(Future Crop) Post Pt 5: Black Boxes are here!!

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Alavaria, Feb 24, 2016.

  1. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    See blogpost: The Clockwork Razor: Purging Agriculture

    Part 1

    On Hauling Logistics
    Certainly true. There are a few finer points to this currently though. Most obvious are:
    • Stacking. Endless stacking. Your colonists-haulers can get stuck in the stockpile just endlessly stacking Wheat and Bread, for example. I don't know why of course, my suspicion is that the next stacking job is really close and really short.
    • As a side note, what happens if your stockpile has something on every square and then colonists come out with more food to cram in there?
    • Early on (low overseer skill) the balance of hauling/cooking varies. If food is close by, it's mostly cooking time, otherwise it is mostly hauling (eg: grabbing steak from the wild)
    • In particular, early on all your logs etc will create trouble as people may haul those instead of raw food and you don't have many people for anything either way (I've been considering only making a food stockpile so that's the only possible hauling job)
    None of these really change with your new farm system, unless maybe the "harvest" is output as a single stack. (Right now a wheat plant makes 3 Sacks of Wheat, but they are individuals and must be hauled separately).

    =======================================================================================

    On aggregate-average worker productivity
    Yes and no. I've always thought of it as a (simplified, sure) "linear per worker, up until the limit of the farm is reached".

    The simplest method I've come up with is an outcomes-based ratio, ie:
    • 1 farmer at least produces about 4 raw food/day (maize)
    • 1 cook at least cooks about 8 times a day (ie: converts 8 raw food into 16 basic food)
    That and you just need an extra. So 12 colonists, would be 3 farmers and 1 or 2 cooks.

    What outcome? "Enough food to not starve".
    Main caveats: farm needs to be big enough** & each cook needs an oven.

    As for what is big enough, now that would of course be fairly static, but currently I'd say a 14x14 works for wheat and about half that (8x14?) should be fine for maize. Since I consider the optimal (or really, maximum needed) farm size to be a constant, it's fine to just force farms of a given crop to be at this size.

    One issue though. Maize early-game for example uses a much smaller area than maize late-game, and your early 2 workers than 5 workers. If your static forced size is going to be "enough for 5 workers at max skill/tech) the larger size can cause issues if there isn't good flat terrain to fit your maize field (granted, cabbage would be fine).

    =======================================================================================
    =======================================================================================

    On *simple* guidelines for production
    For all the "25% farmers" quoting I've seen (in the previous case you used 1 farmer for 4 colonists and 1 cook for 8 colonists) it's really a good outcome-based ratio. Currently it is 1 farmer:8 colonists and 1 cook:16 colonists). While the actual outcome improves with overseer skill and (farming) technology, your critical starting when you have no buffer is going to be the Terrible/Inept and no tech. Any improvement tends to come later, players can tweak (I tend to stay rather strictly by these even as my buffer skyrockets, though that's just me).

    The odd thing is that for how much the 25% farming was used before (and 12.5% cooks) apparently it isn't well-known outside of forums?

    1:4 was perfectly fine for the happiness-workshift maize early-game case pre food-doubling. Though admittedly you might get trouble if using cabbage.


    =======================================================================================

    Potential Feature #1: Static Farm Size
    Potentially a same issue with players adding more and more cabbage fields (though certainly it wouldn't hurt them too much with doubled cooking)

    See below for a lazy "example" of the new cabbage trap (same as the old and really old cabbage trap, minus the huge amount of production)
    [​IMG]

    There's not really that much to defend, and I don't even mean by making walls. So perhaps later on, but that's a question for the Clockwork Empires world of the future... but currently the issue with say Ravenous Herd is if RNG hits you with it, the real questions are 1. How many military with guns and 2. Are they actually working a shift right now (I think they won't hunt off-shift, even though they may fight)

    I will point out though that going by "recent postings", some of us may have issues making the flat room for 20x20 if they are not familiar with the uses and potential of the flatten terrain tool.

    Like foraging, chopping trees etc, flattening terrain for a bigger farm can go into a long list of jobs and...

    =======================================================================================

    Balancing & New Challenges
    Yeah, that's one way to put it. Just one note, I remember some posting about how the workshift change was a new challenge. And it basically (I think) wrecked a bunch of people who were just about able to get along before it (using 6-day shifts?)

    Isn't really that some of us are magically following a better static program** that will be derailed by the new challenge. It's a question of adaptation which almost always means the challenges hit the less dynamic ones more. Now certainly there are possible ways to make challenges that affect colonies with more progression more strongly.

