"Crop stuff"

[Sevenless]

Seeing as this has come up a lot, I decided to just PM* Loftar and clear things up for everyone. I sent him this PM

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.

And I got this as a reply:

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.

Seeing as it's open to discussion (loftar you and your tricksy double negatives), I figured this is a good place to do so. Please comment and bring out those opinions My thoughts on the topic:

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]

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.

[Sevenless]

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.

The issue with the rotation junk is that it's a permanent gain at the cost of effort capital. This is the problem we're already having with the purity system all over again, and I think it could possibly trivialize the value of end tiers for villages who do the work properly.

Sure you need 5 hay/field or whatever (300% influence is enough to make gain on all bars as you go iirc), but eventually that 5hay/field is translating into T3 and some T2 products. I worry it's right back to the issue of broken capital investment game design.

Edit: And yeah, I'm found of that fallow field idea as a way to eliminate hay spam. I don't even think the invariance penalty would stop the need for hay if that's all we changed.

[Potjeh]

I never liked how easy it is to spam higher tiers when you build up the fields. IMO the drain should increase and the base gain should decrease (400% of 0 is still 0 )if you plant the same crop over and over again. The minigame here is maximizing the efficiency with which you use your metres. The current spammy approach would obviously be very suboptimal.

Of course, we'd need crops for all the different drain & gain combos for this to work well.

[MagicManICT]

I'm all for the current mechanic (it makes sense as anything you grow effects the quality of the soil), but what was on the wiki was an exact quote from the the alpha forums. If it's working as intended, that's fine. Let's just clarify (looks like we've gotten that) and maybe come up with some concepts to minimize the influence loss other than "Three Field System". Maybe another type of fertilizer is needed? Maybe setting the fields to fallow for a crop rotation?

[Procne]

I like the current system. It is harder to raise influence for 3rd tier, but at the same time it promotes planning your crops in such a way that you get tier 2 products while raising second influence bar.

With the old way you simply raised one bar and got only tier 1 products, then you raised second bar with crop that didn't use first one and got only tier 1 products. Now, since it doesn't matter which crop you use, as they all drain all bars, you can actually use crop that uses first bar and at least get tier 2 products.

So in the end tier 2 products are more common, tier 3 are more rare. If we get more crops in the future, we will have more choice of what tier 2 products we get while raising second influence bar. And that would be fun I think

[Darwoth]

makes me laugh everytime i see people ***** about how an extremely tedious and grindy aspect of the game is not annoying enough