Bay 12 Games Forum

So, my brother just had a small zombie siege and experienced the age-old Boatmurdered problem of having an object stopping a defensive door from closing. It's relatively easy to clear debris from doors these days with a garbage dump and all, but it still got me thinking about forbidding doors in general. My thought was that if we made forbidding a door an actual job, as in a dwarf would need to approach the door and lock it manually, it would be simple to have the dwarf doing this move whatever is blocking the door as part of the job. It would also make the whole process somewhat more believable than having the door simply lock itself at the whim of an invisible overseer.

Now, I'm sure this would make some things that require many forbidden doors, maybe some megaprojects of some sorts, rather more difficult, so perhaps one could even make "forbidding" and "locking" different functions. Forbidding would tell dwarves that they shouldn't go through the door, but leave it accessible by hostile entities who don't care about your stupid rules. Locking would prevent the door from being opened by dwarves, hostiles, levers, anything.

If locking were to be a separate function, then that brings up a new question: do all doors have locks? As in, will doors need to have "lock" mechanisms applied to them by mechanics in order for them to be lockable? and would all dwarves have keys, or simply be able to lock them with a slide-bar or latch of some sort? If locks are separate, then perhaps there could be locksmiths as an additional mechanic labor, and if not all dwarves have keys, then perhaps there could also be a new "key-keeper" noble.

Just some little musings on the subject of forbidding doors. Thanks for whatever attention you give them.

This idea occurred to me when I was trying out some modded swords in the object testing arena. I noticed that if you pit two fully steel-clad dwarves with equal skills and equipment against each other, they will simply do "the fightey dance" for a while until one of them gains enough skill to be able to cut the other. Then, much later, the one who was cut will bleed to death. So, I thought the answer to this peculiar problem (if it even is a problem) might be halfswording (where a fighter grabs the blade of their sword with their second hand in order to gain more control, and stab into gaps in armour). This, of course, would make the shield and sword/axe/hammer/etc. less powerful and put more emphasis on two-handed swords and shorter polearms, such as the poleaxe. This would also mean that weapons would have to be able to do a sort of wrestling to allow for trapping your opponent's blade in your quillions and disarming them. Another thing that might counter this is having hammers do more actual damage to armour, or having the ability to remove a stunned opponent's helmet and stab them with a dagger. This isn't really much of a problem at the moment, though, seeing that you rarely get equally-skilled or even fully-armoured soldiers. Also, it would be hard to apply this to dwarves seeing that they have no two-handed weapons, and are usually based on the Norse who primarily used shields and a single-handed weapon.

The other thing I noticed is that, even when your opponent is holding their shield in their left hand, you can still attack, and cut their left hand, despite the fact that it would be impossible in a real fight. What I think would be interesting is if where the shield is would change the "easy strike/tricky strike/impossible strike" thingey. This could also lend itself to having various "guards" implemented that would change the hypothetical location of the shield and/or weapon eg. "high guard" and "low guard", or for two-handed swords, "ox-guard" and "plough-guard" etc.

Also, it will be nice when Toady One implements attacks hitting two body parts in one stroke. That would hopefully lessen the amount of "The swordsdwarf attack the goblin axeman in the first toe on his left foot!"

These are just some things that I think might make an already-brilliant combat-system better. Your thoughts would be appreciated.