    But right now, things like Fishpeople Raiders on day 5, or bandits attacking on day 10 really hurt you more if you weren't:
    • using a build order to get weapons
    • using a particular loadout (probably military one for weapons)
    • lucky enough that RNG doesn't slap you with Stochasic Goblins
    Of which only the third one would help against a foreign nation invasion on day 15.

    **Now, some people might imagine there are people who follow a static program by just "reading and doing" a guide on the forums (like the Building Buildings thread, or the Crop Post one, or perhaps the Happiness thread). True, though they can replicate a dynamic solution method when I get around to updating those threads...

    I want to see these charts, as I've never seen them anywhere on these forums.

    =======================================================================================
    =======================================================================================

    Detour: Losing Overseers
    And then there's the whole "if you lose overseers" problem of it being just as expensive to get 1 more overseer than if you hadn't lost any, only now your production just took a nosedive.

    Compounding this issue is that when you're stuck at a high # milestone (eg: went from 16 overseers to 8) and have few living overseers, the fact you need 2 of them on non-milestone production (1 farm, 1 kitchen) hurts even more.

    Oh, losing lower-class isn't an issue, they come in batches, and it seems their arrival is just on a timer. They are also perfectly substitutes for one another so... yeah.

    =======================================================================================


    For my own amusement

    Oh by the way, "generic shrubs as placeholder models" is the caption but I'm pretty sure I've seen the setup for farmable berry bushes. Also coconuts (inadvertently came out in one of the experimental releases).

    That test plant, the model is clearly an immature Maize crop?



    More on the actual "black box farm" later on. Posted too much already (10,000 character limit, the second time I've hit it)
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2016
    dbaumgart likes this.
  2. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Part 2

    An abstract discussion

    I don't know if "put farm next to food stockpile" and "put kitchen next to same food stockpile" is really fitting of the obscure tag.

    But I will give you that people by default don't seem to do this.

    I don't really know if A next to B and then C next to B is exceptional.

    Hmm... basically when your choices matter a lot, then naturally that means a bunch of them are not really viable** choices.

    **Alternatives include:
    1. All choices are the same in terms of outcomes
    2. All choices are fine because the whole band of outcomes is fine (like now, with doubled food)
    3. There are minimal choices, and this smaller set fufills 1. or 2. above.

    Except unlike the axiom (rather, assumption) of no one using the bad choices, actually people do use the bad choices (though we can generalize and say overly sub-optimal).

    ========================================================================================
    ========================================================================================

    Ok, now on walking
    In general this is about the same as the current farm, only you don't have the walking between plants thing.

    By the way, you can probably just "account for" the walking between plants thing by adjusting your jobtime for the actual action-bar Tend Crops.

    If your time-per-tend is a targeted 20 seconds for a low-skill overseer...
    • It is fine to have it as 8-12 seconds walking (10 average) and then 10 seconds of action-bar Tend Crop. It averages out just fine. And you will know the average just by forcing field size.
    • It is also fine to have 3-7 seconds walking (5 average) and then 15 seconds of action-bar Tend Crop
    What the walking does do is establishes a minimum time-per-tend that you can't go below. Which is set by field size (fixed) and walking speed (which affects all kinds of other things)

    So in the first case, even if you set Expert farming to have 0 seconds to Tend Crop, it'll be 10 seconds average-per-tend.

    By the way, this IS what happens with cooking. Expert cooks take 10 ticks (1 second) to cook and about 6-10 of walking to, and then from, oven.


    But NOT with the farms. You can increase farm productivity by changing the time taken to Tend Crop. In fact, here...

    If I remember right, it works like the farmer does some number of animations but I can't remember how it all adds up, it might be like 10+ (1 to 6, depending on skill) hoeing animations.

    So now you have the 1. endogenous walking time and 2. the independently-set-here Tend Crop animation time.
    You can still change it from 10+ (1 to 6) to something like 5+(1 to 6). This makes farmers more productive.


    On again, not with cooking:
    Yeah, this ones seems to go down pretty far, not sure exactly how it adds up again, but at Expert/Jolly good the action-bar part takes 1 second. Unlike the farming case, you can't really go any lower...


    Ok, the actual black box discussion will be on part 3, I promise... got derailed by by average-per-tend analysis.
     
