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Should farmlands be a terrain type?

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SuperLexxe said:
Well it wasn't the peasants or the buildings that the French were being tripped up on. It was the physical aspects of the plowed field, IE, terrain.
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But is there were the RGOs or the building the fields would have not been plowed. i.e Farmland wouldn't be farmland without the farming.

In game, there will be places that are 'grasslands' that are likely to have plenty of 'farm' RGO/building levels.
In game, there is nothing preventing a 'farmland terrain location' from losing all of its RGO/building levels.
 
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One_Eyed1 said:
Considering that we won't be able to change vegetation in location through de-forestation or some other type of investment, I think farmlands gives an unfair static buff to those who have it. The same could be said about countries that are within the Mediterranean climate zone or are mostly made up of flatlands, but those actually feel justified by the fact that you cannot throw a bunch of money and workers into the sky to make the winter go away or turn mountains into a field, whereas you can hire people to chop down trees, and start farming.

I think the ideal solution would be to remove farmlands and have a fourth terrain category of "fertility", but I doubt Tinto would want to introduce this change this far into the game's development (but i could see it being a DLC...). In the end it's not that big of a problem that I would consider the system badly designed, but it is worth pointing out
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How is the new world gonna get it then
 
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I think the possible solutions are basically two.

Either do not base the presence of Farmland terrain upon which locations in 1337 were agriculturally very well developed, but rather base it upon the potential suitability of a location to support high-intensity agriculture (since we can't change the terrain from something else into Farmland, at least have all land that could have potentially been exploited as Farmland be represented as such, so we don't end up with agricultural land being stuck in the Middle Ages in while the games goes into the 19th century), or get rid of the Farmland terrain type entirely and leave its representation to Development.
 
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I'm still baffled that the terrain map mode is the roadblock for changing terrain in game. Who honestly uses the terrain map mode more than like 1 percent of the time? If I want to know a provinces terrain, I open the simple terrain map mode, which as far as I understand it, would be easily changeable as is. I mean yay we can have mods that change it, but this is such a strange thing.
I'd say just remove farmland as a terrain type and add an additional modifier on provinces that represents like forestations and cultivation. These could then be keyed into map modes or something.
 
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Sirbab said:
I'm still baffled that the terrain map mode is the roadblock for changing terrain in game. Who honestly uses the terrain map mode more than like 1 percent of the time? If I want to know a provinces terrain, I open the simple terrain map mode, which as far as I understand it, would be easily changeable as is. I mean yay we can have mods that change it, but this is such a strange thing.
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I do, especially in the newer games. Keep in mind that from Imperator onward the default map mode has been an integrated one where you get political mode at further zooms and 3D terrain mode with colored political borders at closer zooms. So in Imperator or CK3 I spend a lot of time looking at 3D terrain just by default. That, plus better 3D graphics, means it's easy to zoom in (or not even, if you're already zoomed) and read the terrain straight from the 3D graphics. Even in EU4 I'd rather read the terrain off the 3D graphics than memorize a separate set of color-coding for the simple terrain mode.

Simple terrain mode for me is for getting an overview of a large area at the start of the game or maybe occasionally throughout the game. Not for quickly reading one or two locations in the flow of normal gameplay.

Personally I'd find it quite annoying if the map graphics lied about the actual terrain, and I think for new or more casual players who don't know there's an underlying terrain change mechanic that doesn't connect to map graphics it'd be even more frustrating.
 
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Sirbab said:
I'm still baffled that the terrain map mode is the roadblock for changing terrain in game. Who honestly uses the terrain map mode more than like 1 percent of the time? If I want to know a provinces terrain, I open the simple terrain map mode, which as far as I understand it, would be easily changeable as is. I mean yay we can have mods that change it, but this is such a strange thing.
I'd say just remove farmland as a terrain type and add an additional modifier on provinces that represents like forestations and cultivation. These could then be keyed into map modes or something.
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Have you played any of their post EU4 games?
 
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Why not just rename 'Farmlands' into Mollisols, or Arable Plains or something along those lines?
 
Znikii said:
Why not just rename 'Farmlands' into Mollisols, or Arable Plains or something along those lines?
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This is a continuation of our posts in the Balkans thread but it fits better here so I'll post here as you did. You can't "just rename" Farmlands because Farmlands have been distributed (or attempted to, at least) in line with their role as representing actual existing Farmland vegetation. That's why the Americas are nearly if not entirely devoid of Farmland terrain. If you turn it into a proxy for fertile soil or something similar you'd have to redistribute Farmland across the entire map.

