Bay 12 Games Forum

Give everyone chests, cabinets, armour racks etc in their room, then apply free time. They should sort it out for you.

This would functionally replicate the situation talked about in the blog a page or so ago - forest dwellers with plenty of fruit on hand all year have no reason to organize or advance their technology.

That smacks of geographic determinism, the whole idea that jungle cultures failed because it was too hot to think. We've moved past that now. A correlation not causation issue.

The real problem with the tropics (off the top of my head) is really resource scarcity for more advanced technology. There isn't the available surface metals that there were farther north, which I think Jared diamond in guns germs and steel did cover.

Your notes about elvish modes of tree-attack indicate that you can see many avenues for the advancement of technology. Agro-tech to prune, splice, cross-breed, clone; otherwise increase yield, reduce spoilage (refrigeration, even passive evaporation based) can go hand-in-hand with militaristic applications.

If, as you posit, the fruit would cause territoriality (I think we're familiar with the elves possessiveness of the forest), the force behind military technology is certainly present.

On the subject of powerful beings:

Demons and Devils are probably safe to assume are evil powermongers. What about the other forgotten beasts that end up taking important positions in Human Civs? Are they necessarily an evil influence on the civ? Are we going to see benign Lizard monsters and the like? How do you see these creatures ultimately influencing how the human civs act?

How about Are there non-violent/evil ways for an entity to assume/use control? I could see anything with spheres eventually having desires that are best implemented at the nation level, so I'm sure we'll get there later.

does bridge flinging them empty them?

as I recall, desalinated water falling through a salt aquifer layer (even if not touching anything) would become salty again. That might add to the weirdness.

Compare the suggestions for farming to the military changes from 40d to .31. Unwieldy at first, but rewarding because of the level of control you get. We adapted to that. More complex farming can work as long as there is enough automation to make it possible to set it up and forget it, but to have more control if you so desire. (and by that, I mean automatic production of fertilizer, crop rotation, planting schedules, etc. Everything. Unless something out of the ordinary happens, it should be able to run itself.)

I'm glad you bring this up. I like the new military's flexibility, power, and control, and really the interface for it is no harder than the rest of DF.

Farming is too simple, and it does need to be harder. Building a fortress is partly about feeding a fortress, and it should require thought, planning, and skill to set up. This is the basic challenge of DF.

Hopefully for the non farmers, it will eventually be possible to use your military to feed your fortress: pillage and demand tribute. Then they'll never need to farm.

In case anyone is actually wondering: Yes, that's a fake.

It's not badly made, though. It should be something like that.

Including the two-step and make sandwich commands?

Quote from: Arihim on August 10, 2010, 05:47:17 am

About the ponds: probably just a marshy area. If this is the normal then that's not very realistic I think.
 

I get murky pools in scortching deserts, that can't contain water for more than a couple minutes before going dry, and they're STILL about 4 of them on a 4x4 desert embark.   How do those things even exist before your dwarves get there?  They evaporate faster than rain can fill them.

Well, dried ponds and riverbeds shouldn't be nonexistant in deserts, actually pretty common. We could re-name them appropriately though, with murky pools [dry lakes] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_lake) becoming playa, sabkha, alkali flats (what would _you_ do with an easy source of nitrates and lithium?); dry rivers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadi) being wadi, etc.

Ephemeral rains, flash floods, canyons, there is lots of room for water features in the desert.


Although I do agree: in non-marshy lands pools should be larger and less frequent. DF soils are basically all infinite drainage on the surface and aquitards below the surface.

Seeps and artesian wells moving through permeable strata for the win.
[note: this post added about 4 new words to the autocorrect dictionary. Another use for DF found.]

Could be solved easily enough if we could build cisterns that collect rainwater the way that murky pools do.

All constructed flooring should be impermeable and collect water. Then we'd have to consider drainage in above ground forts, and a working surface storm sewer would be the logical outcome. If you had permeable and tracked soil water flows, subsurface storm sewers for de-watering would also be useful.