Bay 12 Games Forum

Several things:


1)

Quote from: Orkel on March 28, 2011, 01:03:33 pm

Vanilla DF, silver warhammers are the deadliest against humanoids as proven by testing (says on the DF wiki).

That, of course, if they're unnarmored.

No, that was if they ARE armored. Unarmored the axes were better.

2) I haven't done any testing myself, but, from reading the weapon testing thread, and the wiki pages regarding weapons & armor, it appears to me that the test was biased. Adamantium armor is pretty terrible at stopping blunt force:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=53571.0

My conclusions from that data (which may be outdated... I think it says its from at least 31.12), as well as from various posts about how quickly things kill:

 - Vs foes wearing armor of a material which is lower in the chain than your weapon (e.g., bronze armor vs iron weapon, iron armor vs steel weapon), any of the weapons are reasonable. For quick kills vs unarmored foes, swords or axes are best.

 - If you have steel weaponry, I'd suggest steel axes and silver warhammers (or steel if no silver available). Depending on what you face, send the axes against less armored foes, hammers against more armored foes. I'd probably toss in some spearmen or marksdwarves for fun. Probably spearmen, as I've heard of lots of problems with marksdwarves right now.

 - With less than steel, it appears that spears & hammers are probably the way to go. (From the above post, it appears spears of less than steel quality hit far more often than other slash/pierce weapons of less than steel quality). Spears vs the less armored foes, hammers against the more armored foes.



EDIT: and looking at that post again, it looks like steel swords are better than steel axes... hmm. I'll have to run some tests at some point.

If you aren't building stone megaprojects i suggest reducing caverns height. 5-10 z-levels caverns still look good and 30-50 levels to magma sea is usually enough, extra unused levels just slow down both dwarf movement and fps.

Yeah, that would be nice. I'll do that on my next fort.

Its a little confusing about caverns... it appears that with a 4x4 embark area, I get either 3 or 6 separate caverns?

I do want the extra creatures/challenges from caverns, but don't like having only a couple z-levels of solid rock between the 3...

I guess I'll go play with custom settings next time I start a new fort, and maybe make 3 very short caverns instead of 3 5-z-level caverns, which appears to be the default.

But yeah basically I want to be able to have fully cave-adapted dwarves living underground. Underground farming, tree farming, animals to slaughter for food/leather until I get up a breeding industry (if I ever do, now that grazing or something is needed?).

Hopefully caravans won't get attacked above-ground....

Hmm so my dwarves all died of thirst... guess they didn't want to walk all the way back up to the wagons to get a drink? (I had over 100 beverages left)

In terms of magma splashback, is the splashed back magma going to form obsidian and block my drain? Or do you mean just make sure that, e.g., I don't have a waterfall that drops straight down to magma, because magma will come back up and fry dwarves standing on the grate? (Drain down a bit, then put a square of horizontal digging, then down to sea?)

Oh I've been carving out ramps so that wagons can get down from trade caravans...

Also, I read a long while ago that dwarves tend to have accidents on up/down stairs, sometimes falling all the way down. So I didn't want to make a 140z-level shaft of just up/down stairs, since that would kill any dwarf who fell... Are the dwarves no longer prone to accidents on up/down stairs?

Right then, to the depths!

I'm not sure what I'm missing... I've got a jeweler's workshop set up next to a gem stockpile. I've got 3 rough blue jades in the stockpile.
I have a dwarf with gem cutting enabled.

When I go to the workshop and try to add a new task, I get the menu with 'cut gems' and 'encrust gems', but pressing 'c' for cut does nothing. (Same with encrust, but I don't have any cut gems I could encrust with, so thats as expected.)

Am I missing something?

EDIT: Using the job manager I was able to add the jobs, and they show up in the workshop. But going through the workshop interface didn't work.

Quote from: Xenos on January 10, 2011, 06:12:06 pm

Quote from: Urist Imiknorris on January 10, 2011, 06:02:58 pm

Try dwarven syrup for filler.

How many units of syrup are gained per unit of plant?  I know with quarcain that you get 5 leaves per plant.  When you can easily get stacks of 5 plants and even stacks of 8 (possibly more, im  not sure what the cap is) that gives stacks of 25-40+ leaves.  The only filler i know of that will exceed this is meat butchered from large animals.  Forgotten beasts, elephants and the like.  (if you like modding elephants to leave a pile of 1k+ meat as a baby, as I do, you get super happy meals)

Dwarven syrup is pretty stupid. You get 5 units per plant, like with leaves, yet the value is 20 or 25 per unit, like sugar/flour. This makes it something like 4-6 times as valuable as any other plant in the game.

That's because its liquid dwarf-crack.

Hmm, well, I think I'll hold off a while longer.

My main interest is military (and balancing that with all the non-military stuff, but I want to support a large, effective military that can run around killing things). I mean, I guess I could have some fun, but probably not nearly as much as I'll have once more bugs are fixed, so I'll just wait it out.

Thanks for all the responses!