Bay 12 Games Forum

Dwarf Fortress => DF Dwarf Mode Discussion => Topic started by: Arkenstone on May 05, 2012, 08:39:22 pm

Title: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 05, 2012, 08:39:22 pm
So, in case you haven't been watching the devlog, the rate at which boulders drop from mining is no longer skill-based.

Now, rocks drop at a flat ~25%, gems 100%.

However, blocks now come multiple to a boulder so if you're using the stone for construction the effective drop rate will be closer to ~100%.

And if you aren't, this means up to 75% less microline to atomize.

Bars also come multiple to an ore now, so that's ~100% drop now too.



So then, the end of avoiding mineral veins until one has a legendary miner is nigh, everything's effective drop rate's gone up, and there's less micromanaging the miners.  Seems like a complete win to me, but at least one person said they'd think it'd be tedious to have to mine 4x more for the same number of boulders, so here's a poll for it!
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Corai on May 05, 2012, 08:41:27 pm
My god, finally! I no longer must rip off the beards of my miners when they waste a entire vein of valuable, valuable silver!
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Monk321654 on May 05, 2012, 08:46:01 pm
I haven't actually played it yet so I can't really form an opinion, but for now I'll say I don't mind.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Crossroads Inc. on May 05, 2012, 08:47:13 pm
My god, finally! I no longer must rip off the beards of my miners when they waste a entire vein of valuable, valuable silver!
I htink THIS is going to echo about 90% of the statements in this thread.

Really that is what htis boils down to, no longer having to worry about  forcing legendary dwarves to mind gold silver and platinum.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: bombzero on May 05, 2012, 08:50:22 pm
well the previous way of skill level affecting drop rate was simply a hindrance that didn't add anything, so the new way seems far superior.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: ZzarkLinux on May 05, 2012, 08:52:03 pm
Hmm, I'm not sure it will really affect me, it may even slightly help.

When I embark in Terrifying biomes, I eventually run out of stone, and I'm waiting on an un-skilled miner to make more stone.
Does a Dabbling/Novice miner drop stone less than 25% of the time ? If so, then it's an improvement for me.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Captain Crazy on May 05, 2012, 08:52:15 pm
I was gonna be grumpy but now that ore yields multiple boulders, everything's lovely~
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 05, 2012, 09:13:40 pm
I was gonna be grumpy but now that ore yields multiple boulders, everything's lovely~
Actually, I think Toady said it was multiple bars per ore.  And then again, there's no guarantee that it's 4 bars per ore, it could be 3 or something.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Kanil on May 05, 2012, 09:20:43 pm
However, blocks now come multiple to a boulder so if you're using the stone for construction the effective drop rate will be closer to ~100%.

Might I ask where you read this? All I saw Toady mention was bars of metal from ore, and nothing about blocks of stone from boulders.

Edit: Nevermind. I'm blind, or retarded, or both.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: talysman on May 05, 2012, 09:22:56 pm
Does the amount of available stone lower FPS? I noticed it takes longer and longer to list my stone in the stocks screen, so I've been assuming it does. If so, the drop rate change will be a big plus for me. I have never needed all the boulders for building.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: GoldenShadow on May 05, 2012, 09:30:54 pm
1. Save on hauling stone of out your excavations
2. 1/4 of the stone listed on the stock screen
3. Need less smelting jobs to get the same amount of ore.

Sounds good so far.

How will this affect adamantine and slade?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: TSTwizby on May 05, 2012, 09:38:27 pm
This will be very good for me if - and only if - we have about the same amount of raw material per tile mined, for construction at least. I know I'm in the minority here, but I like making huge aboveground constructions, which take large amounts of stone. I almost never actually get enough stone from mining out the necessary rooms and such, especially when I want my dwarves to end up living in whatever it is I build. Plus, the stone needed to floor any drains I build (to prevent trees from cluttering it up) takes another large chunk for any of my water-based projects. If boulders now yield multiple sets of blocks, then there won't be any real problem. Even if it isn't quite enough to offset the lower drop rate, It won't be a big problem. But it the total yield drops by more than a third or so it will be a big problem for me. Then again, if there are four blocks per boulder, there is the curious circumstance that a single boulder will yield either four walls or a scant three mugs...

As for ores, I think Toady said straight out somewhere that metalworking will, on the whole, not be overly affected. Apart from a slight improvement in efficiency, since ores for smelting will effectively be transported up to four at a time.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: bombzero on May 05, 2012, 09:47:21 pm
construction wont be affected if you use blocks, i saw that myself over in FotF i believe.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: TSTwizby on May 06, 2012, 12:13:22 am
That suggests a pretty simple model for constructing things then... Cart all the rocks off to a central depot, with a bunch of mason workshops and a bunch of dedicated block-carvers, and then cart them over to wherever the construction is.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: bombzero on May 06, 2012, 12:40:10 am
well, that actually is rather nice tbh, the change to block making may have a major effect on building projects.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: rridgway on May 06, 2012, 01:18:06 am
1. Save on hauling stone of out your excavations
2. 1/4 of the stone listed on the stock screen
3. Need less smelting jobs to get the same amount of ore.

Sounds good so far.

How will this affect adamantine and slade?

So instead of having 160K stone (despite being ~15% done digging) while emptying for my megaproject, I'd just have 40K? Awesome. Except for the nice stones, such as rutile... Having less stone will also help with FPS, to some degree...

As for Addymantine, the multiple bars per ore will probably turn into multiple strands per ore, or multiple wafers per strand?

Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Uristocrat on May 06, 2012, 01:51:37 am
It sounds like we'll spend a lot less time hauling stone and making blocks out of it will be ever more useful.

So, a good change all around I'd say.  Just need to start making wheelbarrows/minecarts so they don't take forever to haul.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: TriggerNaught on May 06, 2012, 04:10:15 am
I have to state my observation here... If ores have a flat 25% chance, small veins could possibly result in potentially very little ore compared to currently where you know what you're getting from it. I'm not sure I like it! We'll have to see won't we, might turn out great, or the chance based will be too annoying. The way I start my fortresses, my miners are nearing legendary before I really strike any ore anyways! Just my 2 cents
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Loud Whispers on May 06, 2012, 05:57:22 am
*sigh*

Well it seems I'm part of the minority that will be struck hard by this :/
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Garath on May 06, 2012, 06:29:34 am
can you explain how? except for rock pots, there is not much that you actually NEED raw stone for, maybe some nest boxes, grates, doors, cabinets, coffers, coffins, mechanisms, slabs... well, in the end you'll always have more stone than you need anyway, right

I'm definately seeing a blockage of my mechanism production here
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Loud Whispers on May 06, 2012, 06:46:35 am
can you explain how? except for rock pots, there is not much that you actually NEED raw stone for

Building :/
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Blizzlord on May 06, 2012, 06:54:50 am
No longer do you need to train your miners for drop rates! Huzzah!
*party dance*

Edit: does this apply to adamantine?!
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Garath on May 06, 2012, 06:57:13 am
can you explain how? except for rock pots, there is not much that you actually NEED raw stone for

Building :/
so make blocks. You'll get more blocks per rock. It'll even train your masons, and, imo, is more realistic
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: rhesusmacabre on May 06, 2012, 06:59:57 am
Yeah, 4 blocks per stone remember. This and the updates allowing you to tie a workshop to a particular stockpile, and hence type of stone(s), have got me thinking big things.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Garath on May 06, 2012, 07:04:33 am
marble temples
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Rince Wind on May 06, 2012, 07:13:12 am
I don't really like the change. I like to have all this stone.
I usually have a couple of mason workshops producing blocks on repeat, because I don't use boulders for anything but the very first workshops.
Now I will probably run out of stone, my masons will be idling and will have less training. Block production is a great way to make legendary masons, or at least train them up to a level where they are listed as masons and, if having a mood, will produce something usefull and not another cat bone mug, menacing with spikes.

I dig out some large rooms in the soil at the beginning anyway, where i temporarily put everything and use them as treefarms and underground pastures later on. So my miners are usually legendary when I start proper digging. (And if not...-> another 21x21 room in soil)
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Manveru Taurënér on May 06, 2012, 07:20:22 am
Not really fond of this fix either, but since it's just temporary I guess I can live with it until Toady figures out how to handle it all. To me this is a step in the wrong direction, as what I've been hoping for is something a bit more realistic where every mined tile leaves at least some mineral, be it rubble, small stones or whatever else it ends up as. It always irks me when the mountain magically disappears when my miners strike the earth :P
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Loud Whispers on May 06, 2012, 07:26:20 am
so make blocks. You'll get more blocks per rock. It'll even train your masons, and, imo, is more realistic
I use up a lot of stone. I already make everything out of blocks. My emphasis is on the building, not the digging, and "training my masons" is hardly a consolidation :|
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: caddybear on May 06, 2012, 07:29:14 am
It's neither, we'll probably have to play it to see how it actually works but less stone cluttering everywhere and dragging fps down can only be a good thing in my book.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Rince Wind on May 06, 2012, 07:29:42 am
so make blocks. You'll get more blocks per rock. It'll even train your masons, and, imo, is more realistic
I use up a lot of stone. I already make everything out of blocks. My emphasis is on the building, not the digging, and "training my masons" is hardly a consolidation :|

You'll train them even less now, if you used to make everything out of blocks before.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: IT 000 on May 06, 2012, 09:01:26 am
It's a temporary fix but I like the direction it's going in. Hopefully Toady can slap on a tag that allows us to mod it.

Just so that I can garnish support, here's the current suggestion topic on modding stone drops. [LINK] (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=108861.0) If you like having 100% stone drop or have it based on skill you should still get behind this so that Toady knows there's interest.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Niyazov on May 06, 2012, 10:19:14 am
How will this affect coal? If drop rates are slashed by 3/4 and bar yields are quadrupled for coal as well as ore, you will still generate more coke total since there will be major savings in coke during coking and smelting. Even if coal drop rates and coking equations are unaffected (e.g. still get 100% coal drop from a legendary miner and net two bars from bit. coal and 1 bar from lignite), there will still be a lower demand for coal due to more efficient smelting.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Blizzlord on May 06, 2012, 10:53:39 am
How will this affect coal? If drop rates are slashed by 3/4 and bar yields are quadrupled for coal as well as ore, you will still generate more coke total since there will be major savings in coke during coking and smelting. Even if coal drop rates and coking equations are unaffected (e.g. still get 100% coal drop from a legendary miner and net two bars from bit. coal and 1 bar from lignite), there will still be a lower demand for coal due to more efficient smelting.
No. There is still a demand for coke in steel production that which will not diminish unless the Toady One addresses this issue.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: GoldenShadow on May 06, 2012, 11:00:59 am
If you disregard magma smelting, coal usage will drop.

You want to smelt 20 copper bars? Now, you need 20 coal and 20 copper ore.
With the change, you will need 5 coal and 5 copper ore.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Rince Wind on May 06, 2012, 11:23:05 am
But as soon as you make something out of bars or if you make steel you will need as much coke as before.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: terko on May 06, 2012, 11:29:03 am
Well, Steel is something precious to have and you can still have multiple levels of underground tree farms, as big as you want them to have and make your coke out of wood. Issue partially solved.


On the other hand, I like it, sounds good. No more mass dumping because of 'I NEED THAT STORAGE SPACE DOWN THERE NOW! NOT LATER!'.

As for blocks, as soon as you can set the stone used by the workshop, it's going to be wonderful. (I know, it's possible already, with burrows and locked doors, but that's a bit toooo ... tedious.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: ZzarkLinux on May 06, 2012, 11:30:21 am
I wonder how this will affect my embark points.
Raw materials will become even more important than the finished product.

e.g.
one raw stone = 3 points = gives 4 blocks = .75 points per block
-> one block of stone = 5 points apiece
and
1-tin / 1-copper / 1 lumber = 23 points = gives 2 bronze bars = 11.5 points per bronze bar
-> 1 bronze bar = 25 points apiece

I guess the extra points will go into food, since dwarves will be too busy making blocks to farm/train/etc...

since it's just temporary I guess I can live with it until Toady figures out how to handle it all.

Hope this isn't tautology (yes I'm very grumpy today).
Otherwise, it'll join the other temporary features such as:
: alcohol-dependant vampires
: stangnant rivers
: dwarves that get repeated bad thoughts from wearing Xsilk sockX but don't change clothing till it's xX (or something)
/grump
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Niyazov on May 06, 2012, 11:46:27 am
If you disregard magma smelting, coal usage will drop.

You want to smelt 20 copper bars? Now, you need 20 coal and 20 copper ore.
With the change, you will need 5 coal and 5 copper ore.

ok let's get our terminology straight

fuel= coke or charcoal
coal= bituminous coal or lignite
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: GoldenShadow on May 06, 2012, 11:50:10 am
The bar stockpile setting that includes coke and charcoal is called "coal".
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Niyazov on May 06, 2012, 12:12:36 pm
Toady is in error, then. Coke should never be called coal except in extremely informal parlance. Calling coke/charcoal "coal" is a harmful and confusing practice.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 06, 2012, 08:37:25 pm
As for blocks, as soon as you can set the stone used by the workshop, it's going to be wonderful. (I know, it's possible already, with burrows and locked doors, but that's a bit toooo ... tedious.
Quote from: Devlog
Stockpiles can now be set to give items to multiple stockpiles. You can also set stockpiles to give to a workshop, in which case the workshop will only use items from its piles. You can use this to set specific materials for jobs in a roundabout way, for example, until we get around to doing that properly.
Rejoice, for the Great Toady One has provided.  All one needs is a dedicated stockpile, which I expect most to have anyways.


PS: I hadn't considered how the production of mechanisms might be affected by the new stone drop rate.  Well, I suppose maybe we can mod in iron mechanisms somehow?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: talysman on May 06, 2012, 09:29:02 pm
PS: I hadn't considered how the production of mechanisms might be affected by the new stone drop rate.  Well, I suppose maybe we can mod in iron mechanisms somehow?
Mod in? I thought they were already in the game? I haven't made metal mechanisms, but I've seen them listed as an option at the forge.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 06, 2012, 10:14:14 pm
Have they been?  I haven't checked either, lol.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Eric Blank on May 06, 2012, 10:22:03 pm
They are indeed possible, but it may still be a pain in the ass to produce enough furniture and non-block stone goods if it all still uses boulders. If they could carve straight from blocks, or if blocks had some uses besides construction, that would be great. Or maybe if a single boulder produced more than one coffer...
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 06, 2012, 10:35:11 pm
I think that having not enough stone to build furniture with might actually be a good thing though.  It seems like we've almost had it too easy up 'til now.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Kofthefens on May 06, 2012, 10:57:20 pm
I definitely like the direction this is going. I feel like this will smooth the way for more update with rubble ect. later on.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: KodKod on May 06, 2012, 11:08:09 pm
KodKod approves of this change.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Ubiq on May 06, 2012, 11:34:09 pm
I wonder how this will affect my embark points.
Raw materials will become even more important than the finished product.

e.g.
one raw stone = 3 points = gives 4 blocks = .75 points per block
-> one block of stone = 5 points apiece
and
1-tin / 1-copper / 1 lumber = 23 points = gives 2 bronze bars = 11.5 points per bronze bar
-> 1 bronze bar = 25 points apiece

I guess the extra points will go into food, since dwarves will be too busy making blocks to farm/train/etc...

A better option is to put it into tetrahedrite and metalcrafting/smithing; two tetrahedrite (18 db) now becomes six billion bars (180 db), which can make eighteen goblets (minimum 1800 db, maximum 21600).  Removing the buckets, splints, and crutches alone from a default embark gives you enough points to make sixty bars. Add in the bags and ropes and it goes to 180.

Plus bismuth bronze becomes an even better bargain. As is, bismuth/tin/copper/copper (40db) yields four bars (120 db), but copper ore/copper ore/bismuthinite/cassiterite (21 db) and would yield twelve bars (360 db). More steps, sure, but you can produce six times as much bismuth bronze for nearly the same price by smelting the ore and then forging the bars. Plus bismuth bronze is superior for trade goods (serrated disks) and could be used for armor/weapons.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Count Dorku on May 06, 2012, 11:53:45 pm
A better option is to put it into tetrahedrite and metalcrafting/smithing; two tetrahedrite (18 db) now becomes six billion bars (180 db)

...so each unit is worth about 3,000,000,000 bars?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Eric Blank on May 07, 2012, 12:18:11 am
That's how I understood it too, but he meant billon :P
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: bombzero on May 07, 2012, 12:50:47 am
so reading the last few pages it seems many people are detrimentally opposed to anything that makes resources actually take work to obtain, why?

if you say megaprojects, then how much of an accomplishment is it really if all it is is how much time you were willing to put in? currently there is no "wow he overcame alot of challenges" with megaprojects, just a "wow this dude has a lot of time", so we actually need more scarcity of resources to make the game decently difficult. for a community that preaches the value of difficulty, a lot of you seem to not want the game to be any harder (current page excluded it seems).
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Eric Blank on May 07, 2012, 01:30:39 am
so reading the last few pages it seems many people are detrimentally opposed to anything that makes resources actually take work to obtain, why?

if you say megaprojects, then how much of an accomplishment is it really if all it is is how much time you were willing to put in? currently there is no "wow he overcame alot of challenges" with megaprojects, just a "wow this dude has a lot of time", so we actually need more scarcity of resources to make the game decently difficult. for a community that preaches the value of difficulty, a lot of you seem to not want the game to be any harder (current page excluded it seems).

Honestly, most people don't even do real time-consuming projects because we honestly DON'T have much time to play. The longer it takes to set up a fort or complete a task, the less likely we'll ever enjoy it because we wouldn't be able to have fun or !!FUN!! within our timeframe/attention span. The game is reasonably paced right now and there's certainly difficulty for anyone not prepared to deal with the naturally occuring !!FUN!!, and unnatural difficulty can be applied through mods, but making resources more scarce doesn't really make things more difficult in the sense that you're in mortal danger, just more tedious and time-consuming. Less resources = less enjoyable and a longer wait for anything to happen, which sucks.

Of course, I am tackling the concept from the standpoint that I absolutely hate grindfest-type games that demand you waste time and energy on resource acquisition before blowing shit up/even encountering real problems, like being killed. I don't want resources to take more work to obtain as much as I want to take my massive hoard of legosstone and make a castle of horrors of such ridiculous complexity that I forget how to operate it, then enjoy the brand-new combat AI that makes defeating a siege far more satisfying and more difficult. I do such sadistic things as throwing a half dozen legendary soldiers against a horde of giants, because that's both fun to watch and !!FUN!! when the tantrum spiral starts because Urist mcDead was married, had a dozen kids, and was friends with everyone else. Waiting for blocks to be ready for my megaproject? No. I've been happy with rough stone boulders because I like to start as soon as possible.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: SirAaronIII on May 07, 2012, 01:34:37 am
I like it because it's going to make me stop usig raw stone for everything and start actually using blocks. The ores change doesn't sound too bad at all, and I REALLY like the gems bit.



