Bay 12 Games Forum

Dwarves taking stuff they own makes sense - hopefully shops will make a return by the time this comes up. Also, they take their families, or send for them later. Morale could also be tied to this, with dwarves feeling bad if their friends leave (or good if their enemies do...), thus increasing the likelihood that more of them will head out. Dwarven sociability could be a factor in this - dwarves who like making new friends could get a happiness boost from new migrants arriving. Even just the likelihood of taking one's family increases the problems of letting dwarves have families, though, just like the problem of spouse/friend death does currently...most dwarves should be upset if they don't have a family or friends and seek them out.

Unfortunately, in 10 years some people will undoubtedly be saying "This game was better in 34.whatever!!"

Clearly you mean back when it was 2D.

The Sliding Scale of Difficulty:

Impressive. I especially like the point that dwarves at the "7 Sods In A Hole" stage should be hardworking and more tolerant of adverse conditions, with the lazier dwarves showing up later.

Barony Stage -

At around this point, you should also be able to start just plain zoning land for sale.  Dwarves would be able to buy their own land out of your hands, and set up their own homes (which they pay property taxes on instead of renting) and set up their own workshops (where they buy raw materials from the fort but own the finished product), and have the ability to sell those products back to the fortress or to any travelers. 

This may be too hard, though it would be appealing to zone levels 6-8 to a dwarf who loves natural beauty and find he's built a big, breakable window in the side of his cavern-top dining room. If that's the case, perhaps this could tie into interacting with hill-dwarves - you plan and command the fortress, but you can send nobles into the hills to dig as they like, and zone their lands via a map screen. Of course they'd demand apartments, offices and other space in the mountain home. In the fortress itself you could probably get a compromise by digging out the needed space and assigning a noble to run a burrow, at which point the noble is responsible for enticing a population.

IIRC, siege engines do fire in an arc - it's just triangle-shaped. On the other hand, does the command to "Fire at Will" result in siege operators actually firing at enemies, or do they just pound away? I think it's the latter, and if so changing that would make a lot of difference.

Really after all the "The stray foal/calf/etc has starved to death!" announcements I'd settle for the option to have all offspring of a pastured animal be assigned to that zone automatically.

Rubble could be taken to a stockpile with wheelbarrows, and then carted out with minecarts and dumped, but I can't see how that could be fully compatible with a semi-fluid rubble model. IDK, I guess it could work but just not the way I expected it might.

The thing is that they are pretty fantastic at turning crappy micromanagement into interesting macromanagement, like the Militia interface.

E.G, my current fort, built into the side of a huge mountain, has a garbage chute that could be adapted pretty easily for dumping rubble - I built a tube jutting out the mountainside until it's over the lowest z-level, with a looped minecart track inside rigged to dump the useless remains and unbutcherable corpses that would otherwise clutter up my refuse stockpile. It helps that dwarves can ignore outdoor refuse, of course - maybe if minecart stops come with the option to forbid dumped items in future?

While the chute depends on having a handy mountain, it's easy enough to build a big silo with the cart track winding up the outside - just tell your haulers to push their carts to the top and ride them back down again. When one fills up, build another. Alternately, fill the caverns.

That said, I was surprised how well the quick-fix of "25% less boulders, 400% products" turned out. Suddenly I'm building with blocks!

I have to say, I'd rather have rubble to deal with as well. Reading through Kohaku's suggestions already has me thinking, well, if I want a huge fortress without the overground turning into rubble, I could always build a huge fuck-off silo tower and dump it in there with all my goblin prisoners, or maybe stuff some of it into the caverns if I really want some magma right now... - but then again I've done a few Realism Challenges where I actually did pile up my stone, dig airshafts and sanitation and a few other things like that, so yeah.

I mean, setting up things like that and then watching my dorfs scurry around to make it happen is kind of the point of this game, whether it's designing the fortress interior or scheduling my militia or playing with magma. The additional infrastructure option is just more potential for fun.

The only real problem with making it an Init option is new players won't be able to turn it off without looking through a tutorial. Having an options menu that let you toggle that sort of thing - along with sieges, population cap and the other basic YES/NO stuff - would be great. But then you can't even play DF without the wiki, and that's likely to stay the case until the Interface Arc.

What I'd like to see is arches, even in a crude, stepped form, required to avoid cave-ins in large, open areas. Something to do with how much open space there is around a given ceiling-block, rather than the "one pillar per 7x7 square" or whatever it was that was in the old 2D version, so there's actual value in building big vaulted chambers.