Bay 12 Games Forum

DFhack and therapist have been out for several days now and work fine.

Then walling off areas may make some difference, but I think number of dwarves is more important.

There was a bug in past DF versions where stress did not decrease properly. I am not sure about this in the current version.

That sounds like a good fix, as well as the healing fix.

Toady should really heed these raws changes, it would be very quick for him to change them.

Ignoring your earlier posts and choosing to take you seriously.

Here is the thing... It really differed not only from society to society but even within those societies themselves. What you described wasn't the norm, it is "Pop History" correct... but not factual.

I am not against Gender Roles in dwarf fortress especially since the game can just create entirely unique ones that do not have to match real life ones. Yet it should be something handled by the generator and not in some attempt to replicate popular forms of history.

Very well, then. Tell me what was correct. Give me the real story. I have already given examples of steppe armies being up to a third female at times due to everyone being trained to fight and mediaeval European wives taking over their husbands' businesses when they died. In many native American tribes, like the Navajo, women played prominent roles in government and property was inherited matrilineally. That does not change the fact that overall, in the most general case, armies were mostly men and carers were mostly women.

If the number of dwarves is capped at, say, 200, and animals are kept constant by butchering or gelding, does FPS death still happen? If so, is it just because of items? In that case, trading or atom smashing would help. I know that atom smashing saved my 200 dwarf forts from FPS death in the past, though they ran very slowly.

In the diffuse dwarven culture we as players have created a dwarf with a motor nerve injury or missing limb is permanently worthless and a dwarf with two is immediately killed so the rest of the fortress doesn't need to be burdened by them. Couple that with the fact that dwarven aftercare is the time that elapses between someone stopping the bleeding and the bed being deconstructed from underneath you and that dwarven psychological treatment constitutes talking to the mayor for a few minutes then getting over it you crippled crybaby it's probably kind of a big deal. There should be a reasonable chance that a dwarf just can't handle going through that no matter how nice the dining hall is.

I agree that motor nerve injuries or damage to vital organs should essentially be incurable by dwarves, but amputations, hook hands and false legs are easily within their grasp and should be added. Dwarves which have lost limbs, or parts of limbs, should be able to continue existence.

Bad reactions to this are completely understandable, hence the need for euthanasia in the form of magma. The new stress system is much better than the old one where dining rooms could offset these problems, though it may need some tweaking. I only send a dwarf to the magma if it will be permanently consigned to insanity and tantrums otherwise - just being useless is not enough. A big fort can easily supply a few dependents.

I think the player should have a moderate level of control over his dwarves - enough to tell them to charge, hold the line and so on, but not so much he can tell them specifically to dodge or shield block all the time. Whether they do these things should be down to their circumstances. Dodging is not possible when in a shield wall; using the shield to block is much more sensible. Against a beast's attack that would smash any solid defence, a dodge and possible shield deflection (angling the shield to glance the blow rather than taking it straight) would be a sensible idea, and dwarves would do it for self preservation regardless of their orders. In the same way, dwarves would not wrestle while in formation.

One feature I think players should be able to control is ordering dwarves to try to capture enemies instead of killing them. I remember seeing "non lethal combat" on Toady's development list and dwarves should be able to do it too. If dwarves are asked to capture an enemy, they will wrestle it and try not to strike killing blows. However, if the threat level escalates to the point where this is no longer possible, they will still kill the target.

Dwarves with no discipline should behave as they currently do, attacking wildly with no regard for tactics, but with less success.