I am not sure how I feel about farms being locked to a single crop

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

  1. Rentahamster

    Rentahamster Member

  2. mrclint

    mrclint Member

    I kinda find this a good change.
    Yes, the start will be more 'boxed in' at the beginning. But that's when you just have to start feeding your colony and without a second thought start focusing on the more complicated matters, like building stuff and defending your colony. Then, when your colony grows the fun(?) of experimenting with other fields can start.

    Now I kinda vision a farm that's positioned a bit from the main town with a lot of fields and a barn (for sleep etc.), and some kind of effective way of transporting the goods to the kitchen. Just like in real life.
     
  3. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    This is basically the case now, and compared to before doubling, is mostly because now your cooks are productive but "only if" there is raw food. Now they not only transform raw to cooked, they also add units of cood.

    The main defense against this is of course to establish your buffer at some multiple of your colony size (6x to 8x perhaps, but really your buffer should be growing however large) and then being careful the moment you go below some cutoff (so eg: 4x)

    In fact, if I have say 50 colonists and my minimum order for Bread is set to 500, I know if I see my stockpile of Bread is below 400 that something is up.

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    What actually happens in order for you to Failure Scenario your food is:
    1. Either you had no buffer and then messed up for a couple days (such that colonists start eating raw food) - but remember your basic Maize will produce first raw output the next day. OR
    2. You had like 10 days buffer***, and then didn't check for 10 days as it went to 0, and then see 1. above.

    Right now your raw food production changes in steps of 4. And cooking capacity (measured in output) changes in steps of 16. So generally if your cooked food in stockpile is not increasing, it's a big thing to do.


    ***See below:
    Suppose I had set my buffer at 500 (I had 50 colonists).
    My cooked food production is 55 a day. Let's assume this is after cutting back from massive overproduction (so my buffer is still left sitting at 500)

    Now suppose I grew to 60 colonists. I now eat 60 food a day, but only make 55.
    This means I have 100 days to notice my cooked food is constantly going down until I hit zero.

    If I grew to 65 instead, that gives me 50 days until I hit zero.

    Some people are (maybe) adding large number of immigrants and not filling up their farm/kitchen workcrew, perhaps?

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    Alternatively alternatively.

    1. Set your buffer at say whatever number (eg: 200). And then let it grow to that.
    2. When you see your are more than 2 days of eating below this number, something is wrong. Fix it.

    So if I am supposed to be holding 200 and have 40 colonists, if I am going below 120, I have to do something. I should have more than 3 days, the time I have is basically 120/deficit (so if I somehow went 10 colonists over my production, this is 12 days).

    You can fill a buffer super fast, and now with doubled food it is very easy to get a how-ever large one. Then the question is just how many people are you adding without changing your farm & kitchen crew?

    Some stats:
    A. 1 maize farmer ~> 4 raw food a day (which turns into 8 cooked Basic Food)
    B. 1 kitchen ~> cooks 8 times a day (which outputs 16 cooked Basic Food)

    Cooking capacity is pretty great, a 5-man kitchen would be looking at over 80 meals. Can easily go above 100 with overseer skill.
    Farming... 2 full maize farms (10 farmers) would supply 40 raw food, enough for the above. I haven't had time to check how much 2 full wheat farms with upgrades and skilled overseers would get you, but 60-80 raw food would not surprise me (this is for the 80 is for more like 6 shifts worked)

    If you pass 80 colonists and are still having only 10 farmers and 5 cooks (and no tech or skillups?) then I don't know... well I thought it wasn't too bad before either but apparently that isn't the case.
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2016
  4. MOOMANiBE

    MOOMANiBE Ah, those were the days. Staff Member

    (FWIW I still want to undo the cooked food doubling; it was done as a stopgap. The main problem is the way we want to solve it via logistics flatly requires Nicholas to fix it, and since he's our main engine programmer his time is always at a premium)

    So the deal with this redo to farms is that it's not actually losing that much complexity. To be more accurate, the complexity that's being lost is incomprehensible ultra-mathy complexity that made it difficult to balance effectively and difficult for players to understand.

    Basically, under the old system, there were a number of ways it was possible to screw yourself out of sustainable food production; farm size acted as a flat cap on productivity, but larger farms introduced additional transit time inefficiency (walking between crops) that was impossible to account for from a balance standpoint. Both of these were super unintuitive.

    The concept of labor cost was effectively incomprehensible to most people, and many players went for the bad crops first because the system was so opaque. Additionally, the complex interplay of growth time + labor time introduced weird behaviors; for example, flatly increasing the growth time of a crop made it -more- efficient over time because the ratio of labor to time decreased, allowing characters to work more crops simeltaneously. The result was a system that took an inordinate amount of work to balance because even finding out the results of our internal numbers took ages of testing.

    The new system removes a BIT of player tweakability (size) but in return will allow us to simply -determine- internally a lot of the numbers that were previously based on the interplay of systems we couldn't effectively control. This means sane balancing and better feedback for players on how effective their farms are being. The crops, in terms of effect, will pretty much all survive the transition, and those few that don't (probably pumpkin) we can make interesting in other ways.
     
  5. Puzzlemaker

    Puzzlemaker Member

    After thinking about it for awhile, I approve of the new farm changes. However, I would like to know what your proposed change for cooking would be. You brought up a good point here:

    https://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/criticism-of-the-kitchen.16397/#post-106938

    I can't really see any easy way to fix that. I suppose you could make cooked food just give more happiness, but with happiness now tied to labor it could still cause a downward spiral if your colony has any hiccups. In real life, cooking food increases the calorie count, so it acting as a multiplier does make a degree of sense.

    So how is it going to work?
     
  6. Mikel

    Mikel Waiting On Paperwork From The Ministry. Forever.

    Will the eventually solution decouple food production from colony layout? As things currently stand, the way food is created heavily influences how things are placed...
     
  7. Palindrome

    Palindrome Member

    What about a system where there is a basic 'starter' crop, lets say wheat, that produces plentiful harvests that are easy to cook into gruel/slop/something grey and wobbly (so quick growing and/or double yields). This will be a very basic 'basic' food, that can't be used to make anything better, that will keep your colony ticking over in the first few days and will provide an emergency food supply if things go bandit shaped but will transparently and intuitively need to be replaced by something better which would naturally require a lot more effort on the part of the player and colony.

    This would provide a soft buffer for new players to experiment and learn farming while also allowing for more creative advanced gameplay.
     
  8. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Properly speaking, Basic Food (ie: Maize Chowder which we are probably first producing, or I guess Stew when people spamming cabbages) was supposed to be that...

    Though an interesting case. If eating this "Edible Food" was triggered at the same level as cooked food, but if it essentially gives a different penalty to just being hungry...
     
  9. Tikigod

    Tikigod Member

    With it being almost 2 weeks since the last experimental release, and 48B being slated for the arrival of the farm changes (amongst some other stuff), anyone else getting the feeling that waiting for this experimental must feel a little like what colonists who know just a little too much about what slumbers below and is just waiting for some curious naturalist to waken it and unleash it upon the world, must feel?
     
    Unforked likes this.
  10. Selly1

    Selly1 Member

    I, for one, welcome our new Triticum overlords!