Bay 12 Games Forum

Wait...she REPLACE the steel bar with the aluminum bar?   I think the dwarves are getting smarter.  Well, time to set my PCs on fire.

I am afraid the situation is actually much worse. Since it was an armorsmithing mood I was pretty interested in her work so I watched her gather the materials and I checked the content of her workshop while she was working. I saw her take the aluminum bar after she had already gotten the steel bar first. I thought it was simply to add some decoration to her steel artifact and I was pretty happy with it since aluminum is as valuable as you'll get, short of you-know-what.

The point is; I'm confident she grabbed only one bar of aluminum and my bookkeeper agrees with me. I had just bought two bars from the dwarven caravan a few month prior, I saw two bars in my stock when I forbidden them, they were the only two bars of aluminum I had and the second is still in my stockpile.

But I wasn't wrong about her intentions, there is an aluminum decoration on that aluminum breastplate...



If I'm not mistaken she should have needed two bars to make both the breastplate and the decoration, yet she only used one. And she didn't use the steel bar either, it's still in the forge she used to make the artifact.
She did replace a steel bar with an aluminum bar, but not with one of mine. She willed an aluminum bar into existence, she materialised 25k dwarfbucks worth of metalsmithing out of thin air.

I have to admit the last fortress I played before this one was back when DF2014 was just called "the current one" and ravens were murder, so I'm a bit out of the loop when it comes to dwarfy behaviours. Is that something that is known to happen ?

I did try several variant of the idea. I'm not sure that talking about "feudalism" is really pertinent tho, it's more about trying to simulate whatever the society of the fortress could looks like.

My take on it was that my dwarves being creatures of law and order would want to make everything remotely important to the fortress life into a form of institution. So for example if my fortress survive mostly on hunting at the start of the game I will think of my 2 or 3 crossbowmen as a "hunter guild", over time I will build them a guild house where they will be housed along with their families complete with their own hall with trophies on dispay. As the rest of the fortress burries itself underground the guild with then grow to include most surface workers, fishers, woodcutters, etc, along with a master bowyer and the beastmasters and in time of war the guild will provide the fortress with an elite squad of crossbow and war beasts. There will also be an internal hierachy inside the guild with the "core profession", in that case hunters, being the most prestigious and the most senior member of said profession being given a title of guildmaster. The point being that I don't start with a hierarchy that I try to enforce on my dwarves, I just try to formalize what they are already doing.


In an other fort, beastmasters could be their own separate guild rather than a secondary job in another guild, when a profession is secondary I tend to make a point of having redundancies just to mark the fact that each guild is its own entity. So for example I woud have one bowyer for the hunters and another one working for the military and if I decide to make a beastmaster guild after the hunters have got their own beastmasters obviously they wont want to get rid of them and obviously the beastmasters guild will be pissed about another guild infringing on their monopoly so I will decide on weird compromise where the hunter guild can train grizzly bears for both war and hunting because they've always been doing that but they can only train polar bears for huntings and war polar bears have to be trained by the beastmaster guild while tigers must be trained by the beastmasters guild no matter what, something like that. That way all the tedium of setting burrow and ownership becomes dealing with the weird and quirky traditions of my fortress in my mind, which makes it much funnier.

I did something similar to what Sanctume explained in one of my fort (exept for ordering the squads, that's a pretty neat idea)

I had every male dwarf required to serve in the militia (I included females to the consription later but only in ranged unit, because when you send all your population to battle, managing mothers and their babies become a real issue) plus the nobles and a dozen hand chosen dwarven knights and rangers serving permanently as royal guards and town guards.

The standard equipement for the militia was iron chainmail, iron helm and leather everywhere else with a steel spear and a wooden shield for the melee units and whatever melee weapon was availlable and a crossbow for the ranged ones. I was a bit worried with that set up at first but didn't had the ressources to give them better gears at that time. Turned out to not be so bad, the metal armor protecting all the vital parts avoided a lot of casualties and the few deaths, injuries and lost limbs made the fights overall funnier.
The spear was mostly for roleplaying reasons since it was the weapon used by every single civilian levy in melee accross the ages, I guess maces or battleaxes would be better. They definitively need a shield however, since they rarely are good enough dodger and will have a relatively poor armour it's hard to keep them alive without.