  3. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Part 3

    Actual black box field
    Ok, my best guess is the following.
    1. Farmer reaches field, begins "working"
    2. Harvest occurs when some number (eg: 50) bars have been filled up, be it 1 farmer 50 times, or 5 farmers 10 times each
    3. Farmers work from start until end of shift
    This sounds pretty good. Yes, your farmers are not actually putting in 3 units of work per maize plant, but if they're putting in 60 total into a farm which outputs 20, that's just about as fine.


    Not that I think the randomness of the walking currently (as opposed to the walking in this new system) really matters that much... because I don't try to match my maize field, it's just 14x14. Same for my wheat, I don't actually play with trying smaller ones, I go for max.

    Right now (refer to Crop Post) the issue isn't that "players are making too-large fields, it means too much walking", it's "players make too-small fields and cap out the field's productivity without realizing it).


    I think you can in fact get a lot of benefits from simply making fixed-size fields and keeping the plants as-is (due to happiness workshifts, I do recommend leaving the spoilage out, but that's another question).

    ========================================================================================
    ========================================================================================

    Now on information-sharing

    Not really useful on their own. We're interested in a particular aggregate, ie: raw food output per day (potentially per farmer...)

    Both of these don't help unless you either
    1. Time your farmers' action bar and know how long they work per day, then calculate how long it takes to get a harvest and then calculate how much per day average.
    2. Time how long it takes for a harvest directly, then calculate the average output per day

    However, there's the following as well:
    Excellent. Though I would vary the second by using the output-per-harvest to give the average food output per day of the farm currently.

    The main question players need is: Do I need to add more farmers?


    Related (for kitchen) is: Do I need to add more cooks&ovens?
    Since the kitchen correctly effectively "produces" (1 in, 2 out), it helps to split the information into the following:
    • Raw food used per day (say, yesterday)
    • Cooked food produced (maybe break down into Basic vs Quality... but even just a simple aggregate helps. If my per-day output is greater than number of colonists, excellent.

    ========================================================================================
    ========================================================================================

    Implications of this

    The main direct effects of this are:
    • Players can't made bad decisions in the vein of too-small fields
    • Player have to consider how to fit in their farms and can't just cram in one which is of course too small (see above)
    • Slightly easier to understand underlying mechanics (it won't matter for most people because they care out the general outcome, so....)
    • More accessible way to track your food production (however, I've mentioned before, you can in fact tell if you are above/below production even currently without having to do much beyond checking your commodities window every now and then)
    All of these still hold if the actual mechanism is "tending plants as they are currently". The game engine is just counting production in the last day (though for wheat it will be a bit troublesome as first 3 days it will read 0)


    What this won't solve:
    • If all the output is still going to be hauled to stockpile (and stacked... then later cooked food is stacked) the whole hauling black hole will still exist
    • Kitchens still have the whole "is mostly about walking" effect
    • The above mean that bad placement will STILL get people, especially if they throw their farms outside because they are big and annoying to build around


    I will post more about the current way we produce food (ie: stock and flow) in a part 4. It's not really that bad, or unfriendly to a system that easily shows outputs (potentially more friendly than the big harvest model, depending on how big and discrete harvests are)

    Gotta not hit the character limit!
     
  4. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Part 4

    Stock-and-Flow: Currently

    Some people seem to think farm output comes in "harvests" (particularly wheat). This isn't true, farms are basically faucets that give a stream of raw food (approximately). Yes, Wheat gives you a certain stream of output which varies a little but is fairly stable actually.

    What changes is mostly the lag time. Lag time effects:
    • When you start a wheat field (for example) your first wheat will start to show up 5 days later (this is not a harvest!!)
    • When you add more farmers, get overseer skill upgrades or tech upgrades, the effect will show up only 5 days later from the change

    So, how does this work with or against a neat "output per day" information tidbit?
    • For: The output per day of even wheat tends to be nice and stable, at 5 days after the last major change (farmer#, overseer skill, technology)
    • For: We can still see the crops and they have all their current information etc
    • Against: If the game is backward-looking, if you adjust anything, it will only show up 5 days later

