Bay 12 Games Forum

Wow, haha, you're what's called an angry troll; I've faced many. Don't worry, your casual throwing of big words while totally ignoring the arguments that don't favor your rant wont faze me. I don't like going down to your level of words to try and stretch one's weak argument out and neither will I bother to dig up contradictory quotes just because you would. First, you said that a stone 'mace' would shatter and I stated that a stone billy club would not shatter (you said against metal) and I said a stone ranged weapon for when one simply can't access any other material, not that I wanted to replace that material completely.

Why must you copy a wooden spear's shape and design for a stone spear?  Hell, technically one just needs a sharp point of stone; it doesn't need to be 7 feet long. Remember, we are making these out of stone, not wood; it's going to be a bit heavier, eh? Your bed argument is friggin' awesome: you describe your bed as a wooden frame with metal bolts, which brings nothing to the argument. It's like me describing the stone in the spear, Mr crazy pants. Your magical bed is simply a frame above the ground (for various reasons) which could easily be made from stone as well as wood and a bed is the only way to designate rooms, which get pretty damn important. You should really work with stone 'cause its not as brittle as you say. A 1m long 6mm diameter shaft is stronger then wood, it's just a lot heavier and unless one is shooting another stone wall it's not going to shatter easily.

Technically, a mace is any significantly tapering heavy blunt object, which doesn't differ much from a hammer, except that with a mace, one rounds the end for more attack arcs than those available to a hammer. A stone axe is basically the same, except it has dedicated cutting edges; so with stone one would end up with a brittle-ended heavy-ass weapon.  However, don't expect it to shatter unless you did a crappy job, as your soft flesh isn't going to shatter it. The entire point of an all stone weapon is for the cases when one doesn't have leather or wood. To easily secure the different parts togetherone would have to spend the extra effort to go without those materials.

I don't think anyone would give up going outside to supply their fortress. I think they will use stone to hold themselves over until they can get the proper materials. (I have no idea what's going on here.  It's just too broken to fix) instead of not having them Besides, it, way more dwarfy to shun wood and stick with trusty ol' stone.

...I think.  Please at least make an attempt to make your posts readable.

Anyway, Wikipedia tells me that pine is over two and a half times stronger than marble (breaking strength, not compressive, which is rarely an issue in making weapons), and that marble is around five times heavier.  This means that a marble spear shaft would need to have over times the volume of a pine one to be as strong for a given length.  This means a functional marble spear would weigh over thirteen times as much as a pine spear.  A "lightweight" modern martial arts spear weighs about 1 1/2lb., so a stone spear would weigh in the region of 20lb. at the very least.  From this, we learn that an all stone spear would be so heavy as to be virtually impossible to wield.

I think presently a chest plate takes about 3 bars, and most furniture (including statues) takes 3 bars. If it's hollow this sort of makes sense, and depending on what size barrels and bins actually are it makes sense enough for them too.

You can either have:

Iron Chest Plate: Weight 1,178
Iron Gauntlets: Weight 196*2
Iron Helm: Weight 157
Iron Boots: Weight 157*2
Iron Greaves: Weight 471
Iron Shield: Weight 393

Total Weight 2,905

Or:

9 Iron Bars, Weight 1570*9 = 14,130

Or:

3 Iron Statues, Weight 2,355*3 =7,065

Judging by the efficiency of the processes, forges don't melt metal down and reshape it into the required shapes, they take a solid block of metal of the size they want and chisel away at it until is the right shape and dump all the excess metal into a matter annihilator.

(* I haven't actually watched to make sure this is so, I just know when I process certain ore my smelters start producing multiple metal types)

Smelters don't produce partial bars when smelting ore, but some ores have a percentage chance to produce secondary products.

Wait, that won't help.  In fact it'll do the opposite.  Then you could make 10 Iron Statues using the Iron needed to make 1 suit of full plate, a sword and a shield.  It's even more absurd.

