Bay 12 Games Forum

It's generally nice to leave these things around in case anyone else has the same problem.

Sure, most don't use the search feature, but there are a few.

words
Different games for different people.
words

Very much agreed, but thought that I should add that a lot of these kill contest type games have a lot of almost hidden objectives that the average person won't even realize are there when they look at or play the game a bit.

It's sort of like my dead stare at any of the FIFA games that have been on wall mounted televisions of late. Two teams kick a ball into a net over and over* ad nauseum.
*Well, more like once or twice per game.
Now, there's this whole game of keep away that they're constantly playing, and what I'm sure is a complex system of not only moving the ball through gaps in the other team's defenses, but straight up trying to exploit and otherwise out think them in order to create those gaps where you need them in the first place- but I've never experimented with that and have always practically assumed I have no aptitude for it, so I've never really tinkered with the system to get past the 'it's just a bunch of blinking pixels on a screen' stage. Even with the actual scoring of a goal there's this impenetrable black box of mechanics in whatever it is people do to get the ball past the goalie, but to me it's just 'he catches it most of the time but sometimes he doesn't and the score goes up one.'

As I stand right now? The game isn't very interesting, and even if I try to pay attention I just get bored. The stuff I know to look for seems really simple and there are a few things I can see, but don't really get what makes or breaks them, so that's basically just random to me.


Now imagine how easy it would be for me to actually think that if I didn't have such a spergy obsession with seeing things from other people's points of view. I'd still deserve a little bit of blame for my ignorance if I said that like I were an authority on the game but actually gaining that kind of understanding of it requires a bizarre devotion to that impenetrable display of little figures dancing around on a screen. As familiar as that sounds I'm tempted to say that the real difference is popularity and social reinforcement.

I've gone with the specialist workers versus peasant class labor system* in therapist for a long time. My broker gets to sit around a ton just because I want him at the gorram depot NOW. Various smiths get the same workflow except when I actually have lots of raw material for them to shape into furniture.

*When you have time you let each peasant snag a single experience in, say, weaponsmithing, to influence the moods and legendary skills you'll get.

I split it down moodable skills. All of the other skills get enabled on everyone. I adjust this a bit if I want to build a lot of walls, profiling the mason's workshop to the skilled dwarves while everyone else gets to install the walls and things. I tweak it a bit for keeping things look food and drink going while everyone else obsesses over the building project.

This thread definitely does belong in the suggestions forum.

Personally I'm pretty confused about why he thought that the folks in dwarf mode discussion needed to see this in the list, rather than putting it in the forum that has lots of threads that more closely match the pattern and content of this thread.

I like the idea of walling off batches of coffins- arrange them in a pattern mimicking a dining hall or w/e. Kind of an Egyptian burial where their social needs in the afterlife are being seen to. You can easily picture the dwarfy complaints of "Oh I wish I had thrown that tantrum sooner so dwarves would aye known I HATE Ibruk- now ah have tay put up with im forever!"

Or rather "Was annoyed by a deceased acquaintance recently."

I did some of the !science! way back when the combat system changed and the demonstrations are basically good for training up the skill of new recruits when you've got some seasoned veterans to lead the lessons, but the dwarves just prefer them if there are a lot in a squad, and they'll tend to waste a lot of time giving a lesson on dodging for that whole one level of dodge they just gained sparring (but multiply that by the number of combat skills, and think about how many of them are relatively worthless...) Folks soon noticed that the lessons were actually stuck in a waiting stage for some sleepy or hungry dwarf to arrive, and add on the observation that they gain skills faster when they are already at the middle to high range of that skill... well, none of us wanted to let them do novice grade demonstrations.

Minimizing demonstrations was accomplished by setting the squads up for maximum uptime of exactly two dwarves. Seeing as they take breaks to sleep and eat and such this means squads 3 large, with orders for two to be active. As they hit tolerable skill levels in their weapon type and as your army grows you start to split these groups up so that one veteran is dealing with two recruits all the time.

As you get legendaries (or near it) you'll probably be comfortable letting them just do lots of demonstrations in larger squads. Even optimized like this it's skill a fairly slow process, particularly because of how fast they learn while actually trying to kill things. You don't want them chasing wild animals around for months on end just to drop them in a single strike so enclosed areas are clearly the way to go, and once you've caged some victims it's very easy to just drop them right in with nowhere to run. Training weapons are specifically designed to suck at killing things so wave your magic wand, compiling the whole shebang in one fell swoop and:

You should give a dwarf with a training weapon in a cramped room the attack orders for any harmless creature dropped in with him, and then let him out for sustenance/rest and promptly assign him some underlings to train (or do a few more cycles of solo training if you've got suitably occupied cages.)

*They'll mainly increase the weapon skill and a few others- armor and dodge are kind of tricky to train as they've got to actually make that choice during incoming attacks, but due to high weapon skill they'll prefer to parry. They don't really need those to bring some serious carnage but it's safe to assume that they'll gamble their way past those spinal injuries much longer with more legendary skills. You can waste some of the easier years trying to seed your army with soldiers that are good at those (for demonstrations) after you've got the hang of manually butchering goblins, as you try to gear up for the ultimate showdown with fun (presuming you want to conquer it with pure dwarfpower.)

Getting a feel for how fast water is going to move horizontally is just something you pick up after messing around some- so I won't try to give any specifics here. Instead in DF you only need to know that there's fast and slow water.

Slow water does the wafer thing moving around on the wafers below it until it hits a spot it can fall to (you've heard about this right?) and all in all this is a slow process that won't flood your fort.

Fast water rapidly fills in spaces and can even 'travel' up. Here the water isn't so much wafers as a huge blob, but only in the cardinal directions. If the water is moving fast it immediately fills the closest empty space, but with how falling works that's mostly the lowest open space. This makes more sense when you know the two things that start "fast" water.
1. If there is an open space on the blob water from a higher z level will go into fast mode.
2. Pumps spit out fast mode water on the same z level.

Probably a bit confusing but the bit you actually care about is how high either of those options are. Doesn't matter how much water there is, it can't flood your fort to z levels above that.


Rivers, as it happens, have the fast variety of water. Really handy if you want a lot of the stuff but as you're well aware: dangerous. The power players here all find it quite easy to harness the power of rivers but since you're worried about that there's an easy solution: dig a test well that isn't connected to your fort. Just go up near those murky pools and a few blocks away and dig a staircase down a few levels, a spot you would place a well (the well won't affect water flow so you don't even have to place it,) and then channel away the last block to the river to see if it fills up the way you expect or if the whole test floods.


Or there is the derpy -Icantunderstandthis- way to make a well with the pools: Just dig down and place the well and such then break into the pool. Looks like the pool is only about 50 tiles of water so if the lowest floor of your fort is around seven times that large the pool could never flood you bad enough that it wouldn't dry out before the next time the pool filled up. You might get some muddy hallways but that's not really harmful to the fort at all.

You can channel into the magma sea near the edge of what is revealed for mapping purposes. Potentially faster to open and seal that than doing it blind-ish.