==[REQUEST] == Seeding animation

[av93]

Not a mahout but a walking man for others animations

[Sundiata]

I still really fail to see why elephants should be seeding anything... They shouldn't.

I also still fail to see why worker elephants wouldn't have a mahout... They should.

 

For actual human farmers, it would be nice to see them using a hoe in the "construction" of the field, instead of hammers. Then they could just use the hoe to go from one end of the field to the other as the "construction" animation, creating rows of fertile, exposed soil in the process (one person going up and down 5 parallel rows, or 5 people, each going down their own row). Then seeding. Then some more use of the hoe in random spots on the field, to represent weeding. It would be sublime to animate the crop itself as well. After seeding you'd see the crop "grow", simply by seeing the crop rise from underneath the ground (reverse sinking). When it's matured (preferably yellowed in color), the farmers would use a sickle for harvesting. It would be nice if the farming could thus become a cyclical thing, instead of continuous food income, you'd see workers harvesting at set intervals of 6 minutes or so. Regardless of when you construct the farm, all farms across the map for every civ will be on the same cycle (food income determined by amount of workers on the farm during the cycle). So there will be a "harvest season" every 6min or so, which could add strategic depth (interrupting someones harvest will cost them that harvest, as the fields turn fallow).  

[Stan`]

15 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

I still really fail to see why elephants should be seeding anything... They shouldn't.

The idea was just for them to carry grain which would then be seeded by units.

 

For new farmland paradigm see :

 

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1318

https://code.wildfiregames.com/D227

14 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

For actual human farmers, it would be nice to see them using a hoe in the "construction" of the field, instead of hammers.

Here they would be seeding instead of using hammers.

[Sundiata]

2 hours ago, Stan` said:

The idea was just for them to carry grain which would then be seeded by units.

I understand, I just don't agree with the logic. I'm sure elephants were sometimes used for ploughing, but even then, they always had a handler, not withstanding the fact that they would have overwhelmingly used oxen. I really just don't like the idea of animals acting with a human sense of agency. 

[EDIT] I misread a little. So the elephant carries seed while a unit does the seeding? Still seems just as illogical. Why wouldn't the people carry the seeds themselves? Why do they need a massive elephant on such a small patch of farmland, to carry something that they could easily carry themselves? I imagine that elephants are expensive. What is a lowly peasant doing with it? Etc.. 

 

I like the first of the farmland paradigms, and actually suggested very similar mechanics as this in the past. I'm strongly in favor. It's natural, organic, immersive, realistic and adds depth to farm placement in a way that's not only strategically interesting, but important. It's sad that it's from 8 years ago and a much more convoluted approach was chosen instead. 

Quote

Farmlands

There should be a set of terrain textures on the terrain that give a big gather boost if farm fields are built there. Anywhere from +50% to +100% gathering rate, depending on playtesting. These "farmland" areas then become areas of contention for players to fight over. The player can choose to seed farms anywhere they wish, but they will be considerably more efficient if placed on farmland.

Efficiency Overlay There can also be an overlay for the farm field when the player is choosing where to place it. This will explicitly tell the player whether they're placing the farm field on efficient farmland or non-efficient land.

Green - When the farm field is being hovered within the farmland terrain adequately (and will receive the efficiency bonus when built there).

Yellow - When the farm is being placed on non-farmland (and will get no efficiency boost).

Red - When obstructed.

Farmland terrain textures in Atlas

A similar technique should be used for farmlands as is already being used for 'city tile' or 'road' textures. Each biome will have its own farmland texture. It'll get placed in a new "Farmland" tab in the terrain panel by an XML file (exactly like what is done with city/road textures). If you don't know what I'm talking about with the city/road textures, then please look in mods/public/art/textures/terrain/types/biome-mediterannean/medit_city_pavement.xml for an example. That file gives the medit_city_pavement terrain its properties and places it in the "city" tab in Atlas.

I just hope that "farmland terrain textures" doesn't mean magically pre-ploughed fields, like the ones visible in some of the maps.

I'm a huge fan of the color-graded "Efficiency Overlay" when choosing a fertile location for a new field. Then there would be no need for pre-ploughed fields. Just make sure that those areas which are indicated with a green color actually correspond to green/lush terrain textures, and yellow and red correspond to dry shrubbery and desert terrain textures or obstructions like rocks. 

I also think that this approach can compliment my suggestions from the previous post, which rather focusses on the specific sequence of the animations (ploughing→ seeding→ crops grow while farmers are weeding→ harvesting→ rinse and repeat). The cyclical aspect of farming doesn't conflict with any of these suggestions either, but compliments the natural sequence of animations. 

Apart from actually choosing a fertile spot for your farms, it also doesn't add any micro at all, since we're just talking about a cycle of animations. Just that a large amount of food comes in every 6 minutes or so (cyclical), as opposed to small continuous trickle of food as it is now. The former is more realistic and strategically interesting, while the latter is just a boring old convention from the 90's.

 

I don't like the second paradigm that was linked. It's unrealistic, incredibly unintuitive, illogical, confusing etc... How are players expected to make sense of this?

