Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeah, it's a bug.  It's called Dwarven Stupidity.  Kind of a Fun one to work around.

Seriously though, check where the lever is.
     Can dwarves path to it?  Maybe you locked a door somewhere.
     Does pathing to it put them ANYWHERE NEAR invaders?  Maybe they're running away whenever anyone tries to pull it.
     What's the alert level?  Maybe the dwarves are restricted by burrow alerts that stop them from going to the lever.
     Who's busy doing what?  Maybe nobody is idle enough to do it.  Lever pulling isn't exactly the highest priority job.
Just try to think of anything and everything that might be stopping them.

Also, it most likely isn't three ambushes...it's one with three squads that you had to find one by one.

That and this might be better asked in Gameplay Questions (don't make a new thread, just future reference if you don't want to move this one).

Traditionally, and I'm not sure if this was supposed to have changed, children have been able to do any job which any adult can do by default.

True.  Note the original claim was about getting all tails or all heads,which is why my expected number of people is about half your probability.  Though I think your number makes more sense for what we're talking about re: posession runs.

If the OP has seen a significant number of moods, and hasn't seen a single non-possession, that's pretty interesting.  What "significant" means is a little fuzzy, and would vary from person to person.  I'd probably say that if he saw something like a ten moods without seeing a single non-posession, then something is definitely* up in his fort that's at least skewing the normal probability to something other than 33%.  (If there were non-posessions mixed in there, then it might be observational bias, but the claim was that there weren't.)

* Within .001%.

I call "significant" to be greater than or equal to thirty observations.  This is because in statistics, it's commonly said that if sample size is at least thirty, you can assume normality of the distribution of the data.  Normality makes testing data easier.

And to be specific, I believe it was 10 moods since switching to v31.0x, I've seen nothing but possessions across various forts in all four v31 builds.  If you're wondering, the reason I've seen so few moods overall is because I've been very busy with real life.  This is a small sample, but it still seems beyond chance.

Yeah, I agree it's almost surely luck.  Although if you REALLY want to use statistics, I think a hypothesis test would probably demonstrate my sample is beyond chance at any common level of significance.  Sadly, my sample size is too small and I don't know about the normality of the parent population...and my sample would certainly fail an Anderson-Darling test...so I really can't run a binomial probability hypothesis test.  And I don't remember off-hand how to run non-binomial probability tests.  So I can only conjecture that my results are beyond chance.

For those of you that don't understand the above (probably most of you), it's probably beyond random chance that anyone would get my results.  It's statistically possible, but REALLY unlikely.  Still, I don't understand why I would be getting these results.  At least with a fell mood, I lose a dwarf but get a legendary out of the deal...

I used to love building out of green glass, because with a magma-glassfurnace, it was literally infinite.  That and one of my first few moods was usually the glassmaker.  A few legendary glassmakers can output hundreds of glass blocks in next to no time AND can consistently produce masterwork furniture.

Baring access to magma or in the new version, I don't feel like digging far enough to get to it, I go for the colored stone.  I think I'm the only DF player that likes microcline.  What can I say, I like blue.  Interestingly, in the real world, while microcline can come in various colors...blue is not one of them.  Toady geologically dropped the ball...in a few places, but this is the one I'm talking about now.

Since it doesn't look like anyone has mentioned it, if you want to play OpenTTD and don't have the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe, you'll have to download and install the opengfx pack to replace the proprietary graphics used in the game.  It's not terribly difficult to do and the game's own wiki gives detailed instructions.  Just thought I'd mention it.

Quote from: SirHoneyBadger on April 12, 2010, 02:17:35 am

Stargrasper: Can reactions operate without any input of raw materials? Could that be the reason the reaction isn't working? If not--if it's spitting out items anyway, seemingly randomly--could there be some kind of time-delay factor at work?

Actually yes, you are allowed to have reactions without reagents.  My testing has demonstrated this unequivocally. To test exactly that, I wrote reactions to spit out wood, fuel, and obsidian.  The wood and fuel worked after a big of tweaking.  The obsidian, like the glass, didn't work at first and then randomly decided to start working after I went to test something else.  In fact, it was the glass I had gone to try testing when the obsidian randomly decided to start working.  And then when testing something else, the glass reaction started working for no apparent reason.  Both obsidian and glass started working for no apparent reason.  It was after I'd stopped working on them that they started functioning.  I can't figure out what the system is doing to detect these things.

What's seemingly random is whether or not the reactions will appear in the workshop list or job manager.  Further testing on my part has yet to demonstrate consistent behaviour.  Given that it is no longer the weekend and I have A LOT of work during the week, I won't be able to do extensive testing, but I'll see what I can do.

Anyone remember me from back on page 3?  Seeing as my issues haven't been addressed, I'm feeling a bit lost in the shuffle.

Anyway, I haven't had time to test anything new.  I just didn't want to be totally buried under everyone else.  Anyone have any thoughts as to what the system is doing to me?  I sure as heck can't figure it out.