Bay 12 Games Forum

On a semi-serious note, I have actually seen tallow soap as a requested trade good at 200%, regrettably on a map without any sand.

A little molten rock I can handle. But several tens of thousand tons of it, full of fire imps and magma men and Armok knows what else? Nope, you can keep that; I'll take my chances with those whining pointy-eared hippies, thank you very much.

Why not have any items designated for melting that are a necessary ingredient for an alloy be used directly without being melted down first?

- There is always a reasonable number of spare beds in the barracks in case someone gets evicted.

- There is always a year-round source of potable water for the wounded and anyone thrown in jail.

- All prison cells cells are tolerably comfortable, with a bed and an engraving on the wall so the prisoners at least have something to look at. Also, anyone sentenced to eight hammer strikes for any crime less than murder gets a full set of plate mail.

- Dwarves are buried with honour, their mortal remains conveyed to a secure location safe from scavengers until such time as a coffin can be provided.

- When my dwarves are struck by strange moods, regardless of their usefulness, every effort is made to accommodate them. My miners will be ordered to tear the mountain apart looking for gems, and if the merchants won't barter an anvil for all the goods in the warehouse then I'll pay them in not kneecapping them with a crossbow.

- The above situation or when the fortress is facing a serious, immediate threat of starvation are the only times at which I will even consider robbing merchants.

- No civilian is ever left to the mercy of a goblin invasion. If they're between him and all the side entrances, the lever to drop the main gate is not pulled until he's inside of it or has been cut down.

- Traps are kept to a minimum, and cage traps never used at all; goblin warriors are permitted the honourable deaths in battle that they so crave... inasmuch as them all charging along my signature marksdwarf gauntlet towards a last-ditch line of weapon traps and getting mown down counts as a proper battle.

- Kobold thieves disturbed by a civilian before they grab fortress property are left to run for it. Fortress property does not include any bits of goblin armour and other battlefield debris the dwarves haven't got around to doing anything about yet.

I've tended towards a bit of a middle way between the two camps. I usually dig a long entrance tunnel and carve fortifications on either side and between the doors at the very end, with one row of traps just inside the tunnel mouth to soften them up and another right before the doors as a last-ditch defence. The trade depot generally gets its own separate tunnel close to the finished goods stockpile with a single row of traps as a deterrent, or even stays up on the surface; my fortresses are always set up with an eye towards self-sufficiency in the essentials so it's generally not a catastrophe if the goblins trash it. Both tunnels can be sealed off by rows of floodgates, so I can position my marksdwarves at my leisure and either wait for the goblins to get bored and wander off (my preferred option if practical, as the others tend to make rather a mess), send my small squad of intensively-trained and well-armoured melee fighters out of a side door to flank them or raise the gate in apparent surrender and let the poor gullible sods wander into a shooting gallery; a gauntlet of twenty-odd crossbows on either side of a tunnel that's only wide enough for four creatures to march abreast would give even a megabeast some trouble, and even if it survived to the very end and booted in the door, every able-bodied dwarf in the fortress would be waiting to scrag it.

Sorry; I still get the init and raw files mixed up. And as far as the tantrum/berserk thing goes, it'd be nice if there was a middle grade of tantrum where a dwarf just hauled off and punched someone but stopped short of inflicting lethal harm, but I'm not sure if that's possible without some fairly drastic adjustment of the AI code.

While we're on the subject of dwarven law enforcement, how about adding theft and robbery to the list of potential crimes?

Is anyone else tired of mopping up after their fortress reenacts the Rodney King riots when a dwarf gets shot and killed for simple vandalism? Here's a couple of ideas I'd like to prevent for curbing this phenomenon:

1. Making the probability of stunning and/or rendering unconscious a variable in the init files, making it possible to arm the fortress guard with low-damage weapons that still have a high probability of knocking a dwarf out.

2. Changing the way the fortress and Royal Guard react to tantrumming dwarves, maybe by generating an 'arrest miscreant' job that works a bit like recover wounded whereby they have to grab the dwarf in question and drag them to the cells.

3. Adjusting tantrums and berserk rages so that merely tantrumming only causes dwarves to break stuff rather than attack other dwarves or animals. Ideally the death of a berserk dwarf should also generate a somewhat smaller unhappy thought than someone dying in a cave-in or goblin ambush.

So, thoughts?

I'd happily settle for the ability to manually select the subject to engrave from fairly broad categories like 'Fortress History', 'Mythology', 'Nature' etc. A system for doing notable fortress events in chronological order would also be nice, particularly if it could be set to automatically update; imagine having the election of each new mayor, the creation of each new artefact, every siege recorded on the walls of the Great Hall or the mausoleum as they take place.