    What about a large "stockpile labor units" before getting a major harvest?
    • For: If a progress bar for the whole farm is given... well actually that doesn't necessarily tell the player how long until next harvest
    • For: Matches people's intuition about harvests. Though not many people noticed that their wheat wasn't actually giving a harvest.
    • For/Against: Depending on how much you need to get a harvest, if say Wheat is intended for 5-farmer crews to harvest every 3 days or so, a backwards-looking "output per day" counter will probably get very confused...
    • Against: Big harvests are more discrete. For players this is either:
      1. Just more complicated (and if you think the current faucet needed "charting", having your Wheat come in only every few days makes charting more important, not less!)
      2. Not easily scaleable. See above, if 5 people gets a wheat harvest in 3 days, then my one wheat farmers gets it in 15 days. And adding another gets it to 7 days. Totally unintuitive. What will players do? Probably stick with their Cabbage/Maize.
        Another alternative. Suppose 5 farmers produce Maize harvest in 1 day (right now growing time is ~1 day) then 1 colonist=5 days and 2 colonists=2.5 days, again easy to stay with the Cabbages...
    • Compare with above: If you make say Wheat less crazily discrete, you also make the switch very easy. If the harvest discretization is set to 5 colonists=1 day, then you can totally switch over no problem, just flatten some land.
      This is not really desirable in my mind. Neither is having many days between harvests...
    • Against: As harvests will be more discrete, this adds a lot more issue than the current gently-fluctuating output. The response is either:
      1. Stick with the less troublesome... Cabbage. Oh...
      2. Have large** buffer (ie: stock) and then carefully watch it to make sure you're not falling behind on your production. This is more complicated than it is in the current setup.
      **Large in this case would be something like 4x(#of colonists)x(days per harvest).
      So with 50 colonists and 4 days between wheat harvests I would be looking to stay at a minimum of 800 units. And if I ever fall below 400 I really need to act.
      In actuality this would look like setting (Make Bread Minimum Order: 1200) and then add a bunch of extra farmers and cooks to quickly get to that level, then reassign. If I ever see less than 800 total buffer*** then I must panic. A little.

    ***Total Buffer depends on what you're producing. In the simple Wheat-only Bread-only case (ie: no quality food) it would be (Raw*2 + Cooked). That represents the amount I can feed my colonists, and therefore how long I can go before starving.
    If the (total buffer/ colonists) is below say 4 days and I rely on 4-day-to-harvest Wheat, I really need to worry. Probably start a Maize farm.

    If you are using Basic Food and Quality Food (eg: Bread and Pumpkin->Farmers' Stew) then you may want to track these separately if possible.
    You can also do it with Maize & Pumpkin combo but the input control is troublesome.
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2016
  5. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Part 5

    Looking at responses to the blog post
    Actually this is a discussion mostly on details of logistics...

    This is a good idea. By doing batches, not only can you (theoretically) adjust your input: output ratio more finely (now it's 1:1 to 1:2, it would be nice to do 5:6, 5:7 perhaps) but reduces the effect of the cook's carrying.

    This lets you easily vary the effectiveness of cooks (and of skills) by adjusting the cooking times (for a 5:7 perhaps, we might start off with 8x more action-bar time for the Terrible/Inept and go with a bigger multiplier on the Jolly Good/Expert which see bigger gains from reduced hauling).


    However, this has big problems as we can see:

    My best guess is problems with how exactly they pick up and carry things.

    Really, I would like to suggest giving stockpiles "auto-stacking". This way there's only one stack of a given input in the stockpile. So only one trip.

    Another possibility, is you have colonist pick up multiple items (but they will all make a big karamari in their hands) and then drop them all at one go (or one after the other) at the oven.

    Currently there are jobs with multiple inputs (see: berry medley) and I wonder what happens if you change the order so instead of:
    1. Go to A
    2. Pick up A
    3. Walk to oven
    4. Drop A
    5. Go to B
    6. Pick up B
    7. Walk to oven
    8. Drop B
    9. ACTION BAR
    10. Pick up Berry Medley
    11. Drop in stockpile
    We changed the order to:
    1. Go to A
    2. Pick up A
    3. Go to B
    4. Pick up B
    5. Walk to oven
    6. Drop A
    7. Drop B
    8. ACTION BAR
    9. Pick up Berry Medley
    10. Drop in stockpile

    This presumably would change from currently (A=berries, B=fungus, 2 units of Berry Medley) to (A, B, C, D, E= something basic_cookable, 7 units of Stew).

    I do think that if the colonist was grabbing 5 units of maize the katamari of bushels of maize... would look like 1 unit? Not sure how it works.

    You could also (I guess) have them pick up the first item, then after picking up #2, the game removes #2, etc etc so they only ever are holding 1 item which they just deposit in oven.



    Another issue is: if maize makes maize chowder and steak makes cooked steak (all under Cook Basic Food) how do you combine them?

