Gumboots wrote:Just Crazy Jim wrote:@nd EDIT: And true to form, I now have a brilliant idea to change Cotton and Wool to a single cargo "Fiber"...
Oh no you don't. Fibre, and spell it correctly you barbarian
, covers everything from jute to Kevlar. Neither or which come from sheep, or not any sheep of my acquaintance.
No seriously, I'd balk at seeing "Fiber" everywhere. Trains shipping wool makes sense to me. Trains shipping "Fiber" just doesn't feel right. It's getting too close to "generic Cargo A, Generic Cargo B, etc". It's the sort of thing that pulls the player out of the game world and makes them look at database dumps.
A better approach IMO would be to use custom icon packs and language files for specialised scenarios, so if you are running around Asia you'll see a lot of rice, and if you're out in Kansas or whatever god-forsaken place you lot grow corn, you'll see a lot of corn.
And you're right about the corn to cows thing. Over here most beef is still fed on grass, with sorghum as a supplement. Corn doesn't get used at all, AFAIK.
Okay, okay, so maybe I'm over zealous to make a 19th century economy with barrels and salt and fish and train oil.
Admittedly, even I thought dropping cotton and wool in favor of fibre was a wee bit far. (one forgets to use -re instead of -er after a few years of having teachers needle one for using the Queen's English, they'll let one slide on /theatre/ - but try getting /colour/ or /cheque/ past them, not a chance)
And, yeah, godforsaken about covers it. It starts in western Ohio and it seems to be nothing but maize and soybeans for the rest of the drive to Colorado. And if you swerve north to avoid Colorado, it goes on a bit farther. I'm surprised every time I use Google maps to view a location out that way and I don't see one giant field of maize peppered with tornadoes.
You're probably right. A language file and special icons would probably be vastly easier to get wide acceptance. I'd balk at seeing a Nuclear Power Plant as a fish monger's shop, but some people wouldn't. However, I'm sticking to my guns on grain as a replacement for rice & corn as the output for Rice Farms and Corn Farms. I've never agreed with the devs' thinking on the grain/rice/corn thing. I just ran 50 years on Ned Fumpkin's New France map with my all-grain mod and it was as beastly hard as ever, but not more or less hard to get those demanded Francs to the Dauphin those first few years than it ever was before. And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't sorghum a grain as well as a source of sugar via molasses?
How about we consider, just briefly, the idea of a sugar farm yielding 1 grain and 2 molasses per year - the 2 molasses then go to a Sugar Refinery to be come 2 Sugars, as opposed to a direct to market commodity.
RulerofRails wrote:Did you edit the Dairy, Livestock, and Wool Farms to consume Grain? I'm surprised then. I would have thought that Grain was more likely to wander aimlessly in the countryside than collect at cities for shipment to Breweries. (In terms of a custom pack, this idea works fine because you can make further adjustments to compensate like seeding % changes and raising production level by event etc..)
Indeed, good sir, I did edit those files. The grain marched across the map with purpose toward cities and animal farms. On the
Go West! map, it even slid down rivers to the sea and ran along the edge of map to get to the Brewery in Boston before the demand from houses and farms caused the price to lose its centre point on Boston.
"We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own."
-- François de La Rochefoucauld. Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales. 1665.