Bay 12 Games Forum

Kinky *snicker*
'Now with 100% more leather'

Hey, Kinky is a serious candidate!  After all, he wrote the first country-western song about the Holocaust.

...even if you work in a bar where people still smoke...

I actually disagree here; I think people who work in smoky environments are pretty much the only people with a right to complain.  Officially that's supposed to be the reason behind those bans, though scanning this thread (and most any thread on the subject I've seen on the internet) makes it clear that for most people it really is just about the smell (as you said).  The only people to even bring up workers are you and I, everywhere else it's all "me me me."

All Siquo is saying is just because you don't enjoy something that's not harmless doesn't mean it's worthless and/or should be banned.

Nicotine is a drug that by all sense and logic should be as illegal as LSD, the only reason it is not is because the ciggy companies were too well established to shut down when dangerous and addictive drugs started getting outlawed and make far too much money (both for themselves and for the government) to be shut down. That, combined with the scarily high addiction rate, near social acceptability and few serious short term effects all combine to allow millions of people every year to happily poison themselves with an exceedingly toxic cocktail of addictive chemicals while thougherly enjoying the expierence.

For example, LSD shouldn't be illegal.  When you read that, you're going to dig up or spout claims that LSD is dangerous.  You'll say it can provoke psychosis, or make people jump off buildings.  You might even say outright falsehoods like "it's a poison" or "it makes your brain bleed."  Then I would say something like "some of the most amazing experiences of my life were on acid" and that even though I haven't touched the stuff for some time and have no intention of doing so again I have absolutely no regrets.  I'm not sure what you'd say then, but I suspect it would be very negative.  Maybe you'd say I have insane addict logic, maybe you'd just ignore me.  I don't know if you'd say "the risk some people experience overrides the enjoyment you allegedly get" but I can all-but-guarantee you would think it--it's been the subtext for most of the anti-smoking sentiment in this thread.  Somewhere along the line you and some of the other folks in here have picked up the idea that people who like fun things that you don't can't have valid reasons if there's a health risk involved.  Or maybe its just that you have strong, irrational negative reactions towards anything a certain set of authority figures deems negative.  Regardless, I feel sorry for you and anyone who lives in a jurisdiction where your petty, puritanical vote counts.

In my oldest fortress one political powerhouse is a family where the mother is in a marksdwarf squad that spends nearly all its time on duty in a single chokepoints.  The children spend a big chunk of their time there and grow up to become mayors due to their high social skills and being friends with 10+ marksdwarves.  The last one was a master in all of the social skills when he reached adulthood.  This was higher than any of the soldiers except the squad leader (a dwarf that came in the first immigrant wave 15 years before the kid was born).

Don't know what any of it means, but it seems significant that children hanging around a place where on-duty soldiers are closely packed level up their conversation skills faster than the soldiers themselves.

/\ Pretty sure the answer is no there, but you might want to wait for someone more experienced with chasms to confirm that; I never even bother looking for them.  /\

I don't think this thing about caravans always appearing where they can path to your depot is true.  I tried to take advantage of it once by digging a trench 1 space from my border all around the map except for one location.  Caravans always appeared on the other side of the trench, in areas blocked in by trees.  The walking traders got stuck there, the wagons bypassed the site (even thought my trade depot WAS definitely accessible from the edge of the map).  And my migrants always got stuck on the edge too...and the diplomat.  It was incredibly annoying, and I dropped the fortress.

I make a trade depot road in nearly every fortress I build and have never had a problem...  but then I've never gone as far as you're talking about, just something like this.  I suspect there was an unsmoothed boulder or something blocking wagon access, which caused everything else--migrants, diplomats, and non-wagon traders may spawn completely at random, given that they will show up even if then entire fort is closed off.

Are you sure about that? Toady has that bug marked as not reproducible. I suspect that the ability to reliably reproduce it would be useful.

Interesting.  Seems like Toady couldn't get it to reproduce from falling entities; maybe it only applies to 'propelled' creatures.

What decides the qualities for the election?
Couldnt i just train a dwarf up in those skills? if i can?
Cos i cant really kill him as hes one of my legendary miners.

You can, but the skills in question are social skills which are relatively hard to train up on a given dwarf.  The best you can do is turn all the labors off of the one you want to be mayor, so he spends all his time talking.

You can also draft a dwarf to make them ineligible for elections.

There need to be different terms for linear and sandbox RPGs.  At this point, they're totally different beasts, and are likely to only become more divergent as time goes on.