Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh, hello. Looks like this thread was necroed recently (before it was promptly beaten to a pulp again by mitten clad little fists, I presume).

Catapults as a training tool is an interesting idea; another one could be automated minecart shotguns launching trash across the training room. Although I'd believe anyone resorting to this would have to accept a few casualties.

After Copperfell became unplayable I have been building small boarding schools into my later forts with moderate success. One trouble with this old method seems to be playing dwarves' tendency to remain in one place, oblivious to the world around them. Earlier when the children just milled around aimlessly they were constantly hit by training spears throughout their childhood but now they'll just dodge randomly until they end up on a tile where there are no spears and stay there. That tends to slow training speed significantly compared to earlier versions.

I have tried to tempt the children by placing the only source of toys  right in the middle of the room; that helped somewhat, especially when they sometimes dropped their toys while dodging into the swimming pool. Placing some goblets into same place also managed to get children off their corpulent backends. But still, basic training isn't as... entertaining as it used to be.

I've encountered this problem as well. It can be minimized by reducing the number of tiles without training spears--the students don't need beds, tables, or chairs. Training their skills keeps them happy enough that they maintain the 'focused' buff the whole time they're in school, in my experience. You only need 1 quantum food/clothes stockpile that has no spears.

Has anyone else had problems with dwarves forcing open locked and even lever-operated doors to get into the school? I've had to start using floodgates in place of doors.

Some caveats:
-"individual choice weapon" means "most expensive weapon of any type," not "best quality weapon I'm trained in." So a proficient speardwarf might grab a sword or axe.
-For some reason, "metal" seems to include "Bone"
-You can wear multiple layers of things.
Here's what I usually have them wear for melee dwarves:
-Helmet
-Wood/leather shield (all shields are equal, so I go for a light one)
-3x Mail Shirts
-1x Breastplate
-2x Trousers
-Greaves
-Socks
-High Boots
-Gauntlets
-3x Cloaks
-3x Hoods
-Spears/Axes/Swords/Maces/etc. I make sure to specify which type so they use the kind they have skills in.

The clothes (trousers, socks, cloaks, hoods) are optional. They don't add a lot, honestly. However, if you have lots of cloth, you can give them up to 10 or so cloaks and hoods each. My ranged dwarves usually just make do with a shield and a crossbow.

EDIT: for armour materials, Adamantine is best, followed by steel, followed by iron and bronze (which are pretty much equivalent; iron is slightly lighter), followed by copper, followed by anything else (bone/leather), which is useless.

So apparently in adventurer mode, you can't get your stats higher than double their starting values. Is there any way to relax this limit with, say, DFhack or the like? I like starting as a peasant but hate that it caps my maximum abilities. I want to climb high before drowning in a pond.

The Dark Spire I investigated had an underworld portal at the bottom. This portal was essentially just a purple down stair above a purple up stair called "underworld portal."

Dark Spires show up as purple squares in goblin cities, and are giant slade towers that go deep underground. All the way deep.

>makes the game harder

how so OP?

You could engrave the floors of bedrooms and such in veins of minerals for crazily-valuable rooms. The value modifier of the engraving is multiplied by the value of the material

Quote from: Th4DwArfY1 on July 14, 2014, 03:45:50 pm

Imagine if all your starting seven were gay, and after that there was a high percentage of gays. It would have too low a child yield, especially in forts that need children. I don't like it as a feature at all, but I could live with/mod it out.

I guess that could be an issue if you were dealing with a fort that 1. included an entirely gay starting seven, 2. had an unusually high number of gay dwarves, and 3. lived long enough for children to have ANY value whatsoever.

Honestly, you'd be more likely to start out in the middle of a volcano, or on a frozen lake that melted instantly. And remember-- Losing is Fun! Wouldn't that weird, statistical outlier that was your one 100% gay fortress be one of your most memorable ones ever?

I think same-sex relationships and marriage would be a great addition to the game. With dwarves, we're essentially building our own culture from scratch here. They're clearly not supposed to be based off of any real-world historical culture (what historical culture executed people with hammers, drank only alcohol, and lived underground?), and they're not really based off of any fictional one, either (what fictional dwarf civilization did all of the above, built pumps for magma, had perfect gender equality, etc. etc.?). Notions of gender roles and sexual orientation and even little things (my favourite--ancient Romans viewed pants as feminine) varied so much throughout history and between cultures that there's no real reason that, even in a pre-industrial society, a different species in a different world couldn't be more progressive than ours.
Arguing that humans in history in such and such location acted in one way or another is pretty irrelevant here. What matters is: what do we want our dwarven society to look like? We have an opportunity to make a society and culture from whole cloth, and I think we should take advantage of that fact. Dwarven males and females are equally well respected in all respects in DF, which is "unrealistic" if you only look at humans in medieval europe, so I don't really see any reason that they shouldn't treat dwarves of different orientation equally in all respects, which is also "unrealistic" if you, again, only look at humans in medieval europe. The world of Armok isn't the West, it isn't medieval (It's not set after a continent-wide empire collapsed. The world starts the way it is in dwarf fortress), and, obviously, it's not even humans we're talking about here.