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Agriculture (Feedback)

Discussion in 'Release 33 Feedback Forum' started by Magos, Sep 4, 2016.

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  1. Magos

    Magos Avatar

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    Am I right in thinking Agriculture is getting work done for R34 ? Anyone know which dev is working on it ?

    A. Agriculture Basics


    1. When you plant a seed it requires 1 x bucket of water from your inventory plus an optional fertizlizer. You may further water the plant up to three times while it grows to increase produce.



    2. Total growing time to maturity/harvest


    i) Group a - 4 days (2 days inside Greenhouse)

    Apple Trees

    ii) Group b - 2 days (24 hours inside greenhouse)

    Cotton

    Nightshade

    Mandrake

    iii) Group c - 1 day (12 hours inside Greenhouse)

    Pumpkin

    Garlic




    3. There is a cooldown timer when you water a plant before you may water it again. This is dependent on the total growing time of the plant. It is also affected by the x 2 growth rate inside greenhouses.


    i) The watering cooldown timer is one third of the total growing time - so cooldown time for Garlic inside a Greenhouse is four hours. Cooldown timer for Garlic outside a Greenhouse is eight hours.

    ii) The watering cooldown timer is not in force when you plant the seed, so you can immediately do the first water. This then sets the cooldown timer.

    iii) You can do a second water one third maturity time later and a third water another one third maturity timer after that.

    iv) This means that the total cost to optimize yield is the seed plus 4 buckets of water - one when planting and three subsequent waters. Total cost eg Seed (16g) + 4 Buckets of water ( 4 x 4 = 16g) = 32 Gold per mature plant





    B. Strategic Changes Needed

    It is too demanding to expect players to be in game to water plants three (or four) equidistant times in a 12 or 24 hour period.






    C. Yield Changes Proposed



    1. Too much Cotton is produced from a Cotton Seed. For a cost of 32 gold the average return is 10 cotton. 6 Greenhouses on a Town size lot can produce 4500 Cotton per 24 hour period.


    Recommendation to consider : Reduce max return to 3 or 4 Cotton. It's a primary resource and is presently next to worthless only weeks into persistence.




    2. Garlic is probably bugged. Where Nightshade and Mandrake return average of 12 reagents per plant Garlic produces a maximum of 7. If you water Garlic twice instead of 3 times it produces 3 per plant.

    Even at max return of 7 Garlic is costing 4.57g to grow compared with a buy cost from an npc vendor of 4 gold. Mandrake and Nightshade cost 2.67 gold to grow compared to a vendor price of 4 gold.

    These are a loss or marginal returns on a considerable amount of work under the present system.


    It's to be noted that Mandrake, Nightshade and Garlic are the only reagents with NPC vendor price set at 4 gold compared to the 6 g for each of the other reagents.



    Recommendation to consider : Increase Garlic yield to 12, increase cost of Garlic, Nightshade and Mandrake to 6 g per unit on NPC Vendors.
     
    Last edited: Sep 4, 2016
  2. Church

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    totally agree expecially pint B
     
  3. kaeshiva

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    Re: Yield Changes:
    10 cotton per plant is only if you water it multiple times at the correct intervals which as you've already stipulated, is very demanding.
    I usually only get 5 from the initial planting/watering as I may not be online/available for the subsequent required waterings. I think the yield is perfectly fine how it is, for the amount of fiddling around and effort you have to put.
    I have two greenhouses full of planters and 4 large planters on a rooftop and it takes me over an hour to plant/reseed this, not counting trips to buy seeds and buckets.

    What I'd personally like to see:
    Ability to let crops go to seed by leaving them unpicked so many days, to reduce the need to keep returning to the cash sink. Perhaps giving something like 5-10 seeds back per plant, if the crop was never harvested.
    Ability to fill up buckets again, because it makes sense and to reduce the need to have a cash sink.
    Both of these things would require a time investment and if we accept that time=money (I could spend an hour filling buckets, or I could go grind green mobs for cash), it shouldn't be too imbalancing but would add complexity and realism to agriculture.
    Both of these could also be boosted via a skill tree under agriculture.

    Agriculture is largely a fire-and-forget activity, it takes days in real time for stuff to grow, its not reasonable to expect players to sit there and watch it do so.

