Bay 12 Games Forum

ok thanks

 So the goblins attacked and I put my marksdwarves in their towers, but even when there were goblins literally on the other side of the fortifications, on the same z-level, they won't shoot. Why?

 On the wiki, it says that when a baron arrives I can appoint a champion, but I have 3 baronesses and I still can't appoint one. Do I need to wait for a male baron to arrive or is this a bug?

 I have a few questions about the military.
1) Apart from ranged and melee, do the weapons types have any notable differences, and if so, what are their strengths and weaknesses?
2) Are single weapon squads better than mixed weapon squads, and should I add a marksdwarf or two melee squads and vice versa?
3) Do dwarves in higher z-levels see farther away?
4) If I give my soldiers weapons and their training equivalent, will they try to use their training weapons in battle?
5) Do marksdwarves recover bolts?
6) Can I make my soldiers form positions like a shield wall?
7) What happens if I separate a soldier from an object they're attached to?
Thanks in advance.

 It's probably a bug. In the last game I played with this version of DF the first two caravans (dwarven and elven) glitched out. The first disappeared quickly and without warning at the trade post and the second never passed the edge of the map.

 Thanks to all of you that was really helpful! I can't believe I was wasting so much of my workforce.

 edit: Does anyone know the rate at which brewers of different levels brew?

 Is there a way to know how many plants will be produced each season? Although since yield is in part randomized a better question would probably be how many seeds will be planted. And what is the best way of improving production? Usually I make huge farms supported by a small army of growers (about a tenth of the population), mostly unskilled migrants, and a single skilled brewer constantly brewing to improve seed production, which produces decent surpluses (triple digits growth every year), although I've seen on the wiki and forums that a few or even a single skilled grower can sustain most fortresses, although to me it seems that the fortress would be vulnerable to the death of even a few these growers, or the loss of its seed stockpile, since I don't think that method would produce many surpluses. Any help is appreciated, and thanks in advance.

Well, I said this in some of the previous topics on the same subject, but what we could have, as one topic, is differing levels of metallurgy. 

That is, dwarves right now seem to have more modern blast furnace methods of steelmaking, and produce "pure" steel of modern quality. 

Instead, we might have a "base-level" wrought iron, crude steel, wootz steel, damascus steel, and dwarven steel. (The last of which having the properties that are associated with current steel.)

Once we get the capacity to properly make items out of more than one material, armors could similarly evolve, starting with the likes of scale or lamellar armor and four-in-one mail, up through six-in-one mail and splint mail, to eight-in-one mail and field plate.  Even leather and cloth armors were improved through different hardening techniques. 

We could have crossbows that diverge in their composition for providing either faster reload rates or heavier impact, with pull-lever-crossbows and repeater crossbows being faster, and windlass or cranequin crossbows or arbalests providing heavier firepower at the cost of speed.  Recurve crossbows can add velocity regardless of loading method.  Compound crossbows could be constructed to allow for greater total power, at the cost of requiring stronger dwarves to operate, or requiring a slower winding method.

All of these could largely just be evolutions.  (Nobody wore scale once they knew how to make field plate.)

These don't have to be all military, of course, music and poetry and such are fully capable of "evolving", although there aren't as practical a set of results to show for such things.

Ceramics, as well, is the source of technological progress, with porcelain being far more difficult to produce than this game gives it credit for.  (I made a longish suggestion on the topic before it was actually put in the game.  Porcelain actually needs temperatures hotter than magma to be properly produced, and was responsible for Europe largely sending nearly all its precious metals along the silk road to obtain all the porcelain they could possibly get.  Porcelain probably should require special forges which are powered to spin fans that provide the proper high airflow to burn enough charcoal to properly make porcelain.)

The main problem with these is that there is no particularly good reason to bother with such things, especially as there is no reason to bother with high-value luxury goods when simple food roasts or bins of cloth are generally worth more money than you can ever spend. (Hence the whole "Class Warfare" thread built to solve that very problem...)

 I'm not sure if this was part of your suggestion, but I think a good way of implementing it would be to have tech groups instead of tech trees, composed of techs that would be discovered depending on circumstance. For example, a dwarf would be assigned to a certain tech group (pottery, to use your example) and then depending on their mastery of the appropriate skill(s), resources available and other techs known to the race/civ/fort to create a new tech. If for example the race/civ/fort has efficient enough furnace techs, and access to the right materials, the dwarf might discover porcelain.

 Another thing that I think is important is how tech is stored. Instead of just being stored in the game file, the known techs could be stored in books (which I heard were being worked on) and individuals. Also, the person doing an activity requiring a tech must know it. So if everyone who knows about a given tech dies and the books (or maybe even engravings, statues and artifacts) that contain it are destroyed, the fort can no longer (to use the example I used above) produce porcelain, unless it is rediscovered or brought by migrants, merchants, enemies or diplomats.