Realistic Farming DLC

[Brain]

Hi,

This is my second try to post a concept for a Farming DLC after my first on died the expired-session-cookie death. I hope I can recover all my brainstorming.

To make Farming in CapLab more realistic there would be a few changes required to existing features, and a lot more features added:

At the moment the Farm output is hard limited by the Farm size (Small or Large) and the Experience of the workers on it. I would add another Farm type that would maintain rural property not displayed on the map but in THE REGION, which allows upscaling into gigantic proportions. Expenses of these farms increase with the managed rural property, but not linearly (in real world some cost factors benefit from upscaling). The total size of all rural farming in THE REGION is calculated by properties of THE REGIONS environment (and can be further limited by City restrictions)
[*] THE REGION is not visible on the city map and would be too small for the World map. It has features that are defined by the location of the city: temperature, humidity, precipitation, soil fertility, sunshine, elevation, each with a minimum, maximum and average value; also the region is split up in percentages of flats, hills, mountains and water bodies, swamp and deserts. The description of the region will be shown in the Info screen of a selected city.
[*] All these properties will be used to define if certain crops and animals are able to flourish in each of the regions. Crops and Lifestock are defined with condition ranges that they are suitable for and the more THE REGION does support the requirements, the easier (read: cheaper) it can be to raise the crop or lifestock there. If for one of the condition ranges there is no overlap with the requirement ranges, the crop/lifestock is not possible there. If the overlaps are very little, then there is a higher risk in events that destroy crops/lifestock.
[*] The amount of farming in the region can go beyond carrying capacity which would over time decay a regions soil fertility and cause soil erosion, then desertification.
[*] Lifestock and crops require water to flourish and the more crops and lifestock are raised in THE REGION the more water is required to support them. The regions precipitation and water body numbers define how much water can be consumed without causing a drop in groundwater levels - which can, as above, cause desertification.
[*] THE REGION is providing water to the city and it's industries. Some recipes will be adapted to reflect how much water is consumed to produce the product, for example in the real world it takes 3 gallons of water to make a sheet of paper. Water is provided to the factories and farms using magic infrastructure owned by city utilities. (I do not think we need to simulate pipe maintenance and infrastructure in this DLC). The city will invoice the factories accordingly and the numbers can be shown in the corporate firms report. (I will provide another Energy DLC proposal later for invoicing of Electricity and Fuels). The player might start their own water plant in the city to provide water to the city and to factories, but it would require consent from the City (and if you own the City Economic Simulation DLC, one of your party members could be the Major...)
[*] Water can be bought and stored in Warehouses (maybe we have one looking more like a water tower or basin?) and be sold into other regions.
[*] Forestry changes similarly, as in simulating real Forestry processes. If trees are not planted after harvesting trees, there won't be any more after a while. The woods with higher quality take much longer to grow than others. Some woods are not suitable for certain regions. Monocrops are risking a big loss by plagues. Neglecting standards might cause fires and destruction of woods. Certain trees have bad influence on groundwater levels. New technologies for protecting forest soil, harvesting technology.
[*] Corporations that are exposed as water wasters in a region with water shortage might lose brand rating
[*] Crop farming can be improved by a Fertilizer budget in the Farm unit
[*] The player can research technologies like GMO but also Ecologic Farming, Meat processing standards, to provide crops flagged with these properties. These flags on the raw materials can be inherited by resulting end products and then used as advertising advantage - or disadvantage (disadvantage: city rules products must be labeled with GMO, and people reject it more or less).
[*] Products can be branded to be GMO free or not, ecologic farming or not, caged or free range lifestock. Consumers might have a product awareness tendency to buy one or another depending on trends triggered by events. A GMO scandal and people would tend towards to traditionally produced crops. A meat scandal in a free range farm might cause people to mistrust their kind of foods.
[*] New Utilities: Waste Processing/Recycling and Water processing. Can be player managed or city managed. The Waste Processing facility will receive city trash and biological waste and will sell recycled products and fertilizer. The quality and amount of recycled products is roughly calculated on the cities consumed products months earlier. for example a fridge sold at that time will cause available recycled Aluminum (properly spelled: Aluminium). It would not make sense to track this for each item but it could be averaged out over all the sold fridges and so on. The recycled Aluminum in this case would have the quality of the average products contributing to the waste. There will be percentual losses on the amounts and quality of the recycling resources, and Technology can be developed to reduce losses.
[*] recycled materials, when used in industry allows to flag the products made from it a environmentally friendly due to recycled materials, as advertising advantage.