Blocks are going to take a bit of time to get used to, though. This plus minecarts and new hauling stiff will probably lead to a confused me.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Raunyc on May 07, 2012, 02:10:56 am
My only issue is the face that "Where does the rock go?" I would think that we'd need the 3 tiers of rocks I saw someone suggest in another thread (I'm lazy, pardon my not digging it up, and I take no credit for the idea a;though I'm adding numerical values)

Small rock 4 from one tile mined = small crafts and blocks (I don't like the idea that one "wall of rock" =/= at least 4 blocks, I mean a whole wall should yield a lot more, but 4 is reasonable for clutter, of course building a wall out of blocks should require 4 to offset this, but floors,  etc using as much as they do I don't understand using and entire wall of rock for a tile floor...  I do see this as running into too many items and could see blocks being moved up to medium, but I would like to request "1 block" be "some blocks" for clarification)
Medium rock 2 from one tile mined = Furniture etc...
Large rock = one to a wall or statue, other large object

Of course the large and medium would be able to be reduced to smaller sizes, but Large would be more common with higher skilled miners. A guy with a pick that's used it for a day will be making rubble out of any stone he's mining, however a guy that's done it for years will be able to carve out large rocks fairly reliably...

Thanks to whomever it was that originally suggest the 3 tiers of stone

I will however wait and see how it is all handled before I complain, not to say that I'm not worried about it thus far...
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: bombzero on May 07, 2012, 02:18:54 am
hang on, why could an unskilled miner not obtain a decent sized chunk of stone? are you sure your thinking about this right? that's like saying I could not dig a round hole in my yard, as I haven't spent enough time digging round holes, its a basic concept, not a valued art. you chip away the stone around a chunk of it, and you have a large boulder, its the masons job to make that blocks, not the miners.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Sadrice on May 07, 2012, 04:10:45 am
Having done a certain amount of work with cutting through stone with pickaxe and chisel (yay highschool paying me $4 an hour for masonry and digging), I can assure you that it is very difficult to cut a piece of stone into the shape you want.  Trying to knock off what looks like a delicate knob sticking out can break the whole stone in half if the angle of your blow isn't exactly right.  This would be especially difficult if you were trying to work quickly, using a pick, to at the same time dig out a room.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Niyazov on May 07, 2012, 07:43:20 am
Even marble quarries, which have one of the higher product-waste ratios among mining operations since they are essentially trying to extract everything, only at very maximum a 50% yield of solid stones, with the remainder becoming rubble, scrapes, and slurry. Rubble and scrapes (small pieces produced during mining and extraction) have essentially no use for most stone types.  Stone slurries have only found application very recently and are typically generated during cutting and shaping.

Only a few kinds of stone possess the necessary properties to remain in monolithic form when being cut out of the matrix with hand tools.

Remember also that many of the stone types in Dwarf Fortress could never be used to make furniture, etc. in real life; e.g. talc, shale, sylvite, borax and chalk are very brittle and delicate; realgar and orpiment have been known to be toxic since antiquity, etc. This is one of those cases where some suspension of disbelief is neccessary. There are few historical real-world analogues for the kind of large-scale underground stone quarrying that DF dwarves perform.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: GoldenShadow on May 07, 2012, 09:56:11 am
Dwarves are known for their natural stone working affinity, humans, not so much.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Niyazov on May 07, 2012, 10:12:43 am
Dwarves are known for their natural stone working affinity, humans, not so much.

Dwarves are known for their natural metal working affinity. Dwarves do comparatively little construction; mostly tunneling. The nature of underground mining precludes quarrying out large rocks; the physical geometry issues involved are prohibitive. On the other hand, presumably humans do know a thing or or two about stone quarrying since they build enormous castles and fortifications out of stone blocks.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 07, 2012, 10:43:49 am
Honestly, most people don't even do real time-consuming projects because we honestly DON'T have much time to play. The longer it takes to set up a fort or complete a task, the less likely we'll ever enjoy it because we wouldn't be able to have fun or !!FUN!! within our timeframe/attention span. The game is reasonably paced right now and there's certainly difficulty for anyone not prepared to deal with the naturally occuring !!FUN!!, and unnatural difficulty can be applied through mods, but making resources more scarce doesn't really make things more difficult in the sense that you're in mortal danger, just more tedious and time-consuming. Less resources = less enjoyable and a longer wait for anything to happen, which sucks.

Of course, I am tackling the concept from the standpoint that I absolutely hate grindfest-type games that demand you waste time and energy on resource acquisition before blowing shit up/even encountering real problems, like being killed. I don't want resources to take more work to obtain as much as I want to take my massive hoard of legosstone and make a castle of horrors of such ridiculous complexity that I forget how to operate it, then enjoy the brand-new combat AI that makes defeating a siege far more satisfying and more difficult. I do such sadistic things as throwing a half dozen legendary soldiers against a horde of giants, because that's both fun to watch and !!FUN!! when the tantrum spiral starts because Urist mcDead was married, had a dozen kids, and was friends with everyone else. Waiting for blocks to be ready for my megaproject? No. I've been happy with rough stone boulders because I like to start as soon as possible.

The problem with that is, what you're describing isn't a game at all - it's just a construction set. 

A construction set where you have infinite powers, and you just use the terrain as your canvas is fine and all, but it's not a game and it has no challenges.

The game that DF is moving towards and should be isn't something where you move blocks around for 20 hours before deleting the world and making another world again and starting over from scratch. 

It should, instead, be a 300-hour project where you scratch your way up from meager beginnings to controlling a world-spanning empire, with every step along the way adding additional challenge and complexity until you are simultaniously juggling the military strategies of an army on the march, their logistical needs, the intra-court politics of your king and nobles, relations between the dwarves and their tigermen and antmen allies over the benefits of citizenry, maintaining farm production, keeping the citizens of your capital entertained with bread and circuses, keeping guild conflicts to a minimum, keeping the minecarts running on time, getting enough barrels made to keep booze production running, and making sure the mandates and moods get completed.

The tagline of the game is "Losing is Fun" because Toady wants us to keep coming back to the same fort and world with its ever-increasing depth and personality rather than just deleting the world and starting another random one every time you're done pushing around your lego megaprojects. 

The construction set things will still be there, but there's so much more game to be added onto DF. 
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Eric Blank on May 07, 2012, 10:51:56 am
I didn't actaully mean that there should be no resource acquisition, just that it shouldn't overshadow other gameplay elements, and that it isn't in itself really valuable or adding difficulty, only making things more tedious. I definitely want to see everything on the dev list happen, and I'm rather happy that certain parts of the industries are becoming more autonomous with the new hauling changes.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 07, 2012, 10:52:08 am
The problem with that is, what you're describing isn't a game at all - it's just a construction set. 
And yet I still fail to see how this is a problem...

If you want more difficulty, there's plenty of mods for that.  I know *I'd* much rather spend more time on my military than spend more time hauling, because at least then there's the chance for Fun.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Bilanthri on May 07, 2012, 10:56:43 am
Seems like a move it the right direction to me.

As for furniture issues, two words...Green Glass.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 07, 2012, 11:00:00 am
I didn't actaully mean that there should be no resource acquisition, just that it shouldn't overshadow other gameplay elements, and that it isn't in itself really valuable or adding difficulty, only making things more tedious. I definitely want to see everything on the dev list happen, and I'm rather happy that certain parts of the industries are becoming more autonomous with the new hauling changes.
The problem with that is, what you're describing isn't a game at all - it's just a construction set. 
And yet I still fail to see how this is a problem...

If you want more difficulty, there's plenty of mods for that.  I know *I'd* much rather spend more time on my military than spend more time hauling, because at least then there's the chance for Fun.

But that's part of the point - If the basics of your economy becomes less readily available, then everything "up the line" becomes more challenging, as well.

You can say you want to focus on your military, but without the economics of the military's upkeep, the military is a much shallower game.  If you cannot outfit your military in all steel everything all the time, and have to try to make do with lesser materials, how do you react?  Do you go for just a breastplate and a helmet and an axe and hope for the best?  Or just a shield and sword and leather?  Or do you make a few elite melee specialists and give the rest crossbows? 

You can't discount the aspects of the game you consider "boring" as therefore being "unimportant".  It just means that the "boring" aspects of the game need to be made more interesting - and making them more challenging while stripping away the tedium of micromanagement is what does that. 

If farming is more challenging, or mining is more challenging, and you can't assume you will always have free infinite resources for your every need up the line, and have to decide what functions of the fortress are most important to you, and where you will devote a limited set of resources, then the game as a whole becomes more challenging, the decisions more meaningful, and overall more fun.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: ZzarkLinux on May 07, 2012, 11:27:14 am
But that's part of the point - If the basics of your economy becomes less readily available, then everything "up the line" becomes more challenging, as well.

You can say you want to focus on your military, but without the economics of the military's upkeep, the military is a much shallower game.  If you cannot outfit your military in all steel everything all the time, and have to try to make do with lesser materials, how do you react?  Do you go for just a breastplate and a helmet and an axe and hope for the best?  Or just a shield and sword and leather?  Or do you make a few elite melee specialists and give the rest crossbows? 

NW, I respect your position, and I do like how your avatar etc... matches the style of your posting :)
However, you seem to be very active in promoting attention-to-detail in core parts of the game, and I'm not sure many players would like that.

Be careful with your goals, if you push too hard you might push people away from it.

It's one thing to want an optional feature in the game e.g. Glazing
You can have that, and despite its bugs you can still use it.
But if Toady were to start changing core drastic things in the game such as seiges/digging/beasts, a lot of people may get upset at having to jump through so many hoops just to have the same Fun as before.

I don't want my Fantasy Simulator to be too boring, and I don't want it to be too tedious either.
I think a silent majority may share these same thoughts.

I wouldn't mind if your ideas would be the default setting for the game, I'm fine with that.
But then I want some options next to the "Savegery"/"Size"/"Minerals" bars that also include "BarberShops" scale and "Difficult Mining" scale so I can de-activate those in my DF.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 07, 2012, 11:46:23 am
But that's part of the point - If the basics of your economy becomes less readily available, then everything "up the line" becomes more challenging, as well.

You can say you want to focus on your military, but without the economics of the military's upkeep, the military is a much shallower game.  If you cannot outfit your military in all steel everything all the time, and have to try to make do with lesser materials, how do you react?  Do you go for just a breastplate and a helmet and an axe and hope for the best?  Or just a shield and sword and leather?  Or do you make a few elite melee specialists and give the rest crossbows? 
I'd say that I'd rather be working on how to deploy my well-equipped squads to best effect.  Keeping them supplied is another matter, and while dealing with a lack of supplies certainly can be enjoyable, such a state of affairs should be the exception rather than the norm in my mind.  Outside of deliberate scenarios (like turning down mineral frequency, or in a very young fort) lack of equipment should really only be a consequence of a failure to properly prepare (or when something really random happens).
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 07, 2012, 11:52:10 am
If farming is more challenging, or mining is more challenging, and you can't assume you will always have free infinite resources for your every need up the line, and have to decide what functions of the fortress are most important to you, and where you will devote a limited set of resources, then the game as a whole becomes more challenging, the decisions more meaningful, and overall more fun.
I would prefer then that the challenge came in the form of a cave-in or a crop blight.  Because if the challenge is predictable and constant, all it means is a bit more hassle in setting up a new system to deal with it -after which the game is no more difficult than before.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Psieye on May 07, 2012, 12:01:24 pm
I'm seeing a lot of "that's nice but it's not really what I want out of DF":
I wouldn't mind if your ideas would be the default setting for the game, I'm fine with that.
But then I want some options next to the "Savegery"/"Size"/"Minerals" bars that also include "BarberShops" scale and "Difficult Mining" scale so I can de-activate those in my DF.
This isn't like a mainstream game where what you get is what you must conform to (and ok, this statement is easily shot down). DF lets you mod things to the point where you make the game conform to you, not the other way around. So...

I'd say that I'd rather be working on how to deploy my well-equipped squads to best effect.  Keeping them supplied is another matter, and while dealing with a lack of supplies certainly can be enjoyable, such a state of affairs should be the exception rather than the norm in my mind.
Then make it so. This was exactly how I ran my version of DF: very easy to supply my military, lots of trash mobs to kill so my military is kept busy. It's how I discovered what I wanted out of crossbow squads.


There seems to be some resistance to dabbling in modding. Is this because people feel it would add a hurdle to sharing their DF experiences with others, as you'd need to supply additional contextual knowledge each time? Or is it about not wanting to delve into the perceived complexity of the raws (and I'll admit, some parts of the raws do take some time to get your head around)? I suppose in the latter's case, the modding forum's assumption that everyone wants to DIY could be an issue. But that should mean people make requests for certain simple 'tailor fits' be made for them and somebody else will deliver.

--- Edit ---

I would prefer then that the challenge came in the form of a cave-in or a crop blight.  Because if the challenge is predictable and constant, all it means is a bit more hassle in setting up a new system to deal with it -after which the game is no more difficult than before.
Yes, that challenge will be in minecart accidents and incidents (the latter being things you couldn't have easily foreseen). Cave-ins can be prevented with careful attention - if you deem this to be unpredictable enough then minecart accidents will certainly be the non-constant challenge you seek. The game difficulty certainly won't be the same after it's set up.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: slink on May 07, 2012, 01:51:44 pm
I'm seeing a lot of "that's nice but it's not really what I want out of DF":
I wouldn't mind if your ideas would be the default setting for the game, I'm fine with that.
But then I want some options next to the "Savegery"/"Size"/"Minerals" bars that also include "BarberShops" scale and "Difficult Mining" scale so I can de-activate those in my DF.
This isn't like a mainstream game where what you get is what you must conform to (and ok, this statement is easily shot down). DF lets you mod things to the point where you make the game conform to you, not the other way around. So...
I think part of what's bothering people is that the drop rate, and the material dropped, has never before been something we could control.  Correct me if I am wrong on that.  We can mod inclusions to be mined out and reactions for the materials once mined, but we cannot change what happens when the pick hits the rock.  We have no gut feeling that this will change.  Some are already viewing with mixed feelings the decrease in drop rate for ordinary rock.  I don't want to open a discussion on that topic here, but it is in everyone's mind for better or for worse.  The thought on top of that of a materially useless, purely obstructive, product dropping from mining is too much negative at one time.  What we envision is that not only can we not get what we thought we were going to get when we mine a location, we also can't get anything done because of this rubbish appearing everywhere, and we have no faith that we will have control over that part of the game because we never have before.

Edit: Excuse my confusion over which thread I was in.  I think I can be forgiven, given that the post to which I was responding was discussing rubble in the stone drop thread.   ::)
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: slink on May 07, 2012, 02:02:36 pm
Seems like a move it the right direction to me.

As for furniture issues, two words...Green Glass.
Can we make green glass furniture that has a quality modifier?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 07, 2012, 02:13:11 pm
I'd say that I'd rather be working on how to deploy my well-equipped squads to best effect.  Keeping them supplied is another matter, and while dealing with a lack of supplies certainly can be enjoyable, such a state of affairs should be the exception rather than the norm in my mind.
Then make it so. This was exactly how I ran my version of DF: very easy to supply my military, lots of trash mobs to kill so my military is kept busy. It's how I discovered what I wanted out of crossbow squads.
Easier said than done.  I don't want a cakewalk, nor do I want a grindfest.

The thread seems to have moved over to the philosophical side of things, but I guess that's fine as this is a derail thread anyways.


Now, I think the problem here is we're discussing two different kinds of difficulty.  On the one hand, there's the "you must hit the target exactly right" sort of difficulty.  On the other, there's "you need to spend time just getting to the target".

The latter sort is not inherently bad, nor the former inherently good; each one must be balanced both individually and against each other.  But with DF in its current state, it's easier to adjust the former without feeling like you're 'cheating'.  By that I mean modding in weaker enemies just means you're not a good player, while modding a reaction to make extra stone is definitely more than just a crutch.  Some people like to build megaprojects with some difficulty.

And some things (like mining speed) are just hard to mod without affecting other aspects of the game (such as movement/combat speed).


In this specific case though, I like the fact that Toady was able to find a way to decrease the number of boulders lying around without adversely affecting construction and smelting operations much.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Rage Machine on May 07, 2012, 02:19:54 pm
Well ignoring all of that arguing and BS i actually like this idea. that meta-gaming of levelling up miners was really annoying, also i like that stone and ore will no longer take stockpiles the size of my fort.

also as for ANYONE who builds with stone, all i have to say is OH GOD WHY!?!?

seriously blocks are so much faster and one dedicated mason can make a fair few very quickly even at a low level, 2 make a decent amount and i have never managed to exhaust 3 masons.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Noodz on May 07, 2012, 02:43:11 pm
I like this change. I honestly don't think it will affect large outdoor structures, all it will do is require a few masons working 24/7 on making blocks. It will reduce stone available for stone furniture/crafts/mechanisms (if i understood that correctly), but it will hardly make building a good fort impossible.

Maybe what is ticking people off is the uncertainty. Probabilities are strange things and maybe people are scared of how a cluster of 4 native platine might mean anything from 4 platinum boulders to nothing.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Tarran on May 07, 2012, 02:46:40 pm
I'm not sure I especially like the change for several reasons:

1: A percentage chance--especially against the player's favor--makes it easy to get luck screwed at the worst possible times. Sure, if you are lucky and always hit a boulder 1/4 times you get the same amount of stone. Chances are, though, you might fail again and again and again and again and... get very little material. Likewise, you could get lucky (likely much rarer) and score lots of boulders. It leaves too much to chance.
2: Rare stone and ore might get really screwed over by the change, due to the above reason. Mine a cluster of 5 *insert rare stone/ore here* and roll within the 75% fail rate? Well, sorry, you're not getting anything. Tough luck with that Platinum cluster!

Other than that, it's a good idea as far as I can think of, I just do not trust the percentages at all.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong on anything I've said.

Also, partially ninja'd.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Martin on May 07, 2012, 02:46:56 pm

I'd given the mining thing a bit of thought over the years and here's what I'd prefer to see (and others have already touched on). Mining is currently imbalanced as the only penalty for poor mining skills is speed and lack of drops - and sometimes you *want* a lack of drops, so that seems odd. And there's a conservation of mass problem that everyone notes. I don't really like the fewer drops because of this.


I'd prefer to see rock replaced with three items: boulders, rock, gravel. A legendary miner would produce only boulders. Envision them as quarriers that can remove an entire block of stone at once. A boulder could be broken into (for example) 4 rocks (4 rocks would stack in a stockpile tile), each of which is Ľ the volume and Ľ the mass of the boulder. And a rock could be broken into 4 gravel (16 gravel would stack in a stockpile tile) which is similarly Ľ the mass and volume of the rock. Masons could break boulders into rock and rock into gravel and would do it on-site. The stone stockpile would hold all three items, and you could set it up so that when the mason breaks the boulder, the 4 stone remain in the tile and are accepted into the stockpile - no extraneous hauling needed, unless you want it.


