Bay 12 Games Forum

I would like to see the unused military tactics skill be eventually tied to battle formations or whatever bonuses military tactics might convey to dwarves in a future update. Imagine the Dwarven Art of War as an actual military manual that can be passed down the ages, or maybe even an actual Kisat Dur Manual that teaches combat techniques? That would make good use of the teacher and student skills as well outside of demonstrations. Like some kind of secret forbidden kung fu manual.

Also, natural sciences tied in to the unused animal care skill so we can treat animal injuries.

I stick to a few "guidelines" when generating worlds myself to ensure that I always get a healthy amount of goblins, elves and humans as neighbors (I don't use legends viewer, though I probably should). So I treat these as "indicators" of a healthy civilization, though its probably easier to just check from legends viewer and extrapolate the data from there. A combination of both techniques is probably the most reliable as sifting through legends for population numbers is particularly cumbersome and unreliable.

These pertain more for world gen instead of legends. But they are still applicable as they use the same site symbols.

- Pay attention to the world map after stopping world gen and before exiting the world gen page. You want to highlight the various symbols of sites and check whether they are occupied by the races you want. What you want is elven forest retreat instead of just forest retreat, and stuff like that. The "elven" shows that the site is occupied though it does not tell the population. Sometimes, sites get conquered so a dwarf fortress shows up as "the goblin fortress of so and so" even though the site symbol shows a dwarf fortress. Conquered sites that are abandoned show up as ruins instead. It helps if you're familiar with the symbols so you can tell at a glance instead of highlighting them manually, that way you can just abort world gen instead of saving the map and checking legends mode, it saves you some time. I find the map legend on the wiki very useful in that regard.

- You can also tell at a glance from the world gen map whether the goblin sites are in range or not, its 30 tiles for goblins and 10 tiles for towers. Also, tight clusters of sites that are not empty might indicate a strong population presence.

- Make sure those races are still reproducing babies, I tab down to the bottom of the units list in legends mode to check. Not a big requirement for goblins since they can steal babies but its probably better if they are also producing more of their own kind.

- If you've got time to burn and want to really to be precise about it, you can look at the world gen map while the years count down and stop every now and then to check the sites. I've gotten to the stage where I'm familiar with the map symbols so I can tell when the sites are all abandoned (the map symbols change to reflect this) then I'll stop world gen before it even reaches the end year and roll up a new map.

- There are other things you can do to boost population numbers for races even before world gen. For example, mountains are necessary for mountainhomes and hills are necessary for dwarven hillocks. Boosting those numbers will increase the number of sites available for dwarves to occupy during world gen. Likewise, increasing evil biomes in the world can boost the number of sites goblins can occupy, the same thing goes for elves with forests and humans with grasslands and plains.

- The default regions and islands when you design a new world with advanced parameters are usually quite balanced but you can tweak them to your liking to boost population. Likewise, increasing the number of civilizations can increase the spread of that race across the map instead of all of them being concentrated in one particular region of the map. It also acts as a buffer for megabeast attacks that wreck entire civilizations during first few years of worldgen before they can establish sites and defend themselves.

Magma-safe stone is largely a non issue. We have the capability of making glass, which is automatically magma-safe and unlimited by anything other than production capacity.

Mechanisms? That said, obsidianizers are always an option...

I'll like to make it clear I meant that revert thing as a joke.
(Then why bring it up in the first place? Shhh!!! Quiet down!)

I appreciate the effort to try to play your turn, and at least you didn't hack stuff or make things unplayable, so things are not irreversibly bad at all. They may be poor decisions, but they didn't break any rules as far as I am aware of. That said, I don't wanna be an ass since my brain says there's really no reason to revert, but my cold black heart kinds of pulls me in the other direction

So, with great irresponsibility I'll leave the decision to revert or not to the next player in line to decide since suddenly we're all self-entitled monsters now

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EDIT: In retrospect, the low FPS you experienced likely isn't from the flowing water but instead pathing lag caused by a breach in the caverns.

Also, I seemed to have forgotten to turn off the restriction of having only obsidian stone be used in the stone menu, so whomever is picking up the save next might want to adjust that to their preferences. Would just like to note that we are short on magma safe rock though we are expecting a shipment of those in autumn.

They will try to pick up all those "stack of one" bolts until their quiver reaches full capacity each time they get a pickup equipment job for bolts (usually 25, but I believe they have been known to pick up more if the large stack of bolts are the last stack they pick up, or they get their hands on enemy stacks which can go up to 40 i think).  So no, they won't path all the way back if you make sure that your ammo stockpile has more than sufficient bolts and they are assigned via the military ammunition screen.

You can always place a bolt stockpile right in their archery range though.

Quality is not the only way in which you can sort the stockpiles. Try these 2 methods out.

1) Disable the related material in the artifact stockpile. For example, Copper for the copper swords, under the weapons tab. You can do the same for other artifacts under their respective tabs to disallow artifacts made out of that certain material from being stored at that stockpile.

2) Mass forbid all the crappy artifacts. Allow hauling for the vault room. When hauling is completed, set the stockpile to take from links only. Unforbid the crappy artifacts.

Come now, although the lack of updates is infuriating, surely we can do better than take verbal jabs at each other. Let's be more civil about this shall we? Gwolfski did say that there will be more updates later on and the deadline is not here yet.

That said, though I don't expect long dialogues and pictures everywhere (I may have contributed to spoiling the market there), it doesn't take much to type out just a few lines of updates every now and then. So the least you can do is drop some updates every few days or so or post here to let us know if you've been having problems playing because of real life or because you signed up for a whole bunch of other community games or whatever other reason. Hey I know shit happens sometimes, but let us know so at least we'll know the reason why you're not updating and keep our expectations in line. That would be much better than silently holding onto the save and helps to keep things moving along at a good pace don't you think?

OK, rant finished. No offense meant to anyone, so please don't take it personally.

Also, I want another turn down the line. Let's see if I can stop procrastinating and update the front page with the missing info from the necromancers.

EDIT:
Frontpage up with updated profiles on the deceased nobility of the stirred irons, updated profiles of our former mountainhome and an entry for the necromancers. Next up will be the new nobility, assuming they don't die on us.