Growing Economics

[Vastin]

So, I've been playing for a couple days now. Finally got a colony up over the 'hump' of being able to survive attacks by raiders with advanced weapons such as M-16/24s.

The transition from field farming to hydroponics is dramatic. It is very difficult to subsist on field farming regardless of the number of fields you have, because the actual harvesting efficiency is so low it leaves very little time for anything else (which makes sense). I find that you really have to rely on the food drop events to get anything done during this early phase.

The switch to hydroponics is dramatic though. You go from food being a serious ongoing problem, to having food coming out your ears to such a degree that you can hardly offload it onto passing trade vessels fast enough. This makes long term sense as well - but I'd presume that in the completed game these two phases would be separated by a lot more research levels and a larger physical investment that is currently required (more power/space for the output you get).

In the long term it would be nice to see crops with different LAND and LABOR EFFICIENCIES. A crop with a Land efficiency would generate a lot of food per square, but might require a lot of labor to tend/harvest. A crop with a high labor efficiency on the other hand, would require relatively little tending/harvesting time per food generated, but might require a lot of land. These two factors (and possibly others such energy) would presumably be some of the trade offs you'd make in planting. It'd be great to see an entire 'Crop Genetics' tech tree that would start with various found or imported plants, and gradually develop them in these different directions.

One thing I'd definitely add at some point would be Spoilage. Even a modest spoil rate places some kind of economic curve of reducing returns on overproduction to complicate the system a bit. Foods that don't spoil (or specialized storage areas to reduce spoiling) would then become another potential factor for grower economies to consider.

[Tynan]

Moved to suggestions.

And yes! This is actually coming in next build. I'm going to add some varied crops, you can set what grows in each zone, growing zones can be shaped any way you like (like stockpiles), you'll be able to grow decorative/dangerous plants as well as food, and it will be very easy to mod in new kinds of plants.

[harpo99999]

would it be reasonable for the blight event to effect only one crop type, but if you still want a all crops fail type event it might be good to call it a drought (lack of water for the plants to grow)

[monkhouse]

Certain crops could even be more susceptible to blight than others - with countering benefits, like yield or grow speed or resistant to pests. So colonies have to weigh the tradeoffs between one crop and another, with the environment playing a big factor.

Though I don't know how much variety you can add to agriculture before it stops being much fun - scrolling through 20 different crops and their GM variants to find the one that works perfectly for your setup is just gaming a system in the end. Nicer to have to make the choice; on your rainy, boomrat infested world, do you go with the wetweather crop that is like ratnip to the exploding rodents or the drier crop that might get waterlogged but is too tough for their little teeth? Then there's always the ultra-hardy high-yield GM stuff, but that always comes with the warning - Moonsanto accepts no liability for injury or distress caused by spontaneous total crop failure....

In terms of upgrading your own crops, it could be interesting to run 'seed lines' - ie improvements are made over successive generations; you've got your plant genetics lab up and running, you set it to '+yield' to feed your hungry mouths, and see a cumulative +x% bonus each generation (or it could be on a separate research timer, but improvements are only applied in the next generation). But then your geneticist has a bad day and introduces a -y% pest resistence, which proliferates through your fields. You switch him over from improving yield to improving pest resist to counteract the malus, which works for a while, but continued tampering lowers the overall hardiness a significant amount. Then there's a blight, and the whole line is lost; oh well, back to the drawing board.

If that all seems a bit complicated, it does come with the added effect of minimizing clutter in a putative genetic engineering scenario - instead of having fifty different varieties flying around, you just have the basic version and the one you're working on, like the crop is a character in an rpg (with permadeath).

Thinking about it, you could even have non-technical people improving their crops by artificial selection - far less drastic effects than the gene fiddling, but less unpredictable.

[Untrustedlife]

Moved to suggestions.

And yes! This is actually coming in next build. I'm going to add some varied crops, you can set what grows in each zone, growing zones can be shaped any way you like (like stockpiles), you'll be able to grow decorative/dangerous plants as well as food, and it will be very easy to mod in new kinds of plants.

That sounds very neat..How will you balance the ability to size farms any way you want? Any tradeoffs etc?

[Tynan]

Moved to suggestions.

And yes! This is actually coming in next build. I'm going to add some varied crops, you can set what grows in each zone, growing zones can be shaped any way you like (like stockpiles), you'll be able to grow decorative/dangerous plants as well as food, and it will be very easy to mod in new kinds of plants.

That sounds very neat..How will you balance the ability to size farms any way you want? Any tradeoffs etc?

Growing areas have always been free by design; I don't expect any particular balance challenges. It still takes the colonists the same time to plant or harvest anything.

I'm just looking forward to the garden designs I expect to see, since you can shape your growing areas any way you want and grow daylilies and other nice flowers

[Untrustedlife]

Thats cool. I can't wait.

[Karakoran]

I'd like to see genetically modifying foods act as a small, temporary bonus you can obtain. Not necessarily something you'd invest weeks into only to have a blight destroy your precious GM-code, but rather expect to lose fairly quickly. You could give the list of buffs (resistance to environment, yield, nutrition, etc.) and with each buff you gain you'd increase the risk of being destroyed by blight or rendering the line impotent. You may be able to research a general impotency resistance if you were advanced enough technologically, but even that would not prevent the inevitable pitfalls that come with untrained and poorly equipped colonists messing around with genetics. Perhaps a professional scientist would be a bit better, but still not perfect.

[ousire]

I would really like to see a crop modification system in place that was based on your colonists researching and growing skills, both of those don't seem to have enough use in this game yet. Once you research everything in this game, is there anything to do with your scientists? And once you get hydroponics you don't need hardly any growers to feed a whole happy colony. My more developed colonies almost always end up just turning those character classes into dedicated cleaners or haulers.

However if you're able to develop food that grows faster or feeds better, this game had better add some sort of system to counterbalance it, since it's way too easy to feed a colony right now. Either make colonists eat a lot more, make certain kinds of food less filling, add a food spoilage system to the game, or some other system to motivate players to invest more into foods than we currently need