Bay 12 Games Forum

Nice summary of selected bits of the article with a little pseudo-logic to support your pre-existing belief.
Electricity is part of the universe and mankind has told stories of taming lightning for as far back as we have records and likely farther. Personally I doubt it would be implemented and wouldn't vote for it, but the physical modeling of the game seems to be about the parts that did exist and what we can do with them. The possibility that on experiencing a slight current someone could have looked for a use is far more interesting than anything else.
I believe it was Archemides who got sufficiently close to calculus that he only lacked algebra to make the leap. Hero of Alexandria made complex machinery and played with steam. Egyptians built giant d4s and the ancient celts (or their precursors) built a giant stone tourist attraction.
It's a world we live in where so many chances could have made our lives so different and our hopes and dreams and even our games exist in that area, both in support of and because of. If people want to speculate and compare and wonder... well, smarter people than you have investigated and written on the Baghdad Battery and smarter people than you have said the dream is more important than the fictions we create and call knowledge.

Just a brief write up...
How about the ability to export data aside from the map?
Fortress stats, population list (with skills and assignments), announcement logs, etc.
Besides being able to provide extra information that the game probably has but doesn't show (how many goblets you've made), you could load your population into a spreadsheet and sort people quickly to see who has what skill or labor.
The announcements thing was an idea I had long ago based on some ideas other people had. It would give bored Perl scripters a chance to try and automate a story out of it, even better if the logs were more detailed than the regular announcements (starts of romances, etc.). (Who's going to write up StarRavingMad's Al Swearagin style from Boatmurdered as a filter...)

I'm taking 16 credits of science, math and engineering this semester so I apologize if I'm repeating known issues.

On a Mac Mini (10.5.6 1.8ghz, 2Gb) with graphics (sphr with the flying mage font if anyone cares) in windowed mode.
I'd estimate this version is almost twice the speed I had with d12.
I haven't experienced any graphics issues in the hour or so it's been running so far. But I haven't tried any of the zoom type stuff (I'll wait until it zooms the map and leaves the menu as is.)

Problems I did have:
1. Trading defaults to F9, which conflicts with standard Mac keybindings.
2. the backspace key doesn't work when naming hotkeys, it puts up a symbol instead.
3. I turned on the pause on load and autosave but it pauses at everything. If I build a building it's in pause when I come out. If I check to see if my trader is finally coming, it pauses when I exit. A lot of the time I'm looking at a paused screen waiting not realizing that the game stopped.

I'd like to be able to place orders directly onto corpses in k-mode, the same way you can with forbid and melt. Send bones straight to the boltmakers. Order that heroic puppy that raised the alarm and saved the village to be buried. Return that poor dwarf who was raised by goblins to his ancestors. Make something useful of the mule that took a nap on a serrated metal blade trap. (Abattoir?) Tell them to put their clothes away!
On that note direct orders could have a number of uses. Make a door from this rock. Bring this dwarf some water. (Just had a recruit die of a training mishap involving a warhamer and a lung because in spite of a well and a pile of buckets everyone kept canceling bringing the guy something.)
Side-note: When the manager goes over work orders, have it reactivate orders the dwarves suspended (as opposed to the player).

As for the crop growing cycle, I've been tempted to see about modding all the crops so that they only grow during the summer just to make food management more of a challenge.

It also occurred to me, but to be fair the underground would need to be expanded since the climate stays fairly constant once you get more than a few meters down. Of course, that's based on what I've read about houses built into hills and mines. A cave system might be entirely different.
As far as food management... there are so many issues with the engine and strengths and weaknesses that I'm content to wait on the farming arc. It's simple enough to limit your farmers or shrink your fields or turn your legendary growers into soldiers or haulers.

It would be best for massive construction projects,...

Is there any other kind?

Engineering an Empire is a series about a dozen large empires most of which only barely reach the industrial era in their coverage. It discusses, in non-technical terms, the major works such as aqueducts going through mountains in ancient Greece, masterworks of irrigation in the Aztec empire, the Great Wall(s) of China, etc.
Given the large scale and nature of the projects it describes I started playing DF again. When I looked I discovered no one had mentioned this here and I thought that other players might like it.
As far as the "write [sic] sub-forum" I had hoped to find someone who had seen it and been similarly inspired and start a topic on actual megascale projects and what could be brought over to the game. But never mind.