Rural setting modd -- adding life to farming communities

[Daeley 46]

Some time agon I started building a farming community in one of my regions. I had never attempted to build a city entirely around farms, but I must say I really enjoyed it. However it seemd something was missing... I thought to myself, what if I could create a mod that gives an annual report of how the harvests have been last year, and maybe give you a bonus if things were good.

 

With the new discoveries on LUA editing, this mod became a reality Each year, you will get a harvest report with how the crops have done last year, and a report on the factors that caused this. A sample report looks like this:

 edit: this is not a picture of the latest verion

 

I have included a chart with all the influence factors inside the download.

To use the mod, simply put the dat file somewhere in your plugins.

 

comments are welcome, this mod is still a work in progress.

 

<<<  Download here  >>>

 

full stat report: here

 

 

edit: this mod will be non-active in cities without rural zoning

[brtim2 11]

awesome. i can't say this is what i have always wanted, cause i couldn't have even pondered it, but now that it is here, wow. you continue to amaze the community with all your hard work. now maybe more ppeople will want to create farming communities, if just so they can see this.

would this show up in every city, or just in cities where there is ag zoning?

[Daeley 46]

This mod will only be active in cities with rural zoning. For cities with no farming population, this mod is set to non-active.

[brtim2 11]

alright, that is what i figured.
i am testing it now, i just got the third harvest report (it is fun to see what changes in the city will affect the harvest. i just had a 63% increase over average!) now this doesn't bother me, but it might mean something to others who have thier cities at different times (i.e. Digby which is being shown in 1950), would it be possible for the report title to be 13th annual Harvest Report or something like that? like i said it makes no difference to me, but for others that cosmetic change might make a big deal.

now back to the game, i might have to make some more farming communities

[MrCinatit 30]

Holy cow, Daeley - this is spectacular. i love working with farms, but like brtim2, i never thought anything like this would even be conceivable. great addition.

[Daeley 46]

I can change it so the number of the year doesn't show, that's not much of a problem. I'm also still tweaking the influences a bit, and I might still add a few.

 

please note that there might still be bugs in the mod, even though I've been testing it for a few days now, I can't say for sure it's fail-safe. For now, I'd also advice you to close the news ticker item before the end of each year, if you don't the new report might not show up. I'll fix this in future versions.

[frogface 354]

this'll be perfect for my new rural region

[Dolfan348488 0]

That is very impressive.  Something i never dreamed, or thought of, ever seeing.  This is great.  Awesome job!

[Jim 6]

This is awsome I love farming towns and now it is way more fun! This is more like the farming I'm used to.

[Daeley 46]

UPDATE: I have changed the headline so it doesn't show a year number anymore, fixed a bug with the news message and I added two influence factors:

 

-local biotechnology: gives you a bonus if you have some IHT present, a small penalty if you have none

-regional trade: gives you a bonus or a penalty according to the number of neighbour connections.

 

this is a sample report: (note that there are different kinds of reports, dependant on the profits or expenses made)

 

I'm still tweaking values a bit, as it's a bit too easy to get very high profits the way I set things up right now. To get the update, simply re-download from the link in my first post, I have updated the file and I'm only keeping the latest version up for download.

[Swamper77 90]

Daeley,

 

A lot of the CSX farms in my city require water to function. Could you make a version the doesn't penalize the mayor for having water supplied to the farms? In other words, inverse the water penalty. This would help alot.

 

Overall, nice work with these UI's and LUA scripts. I can't wait to see what you come up with next....

 

-Swamper77

[Daeley 46]

take a look at the influence chart: providing water to farms does not give you a penalty. As a matter of fact, it doesn't have any influence at all in this version...

 

to prevent further confusion: ground layer humidity is a factor controlled by the amount of water tiles in your city. If your city is 50% water, you will have a very high ground layer humidity. If you have very little water on your map, you'll have  a very dry city (like the one in the pictures)

[Swamper77 90]

Daeley,

 

Thanks for clarifying that. Now I understand how your project works. I thought the ground humidity was from the water pipes. So as I now understand it, the more natural water around my city, the better the rating for ground humidity?

 

-Swamper77

[ardecila 125]

No - it's not water, it's watered tiles.

Another thing - is there a mod that stops farms from polluting the water pipes? Putting a pump near a farm might be a bad idea, realistically, but running pipes near a farm should be safe (well, they are concrete!)

