A Massive Wall of Text on Food and Water

[Turmoil159]

I was reading a post in the general forums where people started talking about how to implement food and water rations, and started typing this as a response. It got so complicated, I decided to move it to here since I was basically writing a book of ideas that could be added. I doubt any of this will get in the game, since the system is almost ready for release by now, but maybe Chris will see something he likes. I mention several other ideas that I want to elaborate on, but I want guidance from a moderator on whether each one should have a separate topic or just put it all here.

My take on it would be to have a quartermaster and a mess hall. This would involve quite a few changes, such as assigning specific jobs to individuals, and separating soldiers from civilians. The idea is that the only micromanagement needed would take place at the quartermaster's post, where the player selects how much food and water each person gets, one amount for soldiers and another for civilians (or, if you can split people into different task forces, one amount per TF). The quartermaster would automatically distribute the rations to each unit, and they would be stored in a ration pack, which is one item that takes up space in the inventory, whose weight changes based on its contents, like backpacks (this might be just a regular item or another equip slot similar to current backpacks). For units located within the base, they can just go to the mess hall and eat there without having to alter their rations pack.

In real life, you often find farms located outside the safety of the city, so in the event of a siege, the city would only live on what they have stored in granaries (I use the granary term just because I grew up on Caesar 3). If the city runs out of food, morale slowly drops. Civil unrest will begin and grow as people get more desperate. After a certain point, rioting and general anarchy will end up destroying the city and it's government from the inside. This is a common tactic during a siege, and it plays a key role in sieges in Mount & Blade (or at least in Brytenwalda mod). When the citizens get desperate enough, so do the soldiers, who may try to break the siege early and almost always end in disaster for the defenders. This strategy has so much potential for sieges.

Also, on expeditions (either war parties, siege parties, or settler caravans, or any other kind of large group), the rations will run out eventually. So you would need carts to carry the food. You would also need carts to carry ammunition, if there is a need for it, and carts to carry supplies such as clothing, spare parts, etc. These carts would be a strategic target for a faction to raid, and often were critical to battles if they were destroyed. In modern times, this is the supply line that we hear about in warfare. If an enemy cuts off this vital line, the war is over. In the American Civil War, this was a deciding factor in the victory of the Union. They were able to cut off the supply caravans to the enemy, and therefore the military of the Confederates just fell apart as they ran out of existing supplies.

Now from theory to execution. The carts would be loaded up in the game similar to the quartermaster. You would select how much cargo of what type they would carry. You would need special carts for food and water, because storage of these critical supplies requires special preparation (salting, liquid storage, etc.). For example, you would have a water cart, select to carry it via slave/worker labor, or horse/oxen (animals would obviously need to be implemented). Then you would select to fill it up with an amount. The amount would be measured in the format "X days of water" or "X litres of water (lasts Y days)" to simplify it. The amount of days would be calculated by the game based on the size of the expedition it would be supplying. An expedition of 10 people would have a maximum of 40 days, while an expedition of 100 would only last for 4 days. A line of research could improve this storage capacity either by increasing the size of the carts, or by improving the storage method (research to increase size because you still need to keep in mind how to make it bigger without overburdening your horses/slaves).

Finally, production. The water table is very temperamental in the real world, ask any geologist. In Kenshi, you could either simplify it, or have a special type of character who is skilled in geology to find a good place to either build wells or farms. The water would be easy enough, just find an area with water at the right depth, and drill the well. This would be very basic. Farming would be simple too, but there would be enough extra content to build an entire industry from it.

There could be various crops to farm, but not too many. In the Masterwork mod for Dwarf Fortress, there are a total of 8 underground crops and 7 above ground. Taking that example, have maybe 4 or 5, but no more than 7. There is no restriction on when and where you can plant each crop, so you could have a massive farm of only Wheat, or use that space to farm various different crops. This is obviously simplistic, but most of us don't want to get a degree in biology or geography just to play the game. The downside of owning farms is that they take up large amounts of space to be effective. You could have a small farm to feed 2 people, but the size grows exponentially with the amount of people it is feeding (the math behind this might be hard, so there is always the linear option). Even more so if you want to sell crops to cities. Of course, with size comes labor. A single plot of farmland (one plot = the smallest practical size, enough to feed 2 people.) would take 1 worker. So 10 plots would take 10 workers. With larger farms, mass production would save labor, because you could use beasts of burden to lighten the workload. It makes economic sense to have 2 oxen to work a large plantation, but it would be a waste to even buy a donkey for a simple garden. Farm labor would be counted in units internally, so 1 worker = 1 labor, 1 donkey = 2 labor, 1 ox = 5 labor, and so on. If there is not enough labor, crops will wither and have to be cleared before the land can be reused.

Of course, each crop could be used to distill a different alcohol. Wheat would be used for one drink, Barley for another, etc. I heard that pre-industrial civilizations understood ethanol could be used as a fuel source, so maybe there would be an option to produce ethanol fuel as an alternative to coal. The different drinks would have varying values depending on the region, since each town would specialize in one crop. On that topic quickly, as part of town generation, each town would randomly select a raw resource to produce and build appropriate industry to utilize that resource, so a town that generates with coal would produce a coal mining and processing industry while a town with corn production would produce corn crops and associated industries (food and ethanol production). Since only a few towns would generate with booze production, the economy would be extremely random and dynamic in that area, while maintaining the critical stability that AI economies lack.

