Bay 12 Games Forum

Work assignment is probably the most important thing to fix for new players. It's a core mechanic but convoluted, time consuming, and tedious, and a beginner will be lucky to find where to do it at all without a wiki. You check what a dwarf is capable of in a different submenu than where you select the work, personality facets you might want to consider are somewhere else entirely, andthe work assignment menu itself is unwieldy and poorly subdivided.

For the most part, I find DT to actually add to the time it takes to complete tasks.

I literally cannot imagine how this could be true, compared to your method, but kudos for doing it anyway; I think the most important flaw DT has is removing you from that personal connection with the dwarves you really need for the stories the game generates to hit home. Even as a fan of its functionality I would agree there are almost certainly solutions which stay more true to the game's core while being less intimidating and decently efficient.

Perhaps something closer to the adventurer creation screen, with the dwarf's (sortable) skills/characteristics to the left, his assigned skills next to that and some fortress metrics like number of eg smiths etc. to inform the decisions.

Looks great, really brings across the how-in-Armok's-name-are-they-eating-off-those-spikes feel the decorations have always had.
Only criticism would be that I prefer lower viewing angles for tables which allow me to see more of the table's legs to make it read as "table" immediately, but that could just be me being too used to my current tileset (good ol' ironhand).

Hmm, yes I can see it looking odd on multilevel views. I wouldn't mind making the ramps look a bit steeper, but i guess short of doing an unreasonable amount of contextual differentiation between ramps it would be difficult to implement if you want to avoid terraces. I think terraces might not be terrible to break up the blockiness of the continuous slopes as they are now, but without a mock-up its hard to say.

Also, I was looking through the recent update video again because I don't think we've had a good look at multilevel ramps elsewhere, and I noticed the grass tiles spreading over the top of the ramps. If that is intentional, I think there needs to be a better lighting transition; the ramps going down are on a different z-level so the fade creates a stark contrast.
I also noticed another ramp configuration which doesn't quite work:
I think the best solution here would be to just have the ramp run flush with the tile, without a corner. It's not quite right, but I don't think this formation would occur like this in reality, so there probably isn't a perfect one.

Something similar is happening here (you can also see some of the blockiness I talked about above):
I genuinely have no idea how this should look. It might need diagonal slopes (sloping in two directions at once) to work, which I don't think are a thing at the moment.
Or maybe, on the vertical edge, the slope going to the right could dominate, instead of the one going north. There is definitely going to be a sheer wall somewhere which is supposed to be traversable, though. Or I could have this completely wrong, because it's nigh on impossible to read.
That's the problem with going from ramps in the abstract to visually defined ones...

PS: Dayum Starver you make my post look like baby talk Thanks for the 'splainin

In the devlog yesterday the details of villainous plots were discussed, as well as how they would fail. Toady suggested having some sort of counterespionage in place around important position holders, to keep them from being flipped too easily.
I feel that solution would be limiting the potential of plots, as well as being quite "game-y", since it essentially treats being turned towards a plot like brainwashing: you either resist turning or you become a pawn. And after all, how many people actually have any counterespionage?
Instead, since implementing plots and agendas is already a goal of the villain arc, it would be better to give everyone (or at least anyone important) their own private, benign agendas to achieve their goals, which would interact with the agendas of others to make them more or less likely to align themselves with another's plot. People already have goals and dreams, so tying this into a system could provide the necessary dynamics.
Since people in powerful positions would already be pursuing their own agendas, which likely wouldn't fit into the plans of some upstart villain, they would be less likely to be turned.
For example, a pencil-pushing bookkeeper who dreams of becoming a fighter, or has a violent nature, would be receptive to a plot by a foreign power to cause a war because this fits with his personal goals, but a count who wants to become a duke wouldn't work for someone else unless their plans benefit that goal.

A system like this would allow for a lot of flavor and depth while keeping allowance for proper villain plots.

Of course, for entity level intrigue counterintelligence is entirely appropriate, and since I've made a bunch of assumptions about how what is planned from the blog post, feel free to disregard stuff that wasn't intended as I understood it.

Nevermind nothing to see here, save got corrupted. My apologies.




 Welcome to Mörulzursùl or Pagechewed, the Unparalleled University of Udon Kajeth, The Domain of Griffons!