Miners at lower skills would produce primarily gravel (and a lot of it). You could clear rooms, but would not get much usable rock in the process. This seems appropriate. As they skill up, they'd produce increasingly more rock (1 rock, 12 gravel; 2 rock; 8 gravel, etc), and then increasingly more boulders, but always the same ultimate volume. In the case of metal ores, they only ever produce 'ore', which is the size of gravel (16 drops per tile) and gets processed as it currently is, with each ore producing a fraction of a bar of metal. This would open the possibility of furnace operators gaining skill as well - by extracting more metal from the ore as they skill up - but 16 ore would at the lowest level produce one bar, as it is now, but a legendary operator could get 4 bars, maybe. Gems would work similarly, but they would drop some variable number of gems (1-4?) and the rest would be gravel - but again 16 drops per tile. The number of gem drops could be based on miner skill. Coals would drop 16 ore as well, and each ore would do the job of a piece of coal now. Flux stone would need to be converted to gravel to work in reactions - again one gravel per bar in the reaction. So in the case of coal and flux, you get 16x the output as you do now, which seems reasonable - coal mining should be much more desirable than it is now as it was a critical industry for millennia, but doesn't produce enough output now to be sought after or efficient. The hard thing should be the metal, and there you're limited to one(ish) bar per tile.


A more interesting approach to ore would be for any gravel to produce a small amount of a variety of metals - maybe based on the ratio of ore squares on the map. If you have a lot of gold, the generic gravel would produce more gold. If you have a lot of hematite, it'd produce more iron. But you'd only get 1% of a bar max or so per gravel. That way, if you didn't want to exploratory mine, but were digging out a vast area, you could turn your output into gravel and slowly convert it into metal. That'd be a fairly big departure for the game though.


As to mining speed, I would argue that legendary miners can't work any faster than novice - but they produce more desirable results. If you just want to clear a room and don't care about having material to use, then draft the fortress and mine it out and then deal with the gravel. If you want material, then use legendary miners - and if you want it done quickly, well, you better have a lot of them. Mining should be hard. It should take a lot of time.


In general, blocks and furniture would require boulders to produce while crafts would require rock. You should get more crafts than floodgates from a given amount of stone, and perhaps two blocks per boulder. Gravel would in general be useless (except as noted above) but could be used for road building and construction. I'd like to see road construction require two gravel for each block (with wheelbarrows, it wouldn't make the task any longer.) I think it's fine if it's just a pure waste product, though. Once you get to legendary miners, you won't produce any that you don't explicitly ask for.


I would also argue that the mason job be split in two - into stoneworker that does all of the workshop work, and the mason who breaks stones and does construction, and that construction done with rough stone take notably longer than construction done with blocks. There should be a benefit to setting up a block industry. Having masons run between workshop tasks and construction tasks with no way to designate one or the other is frustrating.


Now, this would all have been impossible before the hauling fixes. With the changes to hauling, the amount of hauling from this goes up only slightly. Legendary miners create almost no more work (one boulder per tile, or possibly two jobs for gems. I assume one hauler would shovel 16 ore into a cart and treat it as one job). Unskilled miners create as much hauling work as legendary miners (where now they create almost no work). It requires many more miners than currently, however, and would create some additional unskilled mason work if you need to break boulders into rock for crafts. But hauling was 50% (at least) of our labor before. With these changes, it should go down to 20% or less, and I would argue that what we gain in hauling should go back to balancing out other parts of the game. It's just odd that in the amount of time it takes one hauler to put a seed away, my legendary miner can clear out a dining room - and yet that dining room would take 5x longer to smooth. Gravel and rock could be carried by hand so you can clean up without an infrastructure, whereas boulders would require a wheelbarrow or cart.


What we get:


More realistic mining results
Better gem/ore/coal/flux output and balance.
Greater penalty to using unskilled miners.
Slightly more use for masons.
Greater challenge in the early game getting furniture/block production going and clearing space. A big fortress will require a big workforce.
Greater challenge to making an efficient hauling setup.


I'd propose something similar for the wood industry as well. With a tree producing one log. One log is needed for furniture similar to the boulder, but could be broken down into 4 boards for use with crafts, etc. One log would produce 4 charcoal, ash, etc. to keep coal mining more productive once you hit a seam and to reflect the greater mass/volume to stone over trees. Because woodcutters gain no quality benefit for skills, they would get faster with skills. For construction, because you have a 100% success rate even at novice with woodcutting over mining, and because woodcutting can be done more quickly with practice, your best bet to getting an early fortress going is wood rather than stone. Once you've gotten minimally situated, then you'd probably move over to proper stone working.


Finally, if we gain volume calculations, I like the idea of making movement through full tiles (full of stone, gravel, bins, whatever) proportionately slower based on volume than over clear tiles. Again, I don't think this would have been viable before the hauling changes.


Not sure what Toady has in mind overall, but this is what I'd like to see as a general direction. And a number of other people have touched on these as well. Regarding the overall game balance, players that want more military involvement still need to balance that against hauling and other things, and it's not that hard to balance them. Rather than build large constructions and megaprojects, make a simple fort that produces a ton of roasts and processes goblinite like nobody's business - and it doesn't matter what the mining changes are, you can still easily run (and support) a military-heavy fortress. If you want to build that tower to the clouds, you're going to balance away your military for masons. If you want to do everything, then the challenge comes in how to make everything work within your resources. Typically the limitations within the game aren't the number of dwarves or even resources in most cases - it's management. It's keeping production chains running, designating building and mining, and dealing with the various issues that occur - like moods and when invaders screw up your production or kill your soaper.  I have some legendary experience with that, I can tell you.


Changing things like the frequency of mining drops isn't going to radically alter the game. It shifts the resource balance a bit, but doesn't do anything (good or bad) about the management issue. So don't sweat that too much as a resource shift doesn't change the game, just the pace at which certain things happen. The hauling changes massively shift the resource balance (enough that I'd argue other things need to get harder) and probably has a neutral effect on management - adding management around the carts/wheelbarrow while removing it from the sheer logistics of the job and some of the stockpile changes (most of us design fortresses around hauling more than any other thing which is another management impact, which would be nice to change). But adding depth to mining without adding management should be a net plus if we can find a way there (which is what I was aiming for above - particularly with all gravel being able to be turned into metal, and some of the other tweaks around coal, flux, etc).


And part of the game is invoking your own sets of guidelines to shape the game you want. If you want a military challenge, then don't turtle up underground with a massive trap gauntlet to hide behind. Instead, build a functional town where there are no remote-control levers to lower the gate are at the gatehouse and where everything is building destroyable and where fliers/swimmers can path inside. Even with 200 dwarves that'll be a challenge in the later game. Or if you want that challenge along with the economic stuff, turn off immigration. Getting 7-10 dwarves to do all of your production and prepared to fend off a couple of gobbo squads once they start dropping kids is pretty damn challenging. But even in that case, outfitting your fortress with steel isn't too hard if you make good use of the trade caravan.


Oh, and hey all.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: slink on May 07, 2012, 03:11:36 pm
I hadn't intended to post in this thread even though I voted, but since I did so by accident I might as well continue.  I voted that the change doesn't address my concerns.  I wasn't concerned about how much stone was dropped and nothing that I wistfully wish to come about is advanced by the change.  However, it seems to be a part of minecarts and wheelbarrows, so I accept the change gracefully.  It's not that I was particularly wishing for minecarts and wheelbarrows, either, but they sound like an interesting addition to the game.  I do enjoy the mechanical aspects of DF.

My main concern is a potential shortage of building material in the colors of my choice.  That's been partially addressed by getting more than one block per rock.  I didn't usually build with blocks, but I don't mind doing so in the future.  As an aside, I can't see how adding a step makes building faster, that is, using block instead of stones.  But again, I don't mind that change.  The part that has not been addressed, at least in my mind, is the potential loss of rare colors through probability.  I enjoy using realgar for my shops, if it is on the site.  If there is four-stone pocket of realgar, chances are high that I will only end up with one realgar stone.  Shops are not built with blocks, so I can't get back the three lost stones for my buildings.  Likewise furniture requires stones, and again the rarer colors could easily be in too short supply.  I could mod around this by changing the colors of the available stones for every embark, in the raws for that save.  It's a nuisance, but I can do it.  Or, I can create stone at my smelter.  This is much easier, but leaves me feeling vaguely dirty.  Better dirty than unhappy, however.  That's what playing a game is for, to be made happy, right?  If I wanted to be made miserable I could go read the news headlines.  Again.

It will be an interesting change in my outlook on my founding Dwarves.  They have always been seven peasants with picks, who dug like crazy to provide a home for the migrants to follow.  Over the years they became Legendary +5 miners, and were the only miners ever present in the fortress unless a disaster killed all of them.  Their clan was MacUthar, the Firsts. 

With the new system, mining will be like wood-cutting, skill-less with regard to results.  It can be handled like non-shop masonary work, something done by the masses.  In fact, I am thinking of dividing my hauler-class citizens by gender.  Males will cut wood and females will dig stone, when required.  Everyone will build walls and haul stuff.  Loss of speed will be off set by large numbers of hands.

That leaves me to decide what to do with my founding seven.  Being head of a clan of untrained laborers is hardly an honor.  Perhaps they will become the masons and engravers of the fortress.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 07, 2012, 03:46:21 pm
I would prefer then that the challenge came in the form of a cave-in or a crop blight.  Because if the challenge is predictable and constant, all it means is a bit more hassle in setting up a new system to deal with it -after which the game is no more difficult than before.

Actually, "crop blight" (or rather, pests in general, which can include things like locusts or fungal rot or just an infestation of caterpillars) is a major part of the continuing Farming challenge because of this. 

The thing is, however, if you manage it well, resource limitations should be a concern throughout all of your fortress's lifespan.

In games like, say, Supreme Commander, you have really only two resources, mass and energy, and energy is created through reactors you set up with mass, so mass is the real core resource.  It's generated constantly, but the constant flow you get in is limited.  Everything you try to build takes mass, but unlike most strategy games, you don't pay an up-front cost, it just takes, say, 10,000 mass total to build a thing, and a given worker can build 3 mass per second of materials, and you have an income of 120 mass per second.  Once you have spent the total mass you need, you get your thing you were building.  Dumping extra workers increases the rate you can spend your mass, but if you hit the maximum rate of mass income, it just slows all projects down equally.

As an RTS, of course, you're constantly building massive armies and throwing them at the enemy in massive hoards, so you need constant replacement units. 

This works as well for the organic resources of farming, as food and wood and clothing and maybe organic alchemical resources if we get them in later will all be resources we are constantly consuming and replenishing, as well.  That is the other point of the farming improvements; making fertilizers into a functional cap on the output-per-year of a farm. 

This can be done to a degree with inorganic/mineral resources gained from mining.  While technically not inorganic, coal, for example, is a resource you're going to want to continuously develop and consume.  If weapons and armor degrade or need repair, metal may eventually be something that you need to have in a steady stream of supply, as well. 



With all that said, however, I do believe that the notion of an unpredictable mining feature would be the best feature. 

From a gameplay perspective, we could start with geologic formations (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=82309.msg2183808#msg2183808) as well as 3d veins to make the actual topography of a stone layer a little more interesting.  If we have unusual structures, it will help make the exploration of the otherwise generally boring stone formations more interesting, especially if we hit surprise magma tubes or high-stress formations.

We can augment these things with more deadly surprises underground, whether they are pockets of dangerous gasses, weaker stone that are more likely to collapse, tapping into a pressurized magma chamber that will explode if you mine too thin a wall next to one, or other things to keep miners on their toes.

Rubble, I still believe, makes the whole thing slower, which in turn, means that you will try to stop and make the choice of mining those things that give you the most return for your time, rather than just strip-mining everything without a thought, and hence, is required to make the rest of this more interesting.

Gasses and ventilation, likewise, is a long-term dream of mine, which adds many of the same logistics challenges that minecarts will add, although we will probably need either some sort of pumping system, or else a oxygen-producing plant that must be farmed underground to make the system have more meaning than just digging some extra air tiles. 

As I said in the other thread, something I'd hopefully like to see mining eventually become is something more akin to a board game where you would have a choice of drawing face-down cards from different decks that promise different things, or perhaps more like a game of minesweeper, where you have clues in the rock that tell you if you are getting close to certain types of minerals or perhaps dangerous events, and you have to make choices as to what you're going to risk mining into and for what potential goods. 
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: bombzero on May 07, 2012, 03:56:48 pm
Im slowly starting to like NW's conceptualization for the final game more and more.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Graknorke on May 07, 2012, 04:48:46 pm
I'm liking the minesweeper idea, I remember that on my first real fortress I embarked on a huge, shiny, obsidian mountain. I spent so much time digging exploratory tunnels while looking for a magma chamber or something nearby. Not a single one between the surface and cavern layer one.

So I'm pretty biased towards that, and I'm still bitter that I've never found magma on any world. I've broken HFS twice but never found magma.
As well as the fact that the feeling of resource management is great to me, that by, say, limiting the number of wood storage piles going into the barrel shops, I'm affecting so many parts in a hugely complex machine,lots of which I probably won't have accounted for. I like to mentally visualize a huge wall covered in gears, representing the resource system. When I decide to make adamantine,  I'm putting a gearbox between the adamantine supply and the system of the metalworks, and those changes will reach to even the furthest ends of my machine. /ramble
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 07, 2012, 05:04:35 pm
So I'm pretty biased towards that, and I'm still bitter that I've never found magma on any world. I've broken HFS twice but never found magma.
You must have done so on the older versions then; with the current one, it's uncommon even to find adamantine before hitting the magma sea.

I'm not sure I especially like the change for several reasons:

1: A percentage chance--especially against the player's favor--makes it easy to get luck screwed at the worst possible times. Sure, if you are lucky and always hit a boulder 1/4 times you get the same amount of stone. Chances are, though, you might fail again and again and again and again and... get very little material. Likewise, you could get lucky (likely much rarer) and score lots of boulders. It leaves too much to chance.
2: Rare stone and ore might get really screwed over by the change, due to the above reason. Mine a cluster of 5 *insert rare stone/ore here* and roll within the 75% fail rate? Well, sorry, you're not getting anything. Tough luck with that Platinum cluster!

Other than that, it's a good idea as far as I can think of, I just do not trust the percentages at all.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong on anything I've said.

Also, partially ninja'd.
With a 5-ore cluster, you've got 23.7% chance of nothing.

Now, is that really a bad thing?  It's not like you're potentially going to wait a long time before mining it anymore.  If you were looking for such clusters, the randomness is just part of the luck of the draw, there could just as well not have been a platinum cluster there in the first place.  If it was just something you found while digging out a hallway; then oh well, you weren't expecting it to begin with.


As a side note, I don't really care for said small clusters of ore in the first place.  Native platinum has other platinum-group elements in it that make smelting it well outside of our tech range, and native aluminum doesn't even exist! (At least not that I've read...)  The only other small-cluster metal I can think of is bismuth, and if you want more of that just mod it to 'vein'.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Martin on May 07, 2012, 05:17:09 pm
Gasses and ventilation, likewise, is a long-term dream of mine, which adds many of the same logistics challenges that minecarts will add, although we will probably need either some sort of pumping system, or else a oxygen-producing plant that must be farmed underground to make the system have more meaning than just digging some extra air tiles. 


Well, I think the solution to ventilation would have to be cave moss, otherwise the caverns would be inconsistent with artificially dug out spaces. The caverns clearly don't suffer from ventilation problems, so that must be the cave moss at work. We'd need a way to muddy floors without the upper z-level and grow moss before a cavern is revealed (otherwise you might not be able to even dig to one). Show gas build-ups like miasma.

Collapse is hard, mainly because it so severely infringes on how we build. It was very liberating to lose the 7x7 limitation, and it was frustrating to count wrong and bury your best miners. It'd be nice if they could toss up the same warning as before they're about to hit water/magma (Morul cancelled dig as it is likely to collapse the room). Though it would be cool if you could have different support sizes for different kinds of rock (obsidian will permit 11x11 while soil won't go past 3x3) and some non-blocking way to shore up the room. Maybe constructed floors automatically support the room, so you could do them in a way that still gives you freedom.

Earthquakes would be a nice touch as well - perhaps more frequent as you dig deeper, and stronger at depth. They'd randomly move light stuff around, heavy stuff at depth. Maybe collapse rooms at random that are built right at the edge of the limitation, and knock dwarves off of ledges, down stairs. That'd return a bit more of the flavor of the 2d version where the challenges would increase and persist as you dug deeper. We have a little of that now, but it's pretty tame by comparison.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Martin on May 07, 2012, 05:26:42 pm
With a 5-ore cluster, you've got 23.7% chance of nothing.

Now, is that really a bad thing?  It's not like you're potentially going to wait a long time before mining it anymore.  If you were looking for such clusters, the randomness is just part of the luck of the draw, there could just as well not have been a platinum cluster there in the first place.  If it was just something you found while digging out a hallway; then oh well, you weren't expecting it to begin with.


That's why I suggested the change to ore mining. Most of what we're using stone for is quarrying - and that's a real skill. But you don't quarry ore. You get the ore by brute force and crush it down. You can't fail to collect it no matter how bad you are at it. You can fail to recognize that there's iron in there, but I'm assuming we already know that we've hit magnetite. You can also fail to extract the metal from the ore, but that's not a failure of mining - it's a failure of smelting - so collect the ore at 100% and move that skill to the furnace operators - who are also skill-less.


And for the folks that are worried about running out of metal, my proposal would allow for non-vein ore to still be processed for metal. The yields would be low, and you'd have to trade out your usable stone for construction, but you'd get some fraction of a bar of metal out of every tile - if you're willing to spend the labor and provide the fuel to do it.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 07, 2012, 05:30:59 pm
The thing is, however, if you manage it well, resource limitations should be a concern throughout all of your fortress's lifespan.

In games like, say, Supreme Commander, you have really only two resources, mass and energy, and energy is created through reactors you set up with mass, so mass is the real core resource.  It's generated constantly, but the constant flow you get in is limited.  Everything you try to build takes mass, but unlike most strategy games, you don't pay an up-front cost, it just takes, say, 10,000 mass total to build a thing, and a given worker can build 3 mass per second of materials, and you have an income of 120 mass per second.  Once you have spent the total mass you need, you get your thing you were building.  Dumping extra workers increases the rate you can spend your mass, but if you hit the maximum rate of mass income, it just slows all projects down equally.

As an RTS, of course, you're constantly building massive armies and throwing them at the enemy in massive hoards, so you need constant replacement units. 
Heh... In RTS's I always just built up my base until I ran out of resources; then I felt sad that I couldn't continue building.


I'm not opposed to making mining take more thought, just more micro.  I'd rather be contemplating the best return on in-game resources than on play time.  If I wanted to do the latter I'd go play runescape or something.  Rubble is not required to counter strip-mining, any form of hazard would be sufficient.

Rubble, I still believe, makes the whole thing slower, which in turn, means that you will try to stop and make the choice of mining those things that give you the most return for your time, rather than just strip-mining everything without a thought, and hence, is required to make the rest of this more interesting.

Gasses and ventilation, likewise, is a long-term dream of mine, which adds many of the same logistics challenges that minecarts will add, although we will probably need either some sort of pumping system, or else a oxygen-producing plant that must be farmed underground to make the system have more meaning than just digging some extra air tiles. 

