Is agriculture back in the game?

I´m not filthy rich. What I gain in loot and plunder I give out for food and stuff I buy so I don´t have much gold.

You can plant deco plants if you find them unproductive but want the look.

 

No part of the original design includes elements unique to time management games. There is no clock limiting how much you can get done in a day beyond how long you can play, there is no energy meter restricting how much you can get done before resting. If SotA is designed to be a time management game, it is a miserable failure at it. Farming has clock associated with when plants can be water creating a situation where you can maximize yield by logging on at the right times, but unless you are farming so heavily that you have to water continually to maximize your plant growth, that's not time management and if you are, you need to have the game taken away from you.

 

You are wrong again. It's nothing personal, it's all the time management elements that are in our game:

• Sun Magic
• Moon Magic
• POT Sieges
• Cool Down Times
• 3 different crop timing groups which all react to whether they are in a basement or not.

All are time management game elements.

We are all well off here if this were reality, but in reality we would need to eat or sell the carrot or head of letus and further process the cotton.

Plastic plants are tacky which is a style, but far less than we had before it was ended.

We had a nice fleshed out and developed agriculture game that had no reasons to end.
~TL~

 

Ok, so I'm a bit puzzled what the actual issue is here....

We start with:

But then:

Responded with:

I'm genuinely not looking to troll here but understand what the issue is.

 

No, those are timed elements, your definition is so overly broad as to be meaningless. A time management game is a game where the clock controls gameplay, Stardew Valley or Minit are classic examples, something like Cultist Simulator is a bit more esoteric of an example and SotA is not an example. It's like calling baseball a lawn care maintenance game because it has grass and the condition of that grass influences the game.

 

For happening without reason and having been encouraged, developed and totally funded, I count it as a loss of established game and was wondering when agriculture will return in it's established norm, if ever.

There seems allot of reluctance as if it was some sort of cult decision where no one knows anything and sure doesn't want to fund out.

"I think", we ran out of money, thus losing the programer who stopped mid reprograming agriculture and therefore unable to replace it back into our program.

That's pure speculation but I'm sure it wasn't planned that way. It was just left or lost on the cutting room floor file maked, "he doesn't work here anymore".

Agriculture was just simply lost and abandoned leaving only an elaborate skeleton behind with no reason now to be as elaborate as it is.

It's flesh was torn off leaving it's lost meat's whereabouts unknown.
~Time Lord~

 

Let's simplify the question, @Time Lord why should farmers be guaranteed a profit when blacksmiths, bakers, tanners and carpenters are not?

 

My Grandma would still have made Markklößchensuppe from that (Bone Marrow Dumpling Soup) and you keep just complaining for a very, very narrow part of the game that does not work like you would like it too.

 

I hope you'll forgive me if I haven't read all the replies but it seems to me that you don't understand the RIGHT intervention by Time Lord. What he tries to say is that over time the game has lost and is losing more and more "depth" and this is a bad thing because by continuing like this there will be fewer and fewer reasons to play the game in a "horizontal" or "vertical" way because everything it will be FLAT. I deeply agree with this opinion and we should reflect on what to do to restore (one plant at a time if needed) longevity and hopes of survival in this game. Do you want an example?? it used to be that it took YEARS to get an Epic artifact enchanted at Endgame level and an Enedgame gear. No one had them and there were 1) farmers grinding and selling 2) players buying 3) merchants trading around this scarcity. Then it was decided to increase the droprates in a CRAZY way to attract casual players. The result: Casuals have come and gone! the game of loyal players (Farmers, Buyers and Merchants) has been reset and they too have abandoned. Think people before answering "if only cotton is profitable, plant only cotton" because one piece of the game at a time yours becomes less and less rich.

 

I don't agree with this at all. They have made choices to balance certain aspects and limit abuse but the game has gotten more and more deep over the years.

 

But really? And where is the attention to the depth of the game, for example in the choice to insert the "vendor listing" which is certainly very convenient for those same casual players I was talking about before but with facts to be REDUCED/RESET:

1) The fun of trying to get well positioned vendors for a merchant

2)The depth of advertising your sellers

3) The depth of having to search (round and round) for the best suppliers.

As someone much wiser than me said in a beautiful writing "what for some is an inconvenience for others represents an aspect of one's game"

Unfortunately, the current fortunes of the game and of the average user are a direct consequence of some choices (certainly made in good faith) but completely wrong. Continuing to repeat the mantra that now everything is more beautiful and balanced will not increase the number of players unfortunately

 

Are you saying that the town-wide vendor search is somehow turning away new players?

 

I live in a farming community. Not an industrial farming community, but one that grows and sells as if it were a real place. But further, that was a gaming mech that was established and you defend it's loss.

This does not explain "the choice" <--<< you call it... I call it a development stopped mid-implementation, as that change was to place "treated seeds" into our Agriculture game.

~Time Lord~

 

I wasn't attempting to explain the choices they make. I'm not part of their decision making process. If you want to know why then you'll have to ask them.

 

Issue? I don't think there really is an issue. It's hard to have a discussion with people that aren't playing the game anymore. Your time will be spent better doing anything else.

 

I think the "issue" is that Portnip reduced the amount of gold you get for selling your farmed goods to NPC merchants. They have always said that selling produced goods to NPCs for profit was not something that should happen, so being able to grow stuff and make profit by selling to NPCs was likely an anomaly.

