Bay 12 Games Forum

This seems like an idea that would substantially improve the gameplay experience of Vanilla Dwarf Fortress for relatively little coding difficulty.

I spend disproportionate amounts of time marking things to buy off traders. At a certain point, I'd just like to be able to press a button and everything that they have brought gets marked, and I'll just take the cost hit of the useless items (or I can manually deselect things I don't want).

Obviously you could later make this more sophisticated, so that you could "mark all of this type": buy all the food, or all the weapons, or all the cloth bins, or all the toys, but that might make this idea too difficult to implement, and too tied into the way trading currently works (which I understand is a temporary system, and so Toady might be unwilling to invest any time at all into improving it).

I'm sure there are mods for this kind of thing, but it should be in vanilla as a priority, given how straightforward it would be to implement, and how much more pleasant it would make the game.

It also enriches the simulation: I can imagine a broker who was really concerned about the specifics of what was being bought or sold, but I can also imagine a broker who just took a general look over the items, said "yeah that's about right" and just paid up.

Apologies if this has been suggested before; I searched for this idea and didn't see anything.

Well, I'm not sure this would work, but you might be able to have a sorta slotted arrowhead design like so:
. = floor
X = wall
d = Door

XXX.....XXX
X.XX...XX.X
X..XX.XX..X
X...XdX...X
X.........X
XX.......XX
XXX.....XXX
X.XX...XX.X
X..XX.XX..X
X...XdX...X
X.........X
XX.......XX
XXX.....XXX
X.XX...XX.X
X..XX.XX..X
X...XdX...X
X.........X
XX.......XX
XXX.....XXX
X.XX...XX.X
X..XX.XX..X
X...XdX...X
X.........X
XX.......XX

etc


Now I don't know if this has been suggested before, but I was thinking about ways to make combat more interesting overall, but especially for the adventurer/arena mode combat player. This is basically a way of showing the player a bit of personality, rather than the usual approach of telling the player that these creatures have personality. Essentially, in much the same way as we have normal distributions for heights etc, we would have weighted distributions for combat styles. Under the current system, I can think of a few:
Dirty Fighter - uses gouges, pinches, has a preference for knives, backstabs, poison use etc
Show off/efficiency fighter - tries to finish every fight quickly by going for lethal hits (towards head usually), prefers weapons like the spear or sword
Psycho - will attempt to break every bone in your body and tear off limbs etc
Boxer - will use punches more than normal
Thrower - usually large or flying creatures that use the environment to kill their enemies
Defensive - usually heavily armoured, waits for the right moment to strike
Offensive - takes massive risks, is less armoured etc.

Those aren't concrete or anything, but that is the sort of thing you would have. Then somewhere in the raws, it would look like this:
[Offensive][Thrower][Psycho]
5:15:0.5

Indicating that about 5% of the pop will have offensive characteristics, 15% thrower characteristics and 0.5% psycho characteristics. Some could potentially have a mix of these, and some contradictory mixes would just cancel out, but overall I think this would add quite a bit of character to the game. I see the main problem being the combination of two things.

What do you guys think? Any ideas?

I realise that this is not within the scope of this project (as it involves feature implementation by Toady), but in terms of Dwarf Fortress Pathfinding in general, if there was some option for the user to paint a rough route from point A to point B, would this make Pathfinding faster? The "brush" would be several tiles large, to give the system some flexibility. The basic idea would be that there would be far fewer tiles to search through, and even some of the most sub-optimal routes would be acceptable for most players (since they painted them). If the route was sliced in half (say by some deadly magma), it would simply revert to the standard Pathfinding method. Another advantage of this method is that you don't have to calculate total distances with objects many z-levels above. The main disadvantage is of course the lack of automation to this and the fact that you'd still need a much better Pathfinder for situations not involving stockpiles and workshops (or other specific start/end points).

Now I'm sure I'm missing something obvious due to my total lack of competence in this area, but I just thought that it might be worth thinking about (if it hasn't already been thought of).

I suppose the difficulty lies in how hostile your area is, because you can't really build defences. So if you have to carefully maneuver your workshops and dwarves around the scary zombie lions or whatever, it would be an even more fun challenge.

Thinking about it, now kinda like my idea of a screw that goes down to form a stair. In fact, a screw that goes up is also pretty cool and dwarvenly to boot. I'm just going to imagine that that is how dwarves build stairs from now on.

I use ascii because it is both readable, clear and involves the imagination, but I can see that it is not the best solution. The types of tilesets we have at the moment are also not the best solution. I believe there is a third way: symbols. Essentially, each type of object has a clear symbol (these would be very simple, easy to read at current zoom-level and probably single colour representations). The tiles could be coloured depending on the material/individual object, much in the same way as they are now. In order to do this you really do need to separate interface text from graphics. The possibility to overlay one thing on top of another would also help significantly. I think symbols are the best compromise between ease of production, readability, cleanness, aesthetic quality and modability.