As I said in the other thread, something I'd hopefully like to see mining eventually become is something more akin to a board game where you would have a choice of drawing face-down cards from different decks that promise different things, or perhaps more like a game of minesweeper, where you have clues in the rock that tell you if you are getting close to certain types of minerals or perhaps dangerous events, and you have to make choices as to what you're going to risk mining into and for what potential goods. 

Then again, if we're going to that much trouble to make mining realistic, rubble would be little by comparison.

Besides, you really expect the players who think they're wasting their time hauling rubble to look for a better solution than "give up", whether that means ragequiting or just turning rubble off?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: greenskye on May 07, 2012, 05:35:12 pm
My main concern is a potential shortage of building material in the colors of my choice.  That's been partially addressed by getting more than one block per rock.  I didn't usually build with blocks, but I don't mind doing so in the future.  As an aside, I can't see how adding a step makes building faster, that is, using block instead of stones.  But again, I don't mind that change.  The part that has not been addressed, at least in my mind, is the potential loss of rare colors through probability.  I enjoy using realgar for my shops, if it is on the site.  If there is four-stone pocket of realgar, chances are high that I will only end up with one realgar stone.  Shops are not built with blocks, so I can't get back the three lost stones for my buildings.  Likewise furniture requires stones, and again the rarer colors could easily be in too short supply.  I could mod around this by changing the colors of the available stones for every embark, in the raws for that save.  It's a nuisance, but I can do it.  Or, I can create stone at my smelter.  This is much easier, but leaves me feeling vaguely dirty.  Better dirty than unhappy, however.  That's what playing a game is for, to be made happy, right?  If I wanted to be made miserable I could go read the news headlines.  Again.


I can see your problem, but I think brainstorming some ways of solving the solution would be more beneficial.


First off, I never understood why we had skill based mining, but no method to control it. Without using complicated burrow setups, it was random which miner got which job. The idea of skill based mining either needs to be fully supported or just dropped as a skill.


If we bring skill based mining back (which I would prefer), this suggestion (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=34071.0) would work. Basically the suggestion is to add a new standing order that sets the minimum skill required to engrave something. I would change that to be decided on a per-designation basis. When designating something to be mined/engraved you'd be able to choose a minimum skill with the default being <any>.


Another thing I would add is the ability to set a default mining skill level for any stone that you have discovered. This would reduce micromanagement, by ensuring that any unskilled miners will cancel digging of any valuable stones. That way you don't have to fear for the ore you discovered while mining out your dining hall.


Another solution that doesn't require skill based mining is paint. I'm assuming all you really care about is color, not the type of stone. If so, creating paint by crushing stones of the right color could serve to meet the same needs. A suitable materials-to-paint ratio would be needed of course. Say, 1 stone per 10 tiles painted? This also could be handled via the designation menu with an option to choose the color. As an upside you could then have whatever color you wanted AND still be able to engrave!


Personally I have not gotten to the point yet where I care about my rainbow colored fortress. I just wanted to come up with some suggestions that attempt to look at why Toady made the change in the first place and offer improvements that allow for existing features to be preserved or improved.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Martin on May 07, 2012, 05:42:52 pm
Another solution that doesn't require skill based mining is paint. I'm assuming all you really care about is color, not the type of stone. If so, creating paint by crushing stones of the right color could serve to meet the same needs. A suitable materials-to-paint ratio would be needed of course. Say, 1 stone per 10 tiles painted? This also could be handled via the designation menu with an option to choose the color. As an upside you could then have whatever color you wanted AND still be able to engrave!


Yeah, paint is the logical solution. I'd rather expand the plant dye spectrum and use that to produce paint. Paints used to be produced from raw eggs with dye added, which would give you something to do with the hundreds of eggs you can collect from a half dozen hens.


Beyond simple color painting, it'd also be cool to have a painter paint in an engraving or paint crafts to add value.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 07, 2012, 05:50:05 pm
With a 5-ore cluster, you've got 23.7% chance of nothing.

Now, is that really a bad thing?  It's not like you're potentially going to wait a long time before mining it anymore.  If you were looking for such clusters, the randomness is just part of the luck of the draw, there could just as well not have been a platinum cluster there in the first place.  If it was just something you found while digging out a hallway; then oh well, you weren't expecting it to begin with.


That's why I suggested the change to ore mining. Most of what we're using stone for is quarrying - and that's a real skill. But you don't quarry ore. You get the ore by brute force and crush it down. You can't fail to collect it no matter how bad you are at it. You can fail to recognize that there's iron in there, but I'm assuming we already know that we've hit magnetite. You can also fail to extract the metal from the ore, but that's not a failure of mining - it's a failure of smelting - so collect the ore at 100% and move that skill to the furnace operators - who are also skill-less.


And for the folks that are worried about running out of metal, my proposal would allow for non-vein ore to still be processed for metal. The yields would be low, and you'd have to trade out your usable stone for construction, but you'd get some fraction of a bar of metal out of every tile - if you're willing to spend the labor and provide the fuel to do it.
Hm, that seems more reasonable.  If only it were that easy for the game to define an 'ore'; especially the modded-in kinds that don't use [ORE_METAL: ] or whatever that tag was...  But then again, that's as simple as adding a [DROP_ALWAYS] tag.

Still though, I don't care for the metagaming with the miners even with certain stone types, especially when it comes to ones you don't want.  I just feel that any significant difference in drop rates between dabbling and legendary miners would still come with this.


I think the best solution would be to simply assume that all dwarves naturally have the skill to extract usable boulders from the rock, but only skilled miners can do it swiftly.  Making 'ore' a subcatagory of stone (like gems) with 100% drop rate would not be a bad thing though.



PS @^: Surely only a pansy elf cannot tell the difference between the subtle hues of Granite, Gneiss, and Stibnite?!
(On a more serious note though, paint would be awesome but sadly is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.  Also, I thought most paints were based off stones and metals, with floral pigments primarily for textiles.)
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: slink on May 07, 2012, 05:59:06 pm
Another solution that doesn't require skill based mining is paint. I'm assuming all you really care about is color, not the type of stone. If so, creating paint by crushing stones of the right color could serve to meet the same needs. A suitable materials-to-paint ratio would be needed of course. Say, 1 stone per 10 tiles painted? This also could be handled via the designation menu with an option to choose the color. As an upside you could then have whatever color you wanted AND still be able to engrave!


Yeah, paint is the logical solution. I'd rather expand the plant dye spectrum and use that to produce paint. Paints used to be produced from raw eggs with dye added, which would give you something to do with the hundreds of eggs you can collect from a half dozen hens.


Beyond simple color painting, it'd also be cool to have a painter paint in an engraving or paint crafts to add value.
Paint would be a great solution, unless it required one bar of metal for every item painted in the color of the metal.  In which case one might as well build with metal bars.  Vegetable-based colors would also give me a reason to grow dye plants, which I don't do now.  Dyeing cloth for ropes was useful to me when livestock could be kept tied and not starve to death.  I sorted my breeding stock that way.  Ropes are also good for representing the concept of woven carpets.  Other than that, it is only for clothing.  We can't see the clothing, so why bother with the complication of dyeing the cloth?  I wouldn't even mind giving up some of the eggs, which we do eat in my fortresses.  Lots and lots of eggs.  Eggs are good for Dwarves ... or was that dogs?  I forget.  *grin*

Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: stinkasectomy on May 07, 2012, 06:14:05 pm
goin back on topic (mining rates) - would most (or all) of peoples problems disapear by changing it from 25% from RNG to a 1/4 'counter" (where the first stone/ore of each type mined drops, and every 4th after it (so thats 1st, 5th, 9th, 13th or 4x+1)) thus we get approximately 25% (slightly more, more noticeable with small numbers)
each stone type has its own counter (only for stones that have been mined at least once to save on FPS?) so that you cant mine one ore and then 3 stone and maximise ore drops.


the question is, does everyone like randomness? i think most people actually would prefer it, but just putting out an alternative
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Martin on May 07, 2012, 06:19:52 pm
Still though, I don't care for the metagaming with the miners even with certain stone types, especially when it comes to ones you don't want.  I just feel that any significant difference in drop rates between dabbling and legendary miners would still come with this.


Well, I was aiming for a split-the-difference solution. Mining is ridiculously easy now. It seems improper that one dwarf with a copper pick should plow through stone faster than a fleet of TBMs. So not only do they go faster, but they also get better at it? Thats a lot of benefit for the skill compared to other activities. Generally the reverse happens - if you want to produce a really high quality item, you need the skill but it takes the same amount of time as a novice to make a lower-quality item. The skilled person can choose to speed up, but quality drops - so there's the ability to choose the outcome.


And perhaps that's a solution. Skill gets you speed but you produce gravel instead of boulders to realize the speed. On the stone management screen in addition to setting stone as usable or not, you could set each one to not mine, to mine quickly (producing gravel) or to mine for resources (producing boulders but slowly). So if you were just going to turn your magnetite into iron, you could go for speed, because the gravel would work as well as the boulders, but you could still produce magnetite statues if you chose by setting magnetite to 'mine boulders', which you could still break into gravel later if you chose. Additionally, if you wanted dark stone for construction tell your miners to go quickly through the light grey stuff. Even novice miners could produce boulders, but they'd be very slow at it.


Either way skills your miners - so training them up you point them at some stuff you don't want and let them make gravel (which you could still smelt and get something out of), and set the stuff you do want to 'don't mine' and they'll naturally work around it. Oddly, in my proposal, the best thing to start them on is metal ore before turning them on the stone you want to quarry, so it even helps somewhat with getting that early metal operation going - though your less skilled furnace operators will get less metal out of each one. But this way you never lose anything through mining other than time. I think this would address everyone's issues. But I think mining needs to get slower overall. Hell, it takes longer for a legendary woodcutter to cut down a tree than a miner to dig out a bedroom from granite when you incorporate travel time.


And maybe that's another variable that should be in this - pick material and hardness of stone. We already fly through soil. Why not make copper picks slower than iron in turn slower than steel, and make mining in granite slower than sandstone slower than chalk? And then apply the above to that. Maybe the current legendary mining speed in stone is what you could do with a steel pick in chalk, but a steel pick in granite or obsidian is ~5x slower, and a copper pick in granite 3x slower than that.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Niyazov on May 07, 2012, 06:26:32 pm
Im slowly starting to like NW's conceptualization for the final game more and more.

Likewise. Hopefully we will also see a return of area-based cave-ins that coincides with introducing real mining concepts like longwall and retreat mining.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Anathema on May 07, 2012, 06:34:50 pm
Im slowly starting to like NW's conceptualization for the final game more and more.

This is a known side effect of excessive reading of NW's posts. I suggest you limit your intake :P
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Tarran on May 07, 2012, 06:50:34 pm
With a 5-ore cluster, you've got 23.7% chance of nothing.
You also have a getting 39.5% chance of getting 1 less stone than what you would have.

That's roughly 63.2% chance of less stuff than if every stone dropped one.

It's up to you if you like less stuff. If you like less stuff, then we cannot argue further because our views are different.

Now, is that really a bad thing?
Yes. Imagine what this is like: You defeat a boss in an RPG. He was extremely difficult to kill. You have five treasure chests, with only a 25% chance of anything being in each of them. The loot is always going to be good, so not getting anything would be really upsetting.

Well, 23.7% chance is >1/5 people not getting anything. So they just fought the boss for no reason. That is a bad thing in my opinion. Especially if before, there was a guaranteed chance to always get stuff from the chests, but only a few bits of good stuff per each were allowed.

And as I showed above, on average (in chance) there was also a decrease in the amount of loot you could get. That's bad in my opinion.

goin back on topic (mining rates) - would most (or all) of peoples problems disapear by changing it from 25% from RNG to a 1/4 'counter" (where the first stone/ore of each type mined drops, and every 4th after it (so thats 1st, 5th, 9th, 13th or 4x+1)) thus we get approximately 25% (slightly more, more noticeable with small numbers)
each stone type has its own counter (only for stones that have been mined at least once to save on FPS?) so that you cant mine one ore and then 3 stone and maximise ore drops.
Yeah, this could help, but it still doesn't feel completely... right.

the question is, does everyone like randomness? i think most people actually would prefer it, but just putting out an alternative
I either like randomness or hate it, personally. This case, I don't like it since there's no way to influence it. Something like Civ4 where, while there might be luck screws in combat every once and a while, at least you can do some things to influence the chances. Here, you cannot influence the chances.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 07, 2012, 06:52:43 pm
I'm not opposed to making mining take more thought, just more micro.  I'd rather be contemplating the best return on in-game resources than on play time.  If I wanted to do the latter I'd go play runescape or something.  Rubble is not required to counter strip-mining, any form of hazard would be sufficient.

Rubble, I still believe, makes the whole thing slower, which in turn, means that you will try to stop and make the choice of mining those things that give you the most return for your time, rather than just strip-mining everything without a thought, and hence, is required to make the rest of this more interesting.

Gasses and ventilation, likewise, is a long-term dream of mine, which adds many of the same logistics challenges that minecarts will add, although we will probably need either some sort of pumping system, or else a oxygen-producing plant that must be farmed underground to make the system have more meaning than just digging some extra air tiles. 

As I said in the other thread, something I'd hopefully like to see mining eventually become is something more akin to a board game where you would have a choice of drawing face-down cards from different decks that promise different things, or perhaps more like a game of minesweeper, where you have clues in the rock that tell you if you are getting close to certain types of minerals or perhaps dangerous events, and you have to make choices as to what you're going to risk mining into and for what potential goods. 

Then again, if we're going to that much trouble to make mining realistic, rubble would be little by comparison.

Besides, you really expect the players who think they're wasting their time hauling rubble to look for a better solution than "give up", whether that means ragequiting or just turning rubble off?

Again, rubble takes essentially no micromanagement.  It's no more trouble to deal with than hauling stone will be, anyway. 

And likewise, I already play with a self-imposed goal of using up all the stone I mine out, and I don't use low-skill miners, so I can say that the game is entirely manageable when played like this - you just have to learn to suppress that urge to mass-designate giant zones for mining when you see a vein of ore and definitely avoid the habit of designating those huge, ugly rectangular rooms, and switch to more space-efficient fractal shafts. 

Anyway, I expect that a good chunk of players will play with the init option off at first out of fear of change, and most will grow to enjoy it over time, and nearly all new players will wonder why people would ever want it off.  Players who played from 40d or before thought that 0.31 minerals were completely overabundant, and liked the return of limited minerals.  Players who started at 0.31 were outraged that they lost access to absurd numbers of minerals and ores that outweighed the actual layer stone and some still choose those absurd high mineral frequency settings.  Players since the change back to scarce minerals will just pick a median amount of minerals.



As for paints - there are organic and there are inorganic pigments.  Organic pigments means using something like blueberries (or, I guess, dimple cups) as your blue dye, but tends to work best on other organic substances.  Inorganic pigments are often used in glazes or enamels or other things that are meant to last longer.  These are generally made from oxidized metal powder.  For example, iron would oxidize to rust, and make a rust-red pigment. 

Egg tempera paints with organic dyes would fade out, but inorganic colorations, like cobalt blue or lapis lazuli blue were prized paint pigments. 
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 07, 2012, 06:59:13 pm
Well, I was aiming for a split-the-difference solution. Mining is ridiculously easy now. It seems improper that one dwarf with a copper pick should plow through stone faster than a fleet of TBMs. So not only do they go faster, but they also get better at it? Thats a lot of benefit for the skill compared to other activities. Generally the reverse happens - if you want to produce a really high quality item, you need the skill but it takes the same amount of time as a novice to make a lower-quality item. The skilled person can choose to speed up, but quality drops - so there's the ability to choose the outcome.

[...]

And maybe that's another variable that should be in this - pick material and hardness of stone. We already fly through soil. Why not make copper picks slower than iron in turn slower than steel, and make mining in granite slower than sandstone slower than chalk? And then apply the above to that. Maybe the current legendary mining speed in stone is what you could do with a steel pick in chalk, but a steel pick in granite or obsidian is ~5x slower, and a copper pick in granite 3x slower than that.
I really hate to say this, but I think what I've been trying to say is that the speed of mining is really an acceptable break from reality for gameplay purposes.  Sure, there's a lot of cool stuff that can be added, but it needs a good balance; such that we are unlikely to strike by committee.

As for picks, I believe that the speed of mining through rock would be determined by the fracture point of the rock and the maximum impulse that can be delivered.  The latter would depend on the momentum of the pick, its cross-section, how much it deforms on impact (compression strength), and other factors such as follow-through and how well-centered the weight is (i.e., quality).  The momentum would be a function of the miner's strength and to some extent technique, and the pick's mass.

Overall, I think that the difference would mainly be in how fast the pick decays rather than in mining speed.  Although, a simple comparison of the pick's yield strength to the fracture point of the rock would make copper picks, at least, worthless for mining anything but chalk etc.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Naros on May 07, 2012, 07:13:01 pm
I don't like how a master miner has the same chance to gather up something as a complete novice.

There's no poll option that conveys my feelings, so I didn't vote.
Multiple blocks from a rock I do like, for example.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 07, 2012, 07:13:14 pm
Now, is that really a bad thing?
Yes. Imagine what this is like: You defeat a boss in an RPG. He was extremely difficult to kill. You have five treasure chests, with only a 25% chance of anything being in each of them. The loot is always going to be good, so not getting anything would be really upsetting.

Well, 23.7% chance is >1/5 people not getting anything. So they just fought the boss for no reason. That is a bad thing in my opinion. Especially if before, there was a guaranteed chance to always get stuff from the chests, but only a few bits of good stuff per each were allowed.

And as I showed above, on average (in chance) there was also a decrease in the amount of loot you could get. That's bad in my opinion.
I would argue your analogy isn't applicable, since you didn't have to spend a lot of effort to find the cluster.  It'd be more like stumbling upon a random encounter consisting of five chests in a clearing.  And exploratory mining would be compared to wandering around hoping for that particular encounter in this analogy.

As for a decrease in amount, that's easily ratified with worldgen options/raw files.  But on average you aren't getting less at all.  With a 5-tile cluster, the expected value for the number of blocks is 5*.25 = 1.25  Multiply by 4 bars per block and you get an average of 5 bars per 5-tile cluster.  And that's more than you were getting before, because even a legendary miner will occasionally miss one...
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 07, 2012, 07:13:47 pm
I don't like how a master miner has the same chance to gather up something as a complete novice.

There's no poll option that conveys my feelings, so I didn't vote.
Multiple blocks from a rock I do like, for example.
Hmm... I'll go change that now, then.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Tarran on May 07, 2012, 07:29:31 pm
As for a decrease in amount, that's easily ratified with worldgen options/raw files.
Both are workarounds, not solutions. And both don't work completely.

The first, is an artificial increase that doesn't really address the problem. More metal chance can help with the amount you get, sure, but now you lose generic stone. You still lose stuff. And don't say "But what do you care about generic stone?" because that's besides the point.

And as for raw editing, unless you can edit the drop chances and amounts (can you? I haven't played DF lately and am not much of a modder), simply increasing the amount generated once again does not actually address the point because you lose some of whatever they're generated in.