As a closing note on that economy idea, which I will make my next critical design, the easiest way to stabilize the AI economy while making it dynamic would be to use a system similar to CitiesXL's token production. Each town/outpost/community would produce their resources and export them. The export would be in simple integer units known as tokens. Each unit of resources (1 barrel of wheat) would have a value in tokens (0.1 tokens), and each person would use a certain amount of tokens per timeframe (1 person would use 0.01 tokens of wheat per game day). Each industry would be the same (1 still would use 1 token of wheat per game day to produce 0.8 tokens of beer). The surplus would add up over time in storage (after 7 days, the town has 4 tokens of wheat stored, and the rest has been used for food and beer production). This excess would then be exported to other towns, and the town would import a corresponding value. This idea can be expanded on a lot, but I'm going to wait to hear from a moderator or admin if I am even allowed to make such large posts.

[Clawdius Talonious]

I'd be interested in seeing farms diversify to the point where we had a variety of crops to choose from. It's difficult to say what sort of environment Kenshi will wind up having, vast areas of desert aren't good for cultivation. Still, it would be nice to see some crops that could be used to produce trade goods, and others used to feed your masses. It really comes down to an issue, I'd imagine, of entertaining gameplay vs a realistic approach. While there exists the technology today to produce molasses from sugar beets, for example, it is actually fairly labor intensive as a process. However given that the soil in Kenshi seems to be more along the lines of a sandy loam it might prove to be a reasonable alternative to sugarcane for the production of molasses/rum in future game versions.

If it is done well I could see a lot of potential for the research of cultivation techniques and refining processes. Perhaps at first your farm produces many sugar beets, but lacking the ability to refine them properly you take them to another town and trade them to people who can produce a mother liquor, and simply purchase the supplies you need to build up your town. As a game went on you'd build your own refining facilities and could produce your own molasses, and distill your own rum for trade.

It would be interesting, given the "Narcotics" trade good to see those sorts of crops available as well. While the name is rather nonspecific, I think it would be quite interesting to see the descriptions mentioning of the trade guild not trafficking in them be carried out with gameplay implications. Perhaps, upon discovery of a farm producing illicit goods, your factions reputation with the trading guild would suffer. Starting with them charging you increased prices, and offering less money for your goods. In the end I think it would be quite entertaining to see a band of mercenaries under the guide of Trade Guild authorities come to try to burn out your farm.

That sort of behavior, if implemented in the AI, could be applied to other areas of the farming mechanics as well. Perhaps the Starving Bandits would be inclined to try to raid your town if you possessed large food stores, while the Holy Empire might take offense to production lines operating with slave labor.

[iSuck345]

Also, crops won't lasat forever (spoilers). Allow me to explain:
Crops don't rely TOTALLY on rain, they also rely on the water inside the ground. Theese are known as salt minerals (in my country). The plants will slowly drain theese until they are out. This forces people to NOT harvest crops on some seasons and to strategize. That's all about that.

Now about what you just wrote, here's what I think: thank you for teaching a lesson to people who can't read without paragraphs. I understood the whole thing, and it is all good by me. I love when a game has alot of features and is too complex and frustrating, but you allways end up figuring something out, like Rulers of Nations... except you don't go to the wikipedia.

[Turmoil159]

Also, crops won't lasat forever (spoilers). Allow me to explain:
Crops don't rely TOTALLY on rain, they also rely on the water inside the ground. Theese are known as salt minerals (in my country). The plants will slowly drain theese until they are out. This forces people to NOT harvest crops on some seasons and to strategize. That's all about that.

I take the concept of Dwarf Fortress farming as inspiration to solve this problem. I also included that water table as a concept, explained in my work on economics (which is unreleased right now). Basically, for the problem of crops needing soil water, the world generation includes a layer underground of water which is distributed around the map based on certain conditions (hills and terrain features affect it, etc.) Crops can only be farmed on areas of land with enough underground water to support them, while wells can be placed almost anywhere, with their production being dependent on the amount of water. This would imply that the water table is actually a giant aquifer.

Back to the crop rotation and expiration. Since the game design seems to not include seasons, the idea of harvesting certain crops at certain seasons wouldn't work. So to fix that problem, all crops are harvestable all the time. However, you need labor to harvest them or your crops will wither and die. This means that a small farm would be viable to start out, but you must grow enough crops to provide for your town's people and industries, and then even more for export (or just use all the excess for industries and export the refined product).

Now about what you just wrote, here's what I think: thank you for teaching a lesson to people who can't read without paragraphs. I understood the whole thing, and it is all good by me. I love when a game has alot of features and is too complex and frustrating, but you allways end up figuring something out, like Rulers of Nations... except you don't go to the wikipedia.

Any time a work is larger than a few sentences, it should be split into paragraphs. My professors in college are always impressed at how clean my work is, because I understand that vital rule well. When you say "too complex and frustrating" you remind me of one of my favorite games, Dwarf Fortress. I've never played Rulers of Nations, so I don't know about that, but Dwarf Fortress has so much complexity it's impossible to learn without some kind of basic understanding of it. It is intimidating at first for the new player, because the game is so unique from modern games (graphics? What graphics? This is Dwarf Fortress, fool!) and it doesn't ease you into it (Wait, I can't equip that level 95 helmet I got from the uber elf-demon-lord because my character isn't a high enough level to wear helmets? ~ World of Warcraft?). Kenshi has both concepts, but it still needs that critical component called content. The developer promises to deliver on that, and in fact will add so much content with 0.40 that it might grow enough to create a presence in the wider gaming community.