 

Now I want to explain to all you quest-heads how this piece of our gaming program is important...

At it's core, SOTA is a set of dungeon master tools. All Lord British Games have always always always, been D&Ding with tools that enhaced this shared illusion called RPG.

@Barugon is correct in so far as things get over-grown within sontinued development programing, which is why I bring this up each 6 months after agriculture's gold-feedback loop's removal, because the loop supported the crops being "played with". Cotton was and is still the most profit making crop (before and after the loss), as if the other crops were not necessities for life as much as NPC's are crazy about Cotton.

We have an opportunity to either replace the same gold-loop back into the game to support the RPG Reality, or adopt a deeper RPG Reality with all new gold values to feed that loop for each crop.

We have the opportunity to end industial agriculture through a more RPG styled seed availibility more fitting to a distant planet recovering from a catastrophe.

For instance: No one here can find a local store where 20,000 Cotton Seeds are sold next to 20,000 of each type of seed, and so, the NPC providing the seeds is not RPG, they are industrial more fitting in a modern world that is not recovering from a global catastrophe.

..........................................

Quick Response:

I agree, with continually dropping player numbers (from back in the time when we had agriculture), coinciding with your observation that it's more and more difficult to explain the game to new players, there seems a Role Playing D&D Reality inability crisis of not depicting a believable fantasy. We lost Tracy Hickman who could do that type of thinking much better. SOTA is far from being a believable place when a Carrot or head of letus, has no value within a world effected by catastrophe. All basic food would be worth more than gold, but certainly not worth less than the seed itself. Basic food would be at the center of their consern, but our game currently has the opposit.

Much the same as making a potion, most all of our prepared foods are not food, they are enhancers. Our foods are not the NPCs prepared and consumed foods.

--------------------------------

We have the opportunity to make a crop gold loop better than the last...

A bag of mixed seeds would be more R of for the RPG as well as end industrial agriculture. Those bags of seeds could be purchased with a set number of whatever mixed seeds, where the player must grow & harvest the entire bag in order to be in that gold-loop recovering cost of seed and effort. This would cause the player to have a time schedual challenge with their real life schedual. No other element of our game's programing has the qualities of agriculture, in gambling that your personal real life time schedual would allow for a success throughout those crop's tendings. A player could save all their seeds from bags, sepperating them into pure bags, yet at some time, the player would have to fit a short and long maturing crop, as well as (cotton ext) medium growth cycle into their real life demands.


SOTA as a program feature, enhances individual dungeon master abilities, "at a price" and invites new players as the audience for those player made D&D tools to be enjoyed through the reactions of others...
"others who have not played the game, both old and new".

A Bag of Seeds is just one example of how we could fix all of agriculture's believability, economic and problems. But this isn't a quest of mine to just get the gold-loop back, we have a D&D tool that we are either forgetting, leaving behind, or however lost. There is a vast opportunity lost, when we decide that a carrot has no worth in a world in catastrophe.

Making less than cotton... the common crop-npc-gold-loops were lost and need to be returned, not forgotton.

As @Adam Crow rightly points out, it's hard to get people to share our depicted reality... and I say that, "that's the problem".
~Time Lord~

 

Yes, exactly, and with that same past developer who's agriculture works ended mid-stream, combined with his work done with Shipping Containers, I can't help but speculate that the 2 could have had a link which would bring agriculture into our container system, which is much a more desirable outcome for gainful end product delivery reward.

~Time Lord~

 

Well, in the modern world there are seed shops where you can buy seeds in masses but that should not be normal for a preindustrial society like in Novia.
I fully agree that no ingame merchant should have an endless amount of seeds (or any other items) available. At the very least they should have a daily amount that can be depleted and is renewed only on the next (novian) day.

The moonfall catastrophe has not happened recently but before the Obsidian takeover who in turn have fallen already again if I get the timeline right. More than enough time for farmers to supply the population with the basid needs to basic prices and not with an added "catastrophe cost" added.
And while Carrots or Lettuce might not sell for as much as before they still have a value in being ingredients in several recipes for cooking.

The customer in Owl´s Head at the Tavern would disagree. He likes the MLT that I use, too.

 

I don't know any sandwich makers that grow what they sell in real life, so it's difficult to empathize or assimilate real farmers/farming with that role. A field of 2000 carrots or lettuce would feed how many?
7-11 sandwiches grown and sold here? That's a sandwich shop role play, not a field farmer. Cotton is the only loop supported crop. Who are we wanting to role play when only cotton is offered? That is a very limitting role to play.

I see no reason not to use what has been programmed and bug free through developer and player tested.

The loop needs to be closed for the lost crops, not the lost sandwiches. I don't decorate my POTs with sandwiches and I don't grow sandwiches for my garden.

There is not a player population in our game to sustain a field full of potato. Planters come in 20s...

We have all our plants programmed to know if they are in a basement or out doors, with 3 unique time scheduals. "Already extremely professionally developed in our program", and we would have never player funded such deep development with the only end result being a field of sandwich.

Large gardens/farm fields/(empty lots) need a loop besides only cotton and that development stopped mid replacement implementation.

I can't look at a 7-11 sandwich and find immersion.

I could find immersion when I was free to plant what crop I wanted with a loop to reward for having grown them, even though those crops made less than if I had planted Cotton.
~Time Lord~