by
Jalpha
» 07 Oct 2014, 23:03
Well in a real life situation most soils have plentiful potassium, but phosphorus is usually added to assist in root development early in the plants life, giving it a head-start. At least where I'm from (most soils are clay based).
The only thing that really forces plant rotations in modern agriculture is disease, which builds up when the same crop is planted in a field year after year.
LiF doesn't have that level of complexity however. All soil is either fertile or infertile, perhaps with an associated value. There is no distinction between chicken manure, which would be rather high in phosphorus compared to rabbit manure which would have much lower phosphorus but decent levels of nitrogen.
I understand that simply planting and harvesting beans could be too easy a method of raising soil fertility though, if that was your point. To counter this I suggest adding an option to legumes during their middle growth stage which lets you green manure the crop.
So you exchange time (for the plant to grow) and the seed used to plant the crop, for an increase in soil fertility. No other outputs would be acquired. This is also more in-line with the organic method of increasing soil fertility in agriculture.
I'd love to see more complexity with rotations and different nutrients added to the farming system, but I do worry that having tiles remember all that information may place a high load on the server.