Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeah, happens to me all the time, especially when the charger is very strong. It is an odd behavior, but I don't think it's new to this version. It's obviously nonsensical that someone could dodge your weapon, but then let you bodily collide with them, but for some reason it hasn't been addressed for quite a while. If you feel like it's a bug, I'd go ahead and report it.

Yesterday I messed around a lot with sparring and skill demonstrations and made sure they were moving between them properly, and I balanced out some of the timers and skill increases there. The combat rebalancing had had an effect on sparring injuries, which had already been a bit of a problem (and have historically been a major problem), so I put in some more safeguards there. I also found that anybody that was bleeding modestly would take a dive and decide they needed to be carried off to the hospital, even if the bleeding subsequently stopped. That's fixed now.

Today I took some time to think about the site/population rewrite that's the foundation of a lot of the future developments, mainly having your own sites in adventure mode, having sprawl/rural areas, villain groups, and having more dwarves live around you off-map in dwarf mode. Since I'm aiming for the 22nd or 23rd for the next release, I'm not sure if that rewrite is going to fit or not. I'd like to take some small steps on the dev page each time I release, but this one is larger and it still needs to be done early. If we wind up with some more days of bug fixing and then the site/pop rewrite first thing for the release after the next one, I wouldn't be surprised.

Yet more good news on the military front. Entity populations aught to be nice as well. This raises a question: once entity pops are in, can we expect the current (ridiculously tiny) towns to get scrapped in short order? On a related note, does this mean we won't be seeing mundane people appearing in the legends screen anymore?

Standing orders and job priorities I would use. Everything else falls into my personal "too complicated" category. In addition to my personal dislike of it, improving control of dwarves by a method this complex might be shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to new players. If you have to write or download a script to make your dudes do what you want, especially when it's something reasonably simple, then you've got some serious UI problems.

Before I start rattling off my various suggestions, I'd like to highlight a few points from the development page I found particularly exciting:

• Entity populations surrounding your fortress in appropriate environments, both above and below ground
• Ability to move dwarves in and out of surroundings
• Relationship with surrounding dwarves
• Ability to trade/demand food in depot or similar place with surrounding dwarves

In my opinion, these are some of the most interesting ideas on the list, because they will give a grand objective to each new fortress; becoming an absolute nucleus of dwarven society. With this goal in mind, here are some of my ideas on how dwarf mode could come to support it.

When you start a new fortress, especially in 40d, you may notice that your migrants tend to be completely useless. Let's Plays in particular have picked up on this, with a common speculation being that the absolute dregs of society have thrown themselves at your fortress, like some sort of cultural waste bin. This idea, fanciful and dorfy as it is, isn't too far from realism.

Let's face facts here; getting in on the ground floor of a new settlement is a potentially profitable but very risky proposition. Throughout history, those who partook of it have been those with nothing to lose; the broke, the convicted, and the batshit insane. When the settlement in question is run by a bunch of bipolar midgets who can't tie who their own shoes, this tendency is bound to be exacerbated. This little bit of dwarfonomics brings me to my first real suggestion; when your fortress wealth is low, you should get useless migrants. It makes sense, and it's Fun with a capital "F".

While the new arrivals at your fortress may be initially unseemly, this trend will cease once your site loses it's "get rich quick" appeal. As your fortress begins exporting goods, you'll start to see farms popping up in the map tiles around it. With these settlements sucking up the influx of peasant farmers and their related professions, those coming to your fortress will now be dwarves of higher status; miners, masons, metalsmiths -- people you might actually want in your fortress.

Those of you who've played around with DF's farming might notice a problem with this model. Namely, there's no need for farming settlements if a 200-dwarf fortress can feed itself from a tiny garden. In order to give these farms a reason to exist, we'll have to make farming harder. This does mean taking up more space, but it also means taking up more dwarves. At the start of the game, having one half of the population working the fields is probably reasonable, and will make your first satellite farm a big relief.

Once your fortress is a major producer, nobility will start trickling in. This is not a bad thing, because if the economics get modeled right, nobles will be a massive money injection. With the arrival of nobility, your fortress enters into it's third era, as a sizable number of highly skilled migrants come down the pike, hoping to make it big in your now sparkling city. But wealth and talent aren't the only things the nobles bring with them. They will also make your fortress a place of great political importance. As the pettier threats to your survival are steadily erased, your view must expand to deal with the unwanted attention your wealth has created.

Sadly, the empire building possibilities of fortress mode have been discussed at length, and I don't believe I have anything of interest to contribute on the subject. So for now, I'll just leave this little ramble as it stands, and let you lot voice your thoughts on it.

EDIT: Egads. I thought I proofread this.

07/15/2010: I cleaned up a number of training issues today. There was various lingering information that would gum up barracks selection over time, and individual training could interfere with squad barracks selection as well. Some out-of-whack personality effects had far too many soldiers skipping out on their individual practice. Demonstration/training organization has been sped up a great deal, and I fixed another problem with class timers. Civilian jobs should respect attribute growth/maintenance properly now, though we'll have to balance that a bit no doubt. Shell moods are restricted to dwarves with shell fetishes. Goblet/flask construction shouldn't shuffle the metal types anymore.

This is absolutely fantastic news. I can't wait to start working on a proper military.

Indeed. If they have a god of blood, they might as well have a god of vomit, and what better avatar than the sun?

That depends on how much your dwarves' time is worth. If your masons and miners all have better things to do, then no. If they're just sitting around, then it's trading a low value stone for high value ore. Go for it.

Mac version still not working for me. The folder contains "df", a unix executable, "dwarfort", and exe, and README.linux, another unix executable. All of them ask what application to use to open them.