Bay 12 Games Forum

The whole military situation (training, combat, little/no invasions) is definitely unfortunate. However, if we can produce more documentation about these problems and communicate to Toady how important they are, it is quite possible that he might get to them within the next bugfix cycle. After all, we have received some major bugfixes, quality-of-life improvements and updates unrelated to their corresponding major releases during the bugfixing period before.

On balance, I would guess he is waiting until more of the game is actually put together. Balancing it when most of the major systems are in place might make more sense than wasting time balancing the placeholder systems we have right now. Being an open alpha, there are arguments for going either way: balancing now to improve quality-of-life for players, or balancing later to save time.

I believe that Toady actually tries to maintain a balance: eliminate major bugs that severely damage the game's value, but avoid spending too much time fixing systems that will probably just be thrown out altogether later.

That said, I hope invasions fit into the "major bugs that severely damage the game's value" category... More like "Dwarf Inn" than "Dwarf Fortress" without invasions... Oh wait.

Even accounting for pressure, it shouldn't be instant. Faster, sure... 3x faster, 5x faster, no prob. But for that many tiles to be flooded instantly, the pressure would have to flow through a bigger hole. i got 7/7 tiles right next to a 0/7 tile... i dont think this was the intended effect...

"Pressure" means there are other water tiles connected and above the area. The top of these water tiles will instantly teleport to the bottom until there are none left. As lakes are constantly refilling (and usually quite large), it would make sense that it instantly flooded. Perhaps not realistic, though.

Quote from: me at some point on these forums

With dwarf fortress, the only losing move is not to play

The only winning move is to not play: Losing is Inevitable. Therefore:

Choose not to play, and you are in a state of equally losing and winning (failure to play is avoiding failure).
Choose to play, and you are still in a state of equally losing and winning (playing is victory, but implicates losing).

Quantum winstates?

I can play Dwarf Fortress; thus, I can win national Smash Brothers tournaments. They're both just video games, right?

I can play the guitar fairly well; therefore, I can play the violin fairly well. They're both just string instruments, right?

Then we ought to have a throne-making mason skill, a table-making mason skill, a cabinet-making mason skill, a millstone-making mason skill, etc., as well as copies of all of those skills for every single material, including different varieties of stones, such as harder rocks and softer rocks (gypsum vs granite, for instance), and also different varieties of wood, and perhaps even a skill for every single alloy, right?

118 skills is a lot. As I understand it, Toady wants to replace it with a "knowledge" system, accompanied by more general skills at some point; like a good fighter with knowledge mainly in, say, swords, or an entertainer with knowledge of flutes.

But some of the skills we have right now, I really cannot understand...

Gelding? Really?
Crutch Walking? I've never seen someone go exceptionally fast with crutches. Is that a Paralympic event?
Lye, Potash and Soap Making seem strangely specific as well. As I understood it these were just basic tasks rural farmers did.
Milker? Is that the skill of not getting kicked? What effect does this one even have?
Pump Operator? Do you ever get better at turning the screw/cranking/whatever?

Others seem to be awkwardly categorized. For instance, what exactly is different between a mason and a stonecrafter? Or a bowyer and a carpenter? And then there are the social skills. I really don't think it works that way in real life... Talking with your friends for a few days won't necessarily make you a Legendary Comedian or a Great Liar... or is this the secret?

I assume that at some point there will be a rewrite of this, as there will be a rewrite of many things, this being alpha and all. I hope it has less skills, too.

Unfortunately for overseers wishing to make matches, dwarves seem to linguistically refer to each other in terms of their biology, rather than their preferences, making it extremely difficult to know when you have a compatible pair. This seems to suggest that ideas of gender and orientation barely matter to them (as you suggest).

The units list seems to not tell us a lot about the names dwarves give to most animals, as it uses the English words for them. However, it is notable that dwarves find the gender of small fish and rodents to be extremely important, to the point of selling and storing male and female prepared fish/rodents separately ("cave turtle (♂) roast", for instance). I really have no idea why they might do this, but it is definitely worthy of note.

