Bay 12 Games Forum

The latest Bay12 status report stated that both simple suggestions and adventure mode improvements were subjects to be worked on in the relatively near future and so I thought that now would be a good time to gather in one place a list of simple, logical, and easy-to-implement improvements to adventure mode that are widely agreed upon as being good improvements. I have thought up several myself but if anyone else has any they can think of feel free to share it so we have a good list going.

To clarify a bit further what I'm talking about is small peripheral or minor changes that would be easy to put into the game and wouldn't change it too much but would make the experience more rewarding and enjoyable or less frustrating. Adding in significant new things that add a lot of new dimensions to the game wouldn't be the thing to suggest here.


Some of the ones that I've thought of or remembered (a few of which I think other people have suggested before):

1. Allow the player to consume food and water while fast traveling - I think that this is a logical improvement to the fast travel system, if its cold enough to freeze the water then I think its still reasonable to force the player to stop and create a fire to melt the ice but if it is not cold enough to freeze the water and there are no dangerous animal or enemies nearby I don't see why the player should have to stop just to eat and drink. We don't have any means of insta-travel through boats or caravans or whatever and so on large worlds it can take a long time to go from one end to the other in search of a titan or something and it can get kind of irritating to have to stop every 2 or 3 minutes to eat and drink. We can already sleep and wait in the fast travel screen.

2. Allow the player to fast travel over rivers if they are frozen - I don't know how complicated this would be to implement but it only seems reasonable. Forcing players to exit fast travel to cross rivers in general is another subject that people seem to have a roughly even split of opinion on but if the player is just going to safely walk over the ice anyway then until we get to the point where there is a risk of falling through the ice I don't see why the player should have to stop to do that.

3. Allow the viewing of the different modes of the map while in any locations and while not in fast travel - The way the system currently works now is that when you are fast traveling within a certain distance of some objects it changes the fast travel map to a different view which can sometimes be frustrating. It would be nice to be able to toggle with a button what kind of map style you would like to view without it being conditioned on your closeness to various objects. There are also sometimes things that are helpful to see on your local map that you can't see unless you enter fast-travel, if you could see it without entering fast-travel that would be helpful, even if that means you can't see where various other travelers and creatures are on the local map.

4. Create some sort of way for adventurers to make visual markings on the floor or walls of indoor structures to help in navigation - in large and convoluted dungeons it would be helpful to at least be able to scrawl with charcoal on the floor which direction the exit is every so often.

5. Have sleeping bandits/goblins/kobolds immediately wake up, yell and fight back upon being wrestled with or struck with a weapon when they are sleeping - pretty self-explanatory, adding in what level of noise would wake them up could be a more complicated goal for the future but just having them wake up when they themselves are individually attacked seems to be an easy and simple improvement.

Yes, I agree. I wouldn't want a dwarf to destroy some crucial lever or door without me knowing and then have the surprise of it not working when it's needed.

I'm a little confused, usually the miners will ignore damp stone when they come to it and a message will pop up that pauses the game and makes you unpause it. As far as I'm aware they will only dig into it after you have had this happen and you designate them to mine it again.

Either way, It is not bad idea to just have an option in the mining tab to direct all dwarves to ignore damp tiles even if you previously directed them to mine it and the job was cancelled.

This is a good idea to make climbing more realistic.

Also maybe temperature could play a role such as climbing bare-handed in very cold weather would be difficult due to loss-of-feeling in the hands but that this could be negated by wearing leather gloves.

I think that adding more dreams and having some dreams be hidden are both good ideas and are not mutually exclusive in that they could both be implemented.

There are a number of realistic reasons why dreams could be hidden from the player such as the dream is an unconscious yearning for something, the values of the dwarf conflict with the dream so they suppress it or maybe because for whatever reason the dwarf believes it would be a bad idea to tell people about it.

The list of dreams per dwarf that are visible to the player could just be the dreams that the dwarf is  both consciously aware of and comfortable telling people about.

With regards to the post about the pharaoh game and the ways there could be a similar system implemented in dwarf fortress I think those are some good ideas but if they were to be present in the game they should be toned-down and pretty rare.

Right now the atmosphere in the game is that while there are fantasy-based creatures in abundance, true magic is rare. I don't know exactly how prevalent Toady wants magic to be but I think I recall him posting about he wants to avoid the whole "industrial magic" feel where magic is everyday commonplace and people don't think much of it.

For the temple in a players fort to cause the gods to enact some sort of miracle should be a rare and momentous event that is recorded in history and maybe happens once or twice in a forts existence, if that. That way it would keep divine acts significant instead of feeling cheap and arcadey. It should be an exciting suprise for the player when it happens instead of the player feeling like "okay I've done this and that so this god did so-and-so and now I have to do this in order to get this god to do that".

Quote from: Ngosp Umbabok on January 29, 2015, 01:25:35 pm

One simple improvement that could probably be implemented easily would be to make the option to order a squad of dwarves to "engage enemy with ranged weapons".

This way if you have a group of of dwarves out in the open and 70-80% of them were armed with crossbows then instead of them all attacking and the melee dwarves getting ganged up on then what they would do is the dwarves with crossbows would shoot at the enemy while the melee dwarves would stay back and guard the marksdwarves and only attack enemies that came with 8-10 tiles of the squad.

This would make things alot easier for the player.

So basically ordering dwarves to hold position and not move?

Something that I have noticed is that if a squad of dwarves is ordered to hold a position in the open and goblins are within range then they won't attack unless the goblins get relatively close. In order for the squad to fire at them from a longer distance you have to order them to attack. I would like to do that without the melee-weapon squad members leaving the other marksdwarves.

This is a good suggestion although it has already been suggested before. Before posting a suggestion it is advisable to use the search bar in the top right to search for threads relating to tournaments. Then you can read what has already been suggested in regards to tournaments and add you're own input.

This helps everyone's thoughts on a certain subject be consolidated to one area.