Bay 12 Games Forum

And when are tags being brought out into personality traits? I don't think we're doing away with all personality traits in this upcoming release. So what, something like this should wait 5 years until personality traits actually do something?

It would not be a difficult process to convert this over to personality traits anyway, and it has to be done with other tags as well so it's hardly a huge step backward. It's like 1/2 step back and 3 steps forward

But shouldn't chainmail be better at stopping melee combat attacks?

I'm betting chainmail could stop a knife better then a shirt, or even body armor (ones without plates at least)

Coins are generally made with cold metal 'blanks' being stamped with a die.

And how do you get these cold metal blanks? I'm betting they don't just pop out of the ore like that


To my knowledge you melt down the ore and fill sheets to create the blanks. Let them cool and then press into them with a stamp.

Now granted, we have awesome machines that do that now, it was probably harder to mint coins cold back in the day...

Edit: From wiki

The preparation of the flan or planchet has varied over the years. In ancient times, the flan was heated before striking because the metal that the coin dies were made out of was not as hard as dies today, and the dies would have worn faster and broken sooner had the flan not been heated to a high temperature to soften it.

You know what would make the game MORE deep? More z-levels


Pointless redundancy != depth

Needless complexity != depth

Complexity that actually adds to and improves gameplay = deep

So to clarify, you are suggesting that while personality traits lead to generic torture and satisfaction, [SADISTIC] leads to specific behaviors, that may even be independent of satisfaction?

Yes. The creatures this is intended for do not have intelligence, personalities, or morale, so things like "good thoughts/bad thoughts" or "interests" or "personality" doesn't really apply to them in the current build.

Well, if gold & silver crafting is absorbed into jewlery, then you wouldn't need heat for it.

Obviously silver weapons and coins would still need to be forged, but gold/silver crafting would take place at the jewelery so there already is a "no heat" option.

And I think before this could be addressed, how jobs are selected would need to be fixed.

As I type this, I watch a dwarf go clear across the map to bring back a stone for a masonry job. It's comical because I've got a 1-square stone stockpile right in front of him. So he's sitting in the craft shop and decides "I need a stone."

He has to somehow step past the 100+ stones right in front of him to go on a month long journey across the map to pick up a random stone on the ground.

/sigh.

Sometimes I wonder if dwarves just shouldn't be allowed to pick their own material, period. It might make things a hassle, but it also might make things FAR easier. Using the standard material selection screen would mean that every job you queue up could use either the exact material you want or the closest material (if you just enter - enter). Then perhaps a toggle to indicate whehter you want to use a "wheelbarrow" (or as I call it, a mobile bin) to speed things up...

but I digress...

As a whole, I think skill specialization is the wrong way to address skills at this moment in time. With everything around skills being broken (resource gathering, XP gains, quality having little in-game impact outside of combat etc.) that skills at the moment aren't broken, in fact except for some highly redundant skills (lye making...) skills are one of the more solid systems...

but IF people really are clamoring, what about a Generalized/Specialized system.

I.e. you can generalize to a point (I picked Professional Level, makes sense as a good breaking point) and then after that dwarves will automatically specialize themselves (based on items made and possibly own personality/interests?) to go beyond professional into legendary.

So skills from dabbling -> professional would remain unchanged. Once a dwarf gets enough XP to go up to the next rank though, the game would quick calc out what specialization they should go into and bam. Your Professional Carpenter just became an Adept Barrelmaker (to avoid people having to study up on terms, we'll just call them X-maker (bed-maker, cabinet maker).

You can always customize the name to be Cooper or Joiner or Framer as you wish, but for those of us who didn't go to woodworking school, just calling it X-maker makes it far more user friendly).

So, for most of us it won't make much of a difference. If you need a bed made and don't really care about quality, your Legendary Barrelmaker will do a decent job. Just don't expect any masterwork pieces out of him.

However, for items that quality IS important to you (statues, thrones, armor & weapons) you'll want to get your specialist out.

This way it has a noticeable impact on the game (i.e. legendary smiths are specialized) but the penalty isn't too steep. It ups the difficulty slightly (i.e. you'll need multiple armorsmiths to make a complete set of masterwork armor, and gives you that nice dose of realism that you crave.

To balance the difficulty a bit though, specialists would receive slightly higher chances of getting exceptional/masterwork items in their chosen craft.

I'm not saying this is the best system ever, but I think this system has a bit more merit because there are actual pros & cons to it.

One thing that it doesn't cover is cross-materials. For those people arguing that a gold ring is different from an iron ring which is different from a pewter ring...this doesn't cover that, but for those of you saying that a guy who becomes a legendary carpenter from making barrels shouldn't turn around and suddenly make a masterwork bed, this will have it covered.

Finally, this won't add any jobs to the queue, and the simple naming convention would make it easy. Colors wouldn't need to be recoded, and all that would need to change is that next to Legendary Carpenter you'd add a (Barrels) for example.