Bay 12 Games Forum

Bolts and arrows with one-use tips and reusable shafts were in use since prehistorical times. The shafts are the most difficult to make, and the tips were broken or mangled after one use anyway.

Making arrows should be a task for the bowyer. Or better, the fletcher. He could make and collect arrow shafts, and attach arrowheads to them at the bowyer's workshop, made at the smithy by the weaponsmith, or by the stonecrafter from obsidian or silex in a pinch.

Underground rivers draining into bottomless pits/chasms instead of there own little 4x4 'circle' chasm, where applicable.

Hush, the HFS might hear you.

Anyway, they might have sensible origins too: a soil layer, or at most, a chalky layer. With ground water. Or alternatively, in the mountains where we don't see their source being black boxed out of nowhere.

I'd love to see urist playing the piano and all the other dwarves not taking breaks from the euphoria generated by that

Pah! Dwarves don't play elvish instruments like piano, violin and flute. Dwarves play metal, industrial and techno. Urist plays a drum solo, and the crowd goes headbanging wild!

When viewing a fortress, you can see one level and a bit of the second and third. That's cool if there's a lot of mist, but ordinarily you'd expect the deeper levels to be visible from eg. a mountain top. The lower levels could be displayed with appropriate darkening of the tiles to show their depth.

Additionally, instead of a horizontal cutoff, there could be an option for two vertical cutoff modes, for which the same darkening of tiles (or making them more cyan) might be applied to simulate squares further away.

Quote from: Silverionmox on January 22, 2009, 04:39:41 pm

Bankers aren't very dwarven for that matter, since they craft nothing, but just live of the skill of others.

Much like the Haulers that make up 70% of my forts.

And they get a wage to match - so should bankers then.

Bankers aren't very dwarven for that matter, since they craft nothing, but just live of the skill of others. Like mentioned above, a despised race could fill the role that dwarves despise, like jews in medieval Europe - although Lombards did it too. But that's for multi-racial fortresses.

Concerning the economy, the tax collector collects the money, and presumably the mayor hands it out according to need and/or ability. The player should be able to set for each product and job whether it is the business of the fortress leadership, private or both. That way you can control your resources, while still outsourcing the stuff you don't want to micromanage.

Instead of a banker I would therefore prefer a bartering system. The excess value would then translate into favour, so if Cog trades that exquisite GCS sock to Urist for six plump helmets, he can ask Urist for some more in the future, since he owes him one.
That could be hard for memory, because the game potentially has to keep track of dwarves² relations. But I think it's worth it to streamline trading.

Extending that would give a whole editor, with player-created towers of doom to be exchanged. [drool]

Variety is important though, for now only for morale, but later on for nutrition also.

It's the calories that you can get per surface unit that count, by the way, not the size. Mushrooms are mostly water.