The training was also in winter for most of them, but only for two month with an old crippled grumpy legendary veteran to oversee their training and initiate sparing.

Quote from: Zac on March 20, 2016, 02:20:58 pm

the only way i've found to have a nurse/jailer that don't let people die of thirst, burrowing them in the hospital/jail with their quarters, food, a well and nothing to do in their life but give water to the prisonners.

While it is important that these people have a pretty clear schedule...if you are actually forced to burrow them to get them to do their job then you probably picked the wrong dwarf (Some jobs like this require a specific set of traits/values or they dont happen efficiently.  Especially the two you mentioned who need to dish out water, its a specific personality you need)

I know, I know. It's just that I usually pick the least useful dwarf in the fortress for that task, burrow him and be done with it forever. I'm not going to review the entire fort just to find the best guy for a menial job that need to be done 2 or 3 time every years. When I set up permanent hospital and jail in my fort I'm usually well above 50 dwarves, it's not like one less hauler is going to make a difference at that point.

The only reason I give any kind of importance to it and set up the job in the first place is because dwarves tend to die a really stupid death without a dedicated nurse/jailer in the fort, but I'm not going as far as to make sure the guy enjoys it. He can be bored to death and hate his life for all I care as long as the prisoners and patients are fed and watered, a few masterwork furniture avoid him becoming completely bonkers and if he snaps anyway it's not like the fort is lacking in useless drunkards sitting around in the tavern all day to replace him.

Hia all, im quite sure we have left the production line dull, and untouched, prefering things like D̠̥̞̺̻̘̯w̕a̵̲͇͉̝̗̻͙rv̱͟ͅe̗n̠ C̦̫͇̞̟̜h͎̯̥̙̘̤͜i͖̫̙̘̩̻͈l̪͎͓ḍ̤̳̦͙̱͇ ͜D͏̗͈̖̮̘a̤͇y̯̪͖͖͘c̪͕̠a̷̭r͏̤e̯͎̼͎̺̺͠ ̙͔̝̘̜̟͢ͅa̬̰̤̼̤͠ͅn̲̺͖̯̭̻͔d͕ ̦̯̭͔̭̞E̬͇l̺v͖͇̜̭͖̳͔͟ȩ̙͚̲͚̫̺̣n̳̥̻̤̰̪ ͇͖͍̲̪̻T̫̙͍͠o͟r̡̭̤̻̥͇ṭ̡͓̻̦ͅų͚͎̬̪̟͓͖r҉̠͚ḙ ̞̤̼Ho̲̠͖u̜̺̲̼ͅṣ̞̦͇̠̹e͓s̳̫͈̻̻͙̼ and other !!FUN!! stuff, but we need faster production  lines, we need to push dwarves To The Limit^TM so lets get started...
I think we could make dwarves a lot more efficent with a little zone management, what do you gys think, also, pump ideas out

Yeah, burrowing important dwarves near their workshops seem to me like a good idea. As an example, it's the only way i've found to have a nurse/jailer that don't let people die of thirst, burrowing them in the hospital/jail with their quarters, food, a well and nothing to do in their life but give water to the prisonners.

My idea of an efficient production line would be to have the few important dwarves burrowed near their worshops with everything they need and have the rest of the fortress dedicated to make those few chosen ones constantly ectsatic and their stockpiles forever full.

Quote from: Zac on July 29, 2015, 04:15:17 pm

Quote from: NJW2000 on July 29, 2015, 04:01:35 pm

Wow, this keeps getting less and less sane. I go away for a week, and look what happens.

Did I miss the point where it was sane ? AFAIK, the story started with an army of undead ravens invading hell on behalf of Silentthunder.

What, are you saying that's not something you see every Saturday night?

I don't have the cable. : (

I guess they became some kind of bandits group.

You fooled them into a suicide mission by promising them wealth, glory and a new beginning, so yeah, the pariahs probably hate you, your civ and everything you stand for, even in death. Have fun