[Daeley 46]

incorrect arcedila... the more natural water you have on your map, the higher your ground hunidity will be. Please try out the mod before making comments.

[Daeley 46]

So, any more requests for influence factors? and do you think the current ones work well? If there's no feedback I don't really know how to change stuff ya know...

[jacqulina 162]

i think it is great got to sort out the humidity thing but great work i love it,i finally get my taxes right after all this time of building farms

[RalphaelNinja 244]

Date: 7/7/2004 3:59:58 AM
Author:

So, any more requests for influence factors? and do you think the current ones work well? If there's no feedback I don't really know how to change stuff ya know...

quote>

When everone is happy with it Daeley, package it up with all the needed readme, intro description etc. and send it to me via email and I'll post it up on the Mods Section.

Good work dood...

Ralphael

[catweazle_touchwood 1]

Nice mod.

Two questions:
1. Will there be a difference for 1, 2 or 3 star cities (easy, medium, difficult)?
2. Could it be a bit less easy to get extra money from it (there are enough money-cheats IMO)?

Thank you.

[+Guest]

Mine always seems to say that I have Very Bad air pollution, which is weird, because on my air pollution map, there is like NOTHING on my map near my farms....Does it take citywide air pollution?!

[Daeley 46]

Iamrobk: yes, it takes citywide pollution. I kinda like it this way actually.

I can't change it to pollution on IR-zoning only, unfortunatly there aren't enough game variables to do this.

 

catweazle_touchwood: good point! I will factor in the map difficulty. I'm still playing around with the other values a bit too... I'm thinking of adding in IR population, because if I make the factors too hard it will be very hard for a starting city but fairly easy for a medium to large city.

[Ettis 0]

Must the pop up show up every year? It's kinda annoying when running the game at chetau speed and it comes up every 20 sec.... can't you make it so you can select how many years intervall each pop up shows?

[Daeley 46]

I can make an option to set popup on or off, but there will still be a report each year... I could set it to one report every 5 yrs, but I presonally prefer it annually.

 

edit: adding an option for choosing the interval between reports would add a significant amount of code... But I might make several versions of this modd, one with annual and one with a report every 5 yrs.

 

edit: it seems changing the priority of a news message (this changes if the message pops up or not) cannot be done ingame. There's a work-around for this, but it'll take some time to complete that.

[catweazle_touchwood 1]

One more thing:
Does the additional profit really adds up the budget?

BTW: an annually report is fine for me.

[+Guest]

Date: 7/7/2004 1:22:24 PM
Author:
One more thing:

Does the additional profit really adds up the budget?


BTW: an annually report is fine for me.

quote>

Yeah. I've tested it, and it does.

[Djohaal 121]

 

COMPLETELY AMAZING

I made a mod that takes the water polution off the farms but i need to find it in my plugins folder, it was quite simple, just opened the buidling tweaker nd put the water polution of the fields to 0

 

What about 2 kinds of harvest, the dry city would need to have a larger farming area but then it would have more profits:

 

 

the profits of the farming (according to the mosture levels) would worke a little like this, the dry city farms would bring a higher profit if you had a larger farming area (perhaps a % of the city area) than the moist city farms, since the dry ones would occupy a larger area to make the same profits

It is a very primitive graph, perhaps some thinking and calculating may allow us to get in a better result

[Daeley 46]

UPDATE: after quite some additional coding, I have added an option to toggle the popup on or off. I have also added a factor to factor in game difficulty, you should note a significant difference between an easy or a hard city.

Furthermore I have tweaked difficulty a bit, so it should be somewhat harder to get those 62% profits

 

the file in the first post has been updated, please download from there, and unzip the .dat file to your plugins directory.

[Fox 1,444]

Cool, this has been a great addition to the game. Works really well.

 

Although I notice that you never post pics of expected yield  %. I've let a city go while givng this a test run and always got between 138% and 189% every year.

 

I must have found a good terain to farm....hehe.

 

Hope we see more of this type of additions to the game.

 

[Jim 6]

One thing, what is the Weather thing? And the local Biotech? what are those?This is now my favorite modd.

[+Guest]

Date: 7/8/2004 10:00:24 PM
Author:

One thing, what is the Weather thing? And the local Biotech? what are those?This is now my favorite modd.

quote>

I am GUESSING that weather is random and that biotech is high-tech industry.....more=better rating I guess.