We can build skyscrapers from the amount of ore available on a single map because our architects make steel framed buildings with glass shells, and use I-beams and other design tricks to reduce the amount of steel used.  Dwarven constructions use sold steel walls at least a foot thick (walking along the top of them is trivial, not that there's a Balance skill that could be used).  The techniques required to use steel like we do haven't been invented yet.  I agree that it still takes far too many squares of mining to get a useful amount of steel (and that for every unit of steel one gets, an entire cube of marble was consumed, does steelmaking really eat up as many tons of flux as it does ore?).

Now, higher levels of building designer meaning it takes fewer metal bars to build a given construction (via mass construction designations) would work.

Has been suggested before for wood, and it's a sound idea if a little difficult to properly implement.  As for the 1 Bed = 3 Mugs thing, I try and pretend that it's really 1 Bed = 3 Sets of Mugs, where 1 Set of Mugs is about as many mugs as you can make from 1/3rd of an average tree.  If 1 Plump Helmet really means A Plateful of Plump Helmets, and 1 Grass Seed means Enough Grass Seeds to cover a 1m by 1m area in grass, it's not much of a stretch.

What does need partial amounts is armour.  I'm not sure that making a suit of full plate, a sword and a shield for a dwarf uses up as much iron as is needed to build three solid iron statues each as large as the dwarf meant to be enclosed by the plate amour, and you can't use the 1 Sword = 1 Pile of Swords rationalisation with that.

Make Armour User and Shield User go all the way up to Legendary from sparring and one doesn't have to worry about relying on real battle to get your weapon skills up.  Reaching Legendary+5 in Armour User or Shield User would require actual combat experience, though.

Also: Record combat experience and training experience as two separate variables, and determine overall skill level from their sum, and cap training experience to some value.  This way any experience gained in actual combat before hitting the training cap isn't wasted.  Putting the cap for training with lethal weapons higher than the cap for nonlethal weapons might also be useful if training weapons ever get implemented.  I am also in favour of increasing the length of archery ranges required to reach certain levels of crossbow skill, as you can only get so good shooting at something ten yards away from you.  Obviously a dwarf should not bother training if he can't get any skill increases given his current weapon setup, unless there's someone who can and there are no other available training partners.  Oh, and while I'm at it, Marksdwarves who have run out of training ammunition or can't path to a useful archery range should spar to build up their Hammerdwarf, Armour User and Shield User skills.

Proposed caps:
Wrestler: 10,999 (1 point short of Great)
Weapon User, all except ranged weapons: nonlethal: 4499 (1 point short of Talented), lethal: 10,999
Armour User and Shield User: nonlethal: 10,999, lethal: 19,999 (1 point short of Legendary+1)
Marksdwarf: 3-5 tile range: 1,799, 6-11 tile range: 4,499, 12-23 tile range: 10,999, 24+ tile range: 17,999 (1 point short of Legendary)

I had the following setup: Four adjacent workshops with input stockpiles to their north.  The input stockpiles had some stone in them that I wanted dumped (mostly moved there by my architect when he cleared the sites of the workshops).  I make a dumping zone that stretched from one side of the workshop cluster to the other running east to west in the corridor outside.  Every time a dwarf went to dump an object, they seemed to heavily prefer the northwestern corner of the dumping zone, to the point where 72 units of stone were clustered in the westmost 12 tiles of the zone.  I observe a similar behavior with stockpiles.  I had some food in a temporary food stockpile that I wanted transferring to my main one.  The temporary stockpile was directly south of the main one, yet the dwarves carried the food all the way to the northmost edge of the stockpile, meaning they walked an additional 30 steps for every barrel carried, when the average round-trip distance of an efficient path was something like 12 steps.

While improving pathfinding efficiency is something that would require a lot of coding to implement in most situations, this one has dwarves walking over the stockpiles or dumping zones they're filling from in order to give preference to the northwestern corner of the stockpile.  How hard can it be to have dwarves doing Dump Item or Store Item in Stockpile orders check to see if they're already standing in the destination Stockpile or Dumping Zone, and if they are, have them put what they're carrying down?  It just seems silly that all my workshops with stockpiles to their south are considerably more walk-efficient than the ones with stockpiles to their north just because the haulers in the north workshop insist on piling goods on the far wall of the stockpile, while the ones in the south insist on piling it against the rear wall.