Bay 12 Games Forum

I was doing some testing on socializing and relationships. When a unit socializes with another, either because one/both are idle or are socializing in a tavern zone, the "rank" counter in their relationship increments by one or more. When the counter hits 15, they become friends or grudges. It's possible for a unit to socialize several times per in-game day. I don't know if the number is influenced by the personality of the talker or listener. Range seems to be 1-4 per in-game day.

However... Standard good/bad news.
Bad: It looks there are some serious restrictions on which tiles a dwarf will interact with during the "socializing" activity. It looks like they will only interact with units on N,S,E,W adjacent tiles. They ignore units in the same and diagonally adjacent tiles.
Good: A "socializing" unit WILL socialize (increase rank) with other busy dwarves if the busy dwarves aren't moving. I tested with units busy with a pumpstack, a library, and a temple. All of them were repeatedly able to form friendships.

This should give you an option to push your lonely dwarves into having friends.

Good stuff   I have added this to General Information.

I like the efficient design, but I don't think any fancy building will reduce the amount of micro currently required.

In line with the opening post, I want to note that Bay 12 is, paradoxically, the kindest and healthiest Internet community I've ever seen. Even trolls seem to mellow out around here.
I think it's mostly because the community is based on seeing each other and ourselves the way we are - especially our inner monsters, which are present in everyone but accepted almost nowhere.

Here there be monsters masquerading as gods, but they are remarkably respectful and helpful.

Eck, I really don't like any of these options. Constantly cycling out my dwarves is something that kinda ruins the game for me, because I lose that feeling of persistent growth and life. And avoiding any sieges or conflict sounds boring as hell.

Some guy on the subreddit said that if you expand the shit out of your justice system and jail every dwarf who commits a crime in a masterwork prison, you can totally prevent a tantrum spiral. I'm skeptical of this, has anybody tried it? If not I might give it a try and report back.

The only information on justice is from my own findings (middle of 'General Information' in the op).  I was using a modest prison with artworks & furniture, but all average quality, and not paying attention to favorite materials.  Taking the time to micromanage a prison would be good info to have.  That said, even if sufficient quality and favorite items can help the criminals, it won't necessarily prevent tantrums, since some unhappy Dwarves never commit a crime, they just become crazy.

I say the best thing we can do as a community is not be elitist and do our best to help new influx of people fall in love with the game as we all did.
Dont worry about crticisms or impatient users getting worked up, all of that is to be expected. We are the old vanguard and its our responsibility to these people to help them and show them what makes DF so special.

That's fair.  So would it be good or bad to encourage new players that the center of the world contains a fountain of infinite booze? 

In my experience, having a dedicated corpse team has only a partial success rate.  Simply viewing a sentient corpse can be enough to send Dwarves into irreversible depression.  Same thing with weather; you need to either forsake the surface entirely, or have a dedicated 'outdoors building team'.

So is it even possible right now to play a fortress with sieges and everything without an inevitable total collapse and without having to micromanage the absolute shit out of stress?  I just want to play dwarf fortress, but I've tried like a half dozen forts doing every old trick in the book to keep happiness high and they totally and utterly collapse the first time a few dwarves die.

I'm going to say the answer is definitely 'no'.  Even if you forsake the surface and build in such a way that siege fights are guaranteed to happen in the same place (boring, I feel), you still need to force socializing via Burrow once or twice per year.  Unfortunately, right now I'm forced to recommend anyone building a serious Fort use the DFHack command to remove Stress periodically.

Without knowing what kind of Hero shenanigans are involved here, it's too early to tell.  Cat did specifically notice more of her dead than the enemy's.  That said, bluffing 7,000 cavalry with nothing but your reputation as a legendary Villain is pretty amusing.

I'm actually curious to see if the Steam forum receives any kind of moderation.  We do things in this game that would make Crusader Kings II blush.

Anyone else really excited to see if this is the Prince's Graveyard?

OMG yes!  And let's not forget Cat's promise to Larat and the rest of the Wild Hunt: Seven Crowns and One, for Oaths of service in the spirit they were given.  Also, Archer's latest quip of "Prasei Treachery" is without a doubt my new favorite curse (in that context).