    A few alternatives:
    • Don't combine them, you must have 5 maize to make the 6 maize chowder.
    • Do combine them, and it just makes generic Stew. So 5 whatevers will turn into 6 Stew


    I honestly don't think from my observations that the randomness of the walking currently (plant to plant based on which needs tending) is that bad. Actually currently if you watch, colonists frequently walk from one plant to one just a few plants down the row... (a single colonist just goes down the row, two will leapfrog one another, etc). So in some ways, "always go to random location" may mean more walking-to-tending.


    Now the real job cap which causes issues is almost certainly the "farm size" as in "a too-small farm so farmers don't have room to tend more crops" and not "a too-large farm so farmers are walking too much". Not that walking time is not important (and hard to change) BUT, if you wish, you can still reduce the Tend Crop time taken in order to balance. Cooking however cannot really have the time reduced anymore for Expert cooks, but certainly for Terrible/Inept, which is perhaps the most important point to balance...

    This is solved by fixing farm size, it doesn't require the move to a "random walking" as opposed to "walk to crop that needs tending".


    Visually perhaps, but not sure how much information just looking at your field will give you about your output rate with this change... if the "produces a little" and "produces a lot" still have full fields, then uh... yeah


    Stacking again.

    The best outcome (if you could manage it) is raw food is thrown on stockpile, NOT stacked, grabbed by cook, cooked, cooked food is thrown on stockpile, NOT stacked, and then eaten.

    What actually happens is... yep, your people love to stack about as much as hauling the raw food. Which is to say they prefer to do it over hauling almost anything outside like logs or so on.

    (I like the idea of autostacking, the game went from no stacking to stacking by colonist... but it's a bit much as it relies on colonists walking and doing pickup/drop animations over and over...)


    The issue is it varies a lot on the raw food -> oven distance. If you take a look, I have like... maybe 10 tiles of distance. Some other colonies I've seen have 20 or more, which GREATLY affects productivity. If the kitchen is near stockpile, no problem. Move it away a bit and yeah.... if it is even further away... yeah....

    As for the endless stacking, it doesn't affect farmers or cooks, as they will farm/cook rather than haul/stack. The colonists that do it have to be free, which is another problem as if no one hauls raw food, the cooks are forced to. But it's a bit of a different problem.


    Well I may have added like pages of posts to the forum (like this thread alone, or see the Crop Post) but it's a pity I can't really use this computer to make recordings. So, Crop Talk video, better wait until the new farms come out :)


    If you actually read all that, well... well...
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2016
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  6. Mikel

    Mikel Waiting On Paperwork From The Ministry. Forever.

    I read all of that. You do scare me.
     
  7. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    No, this is a problem, you know I actually type less for my actual research because I'm really really carefully doing This One Thing.

    It's like the candy store in this place, plus the candy keeps changing to new ones, it's amazing.
     
  8. dbaumgart

    dbaumgart Art Director Staff Member

    Time it takes to execute jobs is queried at the time the job is begun. The crop growth timers are(/were) not affected by tech modifiers or skill level (and showing that per-plant was another one of those potential UI nightmares).

    The revised farming system will continue to tie job execution time to tech and skill modifiers, but the separate crop timer will be removed. So that'll essentially be converted to a labour pool int stored in the farm which triggers a harvest when it reaches a certain amount. Completing farm jobs adds to the labour pool, as one would expect. Visually, the farm job will choose an animation based on what stage the crops are at, but time to execute will be the same for all "do farming" jobs so you'll always know what you're working with in terms of adding labour pool points to the farm.
     
  9. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    .Part 5 added.

    No, I mean the time for the increased output-per day to fully show up takes 5 days on wheat.

    The simplest case if if you have 1 worker who's been at it for 10 days and suddenly add 4 more. It takes a while for the farm's stream of wheat to ramp up fully to the new higher level.

    In the new "labor stored in the farm -> harvest" version, you will indeed see the gains immediately... well sort of, it might take your next harvest from 3 days to 2.75 days.

    ==============================================================================

    The crop growth timers are an issue in terms of, again, the lag effect. Even if you raise it, the output per worker will be the same provided the farm is big enough (so, the same between maize & wheat).