    Currently at a yield of 5 per assuming planting and 1 watering on say, mandrake, its pretty much cheaper to just buy it from the NPC rather than grow it.
    I think yield values need to be looked at as at the moment, reagent farming isn't really worth the effort unless you can commit to the multiple waterings needed.
    Even then, Seed 16, water 4 4 4 = 28g for 10 mandrake, as oposed to buying them for 60g. Is the savings worth the hassle?
    If you only manage to get a yield of 5, its not saving you hardly anything and its still taking all the planting/buckethauling/seedshopping time.

    What I'd like to see is that plants be foragable for producer xp. That would make them worth doing with the current yield rates. Particularly if you had a chance at the special drops (cutworms/beetles from cotton)
     
  4. Cairo Hayden

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    Yes, doesn't it rain enough in-game to make up for all of that watering we have to do to get max return :p
     
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  5. Black Tortoise

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    Yah I am not attentive enough, and in the future wont always be on frequent enough, to get all 3 doses of water in. I almost always jsut get the 5-7 range for cotton yields, so getting less would make me a sad panda. But then again I get it that some people are making thousands of cotton a day.
     
  6. Vodalion [BEAR]

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    thanks for that excellent feedback - fully supported - especially Point B
     
  7. Toff

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    Totally agree with post, for now I'll just buy my regs from the npc vendor. I have confidence that they will address these issues and farming will be fun and rewarding in the future.
     
  8. Tahru

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    I would like there to be visual indicators to tell the difference between ready to be watered and not. It is so frustrating on a large bed to tell where it is watered and isn't.
     
  9. Sixclicks

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    I hope they add some skills to the Agriculture tree such as "Increases chance to harvest seeds from mature plant" (you already can get seeds back, but it seems to be quite rare) and "Small chance of harvesting uncommon ingredients" such as beetle carapaces or cutworms. The chance for uncommon ingredients would of course have to be very low so that it doesn't beat going out into areas with risk to gather these ingredients though.

    It would be nice if there was something like a craftable irrigation system that you could upgrade your planting beds with. This would add a container to the planting bed where you could store buckets of water that would then automatically water plants as they need more water. You would of course have to maintain the amount of buckets in the container to keep it running, but this would greatly reduce they monotony of constantly having to water every single plant one at a time and keep track of when watering will be available again.
     
  10. LoneStranger

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    Regional weather would be an interesting twist. Certain plants should grow better in certain areas of the world. Not North/South/East/West, but on an individual scene basis so that things like coastal or mountain could make a difference. Places that rain more should have an advantage for most plants, but not all.

    Additionally, I feel like agriculture is ripe (no pun intended) for a collection type arm of the system. One of my favorite things to do in Minecraft whenever I start a new world is to go collect the different types of flowers and plant a garden near my primary base. Flowers, brush, each of the tree types--anything that has variations, pretty to look at or not.

    In SotA, there should be plants that may or may not have an actual use or advantage, but are something we can grow and show off to our neighborhood. Perhaps a common few are all over Novia, and the next circle are regional. The third circle would be quest rewards or rare loot. We explore, gather and quest to bring them home to plant or trade.
     
  11. Mercymay

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    I'm trying to plant seeds in a public garden. Trained water plants. How can I get this to level 10 when I cant plant any seeds to water.
     
  12. Spoon

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    Public Gardens are not functional, yet.
    :(

    If you want to try out agriculture and don't have a lot/house then feel free to send me a PM and I can grant you access to some planting beds.
     
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  13. Time Lord

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    ~SOTA Monk~ ~Monastery~ ~Thailand~
    ~Efficiency took president over Interesting~ :(

    I was very disappointed by our Agriculture and Fishing Updates. It's my view, that efficiency took president over making these activities interesting.

    The problem I see within this development, is that combat minded influences through players has effected these latest changes. Instead of making these activities more interesting, they were made more efficient so that the combat minded player could get back to what they enjoy doing most, which is combat. It's this continuing influence which failed to expand our game through our player base.

    Our player base needs expanding, and it's through making non-combat related activities more interesting rather than convenient which can accomplish this. The ability to mass produce is motivated by our wishes to make money, yet when the activity is shortened for it's expediency, it cuts off our ability to cause it to become more of a fun and worth while gaming experience.

