anything you can make from stone, you make it from stone, because stone is free - free rock mugs, free statues, free tables, free chairs, free doors!
Currently, wood is limited in supply, but still fairly cheap - you can make a huge variety of things out of wood, but really, you tend to stick to barrels and bins and beds, and maybe some charcoal, but not too much. Wood is something you can't just consume completely without any care in the world. You have to put at least some thought into conserving it for the things you really do need, because you only have so much of it in any given year.
Currently, however, steel and to a lesser extent, bronze are relatively difficult to make. You need fuel, metal that you have to find and are in somewhat limited (although still fairly abundant) quantities, and you're prone to supply shortages. You can't just build steel chairs for all your dwarves, you have to really consider what your priorities are for steel. (And also note that steel and wood are both inifinite, they're just limited by the amount you can harvest per unit time.)
Of course, finally, farmable biological materials are free stuff. This means food, cloth, dye, and basically anything else you can get away with growing on a farm. Just throw seeds at soil, designate a few farmers, and watch the limitless resources pile up. I even run into more problems accidentally designating too much farm, resulting in food that I can never store or even harvest properly. (It does keep my children and nobles occupied harvesting it all, though...) I produce clothing, and use it as my primary export fairly frequently when playing, if only because I like to play at economics, even though the economic model of this game is broken, and the clothing mills are functionally expandable to an almost unlimited degree. I can basically buy an entire caravan with one bin's worth of clothing, but wind up just giving away five or six of them, just to reduce my load of exportable materials.
Frankly, these are the ONLY concerns about resources/materials that you really have in Dwarf Fortress.
So yes, you can add a few more jobs onto the processing part, or a little more land onto the farming part, but it doesn't change the fact that it's still basically like glass when you have magma and sand or like stone - it's free stuff, you'll never run out of it, so there's no reason to ever consider it. Food is a default, automatic, easy gimmie, and will continue to be even if you have to up the number of dwarves working - most players just wind up killing off dwarves that they wind up have idling because they can't find any jobs for them, anyway. Simply assigning a larger proportion of their labor to farming is no difficulty, and if their entire supply chain is automatic and thought-free, then the problem will always remain.
This is why we need to move to a new philosophy on resources, so that there is a real decision for the player to make, and for there to really be something there to manage. We need to make materials have some sort of meaningful cost.
The best way to do this is to make farming in-game more like real-life farming...
A biology teacher I had in college once described to my class that farming was essentially just a man-made ecosystem. You harness nature so as to produce the materials that humans find valuable are created as efficiently as possible. However, it is still an ecosystem, if less of a self-contained one, and ecosystems are ruled by Conservation of Mass and Energy.
Ecosystems generally contain the same mass that they have contained for thousands or even millions of years (excepting obvious eroding ecosystems, like rivers), the same chemical components and atoms generally occupy the same soil, turn into plants, get eaten by animals, are excreted back into the same soil again and again and again. Ecosystems, meanwhile, pass energy through the ecosystem through this same mass that is always conserved - sunlight is converted into usable chemical energy by plants, and as various animals and decomposers pass the energy on through consuming the previous holders of chemical energy, that energy is eventually lost into waste heat.
Farms, again, are just ways of converting soil nutrients into materials that contain chemical energy (food), which can then be used (eaten, or used as cloth or other biological products) by the farming species. We then burn through the energy in that matter that was once soil, and eventually, it is reduced back to a state where it is ready to be turned back into soil by decomposer organisms (urine, feces, and decaying corpses).
The problem with farms is that we remove that mass from the ground, and then we don't always replace it. Food is removed from the area where it is grown, and needs to be replaced in the form of fertilizer. All the mass that is taken out of the ground must be replaced. This means that you need to manage your farmlands and lands in general from a perspective of having to balance out the ecology of your land, making sure you replace anything you take out of the ground. That is to say, very roughly speaking, you have to recycle the same "mass" over and over again.
