Bay 12 Games Forum

Another small suggestion: Make animals not stand on top of their owners when the owners are working.

I see your brilliance shining through too, you know. Don't exactly think things through, do you?

I like Name Lips' idea. You can (emphasis on CAN) bring items towards the workshop, and those items at the workshop already will be prioritized since they're the closest. You'd just have to make sure they don't automatically get hauling jobs back to the nearest stockpile again.

I am against such an implementation. What would become of my elaborate trap system built to take advantage of the AI? Those spike traps don't fill themselves with corpses, you know.

Well, it was the first time I tried adventure mode. I was primed and ready to go out on epic quests for helpless villages, and destroy entire keeps of goblins, single-handedly. Sadly, I was disappointed. Then, upon wiping out the majority of a cave's population of troglydytes and named ettins, and for all intents and purposes, destroyed a goblin keep, I found myself with absolutely nothing else to do. That is in stark contrast to my Fortress experience, where I could always come up with crazier engineering projects. In adventure mode I can only wipe out so much, and then I become a legendary swordelf and can't find much else to do. Here are my ideas for fleshing out Adventure Mode:

1) Have people actually wear/carry things worth killing them for. As an adventurer, you can occasionally buy jewelry to wear. But you also happen to be the only one who wears jewelry. I'd like to see it so that everyone who can afford it has at least a little bit of jewelry, or other personal effects, whether at their house or on their person. Other suggestions would be bags of coins, bags of seeds, etc...

2) Make houses worth robbing. Right now, robbing a house gives you a fine bounty of a barrel and some meat. I'd like to rob a house for some actual money, if you don't mind. This will probably be implemented in the Town Arc, but I felt the need to get it out there.

3) Have more house variety. My vision would be a bunch of possible 'room configurations', and then 'furniture configurations'. There would be base 'room configuration' modules, e.g. a plain 3x3 room, 3x4, 4x4, L-shaped 2x2/4x2, etc... And then furniture configurations, such as having a cabinet next to a bed, or the cabinet on the opposite side of the room, etc... You could have a bunch of room configurations put together to have multi-room houses. That was probably very confusing, and I suggest that you forget it promptly lest you lose your menta faculties wondering on it.

4) More loot. Sure, I find it realistic that a cave won't have random chests of loot laying around. But when there is a kobold settlement there, I expect at least some loot. And sure, I don't expect a peasant's house to have much more than the basic necessities of life. But I do expect the royal palace to have at least furniture worth stealing. The only way to settle my treasure crave is apparently to break into my own fortress. But that requires a lot of planning, as far as puzzling traps that I have to do in order for me to get my kicks, as well as having to produce the treasure itself. I'd like to raid a goblin fortress and actually find a stockpile of gems, weapons, or bone totems, what-have-you.

I'm sort of curious, what exactly does the 'lose' screen look like? I always abandon my fortress right before losing, then go 'damnit, I just remembered I wanted to go see the 'you lost' screen'.

Anyways, I love DF since everything else is so easy, I can concentrate on making what I want to make. Make a bunch of plump helmet fields, and cook dwarven wine roasts all day and night gives me more spare time to say, design that herb-garden-lit-by-skylight-that-doubles-as-statue-garden-and-execution-chamber. It's sort of like art. Doing art is easy - you draw lines, you make coherent figures. However, making art is the hard part, the part that everyone looks for. You take that inspiration, and you turn it into reality in DF. If that dream may be surviving relentless herds of zombie elephants? Then so be it. If that dream is creating a floating fortress 3 or 4 z-levels above the ground? So be it. You can't say that you lack a challenge, because DF isn't about overcoming challenges, whether set by yourself or by the environment. It's about turning your confounded dreams into reality.

Or perhaps training dummies. That aren't alive. And don't the word 'goblin' in their name. They'd give relatively very little expierience, but are completely risk-free.

Then, once you think your recruits have progressed enough, set them to sparring. The higher their weapons skill, the lower chance they should have to hurt eachother (a sword master would never allow his sword to touch a fellow soldier, but a dabbling sword user might not have that sort of ability to... stop his sword short of their partner's head.)

Dwarves will eat just a little bit earlier or later if they see someone eating before or after they do. It's like synchronized fireflies (saw a discovery channel documentary on them). Each firefly watches the a few other firefly's blinks, and slightly tunes the timing of their flash to those ones. Slowly but surely, eventually all of the fireflies are synchronized, and they all flash in unison. It kind of doesn't make sense for all of the dwarves to eat at random times: dwarves should want to eat together. The same could go for sleeping.

Dwarves should use their social abilities far more. While they're on break, while they're eating in a meeting hall, when passing eachother by, etc... This would help to improve the social skill of all your dwarves and keep dwarves just a little bit happier.

Dwarves should go and do something during their break, rather than stand around. They could sit in a dining hall, or in an office, reading the Daily Dwarf, or Dwarf Today. They could actively seek out nice-looking/pleasurable things. They should at least talk to eachother a bit more.

Finally, dwarves should utilize rooms more. A couple getting married? All the friends of those dwarves will sit in the meeting hall, and watch the couple get married. Dwarves could set up plays, play in orchestras (yes, I know I'm getting a little bit carried away here), or hold funerals in mausoleums. It would dwarfanize (humanize) the dwarves, and make social events much more important parts of your fortress. Of course toggling would be nice , e.g. [dwarves are borgs: YES/NO]