Bay 12 Games Forum

I noticed this while doing some combat testing in the arena. Dwarves have always occasionally thrown a kick or punch into the mix but from what I've seen, an armed dwarf with a high level of skill in their weapon of choice will attempt to hit their enemy with their weapon under half the time. (I'm just estimating this from looking over the combat logs rather than actually tallying every blow.) Expert weapon users with no fighting or wresting skill appear to be more likely to attack without their weapon than with it which definitely seems buggy.

It's really thrown off my weapons efficacy and divine metal testing. Just to make sure, this has been reported properly to Toady?

Zombie sponges collapse after a few hits, though.

Now a thrall giant sponge, that is another story.

Ah yes, you're right. It was the thralled version that was super lethal and invulnerable. The regular zombies died due to the hp system they used to have. My mistake.

The real problem was giant zombie sponges. They were nigh immortal and on top it they were aggressive and could function on land.

Still, they paled in comparison to a zombie giant sperm whale.

Tranquil and serene areas aren't known for having a large amount of wildlife but that isn't the cause of the problem you had. When a group of creatures shows up on the map, which in the case of tranquil embarks often means a single small animal, they fill a slot for the allowable number of packs of creatures in the area. If all the animal slots are filled, it will prevent any new creatures from showing up. In your case all of the slots were filled by a couple of buggy birds.

To get new animals all you need to do is kill or scare away a group of the current ones from your map. In your case, since they were buggy birds, this made it impossible for your hunters to get rid of them naturally and bunged up the whole system.

My gut feeling tells me the results will likely not be particularly useful in that for the amount of effort put in, you won't get much back but I could be wrong. That's what science is for.

The big problems I foresee are the risk to the fort caused by the chronically low moral of many of the mentally damaged children and the sever damage to the parents' moral caused by occasionally losing said children to madness or injury. You will also have children that will graduate with poor social skills and who will not do any work while they are busy being locked up in their "childcare" area until adulthood.

The big flags I have noticed for a dwarf going crazy have been attributes such as being prone to negative thoughts, prone to rage, prone to anxiety etc. You can have some dwarves that lose half their family and walk away from it with their mind intact and others that try to tear down your fortress because some goblins you shot, snuck off the map with a few of their masterwork bolts in their leg. I've learned to always keep dwarves that are prone to negative thoughts and fits of rage etc. out of the military. They generally aren't worth the risk and do better in less stressful rolls. They are also far more likely to tantrum and go mad rather than ever reaching the point where they "don't care about much of anything."

I guess it really depends on the type of training system you speak of whether it is likely to succeed or not. There are ways to train children without damaging them such as using misters throughout the fort to raise moral and simultaneously train swimming and its related stats. Generally I have found that maiming, killing or harming dwarves is counter productive and I leave that to the goblins and forgotten beasts rather than going out of my way to do their jobs for them.

I didn't know the wiki ever had ads.

I guess ignorance can be bliss!

It does but they don't tend to be intrusive enough that I notice them.

Quote from: Putnam on July 13, 2014, 07:12:33 pm

1. This game doesn't support lysenkoism
2. A small subset of the population not breeding is really no different from how it was before

The third one is the important thing here, as two Dwarves of the same sex will normally at most become friends or grudges, meaning you can allow your Dwarves to freely socialize and expect a new generation of Dwarves to be spored. When there is a risk of same sex marriage you have to micromanage your Dwarves or fully expect a very sizeable portion of your breeding stock to become as worthless as widows. It turns Fortress breeding from a natural process that occurs in all dining halls to a megaproject requiring creches and mandatory socializing cabins.

If its a bug where dwarves are simply failing to take into account the sex of their spouse then this would be true but if its an intentional part of the game then I imagine homosexual dwarves are born that way and no amount of micro managing will change the fact that they will never reproduce during their life time.

If its intentional then it is likely modeled after the real world and it probably doesn't even effect more than 5% of dwarves and really does nothing but add a bit more depth, realism and flavor to the world. I just fail to see how people are getting their panties all up in a bunch over this. It's hardly any sort of real game changer.

It's silly how most of this thread is busy arguing about whether or not this should be included in the game rather than whether or not it already has been. That is the only thing that matters here. If the behavior is intentional or not. If its not then we can expect this behavior to be buggy and disruptive to the game and Toady should be made aware of it. If its an intentional feature then all of this silly debating means absolutely nothing since its already a part of the game. This isn't the suggestions forum.

Anyway, for the small percentage of us who are actually trying to puzzle out if this is a bug or intentional, has anybody found the orientation tag in the raws? I've been looking through the entity raws and its definitely not there. I'm not an avid modder so my skills are rather lacking in this department. If somebody has found the context of where this tag is used would you be so kind as to fill us in? The context should be able to tell us if this is intentional or not.

What we know so far is that in the string dump of the raws there is an "orientation" tag. From what I have gathered, nobody has actually managed to find where this tag is actually used by the game other than a vague suggestion that it involved night creatures. From the observations of those who have seen same sex marriages, it is a relatively rare occurrence. The rarity of it and the existence of the tag both seem to indicate that this may be an intentional feature but without more information its impossible to be certain.

I think that might be the end goal for these metals, maybe for a new release. out of curiosity, what are the metals like now? I heard that they were better than steel.

They are very light weight with generally slightly better stats than steel. Edged weapons made of the new metals will cut through steel armor and are quite nice but the lack of density keeps the metal from being useful for blunt weapons. The new metals are a bit like a step between steel and adamantine.