Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Putnam on March 04, 2020, 09:33:22 pm

Having to learn how to assign nobles before you get the tutorial guy seems a bit... off. Should probably just sort of be a thing adjustable in the options somewhere.

Agreed. There may be a slight weird feeling when a Dwarf of the starting seven (presumably the expedition leader) starts giving "you" advice. Because, who are you? Where are you? Who's this dwarf talking to you? And how is he talking to you while he's floundering in a murky pool having been attacked by a log?

But that's easily just hand-waved away. Just don't worry, better to have advice than not, right? 

This got me thinking, would it make sense for each of the other essential noble positions to be automatically assigned to a suitable dwarf at embark like the expedition leader is? (Obviously while keeping the control for the player to replace/remove them afterwards.) There could even be an option to mark candidates for particular positions when assigning skills to the starting seven.

I think it would make sense from a story perspective, since you'd expect an expedition party founding a new settlement to have at least some amount of organisation, and it would be one less interface based obstacle for new players. Knowing that, say, the manager is likely already present would probably be helpful for experienced players trying to give tips to people who are asking for help, too.

A significant amount of the discussion here seems to be about whether a hypothetical init setting should default to on or off - the default setting mainly being significant because many players (particularly new players) may not realize there is a setting at all. Perhaps this could be handled in a similar way to how DFHack does it: a popup on startup (which can easily be ignored) to say that an example init file will be used until you customize it to your satisfaction?

I was about to make a new thread when I came across the above mention of reverse-engineering, so it seemed sensible to post here instead.

At the moment, a fortress is only able to produce the seven 'native' weapons, and not any of the foreign ones. This makes sense from a perspective of giving different civs flavour (which might be more pronounced in the future when which weapons are native to a given civ is presumably going to be less constant) so I don't think it would make sense to remove the distinction. However, we have mercenaries of different races, who often turn out to be skilled in a weapon that we can't produce for them.
Given that we can make different sizes of armour and clothing to fit different species, it seems odd to not be able to arm them, and I think being able to reverse engineer the design from the weapons they bring with them balances the two features: you still get the flavour of mostly having (say) hammerdwarves, but if a pikeman turns up you can make much better use of him.