And neither fertile soil nor mollisol specifically nor arable plains are a type of vegetation (Plains is the closest but I wouldn't say it's explicitly and solely a vegetation type). Not only would they stick out like a sore thumb among a set of things that are meant to represent, to quote Johan, "the foliage cover of a location," but each location can only have one vegetation type and so vegetation types should be clearly in contrast with one another, and these aren't clearly in contrast with existing vegetation types.

Also, setting aside for the moment the talk about fertility, food production, etc and focusing on actual vegetative cover and its effects, developed farmland is a distinct environ, and is not the same as grasslands, and in-game comes with its own unique modifiers for army movement and road cost. I think that point has been kind of lost in the conversation about farmland as development and food production. It'd be great to have dynamic terrain and a representation of potential farmland, but even in a world where terrain is set according to 1337 conditions and is static you need some way to represent the existing farmland as vegetation.
 
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But those places do have it's own kind of foliage with different tall grass and related species and some of those were over the millennia of human selective breeding produced crops we grow today. Farmlands should be a product of stable human population and activity, a sign of development. Not a natural phenomenon like topography, vegetation or climate. We are mixing here completely different things and constructing confusion for no gain.

If anything farmlands are a proxy for fertile soil + human development and not vice versa....
 
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I think my biggest objection is that farmland comes in all shapes and sizes.

From my England research, the areas that Paradox has labelled as farmland look pretty spot on. However, these regions include open field agriculture (Midlands), closed field agriculture (coastal Kent), mixed farming and woodland regions (Essex), and rolling field/low elevation upland regions (upland Kent/Surrey). All were highly developed and exceptionally adapted to their environment for agricultural production. I think the label and food bonus fit. However, the movement penalty and road build time all being the same doesn't fit. Open fields are obviously going to be easier to march across than rolling hills or mixed woodland regions.

I'd make farmland a modifier that sits on top of other descriptors. Undeveloped grassland is going to have more in common with farmland grassland than farmland grassland has with farmland uplands or farmland mixed woodland.

This is made even clearer when you consider the bocage regions of France in Normandy and Brittany. These regions definitely deserve the farmland label. They were highly developed for agriculture and exceptionally productive. However, as troops invading during WWII can attest, they were not easy to march across. They should be bocage and farmland. Or, at worst, closed field farmland. That lumps them in with places that had lines of trees and stacks of stones enclosing fields (the former seems easy to march through, but the latter could be a pain), but it's better than not giving them the farmland label (completely wrong) or giving them the farmland label and treating them as easy to cross (also completely wrong).

My two cents.
 
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Ekyman said:
This is a continuation of our posts in the Balkans thread but it fits better here so I'll post here as you did. You can't "just rename" Farmlands because Farmlands have been distributed (or attempted to, at least) in line with their role as representing actual existing Farmland vegetation. That's why the Americas are nearly if not entirely devoid of Farmland terrain. If you turn it into a proxy for fertile soil or something similar you'd have to redistribute Farmland across the entire map.
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That's exactly what they should do? That's what they should do even if they keep it. There's more farmland in Belgium than in China let's be serious please

The Americas having no farmland anywhere also makes zero sense in 1337 given how much farming was going on in the Mexican Highlands much less in 1650 when farms in the Caribbean started driving global trade
 
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Bisonmask said:
That's exactly what they should do? That's what they should do even if they keep it.
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It should be named for what it is. I don't want it named after a type of soil if it's not implemented to represent a type of soil. And I don't want it named for a type of soil anyway since soil type isn't vegetation.
Bisonmask said:
There's more farmland in Belgium than in China let's be serious please
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WIP:
Roger Corominas said:
You will notice here that there are few locations assigned as "farmlands", that's because when we did this part of the map there was yet not a clear criteria on how we would be defining the farmlands and their placement here hasn't been reviewed yet.
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Bisonmask said:
The Americas having no farmland anywhere also makes zero sense in 1337 given how much farming was going on in the Mexican Highlands
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If there should be more farmland in the Americas for 1337 then absolutely give feedback on it and hopefully they add it.

Bisonmask said:
much less in 1650 when farms in the Caribbean started driving global trade
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AFAIK they're trying to set vegetation according to 1337 conditions.
 
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Ekyman said:
It should be named for what it is. I don't want it named after a type of soil if it's not implemented to represent a type of soil. And I don't want it named for a type of soil anyway since soil type isn't vegetation.

WIP:



If there should be more farmland in the Americas for 1337 then absolutely give feedback on it and hopefully they add it.


AFAIK they're trying to set vegetation according to 1337 conditions.
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Setting vegetation based on 1337 conditions for a game that lasts 500 years is an exercise in futility.
 
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I posted my thoughts on how this might be able to work better here (among other things).

It will unfortunately produce a clash with visible terrain over time, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
 
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