That is roughly what I remember from last time I wrote it down... I hope you like it.

[David]

Hi Brain,

Cool ideas!

Do I understanding correctly that the REGIONS are not visible on any maps and they are only displayed as text info on a scrollable list on a UI?

Would you add a poll to this post, like what you did for the Realistic Mining DLC post?

David

[Brain]

Do I understanding correctly that the REGIONS are not visible on any maps and they are only displayed as text info on a scrollable list on a UI?

Yes, from the users perspective there is not much to see in THE REGION. A picture representing roughly the region climate zone and maybe its dominant features (coastlines, Mountains, Forests, Meadows) or so would be enough for some ambience, the rest would be tabular data, like in farmland available<->farmland occupied, same for forestry, and some environmental data like soil depth, fertility and weather situation, which crops are growing here at the moment, what harvests would be expected. In the Mining DLC suggestion there could be similar information for mining efforts out there.
Information about expected harvests might be useful for stock market trading. Buying futures on agriculture products, anyone? Big farming corp crops just hit by tornado or early frost? Better expect their shares to drop then...

I might copy the poll options from the Mining DLC in a moment.

[David]

I think it will have a stronger appeal if the regions are displayed visually.

Due to its incompatibility with the current system in Capitalism Lab in terms of map display scale, do you think it will be viable as a separate game?

[Brain]

It could be, theoretically, separate, if you want to only simulate the gaining of crops and lifestock cycles. Maybe having it based on real mapping data (like a google maps overlay).
I think a fresh start Capitalism game would be good,

If I'm going into a brainstorm, I could visualize a system based on real maps, (google maps/earth api?), then projecting some game managed data on it.

[David]

What do you think about this alternative approach:

On the world map under the CES DLC, for tiles that have not been used for founding cities, they are rural areas. The player can click on a tile on the world map to view the rural map, which is essentially the same as a city map visually. But there will be no economic activities except farming and mining.

The size of a farm will be much larger on the rural map as opposite to the maximum size of 4x4 on the city map. The player will be given an option to place additional farming tiles next to a main farm. For example, the main farm is 4x4 and you could place additional farming tiles to increase its size to 7x7.

And roads will not be placed on a rural map.

[Brain]

It would work, but with this game's visual representation capabilities I still think that looking at the abstraction of farms in tabular format and not seeing the farm icons at all is better than looking at a flat iso lawn intersected by road layout in a way that would make any civil engineer cry...

Sorry, my German gene for giving you my blunt opinion came through

One thing that I find with this game most repetitive is that half the time I am typing SPACE and loop through all the capital investments to see if any indicator shows a bad trend. I do use the map features exactly on two occasions: looking for a natural resource, comparing them, and finding real estate locations for new buildings. For half of the buildings the location does not even matter, like I place headquarters and R&D out at the edges because of property prices only. I would play this game totally map free if I could pick real estate from a sortable/filterable table instead. And even in this the map is only barely suitable, the mini map is hard to read and with current times screen resolution it should be renamed to micro map or maybe nano map.

Your Idea would be more tempting if your screenshot would look more like this:

realfarm.png (892.99 KiB) Viewed 3658 times

[David]

It is a good looking mock-up screenshot that you have put together.

And roads will not be placed on a rural map.

As I wrote in my last message, the rural map wouldn't have roads.

But after seeing your mock-up screenshot, I realized that it will be more realistic to add roads sparsely on the rural map, probably 20-30 tiles apart from each other.

[Brain]

h

As I wrote in my last message, the rural map wouldn't have roads.

But after seeing your mock-up screenshot, I realized that it will be more realistic to add roads sparsely on the rural map, probably 20-30 tiles apart from each other.

True - but lets say, decision is to have rural farms on maps, farms should be allowed to extend their assigned fields, Farming is about using lots of land to make lots of crops. Or to heard lifestock. A Farm does not end at the fence of the main building right after the barn.
Maybe this can be done by adding property purchase function to farms as +/- buttons and the map will assign such fields automatic.

[David]

Yep, the player will be given an option to place additional farming tiles next to a main farm. For example, the main farm is 4x4 and you could place additional farming tiles to increase its size to 7x7.

There will be a button on the farm's UI for enabling the mode for adding new farm fields next to an existing farm. You will be able to add as many 1x1 farm fields as you want so long as they are connected to an existing farm or an existing farming field.