    When compared to our combat gaming fun, our Agriculture and Fishing are not competing with the fun we have within our combat gaming experience.

    These should be easy to fix and easy to expand with many simple to program ideas from anyone over the age of 10 o_O and programmable into our game with far less of what our current programmers are capable of.

    Such a game as ours should be like a wheel with a full range of equal gaming fun within it's components, and we seem to have a flat tire right now that needs fixing :(

    [​IMG]
    ~Time Lord~:D
     
  14. majoria70

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    Yes it has been very disappointing. The agriculture update to me was very disappointing and the fact that fishing got totally pushed out until after release. I know we have limits on what can and cannot be done, but these were systems started and never finished as with so much of the game. Did you do the Travian Survey? Feedback on the game are really important to determine the focus, which is not always a good thing because so much of the game needs focused on . *wishes for a down pour of funding from someplace* ;)
     
  15. Time Lord

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    Yes my wonderful friend @majoria70 :) I did take the survey and included comments such as these.
    :oops:
    But I do fear that this comment is the kicker in all this;
    If we are in the final 20% of development, then I'm thinking that our game will be missing a wider player base due to these extremely missing and far under-developed components which are vital to anyone that is not "only looking for that combat game called SOTA" o_O

    o_O It bothers me very much that such great game makers could be so blind to the missing spokes in what should be our complete wheel of fun.

    Here's yet another kicker in all of this; :oops:
    In an early interview with our Lord British (I can't remember the exact public early advertising interview) When asked by the very excited interviewer about our Agriculture, Lord British did make the comment that our SOTA was not going to be competing with "Farmville" (the largest farming game in the world) o_O To that, the interviewer did sound as disappointed as I am now with our present development. Lord British thereafter deflected onto other topics :confused: basically snubbing the very enthusiastic question.

    :rolleyes: Given what we know from that comment, it's a very justified further question of "why not?" o_O yet the interviewer did not ask that very relevant question, given the very simple programming involved for such additions.

    ~The Waiting Game~ o_O
    I do believe that these master Toy Makers of ours will eventually (maybe eons from now) come to a better right mindedness on this subject of our Agriculture as well as Fishing. Just this release they took a direction I was advocating long ago to make our Oracle more sexy or pleasant. Many others scoffed at such an idea when it was first mentioned, but now it seems as though something of all those comments hit home within their thinking. She needed to be more feminine and inviting and now she is :D

    All those comments that the Time Lord wanted to get laid by the Oracle~ :p
    [​IMG]
    :rolleyes: It's not just me, but many that have told them so about our Agriculture and Fishing~ o_O

    [​IMG]
    Farmville could be very easily beaten and thus expand our fan base beyond it's combat audience appeal...

    I currently believe that our Fishing will be more complete in a very long time from now, yet our Agriculture will follow far after that point, but time will (hopefully one day) tell :p

    From an artistic standpoint, we have so many talented artists on staff, that I'm very surprised they have not seen the this missing contrast within our game when seen as a whole. There's extremely large gaping holes in our game as if Mona Lisa had Mona herself missing from it o_O "Everything else within our artwork looks fantastic!" But looks alone don't sell games, yet interest and things that are interesting does, which does give me hope that whenever they decide to step back from their canvas to see what's there, they may see what we've all been seeing within all our missing parts and their lack of quality entertainment.

    But just as with our fishing, I fear that our programmers will skip over the common intricate nature of it and proceed strait into fishing up treasure and monsters to bash, thus completely missing another expanded audience which could expand our player base and thus our funding. I think our game is now seeing the bottoming out of our combat audience's pocket book and barely surviving on what more combat players there are out there, instead of widening their "net".

    Ultima Online was one of the first online Fishing and Agriculture Games on the market, and if we're it's "spiritual successor", then we need to get "spiritual about it" and get back to basics of our Ultima spirituality as a whole :confused:

    ~To Be Whole is to Be Spiritual~
    [​IMG]
    ~Time Lord~o_O
     
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  16. Black Tortoise

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    I eagerly await the questlines, UX enhancements, minigame additions, and adjusted NPC prices for farming ingredients and "craftables" (e.g., regs). I eagerly await the professions of farmer and chef!

    I completely agree that the game needs more focus towards non combat professions and playstyles, and not more enhancements that trivialize resource management in favor of combat playstyle efficiency.
     
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