Bay 12 Games Forum

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In short, capitalism ascribes a monetary value to everything and thus makes the pursuit of money a primary goal for everyone at all times even if they want to claim altruistic motives for a time. This often means that in order to combat the fear of starvation, dispossession, etc. people do counterproductive, dishonest, BAD things in order to preserve their own necessity to society and continue making money. ... "Free market" my ass ... D:

With all seriousness, this is offbat-shit.

 * People with destructive potential are never in fear of starvation or anything similar. People who have reasons to be afraid of starving are hardly in position to threaten any upcomming idea. Read on "triange of needs". Most of people are at least two levels above "starvation". In fact, we are at edge of switching to 4-day work week.

 * Superior technology is not better product, it never was. Why? Because it tends to cost more and to provide marginally better performance. Noone is going to pay for it, hences all those cool toys fail. This is one of worst mistake any technically minded person can do: to start business based on having superior technology. It. Will. Not. Work. If you are making something people are not willing to pay for, chances are, it is worthless.

 * Actually superior product wins. Always has won. Already estabilished Businesses are happy to jump on bangwagon once someone proves it is viable. It can require substantial investment, but they can afford it. History is more filled with big bad businesses taking over rather than stomping over startups that come with new ideas.

 * And with stonefaced seriousness, if you want disaster, try centrally planned economy. You thought it is tough in free economy? You have seen nothing...

Sigh, so much for nice thread, sorry, OP!

Anychance it will generate MSLEB?

Urist McHouse cancels Treat Patient, interrupted by leg pain.
Urist McHouse cancels Take Pills, interrupted by boss.

nah...

Zoidberg McDwarf is Extatic. He ate mouldy leftovers lately.

Quote from: kcwong on February 09, 2010, 09:05:47 pm

Quote from: zwei on February 09, 2010, 01:08:23 pm

And worst thing? If you designate it different spot, list is in different order. It is guarantted to change order randomly. You have to find whatever you want to use every single time.

It is not random; the list is made in order of increasing distance to the location of the task you are assigning. So if you don't care what material it is, you can just pick from the top of the list.

Unfortunately most players do care...

I knw it's a workaround, but if you know what resource you want to work with, place a stockpile nearby and limit the contents to only that type.  Forbid it from the "main" stockpiles and let the extra dwarfs ferry the goods to where they are needed.  I tend to do the same thing for workshops.  I make two rooms.  One for the workshop and another for the resources for that shop.  Sometimes I get creative and make the storage room surround the workshop which can also help with the noise factor.

Yes, it means having people that can shuffle resources around, but your builders don't have far to go and can keep busy.

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Honestly, that's barely even a "workaround". Keeping materials where they're likely to be used often is pretty much a standard thing you should do whenever possible. In real life, it's kind of silly if the pantry is on the other end of the house from the kitchen, or if you keep your clothes in an armoire in the basement instead of your room.

It is different from worshops: Workshop product/raw material stockpiles are going to be static and are worth it to set up: tinker with it once, it is go for rest of fortress lifespan.

If you set up nearby stockpile for each construction you have to select item type (sometimes stockpiles like bar/block one do not have enough controll to set up specific material), possibly set up 'take' from other stockpile. Then wait for hauling job, then you just designate your construction and destroy stockpiles And if you want to build somewhere else, repeat. That is hardly convenient.

I used to make it that way, but waiting for stockpile to fill is not really that good. You could use 1x1 stockpile to just get your chosen material to top (again, not always possible), but then overhead of setting it up is ... awfull.

Quote from: Jacob/Lee on February 09, 2010, 06:31:10 pm

Couldn't you use (S)oldiering and hunting to give dwarves weapons?

Then you have everybody in the workforce wandering the wilderness fighting grizzly bears, as opposed to woodcutting, where they only venture forth when you designate trees for chopping, and the trees get cut faster.

Which is not issue. You eventually run out of animals to kill, and then it is just pointless labor that has benefit or arming dwarves and downside of sleeping on ground/drinking only water.

