New Farmland Paradigm

[michael]

The current situation with the farm fields should be remedied. There have been suggestions for a farming queue or something like that, but after much internal discussion, we've come to somewhat of a consensus.

1 or more of the following may need their own tickets.

• Farm fields are infinite, no matter where they are placed.
• Gatherers have a "diminishing returns" feature, in that for each additional gatherer after 1 drives down the gather rate of all of them, to the point that it is more efficient to build a 2nd farm field by the time the gatherers get to 5.

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.

[michael]

A gathering boost is giving for any farm field built on this terrain texture.

[Philip Taylor]

Replying to michael:

Efficiency Overlay

For normal (non-farm) buildings, I think it might be nice to colour the terrain green where they can be built and red where they can't, so that players can easily see and avoid areas that are overly steep or blocked by trees or outside their territory or too far from shoreline etc, rather than forcing them to wave their mouse all over the screen to find a viable spot. Then we could intuitively extend that for farms by having red for blocked, yellow for low-yield, green for high-yield. (This would be in addition to floating tooltips saying "terrain too steep" or "50% yield - not on fertile ground" or whatever.)

[michael]

Disagree with Philip's idea. Nothing would look uglier than to color the entire terrain with green and red overlays every time someone goes to build a structure.

[Erik Johansson]

Replying to michael:

Disagree with Philip's idea. Nothing would look uglier than to color the entire terrain with green and red overlays every time someone goes to build a structure.

Are you saying you wouldn't want the overlay to show up for all players when one player is about to construct a structure? I agree that doesn't sound like a good idea. I would assume what Philip means is to have it only show up for the player about to construct the building. Probably you are talking about that too, it's just a bit hard to know which you're talking about :)

I'm not sure it's all that bad personally, after all, it's just while placing the structure and then we need (and already have) some kind of indication of where it's possible to construct it. Having overlays over the entire terrain might be uglier than coloring the building, but it sounds likely to make it quicker to determine where to build which should make the relative ugliness lesser =)

Either way I think something like that for farmlands would work wonders.

[michael]

I'm saying coloring the entire terrain when the player goes to build a building would look insanely ugly. I think the current method of shading the building preview red when obstructed is good enough.