Bay 12 Games Forum

My biggest hope for the caravan arc is to see the various racial caravans double up, if there is more than one civ of a given race.

Right now, even if there are seven elven civs, only one of them sends caravans to your fortress.

Traders that actually try to cover their overhead and transport costs would be both realistic, and more fun, especially with this, as developing good relations with multiple buyers would actually be worthwhile. There's little reason to toady to the elves, if you can sell to the humans.

Having two human caravans competing for your skull totems every year, with the nearer city having the decided advantage of lower costs, would be great.

My Grandfather used to say that when he was in Africa, he and some of the guys from his infantry unit bought some hard boiled eggs. Only, when they opened them up to eat them, they found boiled baby chicks in them.

Turns out, the local nomads liked them better that way.

Really, is it any more gross than the way we do it, if you stop to think about it?

Also, head cheese, pork rinds and pickled pigs feet. We need some pig pens in DF.

There are no hours.

Day and night have no meaning for us.

You sleep when you're tired, and you eat when you're hungry.

If you aren't fighting or working, you need to be partying.

Honestly, I'm not sure whether a proper day cycle would improve this game or simply cause mass starvation and chaos.

Having the current date, in addition to the FPS and idlers, or whatever you're running in the corners, would be a nice option, but I can see how some would want to be able to turn it off.

I'd like to see dwarves sensing nearby veins of metal ore, through the local magnetic declination or something, with a longer range as the dwarf get's better at it, but I don't know how that would apply to gems.

I'd be nice if this came in the form of adding more of those little gray marks in the black area, instead of giving you specific information.

"Ooh, a % appeared on the other side of the wall from my geologist. I think I'll dig in there, and see what's what."

Keep the range short to start, as exploratory mining is fun in it's own way, even if it is horrifically destructive, and leveling it up has to be rewarding.

Maybe, give dwarves a tiny compass in their nose, that points them toward the nearest magnetite, so they lose this ability if their nose get's broken.

Gems are a bad example. They don't even follow the current quality levels system. You either turn out a masterwork, or you create a bunch of smaller gems, of undefined quantity. Whether gem cutting needs quality levels is another debate altogether (It makes simulation sense, but it tends to throw the economy all out of whack).

There are two questions being debated here.

First: Should the current quality level system have a quality level so low, it is completely useless? --or even yields no object at all? It's the same thing really, except the latter takes less hauling.

No quality level items are usable products that typically net you 10 or twenty points. Fine goods are worth twice that, etc.

It is theoretically possible, however unlikely, that a dwarf could produce an item that is actually unusable, or a mug with a crack down the side (Dwarves do not have glue. Yet.). Exactly how often this might/should happen is buried under so many layers of raw material abstraction that nobody can actually saw how likely it is.

Modeling this in-game, instead of leaving it under the abstraction could have serious repercussions for certain styles of play, especially those involving a group of accountants lost in the tundra. The will of Toady be done.

This brings us to the second issue, that has crept in: Should an accountant, lost in the tundra, and forced to build a shelter from ice cubes, eventually gain enough construction skills to build elaborate bridges from ice?

Where did he learn the formulas necessary? Did he invent trigonometry while he was out there? What level of statistical math does a dwarven accountant have at his disposal?

This has less to do with the skills and talents of the dwarf in question being deficient, than the local level of technological advancement (zero, effectively) being insufficient to support his growth.

To remedy this, I would recommend tracking the technological level of the fort, relative to each skill. The arts and sciences we all know and love grew to maturity over many hundreds of years, and it isn't completely unreasonable to think, that our dwarves would need to stand on the shoulders of giants.

For memory and personal tastes a [TECHNOLOGY_OFF] tag is probably a prerequisite.

Start with a trained dwarf, and you get the technological level of your parent civ. Every time a dwarf gains a skill level, the civ gains a few experience points toward the next technology level of the same skill.

--Or, just add the ability to have dwarves hammered/imprisoned for incompetence or negligence, at the player's whim.

It wouldn't do anything positive to the fortress, but it would make me feel better, when my broker decides that storing his new sock is more important than buying wood, and all the immigrants have to go without beds.

Tent cities for nomads would be cool, but I think elven architecture is intended to be a bit more impressive than all that.

Yes, elves are ignorant, self-righteous and rude, but that's no reason that killing them for it can't be an interesting challenge. Drowning chambers are all well and good for merchants and ambushers, but sacking the elven capitol should be a bit more dramatic than knocking over some tents.

*Doink*

*plop*

"The city is destroyed! Elves suck!"

Plus, elf city, might be a fun variant to change things up. Not being able to mine and smith properly or cut trees normally and having to woo the wood out of the trees, or whatever it is elves do, contrasted with being able to make trees grow wherever you want and being able to build cities upwards on tree platforms and whatnot would be a very cool change of pace. It's not a short term suggestion by any means, but full of possibility.

Possessions are supposed to be worse than fey moods. They come from unhappy dwarves. Most of the magic you would get out of one would probably be really bad, like the weeps the blood of martyred virgins and screams loudly all night bad. --possibly even kills you for touching it bad. The actually useful magic artifact would be rare and precious and probably come with side effects.

Hello, axe of unending rage. You are my only friend. The others don't understand us. They want to take you away.
--but we won't let them will we. No. We won't let them.

I can buy a sword so well crafted that it's indestructible, impossibly sharp, and perfectly balanced, beyond mortal ability. Maybe even so well crafted that it acquires mystical powers of general magic resistance and evil smiting like Narsil or the Master Sword.

I can't buy a shoe so well crafted that it can make you levitate, or it has floating orbs that rotate around it. That is the kind of stuff you get out of wizards, not dwarves.

The dwarven evoker doesn't sit particularly well with me; magic words and fireballs aren't really earthy enough. --but if there's a flying shoe, a wizard or some sort was clearly involved somewhere, and I'd like him to step out from behind the curtain. Runes are kind of dwarfy.

I could buy the floating shoe guy carving runes on bins, to make them lighter. It's not a game breaking power or anything, but it keeps the wizard where I can see him.

If he can arrange the threads in a cloth shoe so perfectly, that it generates an anti-gravity field from background magic, he should gain enough insight into how the flow works, to create a larger, clunkier, less effective version of the same array, and scratch it into a crate.