Salem

Sevenless wrote:

Procne wrote:Thanks.

While we are at farming - do you think you could pull some info from loftar / jorb about influence bars? The quote in your guide and on wiki says that each crop should only drain the 2 bars it's using, while, since few months, each crop drains all bars, except the ones it uses. It has quite big impact on increasing influence and field rotation.

It's been eating the community alive as to whether this is intentional or not. Mind weighing in? The lowly non-masons don't seem comfortable with PMing you.

loftar wrote:That was at least intentional. The two bars indicated are the ones that are used to influence crop tier, but points are indeed always taken from all crop elements. That doesn't mean the question of whether it should be that way isn't open to discussion, however.

Right now the effect of this is that you power level a field for a specific end game crop. Each crop requires a specific set of input fields. You cycle them on, put your crop of choice on for X generations, and then repeat with the boosting crops. The effect is something along the lines of 60% of the time a field produces what you want, 40% of the time you produce T1 side products while boosting. I don't know the exact numbers because I simply *hate* collecting hay as a mechanic.

Changing this to only draining two specific bars would "make more sense", as it seems kinda wonky logic that it drains a bar it isn't using exactly. However, what you'll find is that it becomes possible to produce max tier product for all fields if you rotate in the proper order. Mid tier products wouldn't be controllable though. In retrospect, I don't like the way that would theoretically work. Final tier products would become easier to permanently produce (there's a requirement for a non-trivial amount of hay production to keep it running), while mid tier products would rely on the old boosting system still. With that in mind, I'm not sure I'd like it to work that way.

Thought about the hay mechanic: It's come up before (from me I think?). Planting grass seed to let the field lay fallow. It could have 0 effect on the bars, but after harvest the influence % for the next crop planted would be preset at a high value. It's an option that would allow large villages to get influence in return for larger areas of land reserved for crops (ie more silver upkeep spent) and would significantly reduce the ability of bots to help out. Hay itself could be removed as an influence fert as well under this system.

Potjeh wrote:I definitely agree that it shouldn't drain the third bar, the focus needs to be on strategic rotation rather than bruteforcing tiers. 2nd tier crops should be a bit more involved too when we get more crops that use different metre combos.

That's a nice implementation of fallow fields you got there.

As for hay spam, I think what we really need is an invariance penalty for fertilizers.