Quote from: Fikes on February 08, 2010, 08:39:34 pm

every story I'd dig through a list of 500 stone types that meant nothing other than a name. NOTHING. If I wanted to use wood I'd dig through 20 wood types that meant nothing other than a name.

Why? Why not just have "Disguishious tree" "Tropical tree" or "iginoius stone" or what ever.

In theory it seems awesome, in pratice it seems silly.

If it seems silly, that's only because a lot of its function just isn't there yet, or you aren't noticing it.

Might be, but your material list gets insanely cluttered eventually.

26 layer stone types
40 cluster stone types
17 ores
24 tree types.

107 items.

each can be also made to bars

214 items. Add soaps, metal bars and alloy bars and blocks... 250 building materials?

Depending on maturity of fortress, you can end up with huge percentage of those laying around.

Ever tried to hunt for bauxite in list of hundrerds of items? Or specific block type from which you are building your construction? You are pretty much guarantted to go insane or at least give in to melancholy.

Those lists do not even grow vertically if you resize window, you have no type as you find feature.

And worst thing? If you designate it different spot, list is in different order. It is guarantted to change order randomly. You have to find whatever you want to use every single time.

You end up making and following one rule religiously: Never, Ever, buy bars/blocks from caravan. Ever. Do Not Make Soap. Never Ever Let Human or Dwarf Caravan Be Attacked.

You have to resort to making stockpiles and locking rooms to filter out specific material types. And that does not help much since some stockpiles do not have fine controll to permit/forbid some materials.

The fact that resources are so limited - and acquisition of resources through trade is extremely difficult.  I don't mind a huge chunk of stone being required to make a wall, or even a stone chair.  But when a giant heap of marble produces only one stone earring, then the game's simplification has been taken too far.

It's too expensive, resource-wise, to train certain skills, but skills increase so rapidly that people can be come masters of their craft after less than a year.

I dislike losing access to resources because of lack of skill (example:  mining), and I dislike that certain tasks are completed so quickly (most especially:  mining).

Yes, there are basically two types of resources:

Infinite
Finite

Infinite resources are just going to accumulate over time. You always have ready source of raw materials. This means several things:

1) You can overproduce on grand scale You have infinite raw material at your disposal, and you can buy out whole caravans with them over and over again.

2) Since you have free material, you can train every single peasant to be legendary on them. This means that your skilled workers are quite easily replaceable.

You can have as many legendary weavers/dyers/threshers/clothiers as you want. Theese industrues work as perpetum mobile engine basically: no input, huge output.

This is especially pronounced when you can train your dwarf on items that are essentially having no quality but are quite usefull: Bonecarvers for example can obtain legendary by creating bone bolts (bone bolts being always usefull regardless of quality).

This of course contrasts with:

Finite resources. They will eventually run out and/or have rate of acquisition capped harshly. They, of course have some implications too:

1) You will run out of them eventually. There is little you can do to get more raw materials.

2) Training is expensive. Skilled laborer is irreplaceable.

For example: Smoothing. You will eventually run out of stone to smooth, and to engrave. If you loose engraver, you will have to smooth certain amount of tiles too get new one to state where you can give him skill-requiring job (engraving) - roughly two fully dug 2x2 zlevels.

This, as you can imagine, leads to problems if loose several engravers in succession. Eventually you run out of room to train in and it is game over - no more materpiece engravings for you, ever.

Mining works like this too: It is even harsher since most maps have very limited soil z-layers to train miners without destroying stone, when you are done with them, every lost miner means that you are going to loose ~100 stones as he trains.

Even if you can import, you are going to obtain materials much slower than your dwarves die of old age.

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If you would try clothesmaking industry you will see the other coin: You simply stop caring about resources and you are going to be annoyed by masterpiece spam from weaver/dyer/tailor.

Eventually, moment will come when you will simply stop caring and just stuff everything you can onto caravans to get rid of that damn stuff, having caravans leave with profits measured in hunderds of thousands.

Ballance is simply off.