According to the Kickstarter introductory video, farming will involve some kind of minigame, and you guys have already prototyped this out. Care to elaborate a little more on how this will work, and if the minigame aspect will also apply to other activities as well, like crafting or herding?
Based on the very brief glimpse of the prototype, it seems like it’s a game that has the player optimize resources like water and fertility, utilize them with smart crop placement, and try to generate as much bonus product as possible. How does this work with what you explained about micromanagement?
From the FAQ:
For instance, for farming, you will decide where to place the farms
and what crops to plant, then design things like irrigation systems,
etc. Your farmers will hoe the fields, harvest the crops, and store
them all by themselves.
Is it mostly “set and forget”, or can the player choose to take a more involved approach to the minigame in order to improve yields? It would be nice to have the option, but then it might run into the problem of players feeling compelled to do so because no doing so would give them too much of a disadvantage. In that scenario, the choice loses much of its meaningfulness.
Any plans for crafting minigames, or will it be a straight up input->output type of deal?
They answered this or something really similar to this in the kickstarter comments, I think it should hopefully answer your question:
It’s quite long:
“On the Farming Mini Game: The mini-game that we showed in the video was a super-quick prototype to test farming mechanics. It won’t look like that in game! Farming in game will look like this: http://i.imgur.com/Tn8FiPw.jpg We’re building these prototypes because it’s about 100x faster to try out new gameplay ideas in a cheap, throw-away version, then when we find something that is fun and awesome we go and implement it in the real game. Also, Derek says “I was hoping to see if there will be a way to not have the minigame so we can focus more on the simulation.” Derek, you’ll be happy to hear that the “minigame” is exactly dealing with farming-related simulations like water tables, nitrogen levels in the soil, and weather. It’s not at all like you’ll plant a farm and BAM! FARM-BASED-MINI-GAME pops up. Maybe the way we showed it in the video was deceiving. If this kind of deep simulation problem solving isn’t your thing, fear not!, you can just ignore all the complexity and do something basic. It means your farm will produce way less, but hey, you put in less work. Let me give a concrete example. MrMuddyPants loves farm games. I mean he LOOOOOVES them. His goal is to build big, prosperous fields and trade his extra crops for the other goods he needs. So MrMuddyPants spends a lot of time optimizing his farm layout, building irrigation pipes, paying close attention to the fertility levels of the soil, and rotating crops to take advantage of the seasons. He’s rewarded with bountiful crops year after year. YouMadBro, on the other hand, is all about building the biggest, baddest fortress on the block. He cares not a whit for farming, but still needs food. So he places a bunch of farm plots, assigns them a crop, and pretty much ignores them after that. His farms produce wayyyy less than MrMuddyPants’, but they consistently produce a meager, base level of food. If the two had similarly sized populations, YouMadBro would have to compensate by getting food from another source like hunting, trading, or plundering”
I had not read that on KS, and I like this thought. I don’t mind mini-games, and I honestly didn’t think they were going to have one; but I’m happy this has been clarified a bit more.
Now this interests me a great deal would that mean we could trade goods online? so one dude who has a lot of farms can trade his extra food for stuff he needs like building materials and such. that would certainly aid in the online playability of the game and add an interesting mechanic so people who have extra resources can sell them off for resources they don’t have or have very little of.
I really rather doubt it is anything like that. I believe it will be something closer to visiting traders or you’re own market place or bazaar where you can trade for things you are lacking, or, perhaps, things that can only be acquired through trade, which would be neat. Of course, as more stretch goals are reached, who really knows what they will do so maybe this could happen as well!
I feel this statement is probably closer to what they had in mind. Since the game is being focused around single player and not a lot of online features.
