Bay 12 Games Forum

idk, I didn't look at your code.  You didn't give me an impression either way.

One of the major advantages of this change is that dogs are no longer the only war animal. I think with this mod in, a dog is right about where it should be--they can take out kobolds, scare off baby snatchers, and can be used as an alarm system. If you want something that can take out big game or be a big help in wartime, capture and train some elephants. Once you fix teeth, elephant tusks are pretty brutal.

Yes this has been my experience as well.  What's more, training an animal for war in 40d doubles its strength. If that's still the case, it should make even war dogs pretty effective.  I was playing an orc fortress (homebrew orcs), and I got sieged by elves.  They brought _50_ war grizzly bear mounts with spear/swordsmen riders backed up by battalions of bow-elves.  Ripped me to shreds.

You should also make elephants to actually USE the tusks. In vanilla they never do it unless they lose all 4 legs which means never.

That's easy enough to do, Deon.  Why don't you do it in genesis?  Just flip the ATTACK_PRIORITY like so:

[ATTACK:GORE:BODYPART:BY_CATEGORY:TUSK]
[ATTACK_SKILL:BITE]
[ATTACK_VERB:gore:gores]
[ATTACK_CONTACT_PERC:100]
[ATTACK_PRIORITY:MAIN]
[ATTACK_FLAG_WITH]
[ATTACK:KICK:BODYPART:BY_CATEGORY:FOOT_FRONT]
[ATTACK_SKILL:STANCE_STRIKE]
[ATTACK_VERB:kick:kicks]
[ATTACK_CONTACT_PERC:100]
[ATTACK_PRIORITY:SECOND]
[ATTACK_FLAG_WITH]


Id like to point out that this is in no way a "fix" as a minor patchup job. The values are probably no way as accurate as Toady would like (seeing how anal he is) and it dosent resolve the issue of attacks being deflected or bouncing off way too often.

in my original post:

Copying the bone values onto the other materials will make them behave more like they should, but its not accurate to the level of detail present in the rest of the raw.

So, you can make bite attacks 'work' by doing the copy, but until toady puts his numbers in, or someone else finds or makes up really good ones, it's not going to be terribly accurate.

As to deflection, I don't really see what you're talking about.  In the testing I've done, things seem to work just fine.  If you have small, weak, creatures doing the biting, naturally many of the attacks will get deflected by clothes.  They should.  The creatures are small and weak, clothes _should_ protect you from a great deal of their attacks.  On the other hand, if you use grizzly bears, you won't see many, if any, deflections.

The last paragraph in their description.

One minor quibble I'd ask of Deon is to start each caste with the name so it's quicker to identify.

Some start with the name, others are at the end of the sentence or in the second one. Glancing everywhere to check if they're moss, obsidian, etc.

Deon you could use CASTE_PROFESSION_NAME to replace all the profession names in all the castes with 'suchandsuchdwart craftsman', 'suchandsuchdwarf mlller' etc.  It's a pain in ass for you, and a billion extra lines of code overall, but I'm sure people would appreciate being able to tell at a glance what kind of dwarf someone is.

Sausage making!
prepared intestines + meat + seed(spice)= sausagex2

I've played about 6 forts into the 5th year or farther(vanilla with my own little tweaks).  In that time, ONCE the humans brought a wagon.  I was so excited!  The following year, they did not bring a wagon.  I died a little, inside. 

The arsenal dwarf works.... but there's issues.  I've gotten used to the quirks, so I know what to do and what not to to make the system "work." 

1) Never ever ever ever assign dwarves a "class" of weapons.  Always use the 'assign specific weapon' option.  This is a giant pain in the ass, but it prevents dwarves from carrying around 8 different weapons.  Classes of armor is fine, just not weapons.

2) Unless you are using the 'replace clothing' option, NEVER assign clothing as part of a uniform.  This sometimes causes dwarves to drive themselves insane trying to put on mutiple pieces of mutually exclusive clothing. 

3) If you do use the replace clothing option, its ok to put clothing in the uniform.  But when dwarves go off duty, they will sometimes drop all their clothes on the ground in a pile and strut around naked for no apparent reason.  This can be kind of annnoying, as it creates tons of extra hauling jobs. 

4) If you need your military in action RIGHT NOW, make sure you halt all production of weapons and armor.  There's a bug where every time a piece of armor is created that's eligble for the uniform, 90% of the militia will run over to a stockpile, drop a piece of armor and pick it up again.  This also happens with weapons if you don't use 'assign specific weapon.'

5) If you need your military in action RIGHT NOW, try to occupy your arsenal dwarf in some way so he doesn't give equipment upgrades in the middle of a fight.  This can be...FUN.

6) always use the 'Exact Match' equipment option.  This prevents militia from being assign items that do not belong to you, and helps reduce the amount of mid fight scrabbling for equipment that happens further.

Unrelated to arsenal dwarf:
6) Never ever ever put your military in the "Training" alert level.  It doesn't work right, and the dwarves get "stuck" and won't do anything.  To train your dwarves, remove all their jobs, leave them "inactive" and assign them a training barracks.  When they have nothing better to do, they'll go do Individual Combat Training in the barracks.  Some dwarves are apparently lazy, and won't ever train in this way, but for 95% of them, this'll work fine. 

All that being said, it can take the arsenal dwarf quite a while to hand out all the assignments.  When your military starts getting really large, it becomes almost a full time job for him.  I think in a tiny fort with 30 or less dwarfs, its probably faster to let the dwarves get their own stuff. 

Oooooh, shiny!

Edibility is defined in the material_templates.  use [EDIBLE_RAW] to make them eat the bread as bread, and add [EDIBLE_COOKED] if you want them to cook it into roasts. 

I don't think anyone's figured out how to take ingredients out of bags/barrels yet, or if its possible.  Surely it will become possible in the near future tho.