    The main issue if the growth time is small and there's spoilage (neither true currently)

    ==============================================================================

    Both systems would have similar long-run average output-per day outcomes, as well as responses to changes, but making it more of a "big lump output" would give more variance (but perhaps more responsive) as opposed to the finer per-plant growth timer


    Again, long-run average output-per worker should be relatively invariant on growth timers. For a fixed farm size (which is not too small) you can adjust the plant growth time up or down a bit and not affect output in a first-order manner**). See: Crop Post: Part 6

    **Second-order effects of increasing growth timers take place via (relatively small) increases in walking time on average. The actual AI of farming farmers is pretty good, they generally go up a row and then walk to beginning of next row and start working their way up. Harvesting works similarly, then they return to tending. It works nicely due to how plants grow, actually. Plants are hitting next stage and pinging for a tending one after the other because that is the sequence they were planted in and therefore their first Tend and then their second Tend follow in order as well.
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2016
  10. Mikel

    Mikel Waiting On Paperwork From The Ministry. Forever.

    Will the new behavior be burst-y?
     
  11. dbaumgart

    dbaumgart Art Director Staff Member

    Basically yes.
     
  12. Mikel

    Mikel Waiting On Paperwork From The Ministry. Forever.

    Sounds like we will need more kitchens potentially then.
     
  13. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    No you shouldn't. The raw food goes into your stockpile and your kitchens will turn it into cooked food every day as usual.

    Just because you get 5 days of raw food at once, doesn't mean you need to cook it all today (and then do what?), you can spend 4.5 days cooking it and then after that the next set comes in.

    It's how a usual stock-and-flow system works.
     
  14. Tikigod

    Tikigod Member

    That sounds like quite a massive hauling workload injection every time a farm spews out its goods.

    Depends on the specific situation. It won't always be happening in optimal situations.

    Imagine a starving colony with 45 hungry colonists, and suddenly a farm just vomits out a few dozen raw food onto the floor where the farms sat in one mass.

    If you don't want all that immediately locked down by colonists however far away and consumed raw, you'll need a individual kitchen worker for each unit of raw food you want secured for food production, which is a lot of kitchens you'll need in order to support that sheer volume of kitchen workers.

    Where are with the current system, yield was a staggered output. So fewer kitchens can lock down and secure a larger farm output over time with less risk of mid-cycle non-kitchen consumption in non-ideal situations where you haven't already buffered the crap out of everything compared to a lump farm spewage output.
     
    Last edited: Feb 26, 2016
  15. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Just another stumbling block that the "big harvest" model will throw in front of people, which I'm sure you've already noticed in one of those 5 parts somewhere...

    Ah here:
    If your colonists are already starving then somehow having 50 cooks and 50 ovens is sort of a "what were you NOT doing with all those resources" sort of thing. You pretty much were asking for it if you had 50 ovens and not a buffer...

    And early on... not only should (depends) it be like Maize or heh Cabbage** which is smoother (significantly so under "big harvests") but how would a day 5 colony have 10 cooks&ovens... well clearly it's an emergency as they were building ovens instead of farming a bit more...

    **Refer above to cabbage trap.
     
    Last edited: Feb 26, 2016
  16. Jesus - I read about half of this and I'm also scared.

    The only thing I will say is that your level of commitment and knowledge is astounding but this is a game and I think when you are posting multiple topics of 50,000 plus words you fall into the "outlier" category of gamers.

    I'm not a min max kinda guy, never have been - I play this thing for fun every so often and I largely play to enjoy the random stories it creates. Though food is necessary for a game like this, it does not interest me. At all.

    It's a means to an end as far as I'm concerned and the easier it becomes to manage the better I say.
     
  17. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    This isn't about min-maxing though.

    But heh.
     
  18. Sniggyfigbat

    Sniggyfigbat Member

    I must absolutely agree. Food is fucking dull, as is my colony starving to death. The only scenario in which food shortages make the game better is if they are directly linked to an outside event - be that beetles, bandits, or the bounders who just murdered your farmers.

    Otherwise, I want food production to be as obvious as possible. Decide where to place my field and how many workers to assign, and I can be guaranteed X amount of food per week (where that value is clearly communicated). This is a better solution, in my eyes.
     
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  19. OddProphet

    OddProphet Member

    I can only hope that the food balancing issue is resolved soon, so we can get on with developing Industry and Science. I'd like to deal with chemical fires and revolutionaries, not corn logistics and kitchen staffing.
     
  20. mailersmate

    mailersmate Member

    Speaking as someone with no interest in min maxing and also not being a newbie, I welcome changes to the food chain that would actually make ovens a worthwhile investment, assuming it all works out.

    Also you are completely mad :)