As for a decrease in amount, that's easily ratified with worldgen options/raw files.  But on average you aren't getting less at all.  With a 5-tile cluster, the expected value for the number of blocks is 5*.25 = 1.25  Multiply by 4 bars per block and you get an average of 5 bars per 5-tile cluster.  And that's more than you were getting before, because even a legendary miner will occasionally miss one...
Good point, but that's different from what I said.

Quote
And as I showed above, on average (in chance) there was also a decrease in the amount of loot you could get. That's bad in my opinion.

But I made a shoddy argument, so I drop the point of on average getting less. But I keep my argument of having a larger chance of getting less.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Raunyc on May 08, 2012, 12:55:21 am
What really blows my mind is we're being handed mine carts to assist with hauling masses of objects, but then we're losing 75% of what we normally need to move the most of, even if it is to destroy it... So now we can move all the garbage stone that we don't get nearly as much of with carts, and we lose stone that we want to make our furniture out of.

It's really a bit baffling to me that we get something to manage something else that's then no longer a problem...

I like that legendaries produce 100% of the time, I would avoid veins that I wanted to make all my thrones/tables out of until I had legendaries, but now it's a moot point to even have a miner on embark beyond novice, minor speed increase seems negligible to me now...

I'm sorry I have a mental problem that makes me string sentences together for weeks.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 08, 2012, 01:33:06 am
As for a decrease in amount, that's easily ratified with worldgen options/raw files.  But on average you aren't getting less at all.  With a 5-tile cluster, the expected value for the number of blocks is 5*.25 = 1.25  Multiply by 4 bars per block and you get an average of 5 bars per 5-tile cluster.  And that's more than you were getting before, because even a legendary miner will occasionally miss one...
Good point, but that's different from what I said.

Quote
And as I showed above, on average (in chance) there was also a decrease in the amount of loot you could get. That's bad in my opinion.

But I made a shoddy argument, so I drop the point of on average getting less. But I keep my argument of having a larger chance of getting less.
Essentially, your argument is about the variance.  With the old system, the variance was practically nil.  But under the new system, the variance is very high (3n to be precise).  Still, the odds of you getting less are always balanced out by the odds of getting a lot more.

The odds of you getting less hovers around 50%.  In four such clusters of five ore, the odds are 45.5%, while in five the odds are 56.1%.  But the odds of you getting less than half are now only 9.6%.


I try thinking of the fact that, no matter if one happens to get more or less than before, one spends a lot less of one's own personal time getting it.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Ubiq on May 08, 2012, 02:05:27 am
Players who played from 40d or before thought that 0.31 minerals were completely overabundant, and liked the return of limited minerals.  Players who started at 0.31 were outraged that they lost access to absurd numbers of minerals and ores that outweighed the actual layer stone and some still choose those absurd high mineral frequency settings.  Players since the change back to scarce minerals will just pick a median amount of minerals.

I played 40d and I certainly don't remember ever thinking 0.31 minerals were overabundant; especially since the default mineral scarcity is 2500 and 700-800 is what gives a 40d style embark. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the entire reason the mineral scarcity setting was added in the first place was that people overwhelmingly thought that minerals were far too uncommon and that the severe lack of them was crippling their ability to play the game in a way that they want. Not to mention that it was a fairly common complaint that it was easier to find adamantine than iron since you were now guaranteed to find it with the proper map settings while the latter cannot be said for iron.

Beyond that, the 40d spread was far superior not only in terms of the amount of minerals one could find but also the variety. As is, the tendency is still to wind up with a vast host of metals that are largely useless for military matters. I've had plenty of 0.31 forts where I could pave the surface of the entire planet with gold bars and probably three or four forts where I actually found iron.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Johuotar on May 08, 2012, 02:12:39 am
Id prefer if ore dropped 100% of the time  but dropped less to keep some balance. Very small vein might not yeild  anything.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Tarran on May 08, 2012, 03:17:44 am
Still, the odds of you getting less are always balanced out by the odds of getting a lot more.
Statistically, I agree completely. In general practice, I don't think I can ever agree with that kind of mindset for rare stuff. The chances of getting less are still quite high at 60%--too high for rare minerals (where each piece counts). For normal stone, I have no real problems with the new system at all. For rare minerals, if you miss your chance how many more chances are you going to get?

Quote
I try thinking of the fact that, no matter if one happens to get more or less than before, one spends a lot less of one's own personal time getting it.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: HorridOwn4ge on May 08, 2012, 04:16:42 am
Didn't Toady say he didn't change the way ore is mined (aka ore still drops like it is now) but only changed how many bars you can get from 1 piece of ore?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 08, 2012, 04:20:08 am
Still, the odds of you getting less are always balanced out by the odds of getting a lot more.
Statistically, I agree completely. In general practice, I don't think I can ever agree with that kind of mindset for rare stuff. The chances of getting less are still quite high at 60%--too high for rare minerals (where each piece counts). For normal stone, I have no real problems with the new system at all. For rare minerals, if you miss your chance how many more chances are you going to get?

Quote
I try thinking of the fact that, no matter if one happens to get more or less than before, one spends a lot less of one's own personal time getting it.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here.
Actually, if I'm not mistaken where there's one platinum cluster there's usually more.  But then that doesn't account for, say, modded-in metals that occur as single tiles, et cetera.

As for the latter part, I'm trying to say that while before you'd have to spend a lot of time in micro to make sure only your legendary miners dug into that platinum cluster, possibly even having to wait to train up a legendary miner, now there is little reason not to dig into a cluster as soon as you find it.


What I've been trying to say is that maybe you should give the randomness a shot.  It might not be as bad as you expect, and if it is then we know Toady's not finished with mining yet.


Didn't Toady say he didn't change the way ore is mined (aka ore still drops like it is now) but only changed how many bars you can get from 1 piece of ore?
Right now, ore is just a form of stone that happens to be smeltable.  This means the changes to mining stone apply to ore as well, i.e. it now drops 25% regardless of skill.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Tarran on May 08, 2012, 05:40:08 am
As for the latter part, I'm trying to say that while before you'd have to spend a lot of time in micro to make sure only your legendary miners dug into that platinum cluster, possibly even having to wait to train up a legendary miner, now there is little reason not to dig into a cluster as soon as you find it.
Personally, before I actually start caring about rare minerals, all (usually 2) of my miners are very high in rank. I tend to like to go overboard with things before I should.

What I've been trying to say is that maybe you should give the randomness a shot.  It might not be as bad as you expect, and if it is then we know Toady's not finished with mining yet.
I've been messing around with randomness for a long time. There's this whole sub-sub forum called "Roll To Dodge" which has games with randomness down to the core which I frequent. And I've played plenty of Roguelikes and recently Civ4. Those are where I gained the pessimistic attitude. They all have quite a lot of randomness.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 08, 2012, 08:03:17 am
I played 40d and I certainly don't remember ever thinking 0.31 minerals were overabundant; especially since the default mineral scarcity is 2500 and 700-800 is what gives a 40d style embark. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the entire reason the mineral scarcity setting was added in the first place was that people overwhelmingly thought that minerals were far too uncommon and that the severe lack of them was crippling their ability to play the game in a way that they want. Not to mention that it was a fairly common complaint that it was easier to find adamantine than iron since you were now guaranteed to find it with the proper map settings while the latter cannot be said for iron.

Beyond that, the 40d spread was far superior not only in terms of the amount of minerals one could find but also the variety. As is, the tendency is still to wind up with a vast host of metals that are largely useless for military matters. I've had plenty of 0.31 forts where I could pave the surface of the entire planet with gold bars and probably three or four forts where I actually found iron.

You're thinking of post-0.31.19 mining, when the scarcity went back in (which is that point where people complained about scarcity I was talking about).  When 0.31 first came out, you could have virtually every mineral in the game on a single embark. You'd have to set the lowest possible mineral scarcity settings to get the kind of mineral densities we had in early 0.31. I remember opening your first cavern would involve having 20 pages of "You have struck <mineral name>" messages.

Besides which, not having every mineral in the game in any given embark was basically the whole point of the scarcity changes, as it's meant to be paving the way for a need to actually trade for specific materials. 
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 08, 2012, 08:23:50 am
I've been messing around with randomness for a long time. There's this whole sub-sub forum called "Roll To Dodge" which has games with randomness down to the core which I frequent. And I've played plenty of Roguelikes and recently Civ4. Those are where I gained the pessimistic attitude. They all have quite a lot of randomness.

Actually, I've written some pretty extensive rants on the topic of randomness in games before.  (Surprising, I know.) 

There are ways to use randomness that are better or worse when it comes to specific styles of play.  In some games, what I would call "Candyland-Type", you have essentially no control over your destiny because the RNG is the ultimate arbiter of your destiny.  You don't really have much strategy in a game of Monopoly, you just have to hope you land on the best properties first, and never land on Boardwalk with hotels.  There's no point in thinking or planning in a game like this, as you have no power or control.  It is fun only for those (usually very young) players who want to win without skill, as completely random games will let anyone win an even number of the time.  A Chess-type game, however, has no randomness aside from what the players are thinking.  These games favor forethought above all else, as without randomness, you can plot out and predict the permutations and consequences of every move to the limits of your mental capacity. 

With that said, there are two very different types of mixed-randomness games - Card-type, and Dice-type. 

Dice-type games let you choose optimal strategies and try to stack the odds into your favor, but it's ultimately up to luck whether you succeed or not, and there's little point in planning more than a few moves that rely upon luck ahead, as you have almost no clue what the results of any given action will be.  These are, notably, most tabletop RPGs and games that rely upon dice.  They discourage planning, and enjoy making everything rely upon the fact that at any moment, a failed saving throw can make the best plans completely moot, and the dumbest lucky actor a winner.  They tend to frustrate players who like to play strategically, because it makes strategy fairly pointless if whether or not you can even move to the position you need to be a matter of dumb luck.

Card-type randomness, meanwhile, often forces random events onto you to which you must react.  This means that you have unpredictable events happening to you, but where the results of your actions will always have predictable results.  Games like the original Avalon Hill Civilization board game (IMHO, Sid Meyer's Civilization is not as good a game) will have you expand your populations, move them, build your cities, and then randomly give you trade or disaster cards, which you can then trade with and try to resolve those disasters in the manner that harms you the least.  You can expect, in an average turn, to lose three cities a turn when it really gets going, so you can always just make yourself prepared to build three or four cities the next turn to compensate. 

Card-type randomness is often superior because it injects a randomness that makes the game less utterly predictable, but at the same time, makes every player choice actually matter and makes them fully in control of their destiny, even as random events are forced upon them.

DF has the fortunate tendency to often have card-type randomness (Except for, unfortunately, combat, although you have so little choice in combat to begin with that it's almost Candyland.  It's part of why I dislike much of the combat in this game.) and in the case of mining, just consider that you weren't guaranteed those minerals you mined beforehand, either. 

Until you actually revealed that mineral you wanted, you didn't know it was there.  It could have been more solid granite wall, for all you knew.  It was a card-type randomness that you actually drew the mineral you want in the first place, and now that you have the chance to draw a boulder of that mineral, it's really like drawing a card from a special deck.  Sure, it may not work out, but you are still in the random phase.  When you actually eventually do get a lucky roll, there are no other forms of randomness forced upon you. 

Unlike Sid Meyer's Civilization, there's no chance your battleship is going to get sunk by a barbarian bowman.  What you do with the minerals when you get it have little randomness (excepting the dice-type randomness of quality, although that is rarely all that important)
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Drawde on May 08, 2012, 08:45:24 am
Hopefully we will also see a return of area-based cave-ins that coincides with introducing real mining concepts like longwall and retreat mining.
Not likely, given that open caverns would then collapse.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Kestrel on May 08, 2012, 09:03:09 am
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
I concur.

Additionally, DF's combat system is, despite its depth, about as screwy as any of the Civ game combat systems, ie Apache Helicopter downed by Apache Bowman, vs Bronze Colossus beheaded by Fluffy Wambler.  In DF's case, I think it's totally defensible and adds to the difficulty/unpredictability of the game.  In Civ's case, it's enough of a problem that I'll never ever play another Civ again.  Ever.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: King Mir on May 08, 2012, 09:17:54 am
Very happy with the change. No need to assign poor miners to dig out rooms. I suspect that reduction in stone won't be enough to stop stone from being an over abundant resource, though.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Tarran on May 08, 2012, 01:01:45 pm
I disagree.
...That's all you're going to say? Really? Not even why or what you disagree with?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 08, 2012, 02:29:57 pm
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 08, 2012, 03:28:33 pm
You might want to edit your post, Arkenstone, you forgot a /spoiler tag in there.

I'd also disagree with how you classify card vs. dice-based randomness, as it seems to me that the distinction is in how well-done and balanced the randomness is, rather than a fundemental difference (as in sampling with or without replacement).

It's not about balance, it's about when the randomness takes place. 

Dice randomness takes place after the player has made their decision.  Card randomness takes place before a player makes their decision. 

In DF combat right now, you're given a list of body parts you can swing for.  You have a vague idea of how likely you are to hit or how much damage you will deal, but you have no real control over the results other than deciding what chance you want to take.  That's dice-type randomness. 

It's like when you make a skill check in D&D and have to roll to see whether you complete the jump over the chasm or fall to your death.  You don't know until after you've made your decision, and it makes success or failure feel like just luck.

Compare this to a card-type randomness, like you will get out of a game of Magic: The Gathering, or some other CCG.  The deck is random, but once something is in your hand, you have a huge degree control over everything that will happen with that card when and how you play it.  The only random factor is in what your opponents are playing. 

The difference here is in how the player gets the chance to react to the randomness and develop their strategy after the randomness has taken place. 

(Incidentally, the fact that "critical chances" or whatever they're called in DF combat occur before the player decides makes this a case of card-type luck in the middle of combat, which is mostly dice-type luck.)

Consider how an RPG game like D&D would be different if, instead of rolling to find your successes, you drew cards that you had to play in order to get through the random portions of your turn.  Your cards may be good or bad in a given turn, but you'd have to choose to play your cards on whether you were focusing on offense and playing those random cards on having better attack "rolls" or on defense and subtracting it from enemy attack "rolls".  You would know ahead of time that if you played all your good cards on completing a jump that you would then have no more good cards for the next set of skills you were required to play, and as such, it would be a game more about trying to strategically play your random cards than just making a calculation as to how much of a risk you were willing to take and hoping you got lucky.

There's a major difference in how satisfied players will feel about one type of randomness over the other - if the player feels that the other side just got lucky, they may feel cheated, or that their actions didn't matter (which is the prime complaint here, actually).  If a player feels that they were simply outwitted when the other side played a better hand than they did, then they're more likely to be satisfied even with a loss.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Martin on May 08, 2012, 04:15:03 pm
The difference here is in how the player gets the chance to react to the randomness and develop their strategy after the randomness has taken place.


I'd suggest using a priori randomness and a posteriori randomness.


Typically in games, a posteriori randomness is high in balanced situations, and your goal as a player is to narrow those odds of failure as much as possible through skill trees, training, equipment, or strategy. It never goes to zero, but it can get sufficiently small.


One challenge I've found with the card games like Magic is that then are more likely to put the player in unwinnable situations. In D&D, you always have hope that you'll roll a string of 20s.


Getting the balance right is really difficult. With a purely deterministic system, if you don't have the cards, you might as well give up. In a purely random system, you're powerless to influence the results. The game needs to give you initial conditions that aren't so easy or hard that they predetermine the outcome no matter what decisions you make, allow you to tilt the odds through effort, but never fully eliminate the possibility of success or failure.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 08, 2012, 04:18:11 pm
Ah, I see.  I get what you mean by dice-based vs. card-based randomness now.

However, I must protest at your conclusion:
There's a major difference in how satisfied players will feel about one type of randomness over the other - if the player feels that the other side just got lucky, they may feel cheated, or that their actions didn't matter (which is the prime complaint here, actually).  If a player feels that they were simply outwitted when the other side played a better hand than they did, then they're more likely to be satisfied even with a loss.
This is but one way of viewing things.  Mine are closer to the opposite: I feel more as if my actions are futile when I've been dealt a bad hand, whereas win or lose I enjoy the thrill that comes with that one die roll that represents the culmination of all my efforts.  I highly doubt I am the only one to have this view, just as I'm certain there are also people who enjoy and who loathe both kinds of chance in their games.


EDIT: Listen to this man, he knows what he's talking about.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Mitchewawa on May 08, 2012, 04:38:46 pm
As far as I'm concerned, the only thing the new changes do is remove some lag-inducing clutter. I still get the same amount of rock blocks, and I still get the same amount of ore. Nothing I can dig is so rare that I need to worry about not getting enough, on the odd chance that I do not get a stone every four tries.

This is also a bit of a nerf to rock crafts, I assume.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 08, 2012, 05:07:09 pm
I'd suggest using a priori randomness and a posteriori randomness.


Typically in games, a posteriori randomness is high in balanced situations, and your goal as a player is to narrow those odds of failure as much as possible through skill trees, training, equipment, or strategy. It never goes to zero, but it can get sufficiently small.


One challenge I've found with the card games like Magic is that then are more likely to put the player in unwinnable situations. In D&D, you always have hope that you'll roll a string of 20s.


Getting the balance right is really difficult. With a purely deterministic system, if you don't have the cards, you might as well give up. In a purely random system, you're powerless to influence the results. The game needs to give you initial conditions that aren't so easy or hard that they predetermine the outcome no matter what decisions you make, allow you to tilt the odds through effort, but never fully eliminate the possibility of success or failure.

Those terms work, too, but I'd still have to explain them to most people. :P

While it's true that you can get into unwinnable situations in card games - I play hearts and spades and bridge, and know that sometimes you just have to suck it up from time to time and try to keep your opponents from getting too far ahead of you on a deal that gives you a bad hand - there's also the fact that your success or failure in those games often feel determined as much by your choice as it does by the hand you were dealt. 

If you are in a nearly unwinnable situation in D&D, and you need something like 15 natural 20s in a row to survive an encounter, if you win, it was nothing but luck, and you'd know it.  It means you failed as a player just as badly as if you'd lost fair and square.  In fact, I'd rather lose at that point, generally.  Worse, it means that the rounds you should have won you will occasionally lose through no bad decision of your own. 

Granted, my own opinions on this matter are not universal - games like Candyland still exist for a reason, and some people prefer pure randomness with basically no skill that lets everybody win some of the time because they aren't looking for a challenge.  (I'm looking at you, Mario Party...)

However, the ways in which randomness are presented to the player are a major factor in how the players perceive the game, and it's something that any game designer needs to keep at the front of their mind when they design their games.  Some gamers are fine with a looser type of randomness that can dominate gameplay, but some want to feel more like they are playing chess, and will perceive randomness that makes a good strategy fail in spite of doing everything right as the reviled "Luck-Based Mission". 
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 08, 2012, 08:38:52 pm
If you are in a nearly unwinnable situation in D&D, and you need something like 15 natural 20s in a row to survive an encounter, if you win, it was nothing but luck, and you'd know it.  It means you failed as a player just as badly as if you'd lost fair and square.  In fact, I'd rather lose at that point, generally.  Worse, it means that the rounds you should have won you will occasionally lose through no bad decision of your own. 
And those moments, when you succeed (or fail!) despite all the odds, are what legends are made out of.  They're always what sticks with you the longest, even when you've forgotten about everything else.