To a certain extent, I know that I'm going to get hit with a "dirty tree-hugging hippy" (or at least "undwarfy" or "elfish") stigma for talking in terms of ecology, but there is a huge difference between being a "dirty tree-hugging hippy", and being a farmer who cares about making sure that the soil will be capable of providing him with food come the next year. It's not for love of every living thing on God's Green Earth that a farmer plants a tree to act as a windbreak to prevent soil erosion from taking his soil away. It's because his soil is his most precious resource, and the basis of his livelihood, and as such, it is something he has to build up and protect at all costs.
This is the way that I want to change the paradigm by which farming is viewed: You have a limited amount of useful mass, and as you use up nutrients in the soil, you need to replace them somehow. You have a finite amount of ways to do this, but this is still a renewable resource. Your job as a player is to manage your resources as well as you can. You need to keep your crops watered, which requires access to water, obviously, but also water in greater quantities the more that you grow crops that depend upon water. For many locations that you might inhabit, there is a finite amount of water that will enter the map per year, and you have only that much water to meter out to all your agricultural projects and whatever water-drinking your dwarves or livestock will need to do. Assuming we have feces and urine, this will be a major way to "recycle" your soil nutrients - if you eat your food, and it passes back on out the other end of a dwarf, then you can compost that into more usable soil, but this shouldn't be entirely perfect, and there will always be goods that you trade to the outside world that will represent a net escape of nutrients from your soil. You will need to use some methods of adding a little extra nutrients into your soil. Dead bodies, amusingly enough, are a great additional source of nutrients. Protect your dwarfy environment: compost those goblin corpses! Still, you can probably only kill so many things for the purposes of replenishing farms. I'll go into all of these different things in much more detail in their own sections later on.
To go back to the "three dwarfy resources" of Soil, Stone, and Dwarves, this is about making soil a depletable, yet renewable, resource. Stone is already a depletable resource, if a very plentiful one. Dwarves need to be made more rare and valuable as a resource, but that's what my other thread on social structure is for. The idea is that if your soil is not something you can take for granted, you will then have to be forced to actually budget what you do with it. Similar in effect to an RTS game, if you can build just about any military unit you want, but you are limited to only x amount of minerals and y amount of vespene gas per unit time, then you have to pick what units you build with that limited amount of resources per unit of time. It's not a matter of "making farming too much micromanagement", it's a matter of "making farming only give you so much, so you have to prioritize what you want out of it".
So, for food, I had the obviously overlong thread on that...
For stone, I actually suggested that we get a model where mining causes a single 1/7 stone item to fall out, and 6/7 useless debris items appear (or some other similar function), and where 7/7 debris just turns into a debris wall, so that mining requires much more hauling to remove stone, and mining in general becomes slower, and the resources you extract from mining more precious.
Migrants should be cut down to something like 5% of what they are just off the bat. Having a massive fortress full of dwarves should be a crowning achievement, not a flood of useless cheesemakers you toss into the magma just because you don't feel like dealing with them. Making dwarves less expendable will make every aspect of the game much more meaningful.
Further, that Class Warfare stuff is all about how to make larger fortresses have more meaningful inter-dwarf relationships, not just between individual dwarves, but between guilds and social classes and the government, and build the basework upon which any economy could be built.
challenges. Ask veteran players what they lose their fortress to when it isn't FPS alone, and they'll tell you most of the time that Tantrum Spirals are the number one killer. Real internal challenges, like those of the Class Warfare thread, are the way in which the game can have meaningful challenge, even from external threats, because the more strain you have to put a fortress through just to meet its own internal demands, the less capacity it has to project force against external threats.
Trade, finally, will only be useful when you start talking about it in terms of having those automated trades where you just say that you are, in general, selling off mugs, and buying anything made of steel. When you can sign contracts or trade agreements to manage these things, and leave them running, so that you can basically skip having to ever make a specific type of good (like just buying all your cloth instead of having a clothing industry) entirely, then trade will have meaning. Part of how Toady seems to want to do this is to make feeding your fortress much harder, so as to force players to just import food.
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Topic: Ricardo's Difficult Idea (Read 3980 times)