Quote

Current field implementation have several drawbacks:

• it should be disfavored in start game (berries and hunt are to be preferred) while still possible as some maps miss enough other resources.
• it should be more sensitive to raids (a raid which does not destroy a field but severely damage it should have an effect on its gather rate, while currently it's enough to garrison its gatherers and wait for the end of the storm)

To solve that, i had proposed some changes some time ago (see some discussion of this concept in https://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?/topic/20406-changes-in-farms/ ) which i've revived here in a working patch. The main ideas are:

• the gather rate depends on the health of the field (which symbolize their fertility)
• the fields are now built very quickly (15s build time), but their initial health is only a small fraction of the max health (30% in the patch), and thus the initial gather rate is small (30% of its full value)
• the field health increases slowly when it is gathered, and decreases when no gatherers (so in case of raid, if we garrison all our farmers, the productivity of the fields will decrease, possibly up to the destruction of the field).
• the initial increase of health when worked on is relatively slow and the initial decrease of health when unattended relatively large, so that fields are less an interesting source of food at start game, until we have researched the irrigation (available only at town phase) which improves the increase of health when gathered and reduces the decrease when unattended.

Really, this is bad game design in my opinion, like our current farming system, it lacks logic and intuition. 

Edited October 15, 2019 by Sundiata

[Stan`]

27 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

I understand, I just don't agree with the logic. I'm sure elephants were sometimes used for ploughing, but even then, they always had a handler, not withstanding the fact that they would have overwhelmingly used oxen. I really just don't like the idea of animals acting with a human sense of agency. 

[EDIT] I misread a little. So the elephant carries seed while a unit does the seeding? Still seems just as illogical. Why wouldn't the people carry the seeds themselves? Why do they need a massive elephant on such a small patch of farmland, to carry something that they could easily carry themselves? I imagine that elephants are expensive. What is a lowly peasant doing with it? Etc.. 

True, true, but currently they are used for building anyway,  so I was offering an easy solution. Since it was gonna help building unless someone changes the way it works, it might as well do that. I guess @Imarok could remove the ability for worker elephants to build farms, but that's out of the scope of the patch. The goal of the patch is just to allow playing a different animation when a unit is building a structure, or a farm. That's it, that's the scope.

Making units go back and forth on the field sound nice however it's kinda complicated to do, as the person adding that feature would have to make it generic for every building , and every unit which has to take other units in account, shape of field, etc

33 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

I just hope that "farmland terrain textures" doesn't mean magically pre-ploughed fields, like the ones visible in some of the maps.

No it means however that terrain textures would be used to define the fertility of the land. So while farmland terrain textures might serve purpose, any texture could. Like let's say grass_a or cliff_b

 

34 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

I like the first of the farmland paradigms, and actually suggested very similar mechanics as this in the past. I'm strongly in favor. It's natural, organic, immersive, realistic and adds depth to farm placement in a way that's not only strategically interesting, but important. It's sad that it's from 8 years ago and a much more convoluted approach was chosen instead. 

I think it's worth noting that while convoluted, the current one was way easier to implement And other than the lack of motivation to work on the paradigm, there were also very heated discussions about it, and it was not a trivial issue.
 

[Sundiata]

@Stan` I always appreciate you taking the time to explain, thanks!  

[Stan`]

I believe it's important to take time to explain. Doesn't always prevent heated discussions, but sometimes this text format, like any other form communication can be misleading for the reader. So you're welcome

[balduin]

I do agree 100% with @Sundiata's post:

Regarding the elephants. They should have a mahout on the back. I think this is doable. Right now, the Mauryan worker elephant just does everything by itself, that looks strange. @Sundiata mentioned that elephants currently act as "with a sense of agency". To put this in a different perspective, I assume if an elephant would walk around on its own, the elephant would probably do what an elephant does for most of the day: eat grass. The elephant certainly would not help building or do other work for humans. There should simply be a human on the back (mahout) of every elephant, unless it is a wild elephant belonging to Gaia (the map) eating grass..

---

In regards to fields. As an intermediate step. How about fields only cost gold and the moment they are build they already are done building and have a health of 100%. This way, no unit would have to build a farm. Instead fields start as empty patch of plugged land. Then crops slowly grow in four steps: earth is ploughed, young green plants are appearing,  they turn green/yellow and finally the wheat is fully developed. You can only harvest if the animation is completed. Workers just do what they do right now. If no worker is working for x amount of time on the field they go back to being brown ploughed earth.

---

As for the future of farming.  In Unknown Horizons you build a farm. The farm has a certain radius in which you can place fields. The fields cost only money (that could be gold in 0 A.D.) and are build instantly. Stronghold and Stronghold Crusader do something similar, with the difference that you build a farm, which has fields already attached to it. A farmer then goes and starts working on the field.

Maybe we could do something similar. One idea would be to have a farm building which already comes with fields attached (every worker has one field). The current field has a capacity for 5 workers. In the future a standard farm would have space for 5 fields. Instead of placing the worker into the field we add the worker into the farm. The farm is then responsible for managing the worker and field animation (state of the field). As long as the worker, works the worker starts ploughing the field, seeding, waiting (grops need time to grow), harvesting, bringing the harvest to the civic center and then repeat it. As I said every worker just works on it's own field. If only one worker works the productivity would be 20%, the more workers work the more the farm productivity goes up. 2 workers 40%, 3 workers 60% etc. In case, the worker is killed or abandons the field, the field will stay the same and after x amount of time just go back to being a brown patch of land.

Fields could be smaller in the future so that a farm does not take too much space. Currently fields are huge. We could also have farms with less fields and more fields depending on the civilization.

Another advantage would be that if the fields belong to a farm. Enemy units just have to capture the farm building. Currently, units always attack the fields, which is annoying. In the future it would be enough to destroy or capture the farm.

Furthermore, implementing a feature where farms can only be build on fertile land would be nice. It is pretty unrealistic to place farms anywhere in a desert and expect wheat to grow just fine.