Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm trying to muddy some ground to farm, but I never get more than about 1 dwarf at a time carrying a bucket (there are 6 buckets).  Because there is some distance between the hole and the brook, evaporation is preventing the water from spreading more than about a 3x3 square, at the rate it is coming in.  But even when I have 5 dwarves idle, they just...  idle, rather than help.

Is there some labor I need to enable to get them to carry buckets of water?

Now that Dwarf Therapist conveniently displays the fact that (for example) my top miner has 16 strength, 11 levels above "Ultra-Mighty", I have to wonder...  does that mean anything?

Strength, in fact, I don't care about much.  I really wonder about agility and toughness.  The wiki does not list any effects for attributes past level 5, and especially for agility, it seems unlikely that the effectiveness would keep increasing along the pattern for levels 0-5.  So once you get a dwarf that is superdwarvenly tough and perfectly agile, is there any benefit in training him further before drafting him?

I have a suggestion on the implementation of traps.  It addresses similar concerns, and in similar manners, to this thread:

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=40924.0

...but it's a bit different, so I'm starting a new one.


First off, there's energy.  There's nothing wrong with an artifact-trap pulsing with dark power, still eagerly dismembering goblins millennia after the last dwarf has starved to death, trapped behind a freshly-constructed floodgate.  But a normal weapon trap should probably rely on normal energy sources, such as winding, rather than "hot, sticky lifeblood" or "pathetic, futile thrashing".  Since traps are extremely cheap anyway (compared to the cost of the trained, equipped dwarven soldiers they replace), why not throw in another component?

Component:
Tension Coil
Made at:
Mechanic's Workshop
Materials:
1 Mechanism
1 Rope (or leather rope, or steel spring)

Properties:
"Tension" and "Max Tension", both positive integers, indicating stored energy.
Max Tension could be determined by, for example, 5 + (rope quality) + (mechanism quality) + (tension coil quality).  Tension coils would thus store 5 to 20 units of energy.

Weapon traps would require at least one tension coil, but perhaps could be made with more (say, one or two, but not unlimited).  Every use of a weapon reduces the stored energy by 1 point.  Thus, a trap with 15 units of tension and 4 weapons would work fully 3 times, then on the 4th activation only fire 3 weapons, and subsequently stop working entirely until a dwarf cranked it back up to full tension.

Tension coils could, theoretically, also be used in other situations.  For example, it would be fun to have a mounted, powered, repeating arbalest - sort of a mini-ballista that takes crossbow bolt stacks and fires more rapidly or powerfully than a crossbow, and can be manned by any civilian with "Siege Operator".  Size-wise, it could be 1x2 like a screw pump, with perhaps a 90-degree firing arc.

With tension coils, weapon traps would be more expensive and require upkeep (winding), but they'd still be overpowered.  I like Devin's suggestion of trap probability.  My thoughts on the formula were something like:

Trap Trigger Probability = 10% + (4% * Mechanism Quality) + (1% * size), or 12% to 50%; for a goblin and a finely-crafted mechanism, it would be 24%.  For a cage or stone fall trap this would be a single chance; for weapon traps, it could be one independent chance per weapon.  If weapon traps required one mechanism per weapon instead of just one per trap, then each weapon could also have a different percent chance, but that would make it more tedious to set up the traps.

This formula does not take into account dodging the trap effect, which could be based on agility, or however dodging is currently handled in combat, and further reduce the chance of taking damage from a trap.

Lastly, stone fall traps should perhaps do damage based on the mass of the stone that falls.  Perhaps they already do, I don't know...  but if not, I will personally testify that it hurts a lot less to be hit by a chunk of pumice than by granite (nobody has ever thrown gold nuggets at me, unfortunately).  Pumice traps would be loads of fun.  And so would floating, freestanding pumice floor tiles in the middle of ponds, for hopping across, though that's perhaps beyond the scope of this topic.