Quote
Granted, my own opinions on this matter are not universal - games like Candyland still exist for a reason, and some people prefer pure randomness with basically no skill that lets everybody win some of the time because they aren't looking for a challenge.  (I'm looking at you, Mario Party...)
What it seems to me is that you're having a hard time believing that there exists a rather large proportion of gamers who enjoy neither high strategy nor utter chance.  Which is understandable; we all have trouble understanding how anyone could like what we don't.  But take our word for it, it exists even if you can't see it.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 08, 2012, 09:36:05 pm
Granted, my own opinions on this matter are not universal - games like Candyland still exist for a reason, and some people prefer pure randomness with basically no skill that lets everybody win some of the time because they aren't looking for a challenge.  (I'm looking at you, Mario Party...)
What it seems to me is that you're having a hard time believing that there exists a rather large proportion of gamers who enjoy neither high strategy nor utter chance.  Which is understandable; we all have trouble understanding how anyone could like what we don't.  But take our word for it, it exists even if you can't see it.

What part of "my own opinions are not universal" comes off as "I don't believe other people have different opinions"?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: slink on May 08, 2012, 09:56:11 pm
Granted, my own opinions on this matter are not universal - games like Candyland still exist for a reason, and some people prefer pure randomness with basically no skill that lets everybody win some of the time because they aren't looking for a challenge.  (I'm looking at you, Mario Party...)
What it seems to me is that you're having a hard time believing that there exists a rather large proportion of gamers who enjoy neither high strategy nor utter chance.  Which is understandable; we all have trouble understanding how anyone could like what we don't.  But take our word for it, it exists even if you can't see it.
What part of "my own opinions are not universal" comes off as "I don't believe other people have different opinions"?
He didn't say you don't believe other people have other opinions.  He said there are people whose opinions fall in between your own position and the often ridiculing position you ascribe to those who disagree with you.  I have also been reading posts by you ascribing to me, not by name but by membership in categories which you have described, that assert opinions on my behalf which I do not hold.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 08, 2012, 10:35:16 pm
I'm saying it's a spectrum - some people play Candyland, some people play Chess, and a lot of people fall somewhere in between. 

And believe me, I know people who have gotten me to play Mario Party with them before. That wasn't an insult on people who play Mario Party, but it's a simple fact that the game is designed to do that - they determine the winner by how many stars a person collects, and give out bonus stars for completely random things like stepping on blue tiles the most or having the least stars. 

They didn't make something like 8 of those games because nobody liked it. 

However, if you really do enjoy having the possibility that anything you do can be dashed at the last moment by a single bad die roll rather than a lack of skill on your part, then you're favoring a game closer to Mario Party than the sort of game I prefer.  And frankly, I remember a Penny Arcade that did not take this sort of randomness where skill was not rewarded in favor of chance very well (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/01/29). 

You can say "respect my gameplay" all you want, but I was telling you what mine was, and would ask you respect mine, as well.

Some people like to feel challenged and the ability to overcome difficult situations through skill, and feel like randomness cheats them of their ability to have that in a game.  Many of them aren't going to have taken the time to seriously organize and analyze their thoughts on the issue, and will simply be opposed to most any randomness they feel will "cheat" them of something they should be able to "earn" through skill alone in their preferred mode of gameplay. 
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 09, 2012, 11:43:36 am
I'm saying it's a spectrum - some people play Candyland, some people play Chess, and a lot of people fall somewhere in between. 
The thing is, nobody plays Candyland.  You're trumping up the one aspect that isn't in games you enjoy, and figure that it's the main attractor.  But it isn't.

Quote
However, if you really do enjoy having the possibility that anything you do can be dashed at the last moment by a single bad die roll rather than a lack of skill on your part...
Neither do I, but you keep on assuming I do just because I like some element of risk.  The games I prefer can only be one or lost on a single die roll if good/poor maneuvering has lined it up that way; it takes nothing less than a string of incredible and nigh-miraculous rolls to overturn skillful play.  Most games that I've seen are decided by the accumulation of smaller chance gains, the opportunities for which and impacts of are adjusted through skill.

The point is, the "somewhere in between" view which you seem to acknowledge only in passing is really where I and, I believe, most others on this forum reside.  The way that you keep emphasizing the extreme seems to me as if you are using a strawman, although I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that this isn't your intent.



The argument has gone on to the point where I'm not exactly sure what is being argued anymore.

It seems to me almost as if we're trying to argue what 'people' like: a futile pursuit if ever there was one.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 09, 2012, 01:44:18 pm
I'm saying it's a spectrum - some people play Candyland, some people play Chess, and a lot of people fall somewhere in between. 
The thing is, nobody plays Candyland.  You're trumping up the one aspect that isn't in games you enjoy, and figure that it's the main attractor.  But it isn't.

Quote
However, if you really do enjoy having the possibility that anything you do can be dashed at the last moment by a single bad die roll rather than a lack of skill on your part...
Neither do I, but you keep on assuming I do just because I like some element of risk.  The games I prefer can only be one or lost on a single die roll if good/poor maneuvering has lined it up that way; it takes nothing less than a string of incredible and nigh-miraculous rolls to overturn skillful play.  Most games that I've seen are decided by the accumulation of smaller chance gains, the opportunities for which and impacts of are adjusted through skill.

The point is, the "somewhere in between" view which you seem to acknowledge only in passing is really where I and, I believe, most others on this forum reside.  The way that you keep emphasizing the extreme seems to me as if you are using a strawman, although I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that this isn't your intent.



The argument has gone on to the point where I'm not exactly sure what is being argued anymore.

It seems to me almost as if we're trying to argue what 'people' like: a futile pursuit if ever there was one.

It seems to me you are trying to argue to me that I meant something other than what I said and believe something other than what I believe. 

I am not trying to argue that all randomness is a bad thing, and dismissing that area in between pure and no randomness as irrelevant, my position is in that area between the two extremes, too

What I'm arguing is that you consider that "people like" different degrees of randomness and have different perspectives on the concept, and that isn't a waste of time if the next time you try to argue to someone who says they hate randomness and it makes them feel cheated that their views on randomness may not be the same as yours. 

Some people enjoy really dry, analytical games, and some people enjoy casual games, and no, there's nothing wrong with casual gamers in spite of the prevailing mood of forums like these.  Telling someone who hates randomness that they should just enjoy it, however, is the fruitless exercise, since they aren't going to listen to such an argument.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Psieye on May 09, 2012, 03:27:35 pm
And so this interesting discussion on personal tastes of how much luck should influence 'our fate' in games we play draws to a close. But this spawned from the concern of "those rare, small platinum/aluminium clusters". Now that multiple blocks per rock and bars per ore have been established and gems guaranteed 100% drop rate, nobody is that concerned about the fixed 25% drop chance from mining except in this specific case.

The way I see it, this is less an aversion of "what if I don't get anything from this rare cluster?" and more an aversion of "I don't know how many clusters I have on this embark". It's this desire to do away with luck^2 (I'll explain below) vs luck^1.

All the discussion I've seen so far have been on luck^1 - whatever our feelings on how comfortable we are letting luck influence our games, they have all been under the assumption that the probabilities themselves are deterministic. In D&D terms, you know you must roll "X or greater" or maybe "roll better than that other player". The latter is a more complex calculation but ultimately you can get out one percentage value that definitively expresses "this is your chance to succeed, be it very high, very low or inbetween".

Luck^2 is where even the probability of success is randomised and cannot be determined in advance. This is beyond the level of "roll better than someone else's dice roll". This is approaching "roll the dice and I will arbitrarily pull out a rulebook from this big heap to tell you if you succeed - oh btw I don't even know if there's a rulebook that will declare you to have succeeded for any given dice value. Like, this example rulebook says you need a 4, 7 or 17 and any other values fail".

The people who are uncomfortable with this 25% fixed drop rate with regards to platinum perceive this to be a luck^2 problem. The people who do care about mining platinum but aren't so worried perceive this to be a luck^1 problem. It's a matter of "I can/can't trust there's another platinum cluster on this map even if this one yields nothing". In D&D terms, it would be akin to "I don't know if this tough monster will, on death, immediately spawn a fresh copy of itself with full HP thereby continuing the fight when I really want some down time". If you could magically dowse for every platinum cluster on the map (and ONLY platinum - or aluminium), I don't think there'd be nearly this much resistance to the fixed mining drop rate.



Oh and since the infamous "primitive barbarian defeats battleship in fluke chance" of Sid Meyer's Civilisation games has come up: I understand the transition from civ4 to civ5 is like the transition from D&D 3.5th edition to D&D 4th edition: some fundamentally game changing tweaks to the game. To my understanding, "caveman beat sci-fi giant robot" cannot happen now because there are not enough dice rolls to make that string of flukes - combat is no longer to the death. Combined with "no stacking", it really shakes the game.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 09, 2012, 03:50:15 pm
Alternately, if someone feels they really need aluminum THAT badly, they're probably just going to savescum until they get it, anyway.

Frankly, savescumming takes time and isn't very fun, anyway, so it sort of has its own incentives to not doing it built in, so I wouldn't worry too much about people actually freaking out to get EVERY aluminum boulder they could when aluminum isn't really useful for much besides value, and it's not like it's hard to make enough silver statues to make a room legendary as-is...
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: ZzarkLinux on May 09, 2012, 04:46:44 pm
Frankly, savescumming takes time and isn't very fun, anyway, so it sort of has its own incentives to not doing it built in

You got another reply from me for this statement :)

I savescummed like hell to get my current RabbitHut in a nice terrifying reanimating area.
And it sure was worth it, I'm enjoying the payoff every bit 8)

It's akin to how people used to play DnD OD&D / RedBox / etc ...
There were all sorts of rules for "weaponVSArmorType" and even the infamous "random h00ker chart" that were all official rules.
People ignored those rules in the official game, made it their own, and now there are many grognards who drone on about "how great the early DnD rules were"

Savescumming = houseruling :)
You will never stop people from doing it.
(as a side note, I only savescum to gen the world, haven't savescummed the actual huts)
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 09, 2012, 04:48:55 pm
Well, if we're only worried about aluminium and platinum than I'd just like to point out they're both anachronistic metals.

Aluminum doesn't even have a native form, at least not outside a lab so far as I can tell.

And native platinum has other platinum-group elements in it (like Iridium) that make it unmalleable; apparently though it was alloyable with gold though.


Lastly, even if these metals were available to a pre-industrial culture I believe they would have been worth little.  Aluminum tarnishes too fast to be decorative, and would (presumably) not be common enough for industry.  Platinum may be as shiny as silver, but without chemical testing it would be thought merely a low grade of that metal, and the difficulty of utilizing it would decrease its value even more.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Graknorke on May 09, 2012, 04:51:40 pm
As far as I remember, aluminium was EXTREMELY valuable because of how hard it was to get it pure. Rich folks wold have special aluminium cutlery and dining sets to show off their wealth to visitors, because it was valuable.
Prettyness and utility aren't the only influences on value. Sometimes people want stuff just because it's hard to get.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 09, 2012, 05:17:23 pm
As far as I remember, aluminium was EXTREMELY valuable because of how hard it was to get it pure. Rich folks wold have special aluminium cutlery and dining sets to show off their wealth to visitors, because it was valuable.
Prettyness and utility aren't the only influences on value. Sometimes people want stuff just because it's hard to get.
The thing is, that's only because the culture was enamored by it.  So the demand was high and supply low, but in a medieval culture the demand will be much lower; if only because of the extreme improbability of a merchant ever having more than one potential buyer for the substance.  It's a "Buyer's Market" at this point, which drives the price down even further.

Sure, some people will want it because it's hard to get, but they'd be such a small minority that merchants will have to practically give it away just to get it off their hands.  Besides, without chemical testing how do you know it's some super-rare new metal and not just a new form or alloy of mundane ones, like tin or silver?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Sadrice on May 09, 2012, 05:23:06 pm
As I recall, native alluminum does exist in certain rare circumstances, such as within certain volcanoes.  Probably not really accesible though.  Alluminum cutlery was valuable (famously used by napoleon) during the 40 or so years in the 1800s between the discovery of alluminum and the invention of the process to (relatively) cheaply smelt it.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 09, 2012, 06:08:09 pm
Frankly, savescumming takes time and isn't very fun, anyway, so it sort of has its own incentives to not doing it built in

You got another reply from me for this statement :)

I savescummed like hell to get my current RabbitHut in a nice terrifying reanimating area.
And it sure was worth it, I'm enjoying the payoff every bit 8)

It's akin to how people used to play DnD OD&D / RedBox / etc ...
There were all sorts of rules for "weaponVSArmorType" and even the infamous "random h00ker chart" that were all official rules.
People ignored those rules in the official game, made it their own, and now there are many grognards who drone on about "how great the early DnD rules were"

Savescumming = houseruling :)
You will never stop people from doing it.
(as a side note, I only savescum to gen the world, haven't savescummed the actual huts)

Well, what I mean is that the actual act of savescumming isn't fun. 

I don't know what you mean by savescumming for your world, but I've certainly genned new worlds until I found histories I care for.  And I don't really consider it savescumming if I'm restarting the whole game from the initial point.

If you have to save, alt-control-delete (or equivalent for your OS) and force quit, reload, force quit, reload, force quit about three or four times per tile to get what you want, I seriously doubt all but the most compulsively obsessed player is going to actually want to do that for every boulder of rare materials.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: ZzarkLinux on May 09, 2012, 06:12:47 pm
He who smelt it dealt it.

...

Aww shucks, NW you beat me by a hare. Oh well.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: King Mir on May 09, 2012, 06:17:58 pm
As I recall, native alluminum does exist in certain rare circumstances, such as within certain volcanoes.  Probably not really accesible though.
Not to people, but to dwarves -- no problem.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Sadrice on May 09, 2012, 06:30:39 pm
Looked it up, native aluminum is found in mud volcanoes in azerbaijan, a few weird igneous intrusive pegmatite formations in Russia, similar places in another couple of former soviet countries, and at least one undersea cold seep off the coast of China.  Very small quantities in all of those sources.


It looks like this, scale bar 1 mm:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 09, 2012, 08:14:06 pm
Still isn't enough to smelt though.  Besides, I don't see anything that would make it more valuable than, say, pyhrite at this point.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: gestahl on May 09, 2012, 09:35:05 pm
I don't mind the change as far as digging stone, or even building walls. And while being able to make four walls or one chair out of the same hunk of rock might be annoying, the dwarf doing this could also be wearing a leather cloak made from the hide of one cat, while wearing a leather cap that consumed an entire elephant hide to create. Making chairs/tables/slabs/etc will be a bigger resource sink, but past year 2 or so I think most of us will be contently stockpiled with stone, rather then drowning in it as before.

The problem with a flat drop rate is that digging out a 10 by 10 hunk of marble and getting between 20 and 30 stones isn't a big deal but carefully digging out the few safe squares of candy on the edge of a tube and getting nothing is going to want to make me execute the miner way more then having an untrained fool waste a vein of silver ever did.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Trapezohedron on May 09, 2012, 09:36:09 pm
@topictitle
Eh, I don't mind.

Then again, I tend to mod in rock-creation and destruction reactions, so yeah.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Drawde on May 09, 2012, 10:23:40 pm
The problem with a flat drop rate is that digging out a 10 by 10 hunk of marble and getting between 20 and 30 stones isn't a big deal but carefully digging out the few safe squares of candy on the edge of a tube and getting nothing is going to want to make me execute the miner way more then having an untrained fool waste a vein of silver ever did.
That metal is currently 100% drop, specifically because of this.

It could possibly end up being all clusters instead of all gem clusters that end up 100%.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 09, 2012, 11:22:26 pm
Last I checked deep metal was a guaranteed 100% drop, and I doubt that changed unless Toady forgot something.  All gems now drop 100% too, which I think is nice.

If anything though, 100% drop rates will be by tag as apposed to by cluster size, because I don't think the game remembers cluster associations after worldgen.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: KharBevNor on May 19, 2012, 11:14:20 am
I believe gems always dropped at 100%

I'm having a lot of difficulty understanding the complains in this thread, tbh. The new fort I started in 0.34.08 is extremely resource rich. Especially when combined with the hauling changes, my metal and stone industries are running faster and more productively than ever, and I no longer need to keep about half my fortress employed as haulers on endless garbage dumping duty.

Also, sorry if this has been mentioned, but from what I can see in my game, platinum is a 100% drop.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: GoldenShadow on May 19, 2012, 12:13:02 pm
Last I checked deep metal was a guaranteed 100% drop, and I doubt that changed unless Toady forgot something.  All gems now drop 100% too, which I think is nice.

If anything though, 100% drop rates will be by tag as apposed to by cluster size, because I don't think the game remembers cluster associations after worldgen.

I verified that adamantine also still produces a single metal thread, not 4
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Starne on May 19, 2012, 01:11:01 pm
I'm okay with the change, but I think more could be done.

These are Dwarves we're talking about, the main things they have in abundance are  foolishness, greed, enemies, stone, and metal.

Were it up to me, I'd increase the flat drop rate of stone by about 10-20%, and I'd increase the drop rate of ores dramatically, to something like 75-80%. I'd leave the "1 Ore Chunk=4 Bars" rule in effect, though. The idea being to make metalworking very lucrative and making the export of metal products into the staple go-to when it comes to trade.

To go off on a bit of a tangent, I'd also make it possible to make crafts, furniture and stuff out of blocks. I'd also rename wood blocks to wood planks, with one log=3 planks(Products made of planks would be worth more than products made of logs). Making logs into planks manually(IE at a carpenter's workshop) would be time consuming, with some kind of powered Sawmill workshop being much more efficient. I know that a powered sawmill might be a bit out of our time-frame, but I could easily see Dwarves rigging up some kind of mechanical saw-thing powered by a water wheel. The exception to this would be the 'odd' woods such as bamboo and saguaro.

The general idea behind all of this being that the more effort and Dwarf-hours you put into your production chains, the more you get out of your resources. Miner->Mason->Stone Products or Woodcutter->Carpenter-Wood Products would still be viable, but with Miner->Mason->Mason->Stone Products and Woodcutter->Sawmill->Carpenter->Wood Products being more resource efficient. With the metalworking industries being the most productive and lucrative(Miner->Smelter->Smith->Lots of Shiny things).
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 19, 2012, 01:18:38 pm
These are Dwarves we're talking about, the main things they have in abundance are  foolishness, greed, enemies, stone, and metal.

Were it up to me, I'd increase the flat drop rate of stone by about 10-20%, and I'd increase the drop rate of ores dramatically, to something like 75-80%. I'd leave the "1 Ore Chunk=4 Bars" rule in effect, though. The idea being to make metalworking very lucrative and making the export of metal products into the staple go-to when it comes to trade.

So you're saying...

"We always have more metal ore than we can do anything with," but also saying, "We should have three times as much metal ore as we already get."

