Realistic Farming DLC

[David]

I have forwarded your ideas for a Farming DLC to the dev team. In general we like your ideas. We have a design doc on a Farming DLC that was written a while ago. I've reformatted the doc a bit to make it more readable and I am now posting the doc here as an attachment for your download.

You may take a look at it and let me know which parts of the design doc you like. Any comments and suggestions on how it may integrate with your ideas (like water supply to plants) will be welcome.

[Brain]

why limit it to 7x7?

[David]

why limit it to 7x7?

I was stating it as an example. It will not be limited to 7x7.

[Brain]

Hi,

I was just looking at your document. Some recommendations and comments below:

Organic pesticides

Nothing like that really exists. The closest thing to organic pest treatment is to find something higher in the food chain that keeps the usual pests under control.
I would replace it with concepts of monoculture vs polyculture

Should organic products be indicated with an icon?

In modern user interfaces it would be called an overlay or decorator - a little image overlaying the main icon. You might have seen that on the folders synced with Dropbox or similar. It should look a little like these:

corn-no-gmo.png (32.29 KiB) Viewed 2127 times

corn-organic.png (32.8 KiB) Viewed 2127 times

corn-gm.png (30.68 KiB) Viewed 2127 times

I would say, all these decorators are necessary, and maybe the city major might decide if "contains GMO" labels would be mandatory; while the "contains GMO" flag should progress into food products that used them, the "100%organic" one will be lost if any other food component in a product does not have that flag.

each of the labels might have a variable malus/bonus to the unlabeled ones depending on events like a food scandal or a farm accident or so.

Fertilizers -affect crop quality and the yield
Pesticides – affect the yield

Pesticides affect quality too - negatively if used too much.

Yield – new formula:
crop yield (the qty of crop harvested in each harvest)
= pesticides quality * 70% + fertilizer quality * 30% + rainfall

how complicated would it be to apply a sigmoid function on pesticide and fertilizer input?


I would change the formula into
ideal conditions yield (tons/ha) * farm size * soil fertility factor * present pests factor * growing period weather factor
soil fertility factor is a number of 0-1 where 0 is desert and 1 is a meter of fertile soil. With each harvest it drops by 1%. This drop can be reduced/negated by adding compost/manure/mineral fertilizer, or have a cover crop on it. Applying mineral fertilizers products would cause to lose the "100% organic" flag on its crops for the next 5 years.
present pests factor is a negative sigmoid function between 1 and 0 where the size of the farm, the years of growing a single crop and the application of pesticides/pest control are contributing.
weather factor is calculated weekly/monthly accumulatively - 1 would mean the whole growing period the weather conditions were ideal. Impacts can be too cloudy, not enough rain, too much rain, extreme weather events, where the latter one can easily destroy 90% of a harvest.

Some types of crops can only grow on land with fertile soil

nothing really grows where soil is not fertile. It would be better to turn this into a soil acidity property.
Here is a table about different crops and ph ranges: https://harvesttotable.com/vegetable-cr ... olerances/

transport them throughout the country to supply them to all of the people at a reasonable transportation cost

I would not bother in this DLC about transport - this is a whole different story about providing specific vehicles and ships and planes for different goods, hiring transport companies etc...

[David]

Hi Brain, your comments make a lot of sense.

nothing really grows where soil is not fertile. It would be better to turn this into a soil acidity property.

So there should be two separate attributes for soil: 1) soil fertility and 2) soil acidity, right? Do you think a normal user can handle this much detail without getting confused?

On a separate note, I just bought a game called Farm Manager 2018 yesterday and have been playing it. The game has nice graphics and tons of details but the micromanagement is excessive. It requires you to assign individual employees for every single task manually. When there are 3-5 farming fields, it is manageable. But when there are 10 or more fields, the micromanagement is unbearably tedious.

But other than the tedious micromanagement, the game does a good job simulating a farm. Have you tried this game? If so, do you think the Realistic Farming DLC for Capitalism Lab can differentiate enough from this game from a marketing point of view?

[Brain]

Hi,

I haven't played the Farm manager, my knowledge comes from living with a permaculture expert.

Soil fertility is important to the player to keep his yield up. Soil acidity is not really an attribute the player can tamper with, it is more like an environmental condition, like average temperature, sun light and rainfall, defining what crops can ideally grow at certain locations. While changing soil acidity is technically possible, compared to the farming itself it is more like a terraforming process. It would be done as last option if there is no other place where you could grow some crop high in demand. I would not bother in simulating acidity control. Alternatively if at all I would simulate this by adding a row for acidity control to expenses for growing crops in unsuitable soil.

[David]

reasonable transportation cost
I would not bother in this DLC about transport - this is a whole different story about providing specific vehicles and ships and planes for different goods, hiring transport companies etc...

It seems to me that adding more realism alone to the farming may not make the game more fun, as someone has voted on the poll about the concern of adding too much complexity. But combining it with transportation will make a difference.

Maybe the right approach is to take some elements that emphasize regional difference, like soil acidity and forget about others, like GMO, pests, diseases, and organic farming.

[Brain]

We could have a "Realistic Transportation DLC" first that adds ships, planes, trains, trucks (not necessarily visually presented in this UI) together with airports, docks, freight stations and hauliers, that would be contracted by factories to deliver goods within the city or worldwide, with appropriate vehicles. This would add a time constraint into the business transaction, it will take longer to provide bread in a NY grocery store if your supplier sits in Sydney, and there might be quality loss on the way. And there might be needs to set up delivery chains where direct routes are not possible (example: Cars Munich/Germany to Emden/Germany on train, then transported to Amsterdam on road for international shipping, reloading on container ship and sent to NY, back onto train to depot near Atlanta before being delivered to the tradesman in Huntsville). Generally I could come up with a lot of brainstorming in this section too. I just think that it should be rolled out in a separate phase before or after this Farming DLC.

[David]

Do you think vehicles should be animated in the Transportation DLC, or just displayed on the UI as static images?

There is a discussion about this at viewtopic.php?f=35&t=4173&start=10#p23511

Right now, there is no conclusion on this and any inputs are welcome.

[Brain]

Before you invest into animated transportation, please put more priority in UI scaling - the minimap hurts. While watching a truck might be a little fun, when you have 16 players with twenty farms, factories, mines and stores each on the city map it becomes quite cluttered, you run into pathfinding and collision detection issues, Traffic deadlocks etc. I don't think with the current UI this would be an worthy investment. As player curious on what is currently on the road I would be happy with a table where I can properly filter for sources and targets and can see a freight BOM for each vehicle and route step, calculated costs, pickup date and time, ETA. When you like to make it fancy, an icon of the current vehicle type of a delivery and one progress bar for each route step and the total route.