Bay 12 Games Forum

One of the things I've been thinking about recently is that castles often didn't house many (or even any) people.  It was more of an evacuation area that could be defended.  In Japan, the lord's house is almost always beside the castle (and even outside the system of moats!)  In my present game I'm building a series of hillocks with a central fortress to mimic this idea.  Each family gets a hillock with an entrance way, a large room (6x6) and an optional large workroom (also 6x6 -- sometimes housing 2 workshops).

The nice thing about this design is that the entrances are placed essentially willy nilly, instead of branching off of main corridors.  And in order to keep the settlement compact I've been forced to consider a more 3D design.  Getting rid of the central corridors has done wonders for making it more organic looking.  However, my dwarfs started getting very stressed about the rain (because they were walking around a lot on the surface), so I started having to retrofit covered walkways and access tunnels -- which became windy alleys.  For me, the process has been a success.

Of course, this design is very difficult to defend (especially since I have a house rule of no entrances that can't be destroyed by building destroyers), so it makes having a good military a necessity.  Also, there needs to be good methods for evacuation.  But even still, I'm going to lose a fair number of dwarfs in a siege.  But I think that's fine.  I always think it's ridiculous to have no casualties and wipe out entire armies on the other side.

It would be very interesting to see what effect atom smashing them would have.  I think I'll commit to testing that out in my current game.  As I have no real problem with low frame rates it won't be bad for me to try :-)  Just have to find a place for all those damn blocks.  I just sold a few hundred to the caravan, but I'll start stockpiling them for the moment.  If my FPS gets down to 20 or 30 without capping it, I'll try atom smashing them and measuring the result.

My suspicion is that it will have an effect, but not an order of magnitude effect (or possibly even a binary order of magnitude effect).  Whereas I believe that poor pathing *even for a handful of dwarfs* can easily have an order of magnitude effect on FPS.  I mean, we see that already with pets and impassable doors.

I think they probably mean can you wear 5 shields, etc.  I believe you can not any more.  There are rules for what you can wear over top of something else, although it can get fairly ridiculous (like you can apparently wear 5 crowns).  Having said that, the combat mechanics are quite different than before and mobility is fairly important, so wearing too much armour is not necessarily good.

So if your question is, can you still cheese the system by wearing ridiculous amounts of armour, I think the answer is mostly no.  Or at least I haven't heard of that kind of thing for a long time.

Interesting.  I haven't played adventure mode since 43.05 but I definitely satisfied the need by looking at statues and random decorated items.  I wonder what the problem is...

You're quadrupling your item count by making blocks. Ten thousand blocks will murder your FPS.

I know this is the conventional wisdom, but my guess is that since blocks don't degrade, the impact on FPS will be minimal.  Archchrystal has many more blocks than I will ever use.  You still have the option of atom smashing them.  Unfortunately the game pretty much makes you choose between atom smashing or QSP given the amount of non-degradable garbage...  Anyway, as I mentioned in a different thread, I've never had a fortress that had lower than 100 FPS as far as I know, although I cap at 20 FPS because I prefer to play like that, so I don't check that :-)

From efficiency point of view, I was bigger about cube forts 'till I realized that stockpile to workshop dominates the calcs.

I play at 20 FPS *on purpose* and my forts rarely last longer than 10 years (because I get interested in doing something else), so I've never even come close to FPS death.  However, I continue to believe that this is the dominant issue for both efficiency and FPS.  Path finding is dramatically computationally easier when the paths are short.  If you have stockpiles 2 tiles from the workshops, then virtually nothing matters when the dwarf is pathing from the stockpile to the workshop.

But then you have to consider the path the dwarf will take to get to the stockpile. The key is to keep everything that the dwarf is likely to want in a small enough space that their paths remain short.  Now, it's hard to do this, admittedly.  But if you think of your work flows, it really helps.  Have a food stockpile near your farms.  Possibly keep staging stockpiles near that, to split up hauling jobs if the paths are long.  Keep your still near the farms (so that the seeds don't have to go very far).  Keep a bag stockpile nearby for the seeds.  Consider only enabling hauling for certain dwarfs -- so food industry dwarfs haul food, but nobody else does.

However, also consider having many small shrines and temples so that a dwarf has an option to pray near where they work and live.  Don't centralise the housings.  Allow dwarfs to live near their workshops.  The list goes on.  Basically, the shorter the paths, the better off you are going to be.  I hear people talk about their dwarfs hauling things for a week, and then complain about FPS.  It's much better to split up the hauling so each dwarf only hauls something for no more than half a day (say 50 tiles at full speed, much less if hauling heavy things).

The real difficulty, though, is when a dwarf decides to go to the tavern at the surface and then has to go back to work in the magma forges.  There isn't much you can do about that, but at least you can design the fortress so that it isn't *required* to do that kind of thing.

I also think that this kind of fortress looks a lot more interesting and "real".  It's also super challenging to do, which I enjoy.

I've noticed this is somewhat true of herbalism gather zones as well.  If you set a zone, the dwarfs will go and pick up whatever they can find.  They *will* return eventually, but not necessarily in an optimal fashion.  If you remove the zone and reset it, then the dwarfs will again go to pick the area clean.