Tree Problems

[Cejer]

So, I started thinking about our deforestation problem and how it compares historically. And I thought about this for a while, so this may be a long post. Scroll to the end if you want a summary. These are problems from the perspective of historical modeling, not necessarily game play.

Problem one, trees simply don't give enough wood. Oh, eighteen trees for a single house is reasonable, perhaps generous. But a single tree only creates six buckets or three shields. A chest almost requires an entire tree. A sword handle is one twelfth of a tree. You can only make six pairs of shoes from a single tree. Houses are a one time investment in a given region. But tools and other goods are a significant burden on the wood supply. However, increasing the wood yield from trees makes them more time consuming to process. Storing three boards after making a bucket is reasonable, storing twenty-three is ridiculous. While it could help, I don't think the real solution is found here.

Problem two, trees aren't common enough. Forests exist, and they have a pretty respectable tree density. But one thing about the world map strikes me as very odd. It looks a lot like a modern road map. You have regions of interest here and there, but most of the map is a neutral green grassland. It's not the map of a virgin wilderness. Continental Europe did not start as fields and grassland spotted by clumps of trees and swamps. It started as trackless forest with small clearings and fields. If the map generation had grassland and forest swapped we could do more logging. But it would also significantly alter the playing experience beyond lumber jacking. Finding your way through heavy forest is considerably more disorienting. As well, this requires a map reset before it takes effect. This may be something to consider.

Problem three, trees are the only source of housing. Continental Europe was heavily forested, but even there people didn't build log cabins for everyone. Wattle and daub construction, clay huts, brick townhouses, stone cottages, hide yurts, and more fancy versions of them all would reduce the dependency on wood and add visual variety. Towns being visually differentiated by resource availabilities would happen naturally. This is something that I recall is already planned, but perhaps accelerating this a little bit is in order. Adding clay huts as an option would certainly free up wood supplies for metalworking industries.

Summary: Vastly increasing the amount of forests might be worth considering, and adding at least one non-wood home option would help a lot. Lots of pointless historical comparisons were made.

[theTrav]

One thing I picked up out of that post and would like to expand upon is the forest => grassland map dealy.

The dev's might have already thought of this, but in case they haven't, I think it'd be incredibly cool to have a dynamic landscape in which areas with a high tree density are treated as forests (and the graphic decorations updated to match) and the areas with very few trees were treated as grassland (again, decorations updated to match) and with swamps and deserts being constant and maybe some rules for a minimum amount of grassland around desert so it doesn't just break straight into trees.

Then you could do something cool like start us all off against an endless ocean and we could start chopping down trees and building our communities and grassland would just happen naturally.

I think it would work especially well when combined with what someone suggested in another thread about trees propagating themselves (tree spawns sapling if local tree density is below a certain level, sapling takes a long time to grow into a tree).


All the other ideas I agree with, but they seem just be symptoms of not enough buildings/skills/production systems being implemented yet, which I'm sure will improve over time fast enough