Tldr: I won’t be farming and instead trade for food.

This will be a community fortress in the traditional sense i.e. not a succession, I will be playing and documenting my unmitigated success and reader input will be limited. You’re of course welcome to request a dorfing, just give me some specification on what kind of dwarf you want to be.

However, there will be some limitations, which brings us to the theme/rules I’ll be playing by. For a while now I have thought that agriculture is ridiculously overpowered in Dwarf Fortress, since you can feed a fortress of two hundred with tiny fields worked by only a handful of skilled planters and some fertilization. This makes survival quite easy once you get the hang of it and makes trade basically superfluous after the first few years. So I’m going to play this fort completely without farming for food or drink and instead trade for it. (Though  I suppose Farmer isn’t the most sought after vocation around here)

I will probably farm some sort of fiber plant though, since, as I already mentioned, I’m also going to try to be a university with a constant output of writing as that’s one of the big features of this release after all. I’m in fact hoping to make books my primary trade good, and caravans just don’t bring leather or cloth in the quantities I’ll need for that(-wait, can you even trade books? I’ll have to check).
I considered having an all merc military as well but I think I’m going to require a proper military if I really plan to be so reliant on trade.

So here we go!

Also, English isn't my first language, so i apologize for mistakes and some stilted writing.

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Journal of McBlind Orbrooted
1st of Granite 550
I was actually pretty nervous this morning, getting out of my bed in my quarters in the mountainhome for the last time. I mean sure, today I’m setting out to found the first university this side of the world has ever seen but I prepared very carefully! I searched for potential sites, worked with prospectors to find out what sort of resources I could expect and I managed to gather some enterprising minds and guards before I even applied for a grant with the king. And with the promise to also establish a faculty for military science and metallurgy I managed to get the money for supplies and permission to set out. So set out I shall and the part of me who is grumbling that my bed is comfy can just shut it.

2nd of Granite 550
A priest! The goddamn clergy demanded I take a goddamn priest with me to “make sure all matters attended are proper”! Proper! How do you do Science that’s proper? You don’t dammit!

10th of Granite 550
Priestess. She has pointed out to me that she is, in fact, a woman. I need to hide my journal better.
She also appears to actually have an actual interest in science, in the matter of heredity in particular. This, she claims, is the real reason she has come with us but I’m not convinced. Some of her theories on the why and how of brewing and distilling are still quite intriguing, I must admit.

15th of Granite 550
We have arrived! I figure this is as good a time as any to elaborate a bit on just why we have set out to found a university. See, down here in the south there has long been a dearth of intellectual progress due to the many destructive wars that have been fought by the elves in an effort to eradicate the two goblin civilizations that also lived around here and which was additionally magnified as they turned on us after the goblins had fallen in the most destructive war that has ever been fought, killing in total more people than there are elves left today in this world.
This lack of progress has caused us to be looked down upon by the humans and goblins of the north. As the son of merchants I have visited the north many times and found myself grudgingly agreeing with them and from that point I had only one goal: Get The Pillars of Feeding, our civilization, to take back its rightful place among the foremost nations. So the idea for this place was formed.

Anyways, I think I may have been shafted with the fees for the prospectors.
Sure the ores promised, iron and gold, are present but I don’t think an expert was necessary to figure that out.

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So, currently available for dorfing are two hammerdwarves, two miners, the priestess who'll also be our brewer and one dwarf who's currently our wood chopper and carpenter but will soon be made a glassmaker. My dwarf is a paper-maker/scribe but it'll probably be a while till i can really get to that so for now i'm helping wherever.

For those interested, the wars I mentioned actually happened, I discovered them through legends viewer. While the 83 wars that have been fought on Udon Kajeth have been split evenly between north and south, of the 10 most destructive wars only 2 were fought in the north, and those take the 8th and 10th place. This is all the more notable as roughly 75% of the people in the world live in the north, all the humans and goblins. The elves in the south wiped out and assimilated all the goblin civs in the south but with over 5000 dead the most destructive war by far was the Scorching Conflict between our civilization and the Fated rains and as i said, a lot of people died there. As in more dwarves were killed than live in our civilization today. By about 500. That war was over 200 years ago.