I'm not sure I understand the reasoning, here.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Tarran on May 19, 2012, 01:32:56 pm
I'm having a lot of difficulty understanding the complains in this thread, tbh. The new fort I started in 0.34.08 is extremely resource rich. Especially when combined with the hauling changes, my metal and stone industries are running faster and more productively than ever, and I no longer need to keep about half my fortress employed as haulers on endless garbage dumping duty.
I'm pretty sure a decent amount of people were complaining about rare minerals being screwed over. Personally, I'm perfectly fine with common minerals and large clusters and veins having this change, as they'll likely not feel much, but rare small clusters and single tile ores have basically become a game of chance. Both because there's a significant chance of getting nothing, and the mode result is 1 metal less.

Yes, there's a chance to get so much more, but the majority of times, you'll get less than you did in previous versions.

The dividing point between the two sides is on that point above. Those who are against, like me, cannot accept this trade-off. Those for it can. It would take a serious effort to convince either side otherwise in my opinion.

Also, sorry if this has been mentioned, but from what I can see in my game, platinum is a 100% drop.
Can anyone confirm this?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Starne on May 19, 2012, 01:55:33 pm
These are Dwarves we're talking about, the main things they have in abundance are  foolishness, greed, enemies, stone, and metal.

Were it up to me, I'd increase the flat drop rate of stone by about 10-20%, and I'd increase the drop rate of ores dramatically, to something like 75-80%. I'd leave the "1 Ore Chunk=4 Bars" rule in effect, though. The idea being to make metalworking very lucrative and making the export of metal products into the staple go-to when it comes to trade.

So you're saying...

"We always have more metal ore than we can do anything with," but also saying, "We should have three times as much metal ore as we already get."

I'm not sure I understand the reasoning, here.

Export (lots of)iron bolts to the Goblins and Elves, steel stuff to the Humans, precious metals and steel to the mountain homes.  Later on, a steady stream of metal products going out to the sprawl around the fortress, equipment for the armies you're sending out, and tribute to the king. Stuff for the fortress itself to upgrade the trap system and to repair and replace all those damaged, broken, and worn-out things. Knick-knacks for your Dwarves when the economy returns. You also can't forget a steady trickle of gold, silver, and platinum for your hoard(Gotta draw those throngs of Goblins, Kobolds, Dragons, Giants and everything else in somehow).

Several ways to use metals in the game now, and even more later.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: ZzarkLinux on May 19, 2012, 02:29:14 pm
These are Dwarves we're talking about, the main things they have in abundance are  foolishness, greed, enemies, stone, and metal.

Might I also propose booze and machines :)

dwarves = gnomes in my opinion
Games like WOW and DnD-Eberron portray dwarves as kinda mechanical, which is a nice contrast to magical elves.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: NW_Kohaku on May 19, 2012, 03:35:27 pm
These are Dwarves we're talking about, the main things they have in abundance are  foolishness, greed, enemies, stone, and metal.

Were it up to me, I'd increase the flat drop rate of stone by about 10-20%, and I'd increase the drop rate of ores dramatically, to something like 75-80%. I'd leave the "1 Ore Chunk=4 Bars" rule in effect, though. The idea being to make metalworking very lucrative and making the export of metal products into the staple go-to when it comes to trade.

So you're saying...

"We always have more metal ore than we can do anything with," but also saying, "We should have three times as much metal ore as we already get."

I'm not sure I understand the reasoning, here.

Export (lots of)iron bolts to the Goblins and Elves, steel stuff to the Humans, precious metals and steel to the mountain homes.  Later on, a steady stream of metal products going out to the sprawl around the fortress, equipment for the armies you're sending out, and tribute to the king. Stuff for the fortress itself to upgrade the trap system and to repair and replace all those damaged, broken, and worn-out things. Knick-knacks for your Dwarves when the economy returns. You also can't forget a steady trickle of gold, silver, and platinum for your hoard(Gotta draw those throngs of Goblins, Kobolds, Dragons, Giants and everything else in somehow).

Several ways to use metals in the game now, and even more later.

The fact that there's an argument for platinum to be removed from the game entirely aside...

That's not really an argument for metal being more common. 

In fact, if you want metal to be terribly useful and valuable, it should be less common, because if it's supposed to be valuable, you shouldn't "always have more metal than you can use", you should "always need more". 

If anything, this is an argument for 5% or 10% ore drop rates.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 19, 2012, 11:46:20 pm
If you want more metal, change the mineral frequency in worldgen options, or do some creative modding.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Splint on May 20, 2012, 02:04:18 am
I don't much care for the nonskill based drop rates. I seem to be cursed with poor rates for ores, while I have almost no use for gems, which seem to be, for alot of gems, nearly worthless. And now mining is just another speed thing, it's like a miller or fish cleaner now with the barely useful benefit of using a pick as a weapon, which doesn't negate bad thoughts.

Besides, without masses of stone cluttering the hell out of the place, it's just.... I honestly can't think of anything other than it doesn't feel right. Flux is ruined rutinly, ores lost, which when trying to actually equip soldiers with more than fancy shoes helmets and shields is bad. My first one using this system, and my miners ruined more ore than they extracted, and I was left with on average enough metal to equiup maybe two soldiers at a time, if that. If nothing else, a higher rate for ores would be nicer. I can't really find a use for gems unless I stick an ass load onto a few thing to increase the value.

I will admit I like the blocks being more economical now. But as with ores, flux gets ruined now, and I have 3 or 4x as much wasted space because I had to needlessly mine that out with legendary miners just to get what i needed for a few steel spears and swords.

I know my opinion is obviously quite overwhelmingly crushed based on the vote, and the realism is improved, but this is one bit of realism I could do without. Hell it kinda makes minecarts outside of trading and improvised weapons a bit moot since we needed the damn things to move the mountains of stone around more than anything. That's just my take on things. No need to point out the holes in my logic or whatever, as I know some people may do anyway.

tl;dr version
Wtf, are miners relegated to sightly less useless fish cleaners now?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Tarran on May 20, 2012, 02:14:25 am
I know my opinion is obviously quite overwhelmingly crushed based on the vote,
Don't be so pessimistic. ~20% are mixed or against. And 25% think it is better, but could easily be even better, which could be taken as "It's a step in the right direction, but there's some serious problems".

If nothing else, at least you've got me. :P
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Splint on May 20, 2012, 02:17:29 am
I'm pessemistic by nature. Years of dissappointment assured that. But enough about me.

Part of what i find annoying is it feels like I just have a construction equivalent of a fish cleaner now, and that's not right! D:
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: GoldenShadow on May 20, 2012, 09:50:40 am
I am enjoying that clearing a small 11x11 room of stone can be done with one wave of haulers to a garbage dump in the hallway.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Dorfimedes on May 20, 2012, 10:54:05 am
I will admit I like the blocks being more economical now. But as with ores, flux gets ruined now, and I have 3 or 4x as much wasted space because I had to needlessly mine that out with legendary miners just to get what i needed for a few steel spears and swords.
Nah, I agree, we could use some tweaks in regards to flux since I think it's something Toady overlooked when the new version was put out. I think it should work sort of like blocks, you should be able to take a flux boulder to a workshop (mason's?) and make four flux bars out of it. Then you would get the proper numbers of flux from the stone and keeping stockpiles of the stuff wouldn't be so cumbersome, since bars stack and can be put in bins.
Wtf, are miners relegated to sightly less useless fish cleaners now?
Well, despite the dwarvish bond with stone, I always thought of miners as being unskilled laborers anyhow since the task is pretty simple. All they're doing is smashing rock into rough shapes for the engravers to work with, who are probably tasked with all the fine details that make a great hall look so grand.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Broseph Stalin on May 20, 2012, 12:01:18 pm
I REALLY like the new system. First of all I never liked the fact that skilled miners were fixtures of the fortress, mining is more about being strong and putting the work in then being skilled. It feels more realistic to have a team of miners working instead of just two guys building a subterranean fortress all by their lonesome. This is actually the first time I've actually had a real stone stockpile, I usually use a quantum stone stockpile and spend half of the game turning thousands of boulders into crafts just to be rid of them.  Plus blocks were basically useless before the change. I made some personal use modifications to make it possible to create furniture from blocks instead of raw stone. It feels much more organic to quarry huge boulders, cut them into blocks, and then use them instead of just dragging a boulder to a construction site and somehow turning it into a workshop.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Sadrice on May 20, 2012, 01:53:28 pm
I don't understand the whining, frankly.  The rate at which you aquire ordinary metal has not changed (if you think that the RNG is cheating you, well, I don't really believe you), the rate at which you aquire construction material is also not changed, the rate at which you find rare metals is quadrupeled, and you get way more fuel for your digging effort.  The only thing that is now limited is crafts and furniture made out of stone (which has been reduced from an endless suply to a merely almost endless supply), and flux.  Generally, if you have flux you have a lot of it, so this isn't really an issue.

As for the making minecarts useless argument, sure there's less stone now, but have you tried clearing it all out without minecarts?  Dwarves don't use wheelbarrows to dump items.  Clearing the stone by hand takes much longer now than it did before.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: loose nut on May 20, 2012, 02:33:31 pm
Almost two years into my first 34.09 fort and there aren't very many functional changes resulting from mineral drop rates. I'm hardly running out of stone. I may not have thousands of stone lying around, but it's definitely in the hundreds. And, actually, it was quicker to get metal up and running, because smelting one chunk of hematite gets you a bunch of iron bars. Haven't gotten to flux or coal deposits in this fort so I can't speak to that.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Tarran on May 20, 2012, 03:21:37 pm
The rate at which you aquire ordinary metal has not changed
Actually, yes it has. It changed from a constant stream to a fluctuating bumpy ride, because you only have a 25% chance to get 4 blocks, meaning it won't be a linear line like it used to be.

Though I'll be fair. Overall, if you drew a line straight through the average, yes it would be the same.

the rate at which you aquire construction material is also not changed,
I don't think anyone did complain much about this.

the rate at which you find rare metals is quadrupeled,
Checking the other thread, hmm, indeed it seems my complains are now null and void.

Anyway, you have to remember most of the complaints were before the new release, and Toady didn't publicly state that small clusters have 100% drops. And I'll admit, I haven't played much DF so I didn't really check for myself.

Generally, if you have flux you have a lot of it, so this isn't really an issue.
Unless you embark on a site with a few levels of Flux in the corner of the map with half of the layers covered with ore. :P
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Psieye on May 20, 2012, 04:45:28 pm
Wtf, are miners relegated to sightly less useless fish cleaners now?
Well, despite the dwarvish bond with stone, I always thought of miners as being unskilled laborers anyhow since the task is pretty simple. All they're doing is smashing rock into rough shapes for the engravers to work with, who are probably tasked with all the fine details that make a great hall look so grand.
Oh come on, I will not accept "I forgot miners have picks, one of the deadliest weapons available" (I will accept "I did not know that"). Treating miners like the other drone job holders will result in extremely !!FUN!! tantrum spirals. If anything, from the perspective of training up a pick-equipped militia, this change makes it amazingly easy to train up legendary weapon users.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Splint on May 20, 2012, 04:51:41 pm
Yeah, but picks don't count as a weapon skill for intents of using them as soldiers. They get bad thoughts every time they're called up.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: KharBevNor on May 20, 2012, 04:58:05 pm

Also, sorry if this has been mentioned, but from what I can see in my game, platinum is a 100% drop.
Can anyone confirm this?

This could be luck, but here are the last two platinum clusters I've mined out in my current fort as of this point:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There's a nugget or two missing from each one, but they weren't that recent and I've been refining platinum fairly heavily. I'll look for some other clusters and see if I'm just being weirdly lucky with the drops; I'm sure I remember them all dropping when they were mined, because I remember thinking "oh good, at least platinum still drops well". Someone needs to crack open Reveal and do some !!Science!!.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: krenshala on May 21, 2012, 12:06:03 am
Yeah, but picks don't count as a weapon skill for intents of using them as soldiers. They get bad thoughts every time they're called up.
Only while they don't have at least Novice in at least one martial skill.  As soon as they get to Novice Dodging, or  Novice Fighter, or whatever, they stop getting the bad thought when being called to active service.  Same for recruits being put off duty.  If they don't have at least one civilian skill at Novice or greater, they get the unhappy thought of being relieved from duty.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Splint on May 21, 2012, 12:10:26 am
I'm aware of peasents lacking civvie skills getting upset about that, but in my expierences, with no dedicated weapon skill or wrestling (as in being actually classed as a wrestler) they still compain.

But that isn't what the thread's about. Still don't like the drop rates, especially when I get consistently screwed by the random number whore and end up with basically a meaningly chunk of irrgular rooms. Yes it has happened. And that's all. I'm entitled to my opinion.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Arkenstone on May 21, 2012, 12:13:53 am

Also, sorry if this has been mentioned, but from what I can see in my game, platinum is a 100% drop.
Can anyone confirm this?

This could be luck, but here are the last two platinum clusters I've mined out in my current fort as of this point:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There's a nugget or two missing from each one, but they weren't that recent and I've been refining platinum fairly heavily. I'll look for some other clusters and see if I'm just being weirdly lucky with the drops; I'm sure I remember them all dropping when they were mined, because I remember thinking "oh good, at least platinum still drops well". Someone needs to crack open Reveal and do some !!Science!!.
Easy enough.  Let's say you got 8 out of 10 platinum. So P^ = .8

H0: p=.25  Ha: p>.25

*checks STAT 350 notes*
*crunches numbers*
*reads t-distribution table*
*reaches conclusion*

There actually is significant evidence that it might not be a coincidence.  More research must be done.

EDIT:
The exact numbers would be very helpful.  It would make a huge difference if it was 7/10, for instance.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Mistercheif on May 21, 2012, 03:27:36 pm

Also, sorry if this has been mentioned, but from what I can see in my game, platinum is a 100% drop.
Can anyone confirm this?

This could be luck, but here are the last two platinum clusters I've mined out in my current fort as of this point:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There's a nugget or two missing from each one, but they weren't that recent and I've been refining platinum fairly heavily. I'll look for some other clusters and see if I'm just being weirdly lucky with the drops; I'm sure I remember them all dropping when they were mined, because I remember thinking "oh good, at least platinum still drops well". Someone needs to crack open Reveal and do some !!Science!!.
Easy enough.  Let's say you got 8 out of 10 platinum. So P^ = .8

H0: p=.25  Ha: p>.25

*checks STAT 350 notes*
*crunches numbers*
*reads t-distribution table*
*reaches conclusion*

There actually is significant evidence that it might not be a coincidence.  More research must be done.

EDIT:
The exact numbers would be very helpful.  It would make a huge difference if it was 7/10, for instance.

I'm glad I was not the only one tempted to do this.  Though wouldn't it be a z-test, because we're dealing with proportions? (Just took my AP Stats test last week!  8))

And anyway, I have mixed feelings on the change.  I like the increased ease of making blocks, as it requires only 1/4 the hauling to the workshop to produce 4 blocks.  On the other hand, you do have a chance of being screwed by the RNG on ores with very little present on the map, because you won't be mining anywhere near the amounts necessary for the law of large numbers to apply.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Ieb on May 21, 2012, 03:51:38 pm
This post will probably not contribute to the discussion in any way except telling you people what some guy thinks of the new update to mining.

I like it. A lot. Ever since I meddled with the 2D version of Dwarf Fortress, I've missed how miners weren't quaranteed to leave pieces of rock where-ever they went, but were able to mine out mineral veins perfectly at legendary level. Coal was a special case, but anyway.

This new version? Aww yeah. I don't have a bazillion boulders everywhere anymore, with mining tunnels looking for metals I still get more than enough of those than I would like, and the "1 ore rock = 4 metal bars" thing is great too. As far as the rare metals go, that is easy to get around. More abundant minerals at worldgen, I just order what I want from the caravans instead of digging for the ore myself. It's not that big of a deal then, but I guess it can become an issue if you prefer less mineral-abundant worlds.

And I can actually have a huge mining crew too and it won't hurt my metal operations that much, it just speeds up the process as long as I got the crew to haul the ore and process it. Sure, it comes down to luck how much ore I get from a vein, but a lot of things in DF get down to luck. Ah RNG, you are a cruel mistress, but I love you so. Hurt me more and send some of those deadly dust titans my way again.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: dbay on May 21, 2012, 05:25:37 pm
I was really skeptical at first, until I had to dig out a huge area to make a refuse stockpile, and found that 75% of the room was clear from the get-go without dumping. I'm all for it, now, I think it's one of the best updates so far
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: GoldenShadow on May 21, 2012, 07:26:13 pm
Yea. I can collect all of the presents from Goblin christmas in a few days instead of years.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Splint on May 21, 2012, 07:31:41 pm
Yea. I can collect all of the presents from Goblin christmas in a few days instead of years.

What does dead guy junk have to do with mining actual ores?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Tarran on May 21, 2012, 07:32:44 pm
Maybe he's from the future and in the future it's possible to mine Goblins?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Splint on May 21, 2012, 07:34:14 pm
Well, I can see what he means if miners are employed against them.... But that's a 100% drop from aliving ore that makes itself available, so it doesn't count.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Makbeth on June 18, 2012, 03:48:49 am
Honestly, most people don't even do real time-consuming projects because we honestly DON'T have much time to play. The longer it takes to set up a fort or complete a task, the less likely we'll ever enjoy it because we wouldn't be able to have fun or !!FUN!! within our timeframe/attention span. The game is reasonably paced right now and there's certainly difficulty for anyone not prepared to deal with the naturally occuring !!FUN!!, and unnatural difficulty can be applied through mods, but making resources more scarce doesn't really make things more difficult in the sense that you're in mortal danger, just more tedious and time-consuming. Less resources = less enjoyable and a longer wait for anything to happen, which sucks.

Of course, I am tackling the concept from the standpoint that I absolutely hate grindfest-type games that demand you waste time and energy on resource acquisition before blowing shit up/even encountering real problems, like being killed. I don't want resources to take more work to obtain as much as I want to take my massive hoard of legosstone and make a castle of horrors of such ridiculous complexity that I forget how to operate it, then enjoy the brand-new combat AI that makes defeating a siege far more satisfying and more difficult. I do such sadistic things as throwing a half dozen legendary soldiers against a horde of giants, because that's both fun to watch and !!FUN!! when the tantrum spiral starts because Urist mcDead was married, had a dozen kids, and was friends with everyone else. Waiting for blocks to be ready for my megaproject? No. I've been happy with rough stone boulders because I like to start as soon as possible.

The problem with that is, what you're describing isn't a game at all - it's just a construction set. 

A construction set where you have infinite powers, and you just use the terrain as your canvas is fine and all, but it's not a game and it has no challenges.

The game that DF is moving towards and should be isn't something where you move blocks around for 20 hours before deleting the world and making another world again and starting over from scratch. 

It should, instead, be a 300-hour project where you scratch your way up from meager beginnings to controlling a world-spanning empire, with every step along the way adding additional challenge and complexity until you are simultaniously juggling the military strategies of an army on the march, their logistical needs, the intra-court politics of your king and nobles, relations between the dwarves and their tigermen and antmen allies over the benefits of citizenry, maintaining farm production, keeping the citizens of your capital entertained with bread and circuses, keeping guild conflicts to a minimum, keeping the minecarts running on time, getting enough barrels made to keep booze production running, and making sure the mandates and moods get completed.