Perhaps dwarves have no linguistic gender, except, very specifically, when referring to vermin. I doubt this would be a wider linguistic feature; they probably just have separate words for, say, a male or female rat; while they can see similarity between the two, they would hardly consider the two to be the same animal like we would. Perhaps if they were uncertain what they were looking at, they would say "(word for male rat) or (word for female rat)", similar to "he/she" (the ugliest construct in English).

I don't like linguistic gender myself; leaves a European taste in the mouth. Supposing that we did, though, we have no idea how the words in the dictionary fit into whatever genders we choose. As Dirst noted, there is no immediately obvious pattern. I would say that we are better without, at least for non-vermin.

The roots are pretty weird. I would personally choose to throw out some of the pointless words for compound words; for instance, in the case of sorcerer/sorcery, you could easily go with something like sorcerer/sorcerer-work (litez/litezducim) or sorcery-man/sorcery (olthezudos/olthez). But that is really a question of how much you are willing to deviate from the word list that we have; after all, it does say that sorcerer and sorcery are completely different words.

Also, I found a word for need: inem (require). So here is my proposal for the sentence:

Inem ozkakducimalodmabdug Urist.
Require carry-work-day-ale Urist
Urist needs alcohol to get through the working day.
Alt.: Urist needs the ale that carries him through the workday.

Who needs prepositions, anyway? With enough compounding, anything can be done! Also, fascinating find in the dictionary: "UN:nas". Perhaps this refers to "un-" as in the negating prefix in English? This could be useful.

Nasinem ozkakducimalodmabdug Rakust.
Rakust does not need the ale to bear him/her through the working day.

Both of these do away with any difference between "requires" (now) and "requires" (generally); I couldn't find any words referring to "now" or "currently" or anything like that. Another thought (again about Rakust):

Nasinem ozkakducimalodmabdug Rakust. Egomasrer dákudos Rakust.
[see previous]. Nature-appear tree-man Rakust.
Rakust does not need ale for his working day. Rakust naturally (therefore/thus) looks like (appears to be) an elf.

Again, it is difficult without a word for "is"/"to be", which is basically the most common and important word in all human languages. But we can probably do without it.

I imagine Dwarven to be a very isolating/analytic language; that is, I would see them not changing their words much for any given situation, instead using particles, prepositions and word ordering to get their meaning across (similar to English or Chinese). This would fit perfectly with the information that we are given about the language: just a huge list of words. We would simply need to make up the rules for syntax, word ordering and add a few particles so that it makes sense.

I like the idea of V-O-S word ordering; it gives a businesslike verb focus that fits the industrious dwarves. Adjectives (and other modifiers) should go before the noun, as they do in the game, with no preferred order for those adjectives (big red balloon/red big ballon both being fine). I would be fine using the same punctuation system as is used in English; it's almost universal, easy to understand, and covers everything necessary. As for pronunciation, I wish I had a clue what Toady meant by those diacritics, but for the basic phonemes, I would imagine mainly sticking to the IPA, with a few English digraphs (like th → /θ/ or sh → /ʃ/).

Finally, there is a somewhat glaring lack of pronouns and verbs in the vocabulary that we have already. We will need to either make more, or be exceptionally creative...

Compound words could be used to eliminate ambiguity and in place of more complex syntax. For instance, a steel sword could be delerdastot; essentially, using compound words instead of our (extremely limited) adjectives/adverbs. Some example sentences with these kinds of rules (with gloss):

Gethdôbar zandelerdastot onolbomeshtân.
Past-create artifact steel sword mountain-home smith.
The smith of the mountain-home created an artifact steel sword.

Nanothgamil dákudos.
Never-trust tree-man.
Never trust elves.

Gomathubmosus gethub.
Legendary-dine-room past-dine.
(I) dined in a legendary dining room. [No first person pronoun. Perhaps dwarves are just that selfless?]