Bay 12 Games Forum

Brewing, milling, processing, or eating raw gives back two seeds (IIRC), regardless of the plant.

It seems to give back 1 seed per plant. So a stack of 1 plump helmet gives 1 seed, whereas a stack of 5 gives 5 seeds.


But I generally don't have my staple crop be brewed. Thats the fallback option for food, when I run out of dog tallow roasts.

I know we've had a lot of threads about digging enemies, but one thing I haven't seen mentioned is requiring that the fort always have a path to it. Even outside of siege situations this could be somewhat important.

A dwarf that is trapped underground with no path to the surface is essentially buried alive. Even if he has a masterwork adamantine barrel of amontillado, he's still buried alive.

This should produce some seriously unhappy thoughts, and they should stack, such that if too many attempts to reach the surface have failed the dwarf will go insane.

Perhaps every time the dwarf goes on break he checks to see if he can escape the fort. He doesn't actually have to go outside, he just checks to see if he can reach the edge of the map. If he cannot, he gets a severe negative thought about being trapped, cut off from the outside world, or so forth. This would be enough to make a content dwarf be unhappy.

Then the next time he goes on break, he checks if he can escape. If that check also fails, he gets another equally serious unhappy thought. I'm thinking after 3 of these, the average dwarf will go insane. Maybe 4 failed checks for ecstatic dwarves.

This would mean that a siege that forces the player to bottle up their fort and seal it off from the ouside world cannot simply be ignored forever. A siege will stick around for a very long time, just camping outside. If the player attempts to wait out the siege until they get bored and leave, they could very well have a bunch of dwarves that go insane from being sealed inside the fortress.

Also the reason for checking for a path to the edge of the map every time the dwarf goes on break is both to save CPU cycles, and to give the player a little time to reopen the fort, so if you need to block off a siege until your military can grab their gear, its okay, but you can't wait for years underground.

Historically sieges often lasted for years, but the conditions for the besieged were utterly horrendous. Disease and starvation were common, eventually weakening the defenders so much that they simply surrendered. Assaults against castle or city walls were quite rare. However, as a single plump helmet farm can feel a 200 dwarf fort just fine for all eternity, because there is no disease in game, and because its trivial to feed them booze or pipe water underground, there is no reason for dwarves to come up for air.

There should be! Air shafts would be an interesting requirement, as would allowing creatures to climb down the air shafts, but thats a helluva lot more complicated than just adding in a new negative thought.

This would sort of simulate the general nastiness of being under sieges for months or years, and if the siege is not lifted somehow or other, the fortress will eventually be driven completely insane, ending in an orgy of murderous trantrums and dorfs flinging themselves into the chasm.


Also, using this you could rig up an insane asylum. Purposefully trap dwarves in rooms until they go insane, then build an arena and unleash them on each other or against caged opponents. 

I'm pretty sure the most common visitor to the arenas would be nobles. 

I think Access flows outward from the Depot not inward as the caravan itself would move.

Yup.

And the wagon appears wherever the green touches the end of the map (or not at all if the edge of the map isn't accessible). With clever manipulation of the terrain you can force the wagons to always take a single path to your depot.

Wagons cannot go over stairs however. If you want wagons to change elevations you need to use ramps.

In Evil Genius, invaders only teleported if parts of your base were completely inaccessible. Behind a locked door was still accessible because they could pick locks, but I'm talking about rooms or parts of rooms that cannot be reached by walking or lockpicking.



But I do think tunneling units would be horrible for DF.

Why?

After a few sieges the embark area will be swiss cheese. There will be tunnels everywhere, which means that even if you rebuild the walls you can't engrave the walls, and it would make building underground forts useless. Towers would be far more defensible than a city built under a volcano, and that just isn't right.

Why spend all the time and effort building an elaborate underground mountain hall when siegers can simply move right through solid rock?

Make big farm plots. Probably at least 8x8 in size, and one for each crop. Have these farm plots grow their assigned crop year round (or at least as often as you can).

The trick is to select a staple crop. This is the crop that is your generic food. It may be bland, but its extremely plentiful, so while they may complain about the food at least they won't starve. This staple crop is usually plump helmets.

Create a 5x5 stockpile for plump helmets only. Disable plump helmets in all other food stockpiles. Don't cook the seeds either. While your farmers will continue to produce food even once that stockpile is full, the extra crops will just rot in the fields, which mean they won't use up all of your barrels, so that means more booze.

You'll also want to get a well started. You need a bucket, a rope, a mechanism, and a block, which is all pretty easy to make. Though do upgrade the well to higher quality parts later on since it can give dorfs happy thoughts from using it.

With the well, while they'll still prefer to drink booze, at least they have a fallback plan if the booze temporarily runs out.

For a large, 100 dorf fort I'll generally have just a single still brewing on repeat. Its not quite enough to booze up all of the dwarves, but thats okay. They drink water about every third drink they take, so they still have enough booze to keep them moving quickly while also keeping the barrels moving through circulation. There's no point in creating tens of thousands of barrels of booze if its just going to sit in some food stockpile forever. Wasted barrels! Same for food stockpiles, which is why I severely limit the stockpile size for the crops I grow.

This can sustain a fort forever. Be sure to buy up the food from various caravans, or occasionally butcher animals or collect plants for variety though. Eventually they'll get bored of plump helmets and have unhappy thoughts from eating them, so a little variety helps out.

Try setting them to be adopted as pets.

I have some dwarves running around with pet cockroaches and spiders. 

I use this exact same kind of structure myself, though its for the purposes of collecting bones rather than meat and hides. I have several butcher and tanner workshops but they're simply not used. Rather than have an isolated breeding chamber I just periodically toss puppies into the pit from above. The bottom of the pit is a room zoned as a refuse dump so the remains don't have to be moved around. There is full access to the workshops, top, and bottom of the pit at all times.

The corpses just rot.