The tagline of the game is "Losing is Fun" because Toady wants us to keep coming back to the same fort and world with its ever-increasing depth and personality rather than just deleting the world and starting another random one every time you're done pushing around your lego megaprojects. 

The construction set things will still be there, but there's so much more game to be added onto DF.

As a person who works for a living, I hope that people who want things in a game that could take 20 hours to take 300 hours get ignored by everyone even related to the business of making games.

Part of the reason we enjoy doing a thing in a game and don't enjoy doing the exact same thing in real life is because in the game, much of the inconvenience is taken out.  One of those inconveniences is time.  Imagine sandbox games that have multiple cities, where the distances between the cities were realistic.  Whatever your opinion of Assassin's Creed may be, I'm willing to bet you'd like it more as it is and less if it had realistic travel time by horse from Damascus to Jerusalem.  If someone tried to defend the realistic distances as making the game challenging, well, I'm not sure what your response would be, but mine wouldn't be very polite, because that person doesn't know what makes a game fun, is not good at their job, and is taking up space that somebody else should have.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: traxzilla on June 18, 2012, 05:20:02 am
I know other people have raised these points but I still feel like chiming in. I like most of the changes, but the lowered drop rate means I can't build as many mechanisms and crafts (and I build a LOT of those), and my legendary miners are not really much better than novices. If you could make furniture/mechanisms/crafts out of blocks and if the manager would list options for metal mechanisms, it would be a non-issue.

I've never had a problem with too much stone, but I use quantum stockpiles and atom-smashers to clear up clutter and I understand that some people prefer not to do that.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Broseph Stalin on June 18, 2012, 05:22:45 am
I know other people have raised these points but I still feel like chiming in. I like most of the changes, but the lowered drop rate means I can't build as many mechanisms and crafts (and I build a LOT of those), and my legendary miners are not really much better than novices. If you could make furniture/mechanisms/crafts out of blocks and if the manager would list options for metal mechanisms, it would be a non-issue.

I've never had a problem with too much stone, but I use quantum stockpiles and atom-smashers to clear up clutter and I understand that some people prefer not to do that.
I think useable blocks is the next logical step I really hope toady comes around.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: WhatDoesThisLeverDo on June 18, 2012, 07:25:15 am
I don't do megaprojects, so it's just positive for me.

Fewer ores lying around, and once I make blocks I'm good to go.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Sutremaine on June 18, 2012, 08:16:38 am
It's a little annoying that flux is now 1/4 as common as it was before, but if you did or didn't have enough before then that's very unlikely to change. Doesn't melting return more metal now? That'll save a little bit on flux useage. Otherwise I'm fine with the drop rate itself.

I like most of the changes, but the lowered drop rate means I can't build as many mechanisms and crafts (and I build a LOT of those)
Do you make them because you enjoy using them as trade goods, or because it's a way of getting rid of the stone that you'd otherwise be atom-smashing?

Mechanisms (and other things that need to be made from raw stone) are an interesting case. If you're making enough of them for the 1/4 drop rate to be an issue, then the labour and infrastructure you already had available for your mechanism-using megaproject can be briefly diverted into pump part production in order to set up an obsidian farm.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Di on June 18, 2012, 12:03:13 pm
I've chosen 'I don't care" since it didn't change things that much. It's a bit odd, to have a pair of veins to be mined in order to equip two dozens of soldiers but I doubt that iron veins in DF resemble the real ones any close. And I've yet to deplete at least one level completely. Though I'd recommend to lower metal rarity to 2000 in worldgen.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: PainRack on June 18, 2012, 12:21:34 pm
Well..... the game changes part of my themed trade, where I would trade mechanism and flour/dye/syrup to the humans but otherwise.... the only difference was a huge shock when I thought I lost my mined iron.

The other thing is, it just became a lot harder to make steel, since, I don't have a dolomite/etc layer and had to rely on a broken up cavern layer of marble.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Blizzlord on June 18, 2012, 02:14:29 pm
Isn't difficult steel production a good thing? It is way to easy as it is now considering all the benefits you reap.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Splint on June 18, 2012, 02:40:35 pm
Isn't difficult steel production a good thing? It is way to easy as it is now considering all the benefits you reap.

Not so much easy in sopme regards, as it depends on where you go that dictates how easy it'll be. A glacial volcano with no coal or trees and caverns more hostile than expected or with no iron ores can make life a little miserable in regards to that.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Graknorke on June 18, 2012, 03:03:42 pm
Steel is supposed to be difficult, and has always required trade to be produced in mass amounts. The initial methods of making it WOULD have the furnace buildings in a site near ore and coal. But as the industrial capacity became greater, it became much better to trade for the materials rather than having such a mix of industrial processes in one place.

Basically, caravan arc to make steel making viable again.
Sources are my own knowledge.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Splint on June 18, 2012, 03:19:22 pm
Eh. Once blocks can be used in place of raw stone in place of it for smaller things and for making steel, since we only get two bars a pop anyway, things will balance out and no-one can complain at all.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Xenos on June 18, 2012, 05:33:40 pm
Time to abuse stack splitting for steel coins/bolts so I can afford to make steel everything...
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Graknorke on June 18, 2012, 05:41:45 pm
Wait what? Using blocks for smelting?
How would that make sense? Before one bar of steel would use a total of two ores and a flux and a charcoal.
With the changes, one ore should then produce two bars of steel, flux and fuel notwithstanding.
Assuming exactly 1/4 drops, for a 4 tile area, you would get the same amount.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Xenos on June 18, 2012, 05:47:47 pm
Wait what? Using blocks for smelting?
How would that make sense? Before one bar of steel would use a total of two ores and a flux and a charcoal.
With the changes, one ore should then produce two bars of steel, flux and fuel notwithstanding.
Assuming exactly 1/4 drops, for a 4 tile area, you would get the same amount.

They should have clarified that you would use flux blocks for smelting ore boulders.  Otherwise it is ridiculous.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Laserhead on June 18, 2012, 09:21:28 pm
One thing I've noticed, if you embark with nothing but a little food and the supplies for a metal industry on the wagon, you can have two guys in steel equipment using just what you brought with you. Before you'd have had to have used bronze to get a reasonable amount of metal for the standard number of embark points.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Panando on June 18, 2012, 09:54:45 pm
I really like the system for the most part, and my only gripe is now the embark prices are even more out of whack. I know, I know, the whole system really needs a massive re-tuning, but now you can get bronze bars (from ore) for a mere 1.55pts each (assuming malachite, cassi, bit. coal).

Other than that I love the reduced drop rate and the ability to more easily import metal ores.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: traxzilla on June 19, 2012, 12:45:58 am
Do you make them because you enjoy using them as trade goods, or because it's a way of getting rid of the stone that you'd otherwise be atom-smashing?

Mechanisms (and other things that need to be made from raw stone) are an interesting case. If you're making enough of them for the 1/4 drop rate to be an issue, then the labour and infrastructure you already had available for your mechanism-using megaproject can be briefly diverted into pump part production in order to set up an obsidian farm.

I use crafts furniture to level up my masons and crafts as my primary trade goods. I tend to load caravans down with as much as they can possibly carry, both to make them happier (and thus bring me more stuff next time) and to inflate my fortress wealth to bring in more fun.

For mechanisms, grates, floodgates, statues, and other such things... well, I like to build excessive amounts of traps, bridges and waterways.

I don't think catapults can use blocks as ammo either. I know siege weapons are not very effective, but hopefully that will change in the future. Not sure about stone-fall traps.

Obsidian farming is what I will probably end up doing.

Edit: I meant to say I use furniture to level up my masons (mostly statues) and crafts as my primary trade goods, and I should probably proof-read better. Edited to fix.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Graknorke on June 19, 2012, 01:31:55 am
Crafts train stonecrafting, not masonry. Metal crafts can easily susbstitude stone ones, especially if you just make a few high-quality gold ones (like it's good for anything else). The rest are totally valid though. Mechanisms and the like will need tweaking to make multiple from one boulder (I mean, it's meant to be about 10 metres cubed? You would have to be pretty inefficient to make ONE chair from that.).
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Kar98 on June 19, 2012, 02:12:56 am
I wasn't aware that creating blocks gave you more building material. I was going to complain about the lack of boulders makes it harder to build walls but this does change things quite a bit. I did like the lack of stupid amounts of rock
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Eric Blank on June 19, 2012, 02:59:01 am
Do you make them because you enjoy using them as trade goods, or because it's a way of getting rid of the stone that you'd otherwise be atom-smashing?

Mechanisms (and other things that need to be made from raw stone) are an interesting case. If you're making enough of them for the 1/4 drop rate to be an issue, then the labour and infrastructure you already had available for your mechanism-using megaproject can be briefly diverted into pump part production in order to set up an obsidian farm.

I use crafts to level up my masons and as my primary trade goods. I tend to load caravans down with as much as they can possibly carry, both to make them happier (and thus bring me more stuff next time) and to inflate my fortress wealth to bring in more fun.

For mechanisms, grates, floodgates, statues, and other such things... well, I like to build excessive amounts of traps, bridges and waterways.

I don't think catapults can use blocks as ammo either. I know siege weapons are not very effective, but hopefully that will change in the future. Not sure about stone-fall traps.

Obsidian farming is what I will probably end up doing.

Stone fall traps are moderately more effective with boulders being larger and/or denser now.

I definitely want to be able to produce more furniture from boulders, though. If you had a high-quality (not badly fractured) chunk of stone, about a cubic meter, which I think is roughly the volume in-game, you could produce a couple good-sized coffers from it just by splitting it in half, shearing a slab off the top, hollowing out the remainder and using the slab you sheared off as a lid, then move on to use the scraps from the process of hollowing out the interior to produce smaller items like mugs. It could be more efficient actually to cut it into 5cm thick slabs and use them to construct tables, cabinets, coffers, chairs or other objects that need large surface area but can afford to be fairly thin. Blocks would basically be premade slabs, so letting dwarves use them to construct the items slightly more rapidly could work if you've somehow made too many blocks and are short on boulders.

I've gotten used to the changes to a degree, but I'd still like some way to control the volume of material that is lost in mining.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Splint on June 19, 2012, 03:54:23 am
I wasn't aware that creating blocks gave you more building material. I was going to complain about the lack of boulders makes it harder to build walls but this does change things quite a bit. I did like the lack of stupid amounts of rock

As far as blocks go, it's basically a requirment now to get the most out of what boulders you get. Although to cover evertyhing I need I tend to need to quarry out vast amounts of stone unless I wanna just go cheap and small.

As far as the gold crafts go, it may be one of those things that attracts more  dorfs than you can take care of, though depending on the situation YMMV after all...
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: chevil on June 19, 2012, 06:37:27 am
I like the changes. Changes in ore drop rate means that less time is spent smelting. Only thing that i didn't like is that i ran out of stone and had to mine just to get more stone.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Rude on June 19, 2012, 12:16:01 pm
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

How does old world masonry work? How do you "sheer" off a bit of stone? Wouldn't chisels ruin anything you chiseled off? I can't imagine any sort of hand saw that could handle huge blocks of stone. It seems like even something as simple as splitting a boulder in half would be mostly hit and miss as far as precision goes.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: wuphonsreach on June 19, 2012, 12:40:05 pm
I think the simplest change that would work for me would be to add a "D" (dig) and "H" (channel) designation for digging which takes 2x as long, but produces 50% better drop rate from that tile.  Then I could go with the faster "d" and "h" methods early on, but when I start caring about how much stone I'm getting I could switch to a slower "D" and "H" method.

I tend to do a lot of construction in my large forts and that often means digging out large portions of the map just to get the raw materials.

I do like having less loose stone lying around from a cleanliness standpoint.  With the new wheelbarrows, it also makes stone hauling take about 1/5 the time it did before as there's both less rock to carry and the wheelbarrows make it fast.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Graknorke on June 19, 2012, 12:49:02 pm
You know constructions can use blocks right? As in, you get the same building materials you got before. Because blocks now produce four to the boulder.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Sutremaine on June 19, 2012, 03:24:29 pm
One thing I've noticed, if you embark with nothing but a little food and the supplies for a metal industry on the wagon, you can have two guys in steel equipment using just what you brought with you. Before you'd have had to have used bronze to get a reasonable amount of metal for the standard number of embark points.
It's good, isn't it? If you spend all your points on bronzemaking supplies, you can have a Legendary +5 Armoursmith before the first caravan leaves. And that's without melting down older pieces to reclaim metal for another dwarf to use in their training.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Felix False on June 19, 2012, 04:55:17 pm
The new system is really ticking me off. Who mines valuable ores with anything but legendary miners? Instead of mining a whole vein of lignite and getting every last stone out of it, now I'm only getting a fourth of what I normally mine. I NEED THAT LIGNITE!!
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Sutremaine on June 19, 2012, 05:26:00 pm
1 / 4 * 5 = 1.25

You'd have to be significantly unlucky to get less lignite now than you would have before.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Felix False on June 19, 2012, 06:10:27 pm
Where are you getting that statistic, exactly? Because I'm definitely getting less lignite now than before.

When I was playing 34.7, I was managing to get almost all of the valuable ores out of veins whenever I mined with my miners minus maybe one or two stones. I updated to 34.11 and now I'm only getting a fourth of that. My metal and clay manufacturing industries have ground to a freaking halt.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Loud Whispers on June 19, 2012, 06:12:18 pm
1 / 4 * 5 = 1.25

You'd have to be significantly unlucky to get less lignite now than you would have before.

The RNG always gives you snake eyes.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: weenog on June 19, 2012, 06:21:54 pm
Where are you getting that statistic, exactly? Because I'm definitely getting less lignite now than before.

When I was playing 34.7, I was managing to get almost all of the valuable ores out of veins whenever I mined with my miners minus maybe one or two stones. I updated to 34.11 and now I'm only getting a fourth of that. My metal and clay manufacturing industries have ground to a freaking halt.

Try turning the lignite into coke and see how many bars you get per unit of lignite.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Sutremaine on June 19, 2012, 06:25:35 pm
Actually, never mind, that figure is bollocks. You do get less fuel from a lignite vein now, because the new return rate on one lump of lignite is less than 4x the old rate. It should be 1.25 vs 2, not 1.25 vs 1.

Bituminous coal also returns less fuel now, 2.25 (average) units of fuel per vein tile and not 3 (always).

Try and get a civ with coal access, and cram the wagon I guess.

Edit: the above is for magma smelting. Regular smelters aren't hit as hard.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Makbeth on June 19, 2012, 09:32:46 pm
The thing that bothers me most about the new system is flux stone.  My limestone mines are larger than my fortress, just to support a steel industry.  It seems odd that equipping an army should require a small hill's worth of carbonate rock.  I'm thinking I should just change the reaction raws, because this is ridiculous.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: traxzilla on June 20, 2012, 04:20:26 am
Crafts train stonecrafting, not masonry. Metal crafts can easily susbstitude stone ones, especially if you just make a few high-quality gold ones (like it's good for anything else). The rest are totally valid though. Mechanisms and the like will need tweaking to make multiple from one boulder (I mean, it's meant to be about 10 metres cubed? You would have to be pretty inefficient to make ONE chair from that.).

Yeah, I didn't really read what I wrote before I hit submit, oops.

Stone fall traps are moderately more effective with boulders being larger and/or denser now.

I wasn't sure if it actually calculated that. Does that mean denser stone does more damage? Is it worth keeping a stockpile of say, chert near my traps?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Loud Whispers on June 20, 2012, 12:22:30 pm
Stone fall traps are moderately more effective with boulders being larger and/or denser now.
I wasn't sure if it actually calculated that. Does that mean denser stone does more damage? Is it worth keeping a stockpile of say, chert near my traps?
Eeyup. And web them if you can too. Stunned creatures always get hit on the head, and stone traps suddenly become extremely lethal one shot head smashers when their quarry is stuck.

Heh, quarry.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Xenos on June 20, 2012, 01:13:46 pm
Stone fall traps are moderately more effective with boulders being larger and/or denser now.
I wasn't sure if it actually calculated that. Does that mean denser stone does more damage? Is it worth keeping a stockpile of say, chert near my traps?
Eeyup. And web them if you can too. Stunned creatures always get hit on the head, and stone traps suddenly become extremely lethal one shot head smashers when their quarry is stuck.

Heh, quarry.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I did not know that webbing stonefall traps would increase their effectiveness, I am assuming this would let me kill those stupid kobold thieves that try to steal my socks...
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Headhanger on June 20, 2012, 01:13:57 pm
Heh, quarry.
Ten points.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: bitwiseshiftleft on July 04, 2012, 03:50:20 am
Also, sorry if this has been mentioned, but from what I can see in my game, platinum is a 100% drop.
Can anyone confirm this?

Confirm.  It is a 100% drop, and smelts 4:1.  Good stuff.

It seems that the top of my fortress has several alluvial layers, since my shallow metals are tetrahedrite, malachite and native platinum, all in veins.  No steel or coal for me, but the platinum makes up for it.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Jacob/Lee on July 04, 2012, 04:02:57 am
The RNG always gives you snake eyes.
I like this quote, I'll have to drop it somewhere in my sigpost. You're part of Bay12 history. Again.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: loose nut on July 04, 2012, 12:56:02 pm
Also, sorry if this has been mentioned, but from what I can see in my game, platinum is a 100% drop.

I have one fort with clusters of cassiterite, and it seems to be a 100% drop as well, so maybe the 100% drop applies to anything that can appear in clusters and not just veins? I don't know. Has anyone run across aluminum?
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: krenshala on July 04, 2012, 04:25:54 pm
I think its based on how its placed, not the actual type.  My small platinum deposits are 100% drop rate, while the native silver and cassiterite veins are both 25% drop for me in my current fort.

Of course, all of this is bonus, since I apparently embarked on a literal hill of magnetite,  bituminous coal and chalk.  Nothing quite like having steel weapons, helms and mail for your dwarves before the first winter.  I'm almost not sure what to do with all this, its been so long since I've had "easy" steel production. ;)
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: Splint on July 04, 2012, 04:29:37 pm
A disproportionally large steel armed army of course.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: loose nut on July 04, 2012, 05:24:40 pm
Also steel furniture. Flaunt your wealth with steel cabinets!
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: krenshala on July 05, 2012, 12:38:11 am
Also steel furniture. Flaunt your wealth with steel cabinets!
That's basically my plan. I've got 10 steel sarcophagi, 3 with dwarves in them. Once i get a few other things sorted i was planning more steel furniture.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: weenog on July 05, 2012, 12:58:04 am
Steel statues.  If they come out depicting anything other than your steel-clad military being badass, or your smith crafting prior steel statues of particular excellence, melt 'em down and make 'em again.
Title: Re: Mining Drop Rate Change: Good or Bad?
Post by: UristMcWanderer on July 11, 2012, 05:03:26 pm
Build a DeadIron-style vault out of your steel into the mountain. Make a lot of electrical-like systems in it, like levers and floodgates to refill the reservoir with water from the river, or the bridge airlock system in the entrance, etc. That kinda stuff.