[Freeciv-Dev] Agricultural methods

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Morgan Jones [mailto:morgan.jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
>
> The Greeks (among other civs in similar situations) developed agrarian
> farming as irrigation wasn't possible in their lands.
>
> I guess in the game it could be represented as an alternate type of
> irrigation - say for instance irrigation added 2 food, then agrarian
> farming might give only one food but also one trade.

I always thought it *was* represented by the "plains" land type.  I
distinctly remember being started with lotsa dry land nearby whenever I
played a Greek.  Although that may have been a Civ III memory, I may be
confused.  Anyways, I'm pretty sure Civ III at least would key your
nationality to the type of terrain you typically start in.  Aztecs get
jungles and deserts.  Greeks get dry land.  English get water.  Irish
get an island.

> Irrigation would require a water source but agrarian farming
> wouldn't.

If you wanted to be historically realistic, the Greeks were not a
pristine civilization, they were a successor civilization.  Ergo, this
farming method should be a tech advance.  If you think it's bad / wrong
that Greeks can't start with their native farming method, I would say
it's bad / wrong that Greeks start at the same time as other
civilizations!

Here is a *multiplayer* game design idea that I have, that I'm going to
implement in a version of Ocean Mars someday.  Allow players to start
the game within a 30 minute time window.  Do not design the game with
symmetrical civilizations / factions.  Make them asymmetrical.  The last
player in the 30 minute time window gets a faction that's appropriate to
when he arrived in the game.  In Ocean March, that order-of-factions is
going to be something like: the USSR, the USA, various private
entrepreneurs, China, India, the EU, Japan, organized crime, religious
cults, miscellaneous small nationalities, and finally terrorists.

The advantage of asymmetrical starting conditions is that for lobbying,
you have a 30 minute time window for entering a game.  You don't have to
cough up and coordinate 8 people or whatever.  You've got a much better
chance of just slotting people in as they show up.

> Perhaps they would be restricted by different terrain types too.  For
> instance you can't irrigate hills but you can agrarian farm them (farm
> them agrarianly, how the hell do you say that?)

I don't know how you say that.  Is it even the correct term?

> I don't know if this is worthwhile other than a extra bit of realism
> though.  It certainly wouldn't help ICS as it defeats the whole point
> of not being able to build cities by water.

How *big* were those Greek cities able to become?  There may yet be a
point: you can build, but you won't get big.  Of course, many other
things about the economics of small cities have to be allowed to change
for this to work.

> Another possibility is to drastically increase the amount of forest
> and jungle generated in maps, which is realistic.  You have to clear
> it first before you can get good food out of it, at least in the
> absence of game.

Civ III has some huge jungles and plays like that, so I can comment on
the results.  Basically, you wait until your civilization is very large,
then you build tons and tons of Engineers who run around turning your
continent into a parking lot.  They get rid of the jungle.  Any manual
method of removing the jungle is a complete PITA.  What you'd really
like more control over your Engineers / Terraformers, so that you don't
need to have bazillions of Engineers to do the jungle cleanup, but Civ
III didn't have even simple controls for this the way SMAC did.  At
least, the initial release of Civ III didn't.  I don't know if they've
since patched it, and I snapped my Civ III disk in half a long time ago.

Better terraforming control is a big priority to me in any of my
projects.  For me, half the fun of these games is terraforming your
planet.  Putting all sorts of ugly smog-spewing factories everywhere.
I've also thought that it would be fun to please the Greeners for a
change, and let them build National Parks.  They'd be like, a lot more
beautiful than regular terrain.  Which is sort of my joke, because it
certainly doesn't work that way in real life, you don't build a National
Park.  :-)  I'm not enough of a Greener to just hand them an inherently
beautiful world in the first place!  They're gettin' Mars, baby, albeit
with oceans.


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

"Desperation is the motherfucker of Invention." - Robert Prestridge