Bay 12 Games Forum

How do I turn off migrants. 

Just set [POPULATION_CAP:5] in the init.txt file. You can even change it dynamically during the game if you want (Some say it's an exploit, some say it's migration policy)

To use squad alerts:

• create a new alert.
• on the schedule screen give orders for THIS alert (i think "/*" moves through alerts)
• when you want the squad to enter the alert, go to alerts screen, choose the alert (so that it is highlighted) and press Shift+Enter

My 2 cents (if nobody wrote it before):
I think a museum/exhibition room is not an addition to statue garden, but a super-set of it. This way you can build a HUGE museum with sections for artifacts, for minerals, for statues, for pictures (maybe), taxidermy, and many more.

I really like the idea, now I usually build small artifact stockpiles with a statue garden between them.

I'd still rather just have your dwarves keep on living in your fortress.  Just because YOU abandoned the fortress doesn't mean the dwarves have to.  Building your fort up to Mountainhome, making it fully self-sustaining, and then leaving with 7 dwarves to set up a new fort, or just plain take up an adventurer who could come and visit that rarest of rares - a fully functioning self-sustained society - would be cooler.

Sounds great. I'd like to build a fort, then leave it (no dwarf really leaves, the player just stops controlling the fort), and then visit it in adventure mode or trade with it in fortress mode (after building a new fort with new 7 dwarfs).
The problem is that it would require determining whether the colony can survive. If I embark, build nothing and just leave, what will I see in adventure mode? Dwarf built their own fort? They just wander around the wagon? They are all dead/disappeared?
Of course some simple decision can be implemented rather easily, but it can cause many unexpected results and annoyance.

I think if you leave the fort in an organized manner (and not flee), than you must build wagons and load them with all the goods that you want to take with you. So you must decide what you take before you leave and not when you embark. Each wagon should have limited capacity, and it must be built and supplied with animals (horses, mules etc).

It would also be interesting if some dwarfs, goods or entire wagons would disappear during the journey (monsters, robbers, cliffs, swamps... )

It is also annoying when you have a chasm/bottomless pit with bats dying in webs, and all the dwarfs rush to meet swallow-men that live there. Of course it can be solved with a forbidden door, but I do want my weavers to collect silk there. Perhaps there could be some way to design areas as clean/dirty so that refuse would be collected/ignored in those specific areas?

It looks like you could draft a dwarf and then allow or forbid military labors:
- fighting
- sparring/training
- justice
- lever pulling
- siege operating
- cleaning traps (?)
- rescuing
- /more/

Sounds good

Quote from: snus-mumrik on February 20, 2010, 02:48:56 pm

Grinding seems to have a simple solution: give each task a difficulty level (maybe equal to chance of success), and give experience based an difficulty and current skill. If a novice thrower throws a stone to an empty place several steps away, he will have some experience; but if a legendary thrower does the same he will get none.

That does make grinding harder, but that can just be solved by switching to repeating a task of the higher difficulty.  For example, once you're getting 0 experience for throwing a rock at a tree 5 feet away, move to 20 feet away to get experience again.

One problem with it is that it would also make legitimate skill gain harder to do as well.  Instead of needing to simply find a place to use the skill, you'd also need to make sure that it was a level-appropriate challenge.

Hmm. I'm looking at the problem from a slightly different angle. I wasn't looking for making the game more interesting, but instead more realistic. So in RL you can train by repeating something over and over, but it must be at appropriate difficulty level. Look at the sport for example: professional sportsmen train many hours a day every day, and there is no other way to win.

As for the example with stone throwing - throwing to a good distance will only give you some low level of skill. Hitting a standing target is a little harder, a moving target is harder, a moving-and-dodging target is much harder. So a master thrower will have to pierce an eye of a quick running enemy in a helm and with a shield. And a legendary thrower will have to kill someone with a ricochet from someone else 

Using skill when needed (for a quest) doesn't always mean it was educational. If a king asks a legendary hammerer to punish a peasant it doesn't mean that the hammerer will learn to fight better.

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As for DOR cap, I like the idea of having to do several different activities to advance. I once thought about a more simple idea of having 'theory' and 'practice' level in each skill, first is gained by talking and reading (maybe teaching/writing on higher levels) and the second by using the skill; when there is a gap the progress of the higher is lowered (down to zero when the gap is big enough).

I think your suggestion is great for a full rpg game. The problem is that DF has its fortress mode (which is much more important for me), and it seems hard to implement such system for a whole fort of ai-driven creatures.


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As for having to wait before repeating the task, it seems that it would be good together with some other changes, not alone. BTW maybe skill rusting will force you to